Preface
Early Goals
The key to the early game is to get resources faster than your neighbors. There are two main ways to do this: increase your resource buildings aka “mines” or farm other villages for resources. You won’t be able to farm other players until beginner protection wears off, but you can farm barbarian and bonus (grey) villages during this time. So the more grey around you, the more sense it will make to build troops earlier. With that in mind, there is no optimal build path for all situations! Here are a few suggested starting paths. Note that these starting paths assume you will be active & farm. If you don’t want to farm or won’t be online enough to do many farming attacks, then use the “no nearby grey villages” starting path even if you have some around.
Farm and warehouse levels
You should build farms when you are nearing max pop, but not too early. Still it’s better to build a bit early than be stuck waiting for a farm to build. Early on at least, farms are cheap and fast to build, so don’t worry too much. Warehouse size is based on how active you are. The more active, the slower you should be to upgrade your warehouse. It’s really not too hard to get a feel for this after a day or two … but to start, I’d say go ahead and queue a level or two just before you logout of your account for a lengthy time. If you find your warehouse about to fill, also remember you can quickly and cheaply build a market and store 1K resouces there for each market level!
The Start
Many grey villages within your 7×7 and you will be active at least 4 times a day
Build all mines to level 1
Build wood to 4, clay to 2 alternating between the two
Build hq to 3
Build barracks
Train 9 spears. Once you have 9, begin attacking abandons with spears.
Continue to build spears as long as you haven’t exhausted the resources in your farms
Build mines up to 7 wood 5 clay 2 iron
Build HQ to 5
Build Smithy so you can get swords
Train enough swords so you won’t get any losses when you farm with swords + spears.
Go back to training spears after you get no losses and build a few swords as needed to prevent losses
One or two grey villages, but more than 3 or 4 squares away and you will be active at least 2 times a day
Build all mines to level 1
Build wood to 4 and clay to 2, alternating between the two
Build wood 5, clay 3
Build wood 7, clay 5, iron 2
Build hq to 3
Build barracks
Build build up to at least 17 spears before farming
Build HQ to 5
Build Smithy
Train enough swords to farm with no losses (use simulator to find the right #)
Go back to training spears after you get no losses and build a few swords as needed to prevent losses
No grey villages on your starting screen or you will not be very active/don’t want to farm much
Build all mines to level 1
Build wood to 4 and clay to 3, alternating between the two
Build wood 5, clay 5
Build wood 7, clay 7 iron 2
build wood 9, clay 9, iron 3
build wood 11, clay 11, iron 4
Build HQ to 3
Build barracks
Start training spears and don’t farm until you have at least 25. With these high resources you might be able to get swords before you get there anyway. If so you should.
Build HQ to 5
Build Smithy
Train enough swords to prevent losses with spears (use simulator)
Continue to train spears and swords so you can farm with no losses.
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