Optimising your gameplay

Edit: I am still in the process of reviewing all tables. I have not yet finished the last paragraphs on page 2. Until then you can get a better look of the tables, if you click "quote" on any post with a text-table in it. In the "quote" the table will have the proper tab stops. you can then copy it to e.g. excel/notepad and it will be more reader friendly. You can also just wait a couple of days, and I will have updated every table as attachement, so it is reader friendly in the forum

Hi guys,

I play a lvl 3 account on server s115, who is currently ranked 41 with 4.518k pp, not including unclaimed 736k pp rewards for level 4-18, which could bring the account to rank 27.

People have been asking me, why I don’t level up, and how I manage to get so high ranked as a level 3. In this guide I will share all my strategies for optimizing your gameplay. So here is my guide for a different kind of challenge in playing haypi: Low level, high pp rank.

I hope any player will be able to find some piece of info here that they didn’t know already – even you seasoned ones out there. I will try to not list the most obvious info or things that are extensively covered in other guides. If you see anything missing or erroneous, please let me know so I can correct it.

If you decide to take the challenge and try building a low level high ranked account, you should know, that you will *never* become the highest pp ranked player on your server as level 3. So don’t set that as your goal. However, if you set yourself the goal that you will try to become the highest ranked level 3 (or other low level, e.g. 4, 7, 10 or 13), then you have a realistic goal. I would say a level 13 has a much better chance at competing for the number one pp rank spot, but I will explain that in the building for pp sections below.

Also decide for yourself if you want to purchase coins or not. The challenge is harder, if you don’t of course. Unfortunately, haypi doesn’t provide a scoreboard for pp/title combined. There is only the “Title” (level) scoreboard and the “Prestige” scoreboard. Most of the players on the prestige scoreboard have maximised their level according to their pp. So you have to locate the other players that stay lower level than their pp affords them on the prestige scoreboard to identify your “real” competitors. So while everyone else (most of the server) is competing for highest pp and level overall, you are competing for highest pp within your level bracket.

What can you expect your gameplay to be like compared to a high level account? Below, I will give some points. These are based on you playing as level 3. If you play as level 4 or higher you will gain more cities/forts/oasis, and some of the points will change of course.
- You will only have one city to manage and will therefore have less hassle than players with more cities.
- Once your city is fully built, you can focus solely on building troops/wall and attacking. You can completely ignore stealing subs and forts.
- You will only have 1 or 2 armies (3 if you vip) and they will be ready for attack instantly once you harvest them. You never have to gather together a big army from multiple cities.
- You will only have 2 oasis, so you will spend less time “refreshing” oasises.
- You will have to gather fewer resources for gaining max daily pp from building troops/wall than higher ranked players.
- You will gain more pp per resource/manpower building troops/wall than higher level players.
- You will have an easier time donating to your alliance, if you are in one, because you just need to worry about filling one warehouse for building troops/wall. All other resources can go to your alliance.
- You will gain more pp from battle where you won and also took troop losses against higher level players.
- You will lose less pp from battle where you lost and also took troop losses against higher level players.
- You will mostly be attacking other players for small-medium pp gains. My max is 30k pp from winning an attack and 24k pp from winning a defensive battle.
- You will never have the largest army on the server.
- People can never steal a sub/fort from you.
- You will be able to attack and win pp from targets behind medium-high level walls that high level players would be unable to gain prestige from due to losses.
- Money will always be a concern for you, because you have no forts.
- You will use the market more than most other players (at least I think I use it more).
- Until you get a “reputation” or become known on the server, other players will think you are weak and attack you more often.
- Importantly, it will be almost impossible for any other player to win any pp from you. I have in total lost pp from 3 battles (not including scout attacks of course) – for a total loss of 2.5k pp. All losses were due to mistakes on my part.
- In the unlikely event, that you do lose pp from battle, you can rest assured that you gained more pp building those troops than you lost losing them.
- If you ever change your mind and want to level up, you can always do so, and chances are prices on the level-up items will have fallen considerably, so they will be relatively cheap. But just be aware, that once you level up, you can never go back.
- There might be more gameplay differences to playing low level, than what I have mentioned above.

