Help Me! I am swimming in a Sea of Lawless!!

Last week I planned on introducing military troops and their effectiveness in certain situations. However, after the week that I just experienced, there is a much more urgent matter than needs to be addressed. It can’t wait one more minute. The importance of the Cottage needs to be pounded into the heads of anyone who plays LoU.

The Cottage is the single most important building that you can put into a city. Every city needs Cottages, regardless of the purpose of the city. More importantly than the manpower bonus that it provides is the Production Speed that a Cottage provides.

Last week a couple of players went redline and all of their cities were abandoned, making them all become Lawless. In such a situation, the city will be seen as gray on the region map and any player may send a Baron to capture it. If that city happens to have a Castle, you’ve got to siege the city to capture it. If it didn’t have a Castle, you just need to send normal settling funds (100k Wood, 100k Stone, 50k Iron, 50k Food, and 250 carts or 25 ships) along with the Baron.

Now the nightmare happens when you first open the city screen of a newly captured Lawless. If you are following my practice, and separate your cities into specific tasked entities, then you are in for a wake-up call 90% of the time. Most of the Lawless that you capture will suck eggs. Take a look at this city:



When I saw this city, I wanted to scream. My chin fell to my chest and I wept silent tears. What a waste of a Baron. What the hell was I to do with that? Look at the stats that I blow up for you. Of all the numbers there, pay attention to the one that is the most aggravating of all of them… Construction Speed 919%. That speed is nothing. In my Resource city layout, you will naturally ramp up to around 1800% to 2100% Construction speed, which is about average for what I need to do. Anything under 1500% is unacceptable for building anything of substance. You are going to have upgrades nearing one hour for completion, and worse of all is that your destruction time is equally as handicapped.

In order to break down this city down and rebuild, I actually need to level every single Cottage to level ten in order to have enough speed to get the job done this year. The other helpful thing is to install the ten buildings available as Cottages and level them to around seven or so in the hopes to get the speed up to 1800%. That is still only just to destroy buildings and rebuild!

Listen folks! I am trying to do you a favor. Build Cottages. Build a ton of Cottages. Before you start trying to do something, build Cottages. If you are setting up your resource buildings in a new Resource City, level up your Town Hall to level four. From there, install as many Cottages as you can in the proper places, and then install the Resource Buildings. This will ensure that the buildings are going in at ten second durations. Once all of the Cottages and Resource Buildings are installed, level the Cottages, repeat, Cottages to around level six. Now, increase the Town Hall to level eight. This will keep the Town Hall upgrades at around 30 minutes.

Doing this may seem self-defeating, but it is the most effective way to run a city. You can get even more things accomplished in a single day if you have a Building Minister. Here I am again, banging you in the head with a Building Minister. I know; you don’t want to pay money for a free game, but hear me out. You are already investing your time into this game. Why would you want to invest your time into a game only to be frustrated? The Building Minister is your friend, not your enemy. He only requires 110 diamonds for a week of service or 280 diamonds for 30 days, which is a deal. Considering that you can get 500 diamonds for $4.99, that means that you can get the Minister for 6 weeks for only $4.99. (Yes, I am going to endorse the Defense and War Minister all in due time if you plan on being competitive in wars.) For my wallet, the best deal is the 2350 diamonds for $19.99. You can pay for the Minister Bundle, priced at 725 diamonds a month, for three months, and still have 175 diamonds left over for miscellaneous speed-ups. Long story short; buy a Building Minister!

Why pay a Minister?

If you don’t have a Minister, you are limited to only six cue slots. Meaning, you can only order six upgrades at a time. The Building Minister expands that to 16 cue slots. Additionally, it is smart enough to allow you to cue upgrades that you can’t currently afford. You can literally place a Cottage and click it to upgrade to level ten and then log out. If you log back in after the amount of time required passes (assuming that you have, or will get, the needed resources), your Cottage will be level ten. This is critical in order to be competitive. You’ve got to be keep building while you are at school, work, sleeping, eating, etc. You can’t do that if you are limited to six orders. If you know that you’ve got a long period of time before you can log back in, then cue up 16 orders to move those 16 buildings from level nine to ten. Lord knows you don’t want to sit there for 16 hours while time ticks away.

Let’s look at another crummy Lawless I captured:



At first glance, the untrained eye will say, “Oh look! They utilized the resource fields that Chris said to destroy and are making a decent amount of resources in doing so.” I look at this and say, “What a freaking mess!” The only thing that I did to this city thus far, beside cry about it, is to kill off one iron field and replace it with a Foundry (anyone want to argue the +25% that the iron field generates versus the +300% that the level ten Foundry produces?)

Just to show you an example of what this Lawless looks like in comparison to a more (albeit not optimized) organized city. Look at the next example:



Now you can see what a mess the first city is as you can plainly see what they were attempting to do. They wanted to make a boatload of Iron and Stone while saving on other building slots. The problem is that it took them forever to get to this point, and with build times approaching two hours at level eight, I can see why they would quit. What I am demonstrating in the Lawless image is that it is a 30 minute upgrade from level four to level five on the Foundry. That is disastrous! Take a look at the Construction speed in that example and then look in the second example.

