2,          EMPIRE BUILDING GUIDE

                By Gitmo (aka QueenDeb)

Introduction

The purpose of this guide is to demonstrate my method of playing Lord of Ultima. There are many different ways to play and I don’t proclaim mine to be the best but I have had success with it. My philosophy is to simply be as efficient as possible in all aspects of the game.  My goals are:

1) Maintain a build queue in every unfinished city 24/7

2) Maintain a recruitment queue in every military city 24/7

3) Produce excess resources to expand as fast as possible.

To accomplish these goals you have to be very efficient in all aspects of the game.  You must also have the ability to spot your impending bottlenecks before they occur. Hopefully this guide will accurately describe this philosophy.

The City Complex

The city complex is the name I give to a cluster of cities all of which are in the same general vicinity and supplied by a central hub.  The cities can be castles or resource cities. The hub should be centrally located within the city complex and the total amount of cities in each complex should not be more than 15-20 depending on your limitations.

The hub is a name given to a city that takes all of the excess resources from the city complex and stores them while at the same time supplying the same city with resources that it lacks.  The hub will be discussed in more detail later in this guide.

Try not to let your city complex just happen.  Plan ahead.  Try to locate your next city complex before you need it.  Start the hub for that complex early.   Initially you will need to supply the new hub from one of the established hubs until you get enough resources in that city to completion so that the hub can operate on its own.

Raiding Clusters:  Keep in mind that dungeon spawning is affected by the amount of overall TS in a given area. By clustering raiding castles around your hub you will cause higher level dungeons to spawn in that area. If you place your raiding castles around a lot of mountains, this increases the likelihood of a mountain dungeon spawning. Plan accordingly.

Creating City Layouts

When I first started playing I spent a lot of time learning the calculations for resource production.  I would use a city building tool, but I would make all of the placements because I didn’t feel like the tool was giving me good results.  Eventually I found out that it was me not knowing how to properly use the tool that was the problem.

If you take nothing away from this guide, at least TRY the following guide in creating a city layout.  You will be able to make 83k+ layouts consistently in less than 2 minutes.

The first thing you will need is to install Greasemonkey or Tampermonkey depending on which browser you use. Then install LoU Tweak.

FIREFOX USERS: Download Greasemonkey first  -

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/greasemonkey/

CHROME USERS: Download Tampermonkey first - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tampermonkey/dhdgffkkebhmkfjojejmpbldmpobfkfo?hl=en

Internet Explorer users: Use Firefox or Chrome (much better for LoU!)

Then install LoU tweak:

LoU Tweak:  (http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/80532).  

Once you have installed the script you will need to reload your browser (F5 Key).  You should now see (among other things) a button with the letter P and a second button with the letter L.

The P button will open the purify resource page and is simply a shortcut.  The L button is the one you will be using to create your city layout.  Notice in my screenshot that the L button is greyed out.  This button is only available in City View.

The following screenshot shows you the options available when you press the L button:

For the most part, ignore what you see in the three window boxes.   Once you use the program you will understand what these string clusters represent.  Change your current city to the city you wish to create a new layout for.  Press the L button and then select the link labeled “Open in Flash City Planner 2”.  If your city already has buildings you will see the complete layout in the city planner.  Below is an example of what you will see.

I encourage you to play around with the tool but the procedure that I will show you now is very simple and requires very little knowledge of the tool.

1. Remove buildings: If your city, like mine already has buildings in it then you will need to remove all of the buildings.  In the bottom middle of the tool is a button called “Remove”.  Fill in the box to the right of this button with 100 and press remove.  Note, this will only remove the resource buildings.  Now individually select any random buildings such as warehouses, markets, harbors.  Do this until there are no buildings on the map.

2. Set optimization weights: In the bottom middle of the tool are the Optimization Weights.  When the program is trying to decide what buildings are most optimal it will see how many resources that building produces and then multiply that value by your optimization weight.  The most common error when using this tool is to increase these sliders in favor of the resource that has the most nodes.  Simply put the following values in for the optimization weights: Wood – 1.00, Stone – 1.00, Iron –

1.00, Food – 0.49.

3. Add buildings:  Now, to the right of the “Add” button put the value 99.  Now press the Add button and after a few minutes you will have a very optimal layout for your new resource city. Add a market somewhere and you are done.