Comparing your pp rank to other players

There are many ways in which you can compete with other players. In the end it’s all up to you to figure out, why you play this game and what motivates you. One of the ways you can compete is in straight up pp rank. The table below lists the pp requirements and pp rewards of each level.

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There doesn’t seem to be a formula to predict the pp requirements based on your level. There are some patterns, e.g. the requirements for lvl 4, 8, 12, 16, 20 are multimplied by 10. However the requirements for level 3 (630) break the pattern for lvl 7, 11, 15, 19 and the requirement for level 10 (35.000) break the pattern for level 6, 14, 18. Also, there is something strange about level 2. If it should have followed the pattern for 6, (10), 14, 18 it should have been 360 and not 200. And also, there didn’t appear to be a level 1 on s58, however on s115 there are lvl 1 accounts. On s58, you jumped from level 0 to 2 the first time you upgraded your general level. I suspect it might have been fixed, so I can only speculate what rewards would be for upgrading from lvl 0 to 1.

Though I am unable to identify a formula for the pp requirements, I have managed to find a formula to calculate the pp reward for level 3-19:
pp rew. lvl x = roundoff ( ( pp req. lvlx+1 – pp req lvl x ) / 20 + pp rew lvl x-1 )

Now if it is now possible to upgrade level 0 to 1, I would expect it to yield 9 pp reward, and if so, the above formula would also work for calculating the reward for level 2.

The formula cannot calculate the pp reward for level 20, because there is no pp requirement for level 21. However, if you notice the pattern for the requirements for level 5, 9, 13, 17 they each multiply by 10. This makes it reasonable to suspect the pp requirement for level 21 would have been the level 17 pp requirement * 10, which would be 20.000.000. Using this number in the formula, the pp reward for level 20 is also calculated correctly.

When you are comparing yourself to other players, you will want to calculate the unclaimed pp rewards, you have not yet collected, which other players might have already collected. Now it becomes tricky if there are other players, who also stay lower level than their pp rank affords them – you can check this in the Title ranking. However, most players just levels up whenever they can, which makes it easier for you to compare your ranking to them.

So as a level 3, you just have to add all the pp rewards from the table above which you have not yet collected. For me that would currently be pp rewards for level 4-18, which adds up to 736.027 unclaimed pp (again I cannot say if level 1 has been fixed and yield 9 pp or not, so it is not included in the number). In calculating it, you have to take into account if you break another level requirement, e.g. for a level 3 to also include pp rewards for level 19, you would have to reach: pp req. level 19 – sum(unclaimed pp rewards lvl 4:18). That would be 6.500.000 – 736.027 = 5.763.973. So if you ever reach 5.763.973 pp, your unclaimed pp rewards become 736.027 + 575.000 = 1.311.027.

The methodology above can be used regardsless of which lower level you choose to stay at, e.g. lvl 4, 7, 10, 13 or some other level inbetween.

Also if you stay at lvl 4, 7, 10, 13 you can have your own pp competition against others who stay the same level, but you will have to locate them manually by synchronizing the pp ranking list with the title list.

Attributes and skill points

You will have much less attributes and skills points than higher level players. It is therefore important that you place them with focus on optimizing your pp gained from battle.

All attributes should go to speed, so get that to 25 at level 3. In most fights, your opponent will have higher speed than you. However, some opponents spread out their attributes or focus on fortune for hunts or spend their money on level up items rather than marching tech. Against these opponents, you will have a chance of attacking first. 25 speed will also allow your troops to get faster to your opponents when you attack for pp or farm for resources.

