[Algona]

Hello, my name is Algona, I started playing two days before the end of season 4.

As I type this introduction, it's the end of the second month of Season 5.

I've decided to haphazardly share ideas i've had or read, detail my many mistakes so you can avoid them, and provide advice for folk who want it.

I would love your opinions, contributions, feedback, and ideas.

Why write this? I had a very frustrating start to this incredibly fun game. Finding answers and information has been a big part of my success and I want to share that hard earned knwoledge.

Let's start with a simple hint - Use the in-game chat room. There are a lot of friendly helpful people in there who might have the answers to your questions. And after you get that answer, stick around, you never quite know where the conversations go. Good stuff, get in there.

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Topic du jour - How to deal with being 'picked on'. This assumes that you are in early development and militarily relatively weak.

You can help prevent being picked to be 'farmed' by getting on good terms with your nearby neighbors early on in the game. And while we are well past early game it is never to late to open negotiations with your neighbors. A NAP can easily lead to a mutual defence agreement to possible empire mates and alliances.

If you are attacked, there is no reason to take it personally, deal with it. I recommend a nice message to the attacker asking them to not attack you. It seems to be part of the LoD culture that most players will honor such a request as long as you are polite. If the attacker does not respond and they are in an empire, talk to the empire leader and ask them to ask the attacker to stop.

However there are players who are out for blood and will keep attacking you. No need to get upset, war is a big part of the game. There are a few ways to deal with this.

First, fight back if you have an army. When you are attacked, counter attack, there is a chance they are sending a majority of their army at you.

Second, see if there are others being 'farmed' by the attacker and see if you can organize a group to fight back.

Third, get full or partial Imperial Protection until you build up an army. (You may find you like being under IP, many players have gone the whole season just developing and not worrying about fighting.)

Fourth, dodge and keep dodging. Move all troops and peasants out of the attacked area, hide valuables in other villages or outposts or with trades and production. This gets tiring after a while.

My preferred response is the second, nothing like the neighborhood getting together to beat up a bully.

Good luck. And if worst comes to worst, ask someone bigger than the bully for help, you never know what might happen. Imagine a bully's surprise when he 'farms' you and there are a couple thousand knights waiting for them.

[rahat]

Very nice first post Algona, its most definitely a good guideline for the new players who usually just consider quitting because of the other players attacking them.
Thanks

[Algona]

Thanks, rahat, much appreciated.

Hint of the day - Make the tools for your next buidling while building your current building. Nothing kills development like waiting for tools to complete. Plan ahead!

Topic du jour - Speaking of tools, after assuring a steady supply of planks, iron, and stone*, you should aggressively upgrade your toolmaker. Ideally, you should be making tools at least as fast as your other upgrades are using them up.

Alternatively, you can set a large number of tools to make when you are going to be out of game for an extended period. (Such as sleeping, for those of you who partake that habit.)

Invest in your toolmaker upgrades, it's a huge timesaver later on.

Chaining into another thought... TIME, the one element of this game that is immutable. With enough upgrades you can get the resources to build anything you need or want. But TIME to build, to make tools and arms, to recruit armies is the most valuable commodity in this game. Make the most of your time in game, you should be evaluating what upgrades get you to your goals fastest.


*I'll talk about how to get to this point another day.

[Algona]

Tip: Planks. Planks, planks, planks, planks. It's always all about planks. When in doubt build/upgrade sawmills and the needed woodcutters to keep them running. Even if you do not need planks for immediate building/tools/arms, planks are extremely valuable in trade.

Speaking of trade...

Topic du jour - A solid understanding of trade can really help you develop your kingdom. Make sure you always have a good supply of caravans. Three aspects to consider.

First, the invasion dodge. If you are about to be attacked, you can hide product in trade. Put resources, products, tools, and arms for trade at 10 gold each.

Second, buying and trading for items you need for development.

Third, selling product you have overstock for product you are short on. With a little extra effort you can generate a regular overstock of a very popular item and cash that in for what you need. Iron and planks are at the top of the list of items in high demand in the market. During different seasons food varies highly in price. Logs and stone can usually net something. Tools and arms are wildly variable. Armor is almost always a high demand product.

Find time to regularly review the market to understand what folk are buying and how much they are trading or paying for the items you want to buy and sell.

