A guide: the possible fastest way to raise your hourly income

[zsqysq]

These guidelines are based on calculations. I compared the "Increased Hourly Gain/ Upgrading or Building Hours" and took the "Increased Hourly Gain" into consideration. However this method is only a personal view and might ruin your fun for game if you just copy.

Castle is ignored. Gem buildings are not included in this guide.

First of all:

Build Cottage 1st
Upgrade Cottage 1st to lv2
Build Cottage 2nd
Upgrade Cottage 2nd to lv2

Then the same for Farm-> Bazaar -> Bakery in order.

Now the real thing comes:

If multiple actions are listed in one step, you could do it in any order you like.

Remember you could have 2 of each type of buildings. Get both done.

1) Upgrade Farm -> lv3
2) Upgrade Bazaar -> lv3
3) Build a Tavern, Build a Silo, Build a Library, Build a Tailor, Upgrade a Silo to lv2
4) Upgrade a Bakery -> lv3, Upgrade a Farm ->lv4

Upgrade Cottage as frequently as you like. Because an ordinary player is actually keeping Cottage idle for longer time than others, gain from Cottage is hard to measure.

Only from now it's safe to build any more advanced buildings asap after they are unlocked, if you have sufficient cash flow.

5) Upgrade a Bazaar -> lv4, Upgrade a Silo -> lv3
6) Upgrade a Tailor -> lv2, Upgrade a Tavern -> lv2, Upgrade a Library -> lv2, Upgrade a Tailor -> lv 3, Upgrade a Stable -> lv2
7) Upgrade a Farm -> lv5, Upgrade a Silo -> lv4, Upgrade a Bazaar -> lv5, Upgrade a Bakery -> lv4
8) Upgrade a Leatherworker -> lv2, Upgrade a Tavern -> lv3, Upgrade a Cartographer -> lv2, Upgrade a Bakery -> lv5

From this point each step of upgrading takes too long (12 hours at least) , thus time management is more important than the guidelines from calculation.

9) Upgrade a Leatherworker -> lv3, Upgrade a Tailor -> lv4, Upgrade a Cartographer -> lv3
10) Upgrade Pottery Maker -> lv2, then take your time.

PS: Welcome to be my allies! 837-377-741

[NeonBlue]

Nice thoughts. That looks like a good schedule for maximizing the early upgrades.

My general rule is "Always Be Upgrading". I choose building upgrades based on their finishing time -- I want to know that I'll be available as soon as one upgrade is completed, to get started on the next one. If an upgrade finishes in the middle of the night, and it's four hours until I check the game again, that's four precious upgrade hours I've lost.

I used to be concerned with not interrupting money earnings -- e.g., if a building is due to pay off in another half hour, I wouldn't start an upgrade and "waste" the invested time on the current payout cycle.

Now I've given that up, because I believe that in the early stages, gold isn't important, only income. To be more specific, I only care about having enough gold to pay for the next upgrades (building and vault upgrades) as soon as they're available to start. So if a 24-hour building is two hours from paying off, but I can start an upgrade now and I have enough gold to do it -- I go ahead and do it.

And why is that? Because however exciting a 200 G payoff looks to me right now, that money is peanuts in the long run. I'd rather "waste" that and keep improving my economy, knowing that once I'm taking in a few thousand per hour I'll laugh at ever caring about a few hundred gold gained or lost.

[superdad]

In response to NeonBlue:

You would have to do a pretty detailed calculation/simulation to discover the correct strategy for upgrading immediately vs getting that gold collection. Imagine you delay a building for 1 hour to collect 30g in the beginning. Lets say that 1 week later, that same building makes 500g/hr. You could think at that point you have effectively lost 470g by delaying the higher income building by 1 hour. However, you also have to account for the income acceleration that the 30g saved allowed you to have by reinvesting it. For example, it could have maybe accelerated an upgrade by an hour, thus completely erasing the 1 hour lost. As an example, lets say that a few hours later you are 30g short to upgrade something. Now you must delay that upgrade for X minutes while you wait for that 30g.