All skill points should go to maximize heal skill at level 4, and next hidden attack skill at 1. You will take heavy losses because your defense and speed attributes are lower than almost everyone else. You will also have only one barracks to continuously replenish lost troops. As such, you get the most benefit from heal. Hidden attack will allow you to sometimes (1 in 33 attacks) get a hidden attack, and this means the opponent will not always get an attack notification and be able to hunt troops. In the long run, this will give you a little more pp.

Your unlock chest skill will stay at level 0. You will almost never get level 6-10 chests or higher, however you will get many level 1-4 chests. Buy keys at minimum price to open these chests or sell them on the market. If no keys are reasonably priced, keep the chests in your inventory and keep looking for keys. It can take days, but eventually you will find them at low price. Level 1 chests usually gives a level 3 ring or 4000 money, so you might get the most from simply selling the level 1 chests to npc or market.

Your break cranny skill will stay at level 0. You will discover, that other players will actually appreciate that you don’t take their resources below cranny max level when you attack them.

Building your city – early game

Stay at level 0 for a while – don’t rush to level 3! You will gain more pp building buildings, wall and army at level 0 than at level 3.

Make sure you get your main buildings upgraded as soon as possible. You should keep chain building the next level whenever one level finishes. Manpower is your most precious resource and you want to maximize it as quickly as possible. Further, the main building lowers build time for other buildings.

Ensure that your warehouse is upgraded to store the resources you get as rewards from completing early tasks and also to store enough resources for your next 2 planned buildings, so you can always keep your 2 building queues full. You don’t have to maximise the warehouse right away though. Always think ahead what building you want to build next, before the previous building is finished. Make sure you have the resources ready in your warehouse when the timer reaches zero.

You of course need to get all resource fields upgraded to level 15 eventually, but some have priority. The priority level is iron > lumber > stone/crop. Iron is simply more needed for turrets, cav and inf.

When upgrading, don’t necessarily upgrade e.g. all iron mines to level 5 before you get one of them to level 6. The reason being is that you must sleep some times. When you sleep, you will want to have your build queues filled for as long as possible – preferably longer than you sleep, so you can keep them filled 24 hours per day. This can require that you e.g. upgrade one iron mine level 5 -> 6 even though you have 3 iron mines at level 4, simply because a level 6 will go further into your sleep cycle, leaving you less time where nothing is being built. Know when you will go to sleep and try to get as many small level upgrades with low build times built before that while you are awake, so that you can queue the upgrades with longer build times while you are sleeping.

I think all smart phones have an alarm function. Set alarms for when your buildings are done, so you can start building the next ones right after. Alarms should also be used for building batches of troops, so you can hunt them right after they are completed.

When I installed Haypi, I didn’t play for the first 2 weeks, so when I finally decided to play, I was out of the free 1 week war refuse period and could farm inactives for resources. I therefore can’t say exactly how you optimize your first week of building when you only have resource income from your own city, but try to stick to the pointers, I gave above. Resist the temptation to buy resources from the market in the war refuse period – you need the money for techs instead.

Early game army

Build cav to farm resources from the inactive ha_a accounts in your area. You have 2 attack queues, so split your cav in 2 when attacking, to speed up the process. Make note of any targets where you get more than 800. Maybe it is an active player or otherwise you just found a good farm.

As your secondary barracks queue, build inf and hunt them. Until you get around 5k inf, i would harvest them every 2 hours. Then start hunting them for 8, 12 or 24 hours. Leave freshly trained inf in your city and add them to the inf hunting army when you harvest and rehunt. Always hunt your cav when you are not attacking.


Mid game army

If you consider the army options you have as a level 3, you are not as privileged as a high level player in your choices. In about 1 month, you can expect that other active players will have levelled ahead of you, so they will have more attributes/skill points/cities and bigger armies. That puts you at a disadvantage.

Because you only have one city to build and sustain army with, you can expect any other city to be evenly matched with yours, when you attack – and the target might also have a wall. If you think about it, that means you risk being at a disadvantage in army size/attributes/skills/wall in every attack you make.

Further, with only 1 city, you only have 2 barracks queues. You want to fill both queues at all times to be able to get enough pp from building troops and to replace your battle losses.