[Algona]

A possibly helpful hint: Before joining an empire, talk to the empire leader and try to get an idea if the philosophy and goals of the empire match what you want. Don't hesitate to jump in the live ingame chat and ask about the reputation of the members of the prospective empire.

Topic Du Jour - Just posted this elsewhere, I reckon it could be useful!

If you are wondering what troops to build, here is a way to help figure out just whay you want.

Under the Military Overview button there is a Battle Simulator (upper right corner of the popup.).

I'd recommend simulating different battles, with the attacker using an equal number of swordsmen against your different defensive combinations.

Seems like 25% knights, 25% swordsman, and 50% archers defending lose against an equal number of swordsmen attacking.

That same combination 25% knights, 25% swordsman, and 50% archers gets beat 2:1 by a 50/50 mix of attacking knights and swordsmen.

Try 75% militia + 25% knights defending against attacking swordsmen and then against attacking knights/swordsmen, interesting results.

But don't trust my word for it, run some simulations, you'll learn a lot and it's kinda fun.

It turns out there are some surprisingly weird but very effective combinations for both attackers and defenders.

[Algona]

Sorry for not posting sooner, it's been an interesting last two weeks. I've learned a lot about kingdom management and I'll be sharing that over the next few posts.

Tip of the day. When putting in production numbers or transferring goods, you can click on the numbers in the parantheses (1234) next to the fill in field. This will fill in the field with the number in the parantheses. Big timesaver and avoids those silly typos.

Topic du jour - Kingdom management overview.

As stated before, have a plan, know what you want your kingdom to do. Everything in LoD revolves around resource production. You need to grow your kingdom as fast as possible and to do that you need to maximize production.

I've found that the fastest route to maximizing production is to get a solid base of production in all villages and outposts and then use the production from all other villages and outposts to maximize production in your main village. Once the main village is maximized, start maximizing another village.

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Generic Production Outposts

A 'generic production outpost' (GPO) is a Plains tile outpost dedicated to producing planks, iron, and stone.

My goal for a GPO is to get it up to at least 300 planks, 300 stone, and 300 iron per hour and to have the outpost be self supporting in food, logs, ironore and coalore. The advantage to being self supporting is that you don't have to waste as much time in the tedious task of moving resources around.

Plains tiles with coalore and ironore work best for GPOs. I build two each of sawmill, timbercutter, ironmelter, quarry, hunter, and fisher, 1 coalmine, 1 ironmine. Note well that this uses up the entire building allotment for the tile. By doubling up on the buildings you save a lot of production resources and time.

A GPO Plains tile developed this way will support 500-1000 points of troops in mid game and a couple thousand late game.

Once this GPO is to the point where it is both self supporting and productive, I then use the production from that GPO to support development of my main village.

I've found that I want at least one GPO per village.

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During the process of developing GPOs and maximizing my main village, aside from helping other villages get to a lvl 15 Main Building, I leave all other villages in 'self development' mode. I let the villages develop themselves with minimal help from my main village (typically tool production) or my GPOs.

Circumstances can change this of course.

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Main Village Development

My goal for the main village is to get the sawmill, ironmill, and toolmaker to lvl 20 along with supporting resources. Quarry, timbercutters, food, and mines have to be upgraded as well, but only enough to support production. Other buildings also have to be built and upgraded.

A little more about upgrading the toolmaker. You will quickly find that your GPOs provide you with a lot of resources to build. The chokepoint is the tools. Upgrading the toolmaker and making tools faster is critical to continued growth.

NOTE WELL! Your main building is important to the speed in this process. You want to get it to lvl 15 as fast as possible, this will dramatically increase food production and possible timber and ore. More important though is the time savings in building other buildings. Lvl 15 MB reduces constrution time by 25%, lvl 30 MB by 50%! I'm not sure if it was the right way to do it, by I brought my MB up to lvl 30 before doing the lvl 16 and up upgrades to any other buildings. I figure I saved dozens of hours in building time this way.

Your military has to be managed during this process, I'll talk about that in my next post. As well as how to get 1,000,000 free resources...

[Frits]

wow algona

Now everybody is rank #1

Verry nais work here!

[TheHeir]

+ Rep

Good job Algona