It’s not as simple as that, but the gains also are probably negligible. And to find the true answer, you’d have to sit down for a long time to calculate the correct strategy, and then you’d try to put it in practice, and your playtime could interfere with executing it. Overall, I’d say you are probably correct to upgrade something whenever you can, but I’m not 100% convinced that’s actually the correct answer, more that it really doesn’t matter likely by too much of a margin either way.

[superdad]

A comment to the OP now...

This could be a decent "guide", but it's certainly not the fastest possible way, because there is a lot that is unaccounted for. For example, what is the checking frequency? Every 5 mins (to maximize cottages?). That is obviously unrealistic for 99% of the cases, especially considering the plan you lay out is probably hundreds of hours of playtime.

This is the 2nd point... since you can only build and upgrade 1 building at a time, did you take that into account? For example, if the calculation of build time is erased (such as it should be for the building/upgrade you do before bedtime), then the order will certainly swap, because the time component of that build is actually zero. I.e. a 1 hour upgrade and 6 hour upgrade is likely the same "denominator" for the build before bedtime, and the fraction would change considerably.

Then you have to consider checking frequency and maximizing that with builds and upgrades to facilitate overlap of the two, while also minimizing the frequency/time that your existing buildings are capped.

Then further, you'd have to consider upgrades that happen before the building can be harvested. I.e. if a 3 hour harvest building is upgraded at 2 hours, and the upgrade takes 5 hours, this delays the harvest by 5 hours, and this impact certainly plays a part. A true optimized strategy would account for minimizing these impacts/downtimes.

TLR to do this properly, this would actually take a significant amount of modelling time to account for everything, and in the end, the correct answer can only possibly exist for a pre-determined game-checking frequency. Each different checking frequency would possess it's own unique solution.

TLRx2.. the proper strategy is likely very simply this.... build or upgrade the building that has the longest upgrade time within the next time you will check on the game. For example, if you will check on the game in 4 hours, then build something who's upgrade time is 4 hours. This way you minimize the build/upgrade bottleneck, which is likely going to be the true inhibitor to economy growth.

[NeonBlue]

Superdad,
Agreed on the possible mathematical complexity -- you make a good point on the tradeoffs. However, in practice I find I'm never too low on gold to upgrade *something*. So, in your hypothetical situation, if I later found myself 30g short of an upgrade, I'd just upgrade something cheaper instead.

This does assume that I eventually want to upgrade all buildings to the max level, which is probably not the case, but again, in practice, there's always something around that's worth upgrading, and that I can currently afford the upgrade for.

Also, I help make that true by planning ahead. If I know that the next upgrade I want to start costs 2500g, then I'll time my other purchases such that I have that much in the vault when my current upgrade finishes. In other words, I might delay a land expansion if that would cut into my "next upgrade fund." That works for me because building upgrades are the long pole, whereas I don't have trouble keeping up with sufficient land expansions, so it's okay to delay one for a few hours if I'm short on gold.

I may have overstated my case, but my main point was that it took me a couple of days to get over my fear of interrupting a building payout cycle. I found myself not upgrading my Silos, which are potential big money-makers, because their payouts never synched up with my upgrade availability timeslots. Now that they're level 5 and paying out a nice 2640g, I'm glad I sacrificed a few hundred gold in interruptions to get them up there.

[zsqysq]

To NeonBlue,

I can't agree more with the idea "always keep upgrading". But as what Superdad has said, you can't check so frequently. I spent 1 hour calculating out these guidelines today. However if I were to make a perfect plan of upgrading time management, I might end up with spending 1 hour calculating everyday, which is not realistic.

If you are in lack of a handful of gold, just go to the last map and farm some mobs. Or if you feel lucky, find a Silo to raid.

[Odie]

I agree with a lot of the thoughts here...although I also know the the "perfect" process isn't achievable because it will be different for everybody depending on when and how often they check in. I have a few general rules though which seem to have been working for me as I've gotten to almost 1000 iph since I started last Friday. Some of these I gathered from trial and error on MW.