To me, that means the only option is an inf/cav army in the mid game.

You must know how the different troops attack in a battle. This is covered in other guides, so I will just highlight the most important considerations:
Regardless of your opponents speed, your cav will always attack before enemy inf/arc/cat/turret/trap. If your speed is faster that your opponents speed, your cav will also attack before opponents cav. This means you can attack with your cav alone in most battles and expect reasonable losses. You want to get to your target fast, so you can catch them off guard, so they don’t command – again this means if you just attack with cav, your army will arrive at your target twice as fast than if you also bring your inf army.

I only attack with both inf/cav on very rare occasions.
(1) If you are attacking a cav target with no wall and you know your cav movement speed is equal to or lower than your targets cav movement speed, bring 1 cav and max inf and wait your troops at the back line. When his cav reaches your troops, he will attack and kill your 1 cav, and after, your inf get a first attack on the cav – make sure you have enough inf to kill most or all of the cav.
(2) If you are attacking a target with an army greater than your cav army can beat, but you think both inf/cav can beat it, attack with full army. If you think you can’t beat his army even with your full army, announce the target in your alliance chat instead. Other alliance members will appreciate it.


Late game army

In the later game, when money is less of a worry for you, you can decide if you want a mono cav or inf/cav army. You could even consider a cav/arc army. You must however always make sure to train 2 troop types in the barracks, so you get max pp from building troops.

When your army is full you can build optimal troop batches and suicide them into forts for max pp from building troops. I will cover troop building strategy later in the guide.

Tech research

It is very important in what priority you research your tech. You both want to gain max pp from attacking and defending.

Tech costs money, and you will never have a fort, so you will always need money. This puts you at a disadvantage compared to other players. However, you also have the advantage that you never have to worry about purchasing or hunting for level up items, and these are quite expensive. Other players that focus on levelling will therefore spend money on items while you spend money on tech. Early and mid game this will actually put you at a slight tech advantage – at least against some players. Late game, you will still have a tech advantage against lower level players, however high level players will have teched up, so you no longer have an advantage.

Only buy resources from the market if it is absolutely necessary. The speed at which you acquire the relevant techs, directly affects all future pp gains, so in effect, your money in the early/mid game yields pp at least until the relevant techs are maxed.

Take advantage of the fact that all techs are cheap at the lower levels and that the benefits increases linearly while the costs increases exponentially. This means it is relatively cheap to get e.g. attack skill to level 4 for only 11,8k money.


Tech priority list

There are 4 techs, that are your number one priority: Scout skill, Turrets research, Marching skill and Defensive skill.

Planting and Attack skill are your secondary priority. Level these to level 4-5 and don’t maximize them until you have maximized the 4 more important techs.

Woodcutting and Smelting are your third priority. Level these to level 4-5 and don’t maximize them until you have maximized the 6 more important techs

Digging is your fourth priority. Level it to level 4-5 and don’t maximize it until you have maximized the 7 more important techs.

Shooting is your fifth priority. Early and mid game, it is very important you don’t get too high shooting level, so stay at max level 5. I will explain why when I cover defending later in the guide.

Traps research is useless. Don’t ever spend money on it beyond level 1 – even if you have maximized all other techs, start saving your money instead. You might need money to buy from market after a merge where some of your farms might disappear or become too far away from you. Or if you decide to level up sometime, you will need money to buy level up items.


A bit more detail about the 4 most important techs

The secret to defending and ensuring other players can never win pp from you is to get level 10 turrets as fast as possible. Once you get level 10 turrets as a level 3, you are immune to pp loss when being attacked. I will cover defending later in the guide. Note: It is very costly to get level 10 turret tech. Luckily it is just as costly to get level 10 shooting tech, which is the most dangerous counter to turrets. Early/mid game almost noone will have level 10 shooting yet, and you can win battles defending with a wall of level 8 turrets.

