6.  Skiotha’s Fantabulous Guide to Hubs and Palaces

I am going to give a quick rundown of how to properly build and manage both personal and palace hubs. I will include pictures for those who have trouble with big words.

What is a hub?

A hub is a city built specifically to store and dispense resources.

There are two types of hubs, personal or primary hubs, and palace hubs, and they have some slight differences which I will discuss below.

Personal Hubs

Personal hubs, or primary hubs, are built to manage and supply all the rest of your cities and castles.

Every resource city should automatically deliver any extra resources that it produces to your primary hub. Every castle should automatically deliver any resources gained through raiding to your primary hub. Likewise, when a city or castle is in need of a certain resource, it sends a request to the hub asking for it.

The hub, in turn, stores all these resources until a city or castle requests from it. When it receives a request for resources, the hub ships out the desired amount to the target city, if it is able. If the hub’s resources reach the maximum storage capacity, it purifies a set amount to bring it down to acceptable levels and keep any resources from going to waste.

This is all done through proper setup of the Trade Minister.

Palace Hubs

Palace hubs are designed with the sole purpose of storing wood and stone, and delivering them to palaces during periods of enlightenment. They do not purify or deliver resources to anywhere other than palaces, and any resources not being used by palace hubs simply stay in storage until needed.

Palace hubs are filled automatically from a palace feeder using the trade minister, however the deliveries are handled on an individual basis by the player.

Personal Hub Layouts

The layouts for the two types of hubs are very similar, with only minor differences between them.

For a personal hub, the basic layout is this: http://louopt.com/RY4C

As you can see, you don’t need more than 10-12 million storage capacity at the high end. The reason for this is because resources should be constantly flowing in and out of the hub and if you find that you are consistently maxing out your storage capacity, it generally means you need to be building more cities or doing more research. There is no reason to be sitting on a large amount of resources in a primary hub when you could be purifying it or sending it out to your cities or to alliance cities.

The limiting factor to hubs is almost always how much resources it can move out at a moments notice, and that is determined by carts. The more carts (and boats), the better. You generally want to have at a very minimum 10,000-11,000 carts.

As you get bigger, and have more cities and castles to manage, sometimes one main hub will struggle to support every one of your cities on a continent. When this happens, it can be useful to have 2 main hubs, each focusing on 2 resources.

An example of what one of these hubs would look like is here: http://louopt.com/p34C

You will notice that because it is focused only on 2 resources, that less storage buildings overall are needed, and you can build more total carts. This allows your hub to service a larger area.

Usually, if located in a central location to the rest of your cities, this hub will be able to support all the rest of your cities for an entire continent. Add a second hub with the same layout, but focused on the other 2 resources, and you have all your resource management needs met with only 2 hubs.

Whether you go with one or two primary hubs is a matter of personal preference and either way will work out ok if you stick with these layout concepts and have your trade minister set up properly.

Palace Hubs - Feeder

Palace hubs are a little more complicated, for 2 reasons.

1. You need to manually send out deliveries of resources from them to the target palaces rather than having the minister handle it.

2. You need to set up a proper feeder/draw system to ensure that your palaces fill up properly without tying up your carts.

Number 1 should be pretty self explanatory. When a palace is enlightened, you need to go to each of your palace hubs and send out as many resources as you can to fill that palace.

Number 2 is a bit more complicated, and I will explain.

There are 2 types of palace hubs that you will build. A feeder hub and a storage hub. The purpose of the feeder hub is to collect all the extra stone and wood from your resource cities and raiding castles, and distribute it to your palace storage hubs.

A feeder hub looks like this: http://louopt.com/664C

You will notice a couple things about this hub. For starters it only stores wood and stone. This is because palaces, of course, only need wood and stone, so there is no point in storing iron and food. Secondly, there are no harbours. This is because generally we will not build any palaces on the water, and so there is no need for ships when you could be using that space for carts. Lastly, this feeder hub has a moonglow, and higher levels of storage capacity than a typical personal or palace hub. This will be explained further below.

The purpose of a feeder hub is to serve as a gathering point for all your excess wood and stone. There are 2 ways of doing this, one is very simple, while the other requires a complicated set up but provides much more effective results.

Option 1: You have all excess stone and wood from your personal hubs sent to this feeder, this is the most simple and direct way to fill your palace hubs, and only excess stone and wood that your other cities are not using will get sent from the personal hub to this one.

Option 2: This involves more setup time, and every new resource city and raiding castle will need to have its trade minister settings adjusted, but it is the more effective way of filling your palace hubs as fast as possible, and by late game everyone should be converted to this method.

With this method, you set every individual resource and castle city to ship all wood and stone to your palace feeder hub instead of your personal hub.

Then you set your palace feeder hub to ship all overflow of wood and stone to your personal hub.

In general, the 2nd option, while more effective at filling palace hubs, also means that your personal hub is not filling up with wood and stone as fast, therefore it is not a good choice unless you have many self sufficient cities and castles and don’t have a big draw on your hubs. This is usually later in the game and most players will switch from option 1 to option 2 at some point in the late game rather than starting directly with option 2.

Palace Hubs - Storage

The purpose of storage hubs is to store large amounts of wood and stone, and more importantly, to be able to ship large amounts of wood and stone to palaces during enlightenment periods.

A storage hub looks like this: http://louopt.com/F9

One thing you may notice, and where many people make mistakes with hubs, is that there is relatively little storage capacity. 10-13 mil is the target you will be shooting for with a palace storage hub, and no more. Why is this? This is because it is absolutely useless to have wood and stone that you cannot send out to the palace.

Having 13-15k carts means that when a palace enlightens, you will be able to send out 13-15 million res with one click. If you have 25 million resources stored, but not enough carts to send it, those resources are essentially wasted.

Now clearly this storage hub will fill up rather quickly once your resources really get flowing in the late game.

When you find that your storage hub is filling up faster than you are sending the resources out to palaces, that means it is time to build another storage hub. Likewise, as the new hub fills up, you build a new one, and so on and so on. In the late game it is normal to have 6, 8 or even more storage hubs on each continent that you inhabit. Each storage hub that you add means more resources that you can contribute to a palace in one shot.

Resource Flow - Managing your hubs

Now the last thing I am going to talk about is how to establish the flow of resources between your feeder and storage palace hubs.

As mentioned above, to fill the feeder hub there is 2 methods, however, to fill the storage hubs, there is one method that is most effective.

Each of your storage hubs will be set, with the trade minister, to request resources from the feeder hub, up to the max storage capacity. Once a storage hub is full, it will stop requesting resources, and will sit quietly doing nothing. In this way, the only hub that is using carts is the feeder, and only until the storage is full. That way, if a palace enlightens and you need to send resources, all of your storage hubs have all of their carts at home and ready to go.

An example of the final setup for resource flow is here:

This is what your resource flow will look like in the later game, and is set up through the trade minister.

As you can see, your resource cities and raiding castles will deliver all excess wood and stone to your palace feeder. Your excess iron and food will be delivered to your personal hub.

From there, the feeder hub will wait for resource requests from your storage hubs. It will fulfill those requests as they come in, until your storage hubs are full.

When your feeder hub is full, and is not receiving any requests from the storage hubs, it will deliver excess wood and stone to your personal hub.

When your personal hub is full and not filling requests to your cities or castles, it should be automatically purifying resources to keep it below max