Welcome to another exciting edition of I, Tynion. Last week I introduced this article series to you and showed you a basic understanding of how the game works. Today I will take the next step and help you get going in your quest of global dominance.

First, as always, there are many ways to skin a cat. You can use many different techniques in building your city in working towards your goals. With this article, I am going to establish a goal for my second city. Remember, the goal for our first city was to have it produce a moonstone, 4,000 Bersekers, and with the installation of a Trinsic Temple, a Baron. The second city in our empire is going to be a resource city.

What I want this city to do is generate the Wood and Stone that my military cities will need to build itself up.

What Makes a Successful Resource City?

• Resource Building Squares
• Storage
• Transportation

Resource cities—in my opinion—should not produce military troops. They could, but they shouldn't. They should focus just on what you are trying to accomplish: making, storing, and shipping resources. If you will take a look at my common resource city design, you will see that even though I talked about the complete center destruction of resource fields, I don't do it myself. Hypocritical? Maybe, but I prefer to be able to mix in Warehouses and gold production in my resource city. Take a look below at my center ring:



What you will notice in the above image is that I didn't use the entire inner ring. Instead, I started at each gate and ran a line of resource buildings to the other side, then sandwiched a row of Cottages in between. If you leave the resource fields in the outer most tiles, then you might be able to get a small bonus from them if you rotate your layout around the Townhall. You will note that I am getting a little bonus from the wood along the top—from the Forest next to the Warehouse.

In this design, there are two major items that I want to point out to you.

First; the cyan box is showing you what I am calling a Resource Square. A Resource Square consists of six resource buildings (all the same type), two Cottages, and one Processing Building (in this case, the Stonemasonry). This city setup has four Resource Squares. Yes, I could have forced another of each Square into the ring, but I will show you below why I chose not to.

Second; the red box indicates the Warehouse Square. No, its not a square, but I wanted to keep it named similar to the Resource Square (sue me...). What this does is provide the Processing Bonus to one of the two Resource Buildings that otherwise wouldn't get the bonus and provides the same bonus to the Warehouse. The Warehouse is the real reason for this square. The bonus provided to the Resource Building is just that, a bonus. (Note: Resource Buildings can only get the processing bonus one time, so the overlap of coverage on the Resource Squares and Warehouse Square is not beneficial.)

Why do I need the Warehouse Square? It may not make sense now, however, once the city is complete (all the buildings are level ten) you are going to be doing nothing with this city except exporting goods. If you don't have a Warehouse, you get a maximum storage capacity of 175,000 of each non-gold resource (which is provided by your Townhall.) With two Warehouse Squares, you will increase your storage capacity to a whopping 975,000 of both wood and stone. Since we are not making iron or food here, those capacities are irrelevant. However, if you didn't set those Warehouses next to these processing buildings, then your capacity would only be 575,000. So you can see why the processing bonus is important.

Why do I need to store 975k? This is because there will come a time when you are shipping 300k of wood to this city, and 450k of stone to your buddies city, and 100k wood back to your Ranger city. While that sounds crazy right now with only one city and not much going on, you're gonna have to trust me, you will need that capacity in the future; so you might as well build it now so it's out of the way.

I prefer to have my Barons settle Resource Cities on the water (next to ocean or river tiles). It provides me with a port and the ability to ship resources via water, which means you can ship more at longer distances in a shorter time. Additionally, it offers you the distinct advantage of the bonus that Harbors have on Townhouses. Townhouses are the building that allows you to make the almighty dollar in Lord of Ultima. A fully leveled up Harbor provides a +50% bonus to taxation of the Townhouse, while a Marketplace only provides a +25% bonus at level ten.

Making gold is nice and is important, but the most important thing here is that you've got to be able to transport these resources and not worry about running out of carts and ships. Take a look at the next image and you will see that I have a complete port full of Harbors, surrounded by Townhouses, which are surrounded by Marketplaces.


I have a couple items noted in this picture for you. In red you will see the number of carts and ships provided by the Marketplaces and Harbors. You will note that there is a good number of both transportation types available in this city, even though they aren't levelled up to completion. A level ten Harbor makes 30 boats, while a level 10 Marketplace makes 200 carts. A boat will transport 10k resources and a single cart will transport 1k resource. So you can keep track of your transportation capabilities in this region.

You'll also see that the magenta box is showing you how much this city is making in gold per hour. Currently, it is making 2,576g/h, however every building in this port that you raise the level of will increase that amount. As indicated in my previous article, everything in LoU is centered around the Base Number. The Townhouse provides that base number, so it is important to level it as fast as possible to get the most money as quickly as possible. This is also a good time to mention that it's more efficient for you to level all the buildings of a type at the same time. So in this case, just level all the Townhouses a few times, then bump all the Harbors one level, then bump the Marketplaces a level, then return to the Townhouses again.