Marching skill and Defensive skill directly affect your pp gains in all battles. Marching skill is slightly more important than Defensive skill. They are some of the cheapest skills too.

Scouting skill is also one of the cheapest skills. Scouting is useful for several reasons:
- Avoiding dangerous battles: Early/mid game, you will want to get scouting to level 8-9. When you scout someone and you don’t get a successful scout report, you will know that target is focusing on scouting tech too and probably have a lot of money for techs. So be very careful about attacking.
- Winning defensive battles: In the early/mid game when you attack someone, you can expect that they might ask someone in their alliance with level 10 scouting to scout you for them. Luckily a wall does not show in the scout report, and some just send their attack force right into your high level turrets because they think a level 3 is an easy target.
- Identifying farms: Make sure, you know the different warehouse limits. When you scout someone and they have reached warehouse limit in one/more resources, they might be an inactive player which you can farm for resources.
Mid/late game, you will want to get scouting to level 10. This will somewhat protect you against cropping attacks.

Money, items and the market

Obviously, money is always a concern for you. How do you get money fast? What I did was open 4 silver chests using starting coins + free coins (only available on droid now). This gave me 2 medals 1 gem and money (I can’t remember how much). Sell medals off at max price 200k – they *will* get sold earning you 180k money. Put gems up at max price and keep an eye on the market prices a couple of times a day. If it doesn’t sell try to lower the price slightly. Always sell off gold chests to npcs – the extra coin cost is just not worth the potential extra rewards compared to silver chests, and you get 40k money for a gold chest which is a lot.

Now you might be sad about using your coins to open chests, but think of it this way. The faster you get your 4 high priority techs maximised, the faster you get pp. This will compound over time. You are at a huge disadvantage as a level 3, so you want every edge you can get.

You might think it is better to save coins to buy a level 15 horse/manual/armor, but it isn’t. Eventually, you will get high level items anyway, but you will have to use diplomacy to trade for them or get help from someone in an alliance. As a level 3 it is simply impossible to sustain a hunting army that would be able to hunt level 15 items. Should you instead decide to play as lvl 10 or 13 I think it becomes viable to try and hunt for high level items with a huge inf army though.

Always save some coins to be able to callback troops from battle, so keep around 10 coins for that.
Don’t keep opening silver chests. Only open in the beginning till you have earned around 350k money. That should be enough to give you a tech advantage over your targets.

Keep an eye on the market and scan it several times a day:
- The supply and demand for iron/lumber/crop changes in the different timezones, as people wake up and go to sleep. So the equilibrium price varies across the hours of each day. Pay attention to what timezones have more demand than supply as this will drive the prices up. Also pay attention to what timezones have more supply than demand as this will drive the prices down. You will of course want to buy at low price and sell at high price.
- I started playing before version 3.0 – at that time, iron/lumber was the most expensive resources. Post version 3.0 alliance wars have made crops expensive. Early/mid game, you can make a good profit working the market selling resources. If you find it difficult to get your manpower spent on building buildings, wall and army, use them to sell resources instead. Never try to sell stone.
- Be careful about buying nuggets – the supply will relatively quickly outweigh the demand and the prices will plummet to 5k.
- Be somewhat careful about buying gems – you can still make a profit, but sooner or later the demand for medals will also become less than the supply. And you don’t want to end up with gems you cannot sell off again.
- Early-mid game, if you see medals priced at less than 180k, buy them and sell them at max price. They will get sold earning you money. Late game, stop trying to make a profit from medals as the supply will start to outweigh the demand and the prices will go down – your 4 high priority techs should be maxed anyway by now.
- Scan the costs of keys several times a day. Buy any key level 1-5 at min or close to min price (2k x key level) even if you don’t yet have a chest that matches the key level. You will need them eventually. If you have 5 or more keys of one level, stop buying that level. Oddly I always need level 1, 2 and 4 keys and have plenty of level 3 and 5 keys.
- Scan the supply of medium-high level items several times a day. On server 58, supply of level 8+ sword/horse/armor and 5+ manual was extremely rare early-mid game and is still uncommon in the late game. Depending on your inf hunting army size, you might be able to hunt level 8 sword/horse/armor and level 5 manual eventually. But until then, upgrade your horse, manual and armor whenever possible. You might think e.g. a lvl 7 horse costing more than 70k money is expensive, but don’t worry about paying it. Once you later hunt or buy a higher level horse, you can easily sell of your lvl 7 horse at max price again. That way you only lose the 10% market cut. Since you are gaining anymore attributes to put into speed the horse/manual are your only source, so you just have to pay whatever they cost. It will yield lots of pp in the long run, because you will take fewer losses in battle and get to your enemies faster.
- Buy a level 10 ring – they will frequently be available.
- You will on rare occasions see a high level item (lvl 11-13) on sale – this can come from someone opening a level 10 chest, which happens from time to time. If you see one buy it. You will always be able to sell it off at max price.