1. Follow the quests - Build what they tell you. Obviously you have to weigh the options between building unit/boost/defense building and money makers, but the game itself actually gives you a decent blueprint early on.

2. When it is a money building, build 2. Typically the buildings goes up fast (definitely at lower levels) and you can upgrade the first building to level 3 pretty fast also. Plus, it is easier to place two buildings next to each other immediately and then get them on the same collection schedule. Rearranging an entire Kingdom later is ROUGH (I just did it in MW with a base probably 3x as large).

3. Build linearly - My Kingdom is 3 plots wide (North/South) and I expand East-West. The bottom half is 3 rows of money/defense buildings. The top half is filled with Unit/Boost buildings and some defense scattered in. Here is my logic. The money buildings come in 3 basic sizes it seems and the towers/bunkers are basically the same size as the smaller money buildings. I build a row of money buildings (2 each of the same building like I said), then a row with 2 small money buildings and a defense building after each group of two (tower or bunker depending on the amount of money I am defending). The third row is all money buildings again...sandwiching the defense row. What I have ended up with is land that is basically maximized to eliminate as much open space as possible by putting similar sized buildings together...and the row in the middle with defense buildings layered in basically adds protection to all 3 rows with money buildings. The reason I have unit/boost buildings together is their sizes are all over the map so you basically have to puzzle them together to make it work.

4. Vault and Land above all - obvious logic, but I will hold off on upgrading or building if one of them is coming up soon so I can get them going ASAP. Land is actually pretty cheap so far, and fast in terms of build time, but I am sure that will not be the case and there is nothing worse than waiting for land when you want to get a new building in. I don't think this is a revolutionary concept like I said.

Maybe a little TLDR on my part also, but I wanted to throw the ideas out there.

[NeonBlue]

Nice ones, Odie!

1. Follow the quests - Build what they tell you. Obviously you have to weigh the options between building unit/boost/defense building and money makers, but the game itself actually gives you a decent blueprint early on.

I'd be cautious with this one. In MW there were some upgrade quests that definitely didn't feel worth it (e.g. Level 7 Warehouse). And the bonuses for completing the quests didn't remotely make up for the large amount of time invested in upgrading that one building instead of others with faster upgrades and higher profit gains.

Maybe they've "fixed" that in KA, but still, I'll continue picking my upgrades based on the time they take and my predicted profits (e.g., a $100 increase on a 6-hour building, I might count as $250/day, assuming I'll manage to collect it 2-3 times each day). If it happens to line up with an upgrade quest, then great, but I won't go out of my way.

[PorkChopExpress]

Gotta dispute the "land is cheap" statement... My next purchase will be for $7,700... even @ nearly $1,500/HR (while trying to strengthen my army, expand my vault, and upgrade money buildings) it'll take me 24-48 hours to get the $$$. (PS - I know that mathmatically I can do it, but I'm putting more effort int strengthening my army against those of you who are spending real cash to get the higher value army pieces)

[Chido Katori]

I just want to say, I can't seem to see anything on saving yourself from robbers efficiently. Last time I had around 9000 gold and lost around 2200 from 1 attack without any guards. What would you say to this?

It's just really annoying being so vulnerable. Any idea as to how to combat that?

These guidelines are based on calculations. I compared the "Increased Hourly Gain/ Upgrading or Building Hours" and took the "Increased Hourly Gain" into consideration. However this method is only a personal view and might ruin your fun for game if you just copy.

Castle is ignored. Gem buildings are not included in this guide.

First of all:

Build Cottage 1st
Upgrade Cottage 1st to lv2
Build Cottage 2nd
Upgrade Cottage 2nd to lv2

Then the same for Farm-> Bazaar -> Bakery in order.

Now the real thing comes:

If multiple actions are listed in one step, you could do it in any order you like.

Remember you could have 2 of each type of buildings. Get both done.

1) Upgrade Farm -> lv3
2) Upgrade Bazaar -> lv3
3) Build a Tavern, Build a Silo, Build a Library, Build a Tailor, Upgrade a Silo to lv2
4) Upgrade a Bakery -> lv3, Upgrade a Farm ->lv4

Upgrade Cottage as frequently as you like. Because an ordinary player is actually keeping Cottage idle for longer time than others, gain from Cottage is hard to measure.