The reason that I place 99 buildings is that I never use Warehouses in my resource cities and I always use a single market.  In general, you need 1 market for each hour that you are away from your hub.  You can find the distance by going to either your hub or city and then selecting the other.  The time next to “carts” is how far away you are.  If it says 1 hour and 10 minutes than you will either need two markets or replace the markets with a Moonglow tower.  The Moonglow tower is only a viable option for an established city complex because all resources will be purified.  So, if you need two carts, then you will add only 98 buildings.  You can now place your market(s) anywhere there is a free space.

Feel free to improve on the layout if you think you can.  Most of the time the layout provided is very good and I often accept it out of hand.  Now you want to apply your new layout to your city.  Go to the top and select the Import/Export button and you should see a popup like the one below:

There are two important sections.  The “Short Link” can be used to share the layout with others.  The large text box in the middle is the most important and provides you with a layout that you can apply to your city.  Place your mouse inside the box.  By default it will select all but sometimes you lose the selection.  If this happens use CTRL-A to select all, the either use CTRL-C to copy.

Go back to the game. Using the same “L” button you will see a second tab at the top called Overlay Layout.  Select this tab.  Place the cursor in the large text box and CTRL-V to paste the selection.  Then hit the “Apply Layout” button.  Below is an example of what you should see:

If you now close this window you will see the buildings from the layout right on top of your city squares.  Now you have a reference on where to add the buildings.

If you are reconstructing your cities, and I encourage you to do so, you will need to move the buildings around and optimize.  Eventually however, you will need to destroy some buildings in favor of the more optimum buildings.

Why mixed resource cities are superior

Let me step back and talk about some global issues about creating a city layout.

You will notice I have made no mention of favoring one resource over another. That is because I believe in optimization in all my cities and not short term needs. Every time you build a new city there will be a resource you feel that you MUST get.  This does not mean that you should place more of those buildings just because you need it most.  When you decide where to place your baron, select a spot that favors the resource you need the most.  Naturally the tool will have more of that resource in the layout.

If you maintain this philosophy for every resource city you build you will have the best city possible at every location and as your city count grows this will make a huge difference. This will allow you to grow faster than others who do not optimize.

Food cities:  Having said all of that, there is one type of city that works well as the only resource and that is Food.  I do put food in my resource cities if the optimizer tells me that it is best.  However, this is not enough food for a high military player.  So, I have many dedicated food cities.  To create a food city you would still use the tool, except that you would delete all resource nodes except lakes.  You will then place the Optimization Weights to 0, 0, 0, 3.  Then press 98.  Food cities create more resources than the other three and thus usually requires 2 markets unless very close to the hub.

Do NOT create a “Gold” city.  In fact, I would say never use a townhouse.  They are simply broken.  Use the market for gold or raiding.

In a later section I will outline how to best build your city from scratch and how to best rebuild an already finished city.

City Maintenance

There are a number of tools the game has provided to help you better maintain your cities as a whole.

A)    City groups - If you go to the options menu at the bottom right of the screen you will see a City groups tab.  Select this.  You can now create city groups.  This are simply labels that you can apply to cities so that you can sort them easily.   A city can belong to multiple city groups at the same time.  Below are the city groups that I use. Some of them are obvious, others I will explain in more detail later.

Once you have city groups you can assign these groups in the city notes located by a notepad near the city name.

Within the city notes is a “City groups” button, when you press this you have the option of applying the city groups to your city.

Once you have all of your cities assigned to groups you can then select a group by pressing the button to the left of your city name.  As you might guess, this makes it much easier to filter through cities. Later, I will show you how to use these city groups to help you build your cities in a more organized manner.

B) City Names - The second method of better identifying your buildings is the City name itself.  I do not believe in naming cities in a cryptic format because it is boring and also everyone else can see it.  I believe it is completely unnecessary due to the fact that you are offered a second hidden descriptor described below.  I name my cities after things I would rather see daily.  C20H00L does not appeal to me.  Having real names helps me better remember which city is where.

C) City Reference – In the city notes is the option to put in a city reference.  It is here that I place something descriptive to help me identify a city.  For military I put the troop type.  For resource cities I generally put nothing, but sometimes I put “Food” for food cities. Only YOU can see this.

D)   User scripts – There are a number of scripts that make things easier.  One that I recommend is LouPAK (http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/125367).  This tool adds a + button above the building queue.  This button will autofill the building queue and can be very helpful in the building process.  There is also a # button which will pay for as much of the queue as possible.