In the second example, I have a tremendous advantage in Iron and Stone generation as well as Construction speed. Look at the army size (the City is Defenseless indicates that there are no troops trained) and see that they have a maximum of 2400 men. In my example I have just under 17k Guardians trained (the -1998 army size is because I am in the middle of relocating a Barracks). Now compare the 420 carts and 12 ships to the 600 carts and 225 ships. You can see that with better planning, organization, and focus, you can generate a really powerful city with a lot less time than you would expect. That time is given to you by your $4.99 investment because most of these upgrades were cued up and ran while I slept and worked (or warred…).

Now hopefully the point has been driven home. You’ve got to build Cottages. Don’t rely on resource fields. They don’t help you like you believe. You have got to build Cottages in order to be competitive. Or… just build Cottages so that when you quit and the city becomes Lawless, Uncle Tynion and settle his Baron in your Town Hall and not have his head explode.

Before I end the educational portion of this article, I want to show you how you can start your city and build it quickly and efficiently. In the following image, you will see that I created a starting point for a Naval city. In a Naval city, most of your buildings are going to be located in the lower right quadrant of the city. You will be building eight Shipyards and trying to fill the rest of the quadrant with Barracks and possible unit training buildings like Trinsic Temple and Training Grounds. Since the center ring of the city is not as important in these cities, you don’t have to kill all the resource fields, (I still do it though). You would think that all you need to do is level the Town Hall to 10 then build Shipyards and Barracks right? Nope!



As shown above, just build Cottages, but don’t stop there. You need to hit a new city just as hard as you would hit an enemy in war. You send excess. Build several Warehouses, Cottages, and Processing buildings next to the Warehouses so you can ship a ton of resources to the city and just build. You don’t want to have to worry about getting more resources. You just want to build, setting your Minister cue and coming back periodically to add more to the cue.

In the example you can see that I have installed a big square of Cottages and a Warehouse just for effect. This is not the huge impact that I was talking about.



That’s right… I said install a bunch of Cottages! Get that Construction speed up between 2500% and 3100% and just blaze through the build times of the barracks and unit training buildings. With 2600% Construction speed, you can get through an upgrade of a Barracks from nine to ten in just under 30 minutes. That is huge compared to the hour the same building would take at 1800%.

Now, the goal of this city is to make a really big army and be able to transport them with Frigates. So I don’t need a ton of Barracks in the middle and I don’t need a full port of Shipyards, so I am able to utilize the middle but also spread some Barracks love in the port as well. But I am not even going to use the lower left quadrant, so I just filled it up with Cottages, leveled them all to seven (stopped at seven because I broke 2600% and then I installed the Barracks.)

Yes, as I complete all of these Barracks, I will begin to need more building slots. When that happens, you destroy one Cottage and install one more building. Be sure to level the building from one to ten before destroying more Cottages. I advise you to continue watching your Construction speed. If it starts to dip below 2400%, I would level a few more Cottages to get it back up to where you feel most comfortable.

I also would advise not removing all of the Cottages. The bad side effect of having a Castle is that people like to shoot cannon balls and throw big rocks at them. If you thought that these build times with Cottages were slow, try rebuilding those lost levels without any Cottages.


Noob Tip of the Week

In the previous image, you were given an example of a military city in progress. Do yourself a favor… Don’t build your Castle in the center ring. Put it in one of the quadrants that you don’t plan on using. This city was one that I captured and then freaked out about when I saw its Castle location. If you look at the image and follow the pattern, I would have loved that spot to have been a Training Grounds. Instead, there is a big freaking sore thumb plugging up production.

Oh, and don’t build the Castle until you have the city completely built, the walls and all the towers are level ten and you have 20k Rangers, Templars, Guardians, and Ballista recruited solely to protect this city. *Foreshadowing of Next Weeks Article!*

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Now to revisit our last article!

Last time we left off, you were asked to build an Iron city. I gave you a randomly generated city and let you go to work with the reminder that you needed to be able to store it and ship it. Let’s take a look at some of the designs:



















Well, that took a heck of a lot longer than I anticipated. So let me quickly dive into this week’s contest!

This Week's Contest! (Contest Overview)
Last week we developed an Iron city to fuel our Military city. Several times during this article I have foreshadowed that we are heading into Warsville next week. With that said, I want you to design for me Warsville.

What is Warsville?

That’s part of your design. So far we have our first city, which is our Moonstone city. We then built a resource city next to it, generating as much Wood and Stone as possible to fuel our growth. Finally, we built an Iron city that will churn out a ton of iron. Now, our Baron has just squatted next to our Iron city and Resource city.

Take the mic and tell me what is going to go in this new city.

Objectives
Design your first military city.

Considerations
You have a Wood and Iron city next to this city.

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 the next Lord of Ultima article. Be sure to tune in to find out if you are a winner!

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Please check out the rest of the forum! We have plenty of conversations going on to keep you interested and entertained.

Last week I mentioned that we can provide a private forum for your Alliance. What that allows you to do for this game is post links, maps, guides, etc in a manner that you are more accustomed to on the internet. Most of the larger alliances in LoU have created their own website and then private forums. I am bypassing all of that and am offering to let you host your own private forum, free of charge, here in our TGE forums. If you are interested in having a private forum set up for your alliance, let me or our Forum Admin, Cameron, know and it will be set up for you.

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