4. CASTLE BUILDING GUIDE

By Iceburgh - iceburghorc@gmail.com

Military Cities vs. Castles

Whether you decide to build a military city or castle, they should be identical except for the castle itself.  A lvl 10 castle provides 10 additional commands and allows you to recruit three times as many troops.  I’ll summarize the different types below and give you the pros and cons.

Defensive City – Defensive cities will cap out around 80K troops.  The advantage of a defensive city is that they are safe from attack.  You can also place them on water without any danger from enemy navy.  Generally when you do not have the upper hand on a continent you may need some defensive cities.

Defensive Castle – Defensive castles give you the ability to create many 3x the troop strength as a defensive city.   However, they have the negative side effect of being a target for attack.  Because you cannot move units out of a city that is under siege, it is a common strategy to siege a known defensive city early in an attack so that the troops cannot support other cities.

Offensive City – Offensive cities are not very common but and when they are built the purposes is for raiding dungeons or bosses.  In this respect they are great for gold generation.  The best unit for this type of city is the berserker.

Offensive Castle – The purpose of the offensive castle is to attack enemies.  During peace time they also make great raiding cities.  The downside is they must have support cities or castles to cover the defense.

In this guide, I will be discussing how to efficiently build CASTLES. Military cities will be pretty much the same, but do not need full walls/towers (save for 2 lookouts).

CASTLE PLACEMENT - CLUSTERING

1. Always try to build castles and cities close to your hubs and defensive castles (3 hours max). This allows for quick transfer of resources and speedy defensive support if attacked. Also, the more TS in an area the more higher level dungeons pop up... this will greatly improve your raiding options.

2. Castles with good raiding troops (Zerks, Rangers/Guardians and Paladins) will need warehouses in which to store the loot from raiding, and markets to ship it back to your hubs. Find a good balance so you are not wasting resources from returning raids due to overcapacity.

3. Make sure you can defend yourself. You will need various types of defensive castles around to adequately do this (Rangers/Guardians, Templars, Paladin, etc). Keep in mind how many castles you need to defend and how dangerous your continent may be.

Setting ministers

To ensure your castle is firing on all cylinders, set the ministers to do the work for you:

1. Set Build Minister to upgrade all building types automatically

2. Set Defense Minister to recruit the castle to its full TS capacity automatically (e.g. 300k zerks)

3. Set Trade Minister to keep the castle stocked to preferred amounts at all times. Resources will come as always from your HUB. Set all resources above these limits to be sent back to the hub for redistribution

Essential Castle Buildings

Hideout:  Commonly overlooked but ESSENTIAL building. By having one hideout in your castle, you are not able to completely starved out from an enemy plunder. If your food reaches 0 at any time, 10% of the troops within that castle (including supporting troops from allies if under siege at the time) will immediately die, losing another 10% every hour afterward. Give you and your teammates some time to react and send food by having ONE of these in here to avoid “insta-starvation.”

Warehouses:  Needed in all military cities/castles to store the resources necessary to build your city, and to recruit and feed troops. 2 Warehouses should be all you need as long as your supplying hub is within a few hours (especially depending on food consumption/h!). To increase food production further, you can place a Mill touching them.

Markets:  If you wish to raid and plunder with this castle/city, you will need markets to supply the carts necessary to ship the res back to your hub for distribution. This is a MUST in zerk and knight castles, as raiding is the best way to produce resources for your empire.

Trinsic Temple:  A MUST for offensive castles (except Siege Equipment + War Galleon castles), if you wish to train barons and capture enemy castles using this castle. Not needed in defense castles.

Moonglow:  You don’t want to lose your hard-earned resources from raids and plunders due to over capacity, therefore, in all raiding castles (typically Zerks, Knights and Paladins) build one moonglow tower which will auto-purify any incoming resources that exceed storage capacity.

7-Step Castle Building

Step 1: Choose a layout

Once you have decided what type of castle you are going to build, find a decent layout and plug it into your city overlay. This is the one I will use here: http://louopt.com/USoA (3 sec zerk castle).

Step 2: Clearing the way

Destroy any and all resource nodes that are in the way of your layout. Simple enough. This can be done gradually as you need the spots for buildings, or all in one go, depending on your schedule/preference. I personally like to get recruitment buildings up and recruiting as soon as possible in the early game.

Step 3: Groundwork

Upgrade the town hall to lvl4, place 38 cottages and 2 warehouses. Level all of those to 3 or 4 and then take the TH to 5. Place 10 more cottages and your city should look something like this.

http://louopt.com/fToA

How far you upgrade the cottages is up to you, I prefer to get to at 3000% construction speed. You could go with a bit less or a bit more but it's a good solid speed to build at. After getting the Construction speed % up, level the TH to 10 and we can move on to the fun stuff!

Step 4: Recruitment Buildings

After getting your construction speed up to par it is time to place your recruitment buildings as shown in the layout and level them all to 10, as they take much longer than barracks. Now you should have something like this.

http://louopt.com/xToA

This is just a basic layout of a 3 second zerk castle.  You’ll want to start recruitment ASAP, so add barracks as you need the space for new troops.

Step 5: Barracks, Hideout, Markets

Continue building the barracks in your layout and recruiting troops.  Also build one hideout (touching as many wood nodes as possible) to prevent starvation by enemies.  This will safeguard some food in the event of a plunder, so your food doesn’t instantly hit 0 and starve your troops. Every castle must have a hideout!

Step 6: Walls/Towers

Now you want to put up your defenses in preparation of castling. You want to get this done now while your CS% is still high and before you open yourself up to assault/siege. So walls/towers need to go to 10 now.

IMPORTANT: Every castle MUST HAVE level 10 walls 2 lookout towers.

The rest of the towers are up to you, but I recommend something like:

10 ranger towers

6 guardian towers

6 templar towers

This is the point in the castle construction that you will go through the most stone...towers are very expensive to make but have a short construction time so make sure to be ready to send lots of carts to your castle.

Step 7: Castling and Completion

You should be well on your way with recruitment now and if the coast is clear it's time to put up the castle building. If you're unsure if you are ready for this talk to an officer, explain your army situation and ask for advice. Continue the process of knocking down cottages and building barracks until the layout is complete:

e.g. http://louopt.com/YNoA

Grats on a completed castle and enjoy!