E)     Overview screens - The overview screens should be used often.  I will talk more about how to uses this in other sections.

Building a City (13-steps)

This section assumes you have your layout complete and are ready to build your city.  In a stepwise format I will walk you through the procedure I use to create a city.

1)  Raise the city hall to LvL 4

2)  Configure your ministers to receive resources from your closest hub, place 100,000 in both Wood and Stone.  The game will show the values in bright Red indicating that this value is larger than the city can hold.  However, if you do this you won’t have to keep increasing the value to maximum at each level of city hall growth.

3)  Delete all of the resources that the template requires you to.  These should be marked with a red X or will have a resource building on top of the node.

4)  Assign the city to the City Group “Step 1 - Scorched Earth”.  I use this category to indicate which cities are still destroying resources.

5)  Place cottages in the remaining building queue slots and turn on your building minister so that he will upgrade the cottages.  By placing the cottages now, as soon as the node destruction is complete the building begins.

     

6)  At some point as you cycle through the “Scorched Earth” cities you will see that the city has completed the destruction process and is building cottages.  At this time add additional cottages until you are building 30 .

7)  Assign the city to the City Group “Step 2 – Cottages”.  This group of cities represents those that are building the thirty base cottages.  When cycling through these cities, use the + button provided by Lou Pack script to fill the queue.  When you see that all of the buildings are level 10 and not filling the complete 16 building slots than you know you are at the end of this stage.  Fill the remaining slots with City hall upgrades.

8)  Assign your city to the “Step 3 – Place Bldg” City Group.  First get your town hall to lvl 10.  Next place 70 of the remaining buildings as per your layout.  Be sure to move the cottages to the spots that call for them.   Since you have 30 cottages and your plan only calls for 12-16 you will not be able to place all of the buildings.  Simply place the 70 you think will be the most productive.  Be sure to include your market in these 70.  You will not be able to complete this step in one sitting.  However, go to your building minister and have him auto-build resource building and markets.  This way, until you get all 70 buildings placed you will be building those you have laid and not wasting time.

9)  Once you have all 70 buildings down, assign your city to the “Step 4 – Building” City Group.  When you are cycling through these cities you simply fill the queue and analyze what you see.  You know you are near the end of this stage when the building being built are lvl 10 and eventually you can’t fill the 16 build slots.

10)  When your 70 cities are maxed, assign the city to the “Step 5 – Revamp” City Groups.

11)  Destroy a cottage and replace it with one of the buildings the layout requires.  Repeat

this process until all buildings match the layout

12)  Assign the city to the “Step 6 – Complete” City Groups.

13)  Open the trade minister and reduce the wood and stone required to zero. Your city is done!

If you are not building from scratch and instead of taking one of your old cities and improving its resource production you can still apply these steps except that you will start at Step 11 and instead of destroying cottages you will be destroying unneeded building of many types.  Be sure that you move the buildings around and thus are only destroying the minimum required by the layout.

Castles: When building castles, place 40-50 cottages instead of the 30 listed in step 6.  Focus on building the troop producing buildings first, placing barracks only when additional recruitment space is needed.

Building a Hub

The purpose of a hub is to collect all of the resources from your resource cities and re-distribute them to cities that are building or castles that are recruiting.  For this reason the hub should be in the center of your city complex.

The hub should be placed on the water.  The reason for this is to have the ability to use water transport.  Often water takes longer but you do get more capacity per building with harbors.  Also, you will eventually need to transport to another continent and the harbors are required for this.

Initially you don’t need much more than 10 markets for your hub but when the game has advanced into the stage of palace building you will need the ability to ship large shipments of wood and stone.  The best way to demonstrate a local hub that has the dual purpose of a palace hub is to provide a layout.

http://louopt.com/XO3s

This hub has high storage capacity that leans toward wood and stone for palace building.  There is something called a palace hub that is very similar but has no food or iron storage so simply replace the mills and foundrys with quarry and sawmill.

This build also has a trinsic and a barracks for recruiting Barons.  Yes the baron will take 6 hours but to avoid having to wait, always have a Baron ready.  Then when you level up you send your reserve and recruit the new one.