Only from now it's safe to build any more advanced buildings asap after they are unlocked, if you have sufficient cash flow.

5) Upgrade a Bazaar -> lv4, Upgrade a Silo -> lv3
6) Upgrade a Tailor -> lv2, Upgrade a Tavern -> lv2, Upgrade a Library -> lv2, Upgrade a Tailor -> lv 3, Upgrade a Stable -> lv2
7) Upgrade a Farm -> lv5, Upgrade a Silo -> lv4, Upgrade a Bazaar -> lv5, Upgrade a Bakery -> lv4
8) Upgrade a Leatherworker -> lv2, Upgrade a Tavern -> lv3, Upgrade a Cartographer -> lv2, Upgrade a Bakery -> lv5

From this point each step of upgrading takes too long (12 hours at least) , thus time management is more important than the guidelines from calculation.

9) Upgrade a Leatherworker -> lv3, Upgrade a Tailor -> lv4, Upgrade a Cartographer -> lv3
10) Upgrade Pottery Maker -> lv2, then take your time.

[Odie]

Gotta dispute the "land is cheap" statement... My next purchase will be for $7,700... even @ nearly $1,500/HR (while trying to strengthen my army, expand my vault, and upgrade money buildings) it'll take me 24-48 hours to get the $$$. (PS - I know that mathmatically I can do it, but I'm putting more effort int strengthening my army against those of you who are spending real cash to get the higher value army pieces)

No...at $7,700 land is no longer cheap. The upgrade I have going now was $3,300 which, relative to what I make/hour now, feels cheaper than MW to me. It might be a misconception. I know hat will end though and it will be ncreasingly harder to have land to build on.

[Odie]

Nice ones, Odie!



I'd be cautious with this one. In MW there were some upgrade quests that definitely didn't feel worth it (e.g. Level 7 Warehouse). And the bonuses for completing the quests didn't remotely make up for the large amount of time invested in upgrading that one building instead of others with faster upgrades and higher profit gains.

Maybe they've "fixed" that in KA, but still, I'll continue picking my upgrades based on the time they take and my predicted profits (e.g., a $100 increase on a 6-hour building, I might count as $250/day, assuming I'll manage to collect it 2-3 times each day). If it happens to line up with an upgrade quest, then great, but I won't go out of my way.

I guess I meant early on...as in up until level 10 or so. That said, following the unit purchase quests...and upgrading the buildings to unlock those units...did significantly boost my army ratings. The quests are definitely not always the best at that time though as you get higher up.

[NeonBlue]

I just want to say, I can't seem to see anything on saving yourself from robbers efficiently. Last time I had around 9000 gold and lost around 2200 from 1 attack without any guards. What would you say to this?

It's just really annoying being so vulnerable. Any idea as to how to combat that?

Chido, my approach to that is to rarely have more gold than my vault can hold.
1. I constantly upgrade my vault
2. When I end up with "too much gold" (heh) I go shopping. This is a great time, for me, for land expansion, defense buildings, or units and equipment. Lately I've been grabbing a Tome of Winter (5/5) for $2k when I need to drop my cash level to what my vault can hold.

I'm told there are better weapons available from PvE, but frankly I'd rather buy it, use it for a while, and replace it, than have someone steal my cash.

[Odie]

Good point on vault...I rarely have more than my vault and when i do, only a few hundred if I am actively on the game and trying to get enough for a building priced just over my vault amount. I never leave the game with more money than vault though because you will get raided obviously.

[NeonBlue]

PorkChop, I'm curious, are you expanding your land because you have to (i.e. ran out of room) or just to keep progressing on expansion?

I'm trying to wait on each land expansion until my vault amount is as high as the price. My next land will be $5400, so it still feels somewhat affordable, but it sounds like I need to be prepared for a sharp spike in pricing. On the other hand, I have plenty of room -- I'm at level 10 so my buildings easily fit in the space I have. I'm curious if that has become a problem for you, though.