Level 15 items

- Take advantage of the fact that there is no level requirement to equip items. So you can equip level 15 items when you get them.
- You will almost never see a level 15 item for sale. If you see one, it is usually because you agreed with someone to buy it from them.
- There might be an expert on your server, who will eventually buy and sell lvl 15 items using the expert coins daily bonus just to help people out. There is one such expert on s58 (thanks Lustalot). I don’t know how it is on other servers though. Keep a watch on wc for possible messages about lvl 15 items for sale.
- You might be lucky that there is someone on the server who will buy you lvl 15 items just for helping you out. There is one such person on s58 (thanks FRY2000). Here your diplomacy and reputation might seriously influence your chances of getting help with that. I will go deeper into why diplomacy and your reputation are important to focus on later in the guide.
- There might be someone in your alliance, which has extra level 10-15 items. You will have a good possibility of getting a high contribution rating because you only have one warehouse to worry about as a level 3. If your alliance shares high level items based on contribution ranking, you will therefore have a good chance of getting decent items that way.

Optimising your enhancements

Only enhance items which are max level, i.e. lvl 15 sword/horse/armor/manual and lvl 10 ring.
Do not enhance ring until you have enhanced everything else. The benefits from enhancing ring are simply too low compared to the opportunity cost of enhancing sword/horse/armor/manual.

There are some myths about enhancing:
- Some people claim the probabilities of success are lying. From my own research and tests, I say the probabilities are correct. Some players will just get lucky while others get unlucky. Welcome to the world of math and standard probabilities. The thing about probabilities is that sometimes you will see rare results (either very cheap or very expensive enhancement results). I think mostly the people with extreme results are the ones that complain in forum or your servers wc. Hence, it gives the appearance that the probabilities are wrong, but really it’s just all the players who have normal results, that don’t complain, so you get a distorted image of people’s results.
- Some people claim you should not try enhancing again right after a failure. I say it doesn’t matter at all. I have had 1-4 consecutive failures in a row before a success for the same enhancement level, and it simply boils down to luck and the probabilities.
- Some people claim you should only try enhancing at certain times of the day. Again I say it doesn’t matter at all.

There is an enhancement table elsewhere in the forum which shows stones needed for each level and probability of success. There are 2 important things, the enhancement table doesn’t show:
- The expected actual stones cost for any given level including probability of success
- The actual attribute benefit for each item type per enhancement level. The formula for this is: rounddown ( ( 1 + additional attribute % ) * item base attribute ). The item base attribute for lvl 15 sword/armor/horse is 30, manual 45 and ring 10.

Below I will show both the basic and the extra info you need to get the most from enhancing:

enhancements.jpg (138.57 KiB) Viewed 11978 times

actual stone cost = the number of stones you should expect that level to cost. You calculate it using this formula: roundoff ( actual stones = stones cost / prob. )
accum. stone cost = the accumulated stones you should expect in total it would cost to reach that level from level 0. You calculate it by summing actual stone costs for all previous levels.
actual attribute point sw/ar/ho/manual/ring = the extra attribute benefit you get for that level compared to the previous level

Consideration for enhancing:
If you have enough coins, by all means enhance everything to level 20. However, if you only have limited coins from hunts or from say a limited purchase of coins, it becomes extremely important which items you decide to enhance and how, so you optimise your attribute gains. Íf you look at the table, you will want to focus on what your actual attribute gains are from enhancing. This is due to the “rounddown” function of the formula.