Using Ministers

All the ministers are required to play this game effectively.  They will cost you about $5/month.  If you do not think you want to pay this then you should simply not play this game.  You will eventually regret starting something you are unable to finish.  I’ll explain how to use each minister to make your empire run efficiently.

Building Minister – Once you reach Marquess you can get the full potential from the building minister.  Not only does the minister increase your building slots to 16, he will automatically fill your queue with buildings, per your specifications.  Use of this minister is pretty straight forward.

Defense Minister – There are three key aspects of the defense minister.  First, the minister will notify your allies of incoming attacks and provide needed information.  If you do not have this minister nobody can even tell which of your cities are under attack.

Second, you can turn on outbuilding of walls and towers.  Be aware that because walls and towers take a VERY large amount of stone to build, you should not turn on this auto feature for more than one or two castles at a time.  If you do you may starve your empire of stone which will slow your growth.

Third, this minister is used to set your target army.  You should do this as soon as you lay down your first barracks so that your minister can start recruiting.  If you plan to only recruit a single unit, simply set the value to something high like 999999.  You are basically saying fill this castle to the maximum.  This will prevent you from having to keep increasing it as you lay down more barracks.  If you are building more than one, such as rangers and guardians then you should set the values to something specific and only the ratio matters.  For example you could do 250,000 rangers and 250,000 guardians.

When the minister is deciding which unit to recruit he first checks to see who is furthest from their target value by a percent basis.  Then he checks to see if you have the resources to build that unit.  If you do not have the resource, he goes to the second on the list.  Therefore, if you fail to provide iron to your Ranger/Guardian castle you will get only rangers in production.  When you make your first Ranger/Guardian city you should be aware that while rangers can be recruited right away, the guardian requires at least one level 10 Training Ground.  So initially you will only produce Rangers.  Try to rush a Training ground to 10 to maintain your desired ratio.

War Minister – The war minister essentially gives you more options for your raiding and assaulting.  He allows you to set leave times in the future as well as allowing you to auto raid dungeons.  I will discuss this minister in more detail in the Raiding section of this document.

Trade Minister – This is often the most confusing minister to set up for most people.  I will try to focus on various scenarios and show how the minister is used on the next page.

1.  Resource City

The example shown is for a resource city that is still being built. You will want to set the “Request missing resources from” to your closest hub location.  You want to set the wood and stone to about 125000.  This tells the hub to try and maintain a constant storage of that amount.  When he sees it fall below that he will send a small shipment.  You do not want to set these to

maximum because if you go over you will simply have to send it back to the hub and this isn’t efficient.  You will set the “Deliver surplus resources to” to the same hub.  You generally won’t begin to ship out of the city until the city is almost built but if you are producing a large amount of food or iron this will come more quickly.  Therefore you need to build your market as one of your first buildings.

Once the resource city is complete you will want to set the target resources to zero.

*Tip – If you reduce your Town Hall to level 9 once the city is complete your minister will ship out more frequently and thus keep your overall storage lower.  At level 10 it will only ship out once a resource is over 100K.  At level 9 this is 20K.  Therefore you will never have more than 20K of any resource.  This is good plunder defense.         

2.  Hub

In this example you can see that I am receiving resources from 19 cities and there are 30 cities that are pulling from this hub.  That means I have 11 castles that this hub is feeding.  I do not put a city in the requesting resource field because I have adequate supply from my 19 resource city.  However, if you do have a shortage you can request resources from another hub.  Be aware that a shipment will not occur until you exceed a certain surplus.  You can get more detail on this by hovering the mouse over the green boxes.

If you do ship excess resources to another hub, you will need many more carts and you will also want to put a number in the “% of carts are reserved to wait for requests”.  If you do not put something in this box (I use 10-20%) then you may run out of carts and disrupt your supply line.

The target resource amount can vary depending upon your needs.  This value is only important when you are either delivering surplus to another city or if you are purifying.  In my example above I am sending all of the excess wood to a larger hub that I use for palace deliveries.  The stone I have set to “Store surplus”.  This means that the 500,000 that I have set for target doesn’t have much meaning.  It will simply continue to store stone until it meets the maximum 1,175,000.  At that point it will then purify any excess.

Remember that you do not want to check the box “Protect target resource amount from requests of other cities”.

*Tip – If you have a moonglow you do not have to worry about losing excess resources.  All excesses are purified.  If you have a large raiding party bring back 2,000,000 plundered goods, you do not need to have that much storage.  It will simply be purified.