Are you struggling to get a certain resource? Then I have a bonus plan for you. In the image above, you will see what I call the Bonus Resource Plan. Essentially, find one of your outer rings that happen to have a nice fat build up of whatever resource you are hurting for, then make several Resource Squares in a row just like the example. You can run the squares vertically if it works out for you. In this city, as an example, I wanted to fuel a city dedicated to making a ton of Rangers. Therefore I needed to sink a ton of lumber into that city. So in addition to my normal resource center ring, I also ran this Wood Resource Square to bolster my wood generation. It will be tremendously helpful when completely upgraded.

Tweeting About Lord of Ultima
The best way to make sure that the developers of LoU continue to improve the game is to help out in the promotion of the game. To do my part, I have started this article series to teach new players and I have created a forum in our public forums to chat about the game. Further I have created a Twitter group called Lou. If you are on Twitter, you can follow this group, or you can let me know that you're interested in the group/want to Tweet about LoU, and I'll add you to the group. If you're not on Twitter, then I'll have you know that it's not as dumb as publicly believed, once you start using the tools available to you. This is in an effort to spread the word about the game as well as maybe generate a little competition. Twitter is a fun way to keep up with the game even while you are sitting in the doctor's office. Oh, and don't Tweet about LoU while driving. Put your damn phones down already...


Noob Tip of the Week

Most LoU players are fully aware of the Building Minister and how good he is. If you don't have him, then you most likely won't be able to play this game competitively, sorry…

What most noobs don't know is that the War Minister is equally good, if not better, than the Building Minister. While the Building Minister allows you to extend your building cue by ten slots and lets you cue those buildings to begin construction when resources come available, the War Minister does the same exact thing with military troops.

How many times have you not been able to recruit that Baron because you are waiting for the iron to come available? Not anymore! Add the Baron to the cue and don't worry about him. However, if that was all the War Minister did, he would be good, but not as good as the Building Minister. He does have two more uses though.

First; he lets you cue attacks. You can program him to have your attack land the very instant Night Protection ends, giving your troops the maximum amount of time possible to siege that castle. The other ability is perhaps the most powerful ability in the game...

When a dungeon spawns near your city, you can send out your troops to raid it. When they are finished, they will bring back a bunch of each resource and a chunk of gold. Without the Minister, you need to send the troops out again manually. However, the Minister has a feature that allows you to tell the army to keep doing the raid over and over until the dungeon is complete. One of my cities currently has a level 7 Mountain Dungeon near by. I have six groups of 11k Berserkers raiding that dungeon over and over. The key here is that the city that they are coming from generates zero resources. It is full of Barracks, Training Grounds, and Warehouses. Those raids bring in a TON of resources. Each group will return with 23k gold and 54k iron (plus the other resources that don't really matter here). What this translates into is that my troops are generating 23k x 6 = 138k gold and 54k x 6 = 324k iron every hour.

How many of your maximized resource cities can come close to those numbers? (Note that my stone is at its maximum capacity at over one million. That is a ton considering all the sonte required for the barracks, castle, walls, etc.)



Contest Resolution
Recapping last week’s article; I left you with a contest asking you to design a “City #1” which could recruit and maintain 4,000 Berserkers and build a moonstone. There were a good number of responses, of which I'd like to touch upon and respond. Additionally, I’ll award the diamond prizes to the winners as we go along. I put them each in spoilers so that you could skip them if you wanted to just get to this week's contest immediately.









This Weeks Contest! (Contest Overview)
This week you will be helping Uncle Tynion make a resource city. The situation is that I have plenty of wood and stone, but it is time to make metal wearing troops and I have no iron! To solve this problem, I will simply make an iron city. Here is your map:



Objectives
Design a city able to generate as much iron as possible and be able to transport that iron to military cities on demand. Keep in mind the three concepts that I have outlined to make a successful resource city.

Considerations
I may decide to train Guardians or Templars out of this city at some point.

Prizes
Three lucky winners will earn 75 LoU diamonds. Not real diamonds. Diamonds that purchase artifacts in the game!

You can find the submission thread HERE!

The winner of the contest will be announced in next weeks article. Be sure to tune in to find out if you are a winner!

---

Please check out the rest of the forum! We have plenty of conversations going on to keep you interested and entertained. Also, if you are interested in a private forum for your Alliance, please drop us a pm in the forums and we would be happy to help you out.

---

---