There are some important patterns to note in the attribute gains:
- Sword/armor/horse follows the same pattern but manual and ring each have their own patterns.
- For all items, you gain nothing from enhancing to lvl 1, so its just a 4 stone cost to get started.
- For sword/armor/horse you start gaining attribute points for every lvl beyond lvl 1. However lvl 11, 13, 14 gets you +2 attribute points while lvl 12 only gets you +1 attribute point. That means lvl 12 is actually more expensive than lvl 14. Only at lvl 15 is the stone cost above lvl 12 again.
- For manual you start gaining +1 attribute points at lvl 3, but lvl 4, 6, 8, 10 gets you nothing. That means the attribute points until lvl 10 are actually much more expensive than you would think. You will have spent 140 stones to get only +4 attribute points (gained at lvl 3, 5, 7, 9).
- For ring, you only start gaining +1 attribute point at lvl 4. Further, there are a lot of useless levels for ring (1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11, 13, 16), so in general, it is horribly expensive to enhance ring. The rewards are simply too small.

For any level player (not just level 3) I would say the priority for enhancing is:
- Horse first, then manual. The speed attribute beats the other attributes.
- Depending on your army build you will then either enhance sword or armor first. For a lvl 3, armor is more important than sword because you are focusing on minimising battle losses.
- For all builds ring should be enhanced last.

Optimal enhancement path

So how do you optimise your enhancements? You must select one primary and one secondary attribute and optimise based on that. For a level 3 primary is speed and secondary is defense. For any level, you will want to enhance in a priority based on stones / attribute point That way, you get your attribute gains as early as possible for as low as cost as possible. Below is the priority in which you should do your enhancements to optimise with that goal.

Note: I am only mentioning target levels where you should stop enhancing one item and start on another – you will of course need to also enhance all the levels below the target level.

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The stones/speed shows the average stone cost per speed point in each enhancement line (e.g. first line shows average for horse level 1-6).

Now at some points in between maximising for speed (primary attribute) you will want to look at also enhancing for defense (secondary attribute), simply because the costs for lower enhancement levels of armor are relatively cheap compared to higher enhancement levels of e.g. manual. Say you have lvl 20 horse, lvl 18 manual. Lvl 19 manual costs 190 stones and gives +1 speed and +1 defense and it would be the next priority if you are maximising your primary attribute. However, for 174 stones, you could instead enhance your armor to lvl 11 for +11 defense. In the end, it’s up to you how important your primary attribute is compared to your secondary.

The methodology used above can be used even if you don’t focus on speed/def. Say you focus on speed/attack - in that case just substitute your primary/secondary attributes. You would still want to focus on horse/manual however sword would take priority over armor when you want to optimise secondary attribute.

Optimising your pp from building

Your most precious resource in the game is your manpower. Yes your manpower – not your coins. If someone asked me if I would rather have 10 extra coins per day or 10% extra manpower per day, I would go for the manpower. In the end, the manpower is the source of most of your pp. And there simply is no way to get more manpower, than your main building produces. You can’t enhance manpower production, and you can’t steal manpower from someone by attacking them. The limit on your manpower production is the only thing which limits your daily pp gain in the long term. Pp from fights and hunts is simply too random. If you got 10 daily coins, you could argue that you could e.g. port attack or vip for a better troop build, but vip only adds a potential 3,5% pp from building per day whereas 10% extra manpower would add 10% extra pp per day. And you could still buy or earn free coins and vip or port if you wanted.

There are 4 ways you can spend your manpower:
- Selling resources