         

3.  Castles

Castles that are being built will have a similar setup as any other resource city.  The example listed here is a castle that is already complete.  This one happens to be a zerk castle.  I do not put markets in my castles, therefore all excess is set for purify.  When my units are raiding I generate a lot of purified resources for growth and research.

I want to explain why I only have 150,000 iron storage in my zerk castle.  Because I operate at fairly low storage levels in my hubs I cannot withstand large chunks of disruption.  When you store a large amount of material in your castle and that bulk is used by your war minister then you trade minister will send a large shipment to replace it.  If three or four of my castles do this at the same time my supply chain is disrupted.  With lower storage, this is prevented.  This does not mean that I recruit less.  My recruiting is still 24/7.

Here is how I calculate how much storage I want in my castle:  

[(X * 60) / Y * Z] * 1.25

X  = Distance to hub in minutes

Y   = Recruit speed in seconds

Z   = Resource to build one unit (150 for zerkers)

This basically calculates how much resources you would need to recruit for the length of time it takes to get a shipment from your hub.  Imagine that your minister uses up your stored iron to recruit zerks.  Your hub will then send a shipment to replace the iron.  If your iron arrived just as you finished recruiting and then you would repeat the process.  The 1.25 in the equation is to give a 25% buffer to this calculation.

On the next page I will discuss raiding.

Raiding

Raiding dungeons can be very time consuming if you do not provide yourself with the necessary tools or knowledge required.  The first thing I recommend is the following script called LOU Dungeons Riding (http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/132554). With this script installed you will see a new popup window when you hover over a dungeon.

Here is an example of a Level 5 Hill dungeon that is new.  It shows you which troop is best to use with highlights, that being Mage or Warlock and it gives a suggested troop counts.  If you like to set raids and let them run for a few days then go with the recommended TS.  If you reset raids daily you can go with the minimum.  When you use the R+G or Z+G the total TS assumes a 50/50 split.  That means if it recommends 3000 TS for R+G, send 1500 Rangers and 1500 Guardians.

When deciding which dungeon to raid you should always send Magic (Mage, Warlock)  to Hill dungeons, Infantry (Zerks, Ranger / Guardian) to Mountain dungeons and Cavalry (Knights, Paladin, Xbow) to Forest Dungeons.  I very rarely send my units to the wrong type of dungeon.

There is one key thing you should know about dungeon formations and that is that they will form in close proximity to the troop in that area.  So when you first make your new castle, you may not see any dungeons to raid.  But as the saying goes, “If you built it, they will come”.

When you send a raiding party there are a few options which I will discuss below:

Timing

Now - This sends the raid out as soon as you hit the Raid button.

Departure time – You can set the raid to leave at any time in the future.  This is very useful in a number of circumstances.  Let’s say that you have a large army that is returning from a siege.  If that army is returning 3 hours in the future but you do not want to stay online for that long, simply note the time of return and set up all of the raids to leave soon after. 

You can also use this option to stagger your raids.  Sometimes if I am running low on a key resource like Iron I stagger my raids.  This means if I am sending 6 raids out, I may stagger them 15 minutes apart.   I use moonglows in all of my towers and do not use carts.  So, let’s say I send out 10 raids all at the same time and they are bringing back 1 million iron at the same time.  This will exceed my storage capacity and a large portion will be purified.  If I stagger them, I instead will have a steady stream of iron returning to my castle and it can be more easily managed.  I can set to recruit troops after each party lands and thus use all of the iron.

Arrival Time – This option is never used for raiding, it is used for attacking other castles and coordinating the landing time.

Raid

Once – The only time I use this is if I know I am sending out a raid that is too small for the dungeon I may send it out just once.  Then when it returns I have recruited enough to increase the raid size.  I do not want to leave the undersized raid on for too long.

Dungeon Completed – This is the most common option for Raid type.  Your minister will continue to send the raid until either you stop it, the dungeon closes or you do not have enough troops to reinforce the set amount of units.

Last Return Time – This is a very useful feature for those that are involved in PvP.  If you are set up to siege a castle and the troops do not leave until the middle of the night, you use this option.  You simply set the last return time for a time before the party is set to leave for your siege.  This means that when the minister sends out the raid, it checks to see what time it would return.  If it would have arrived later than your set time, it will stop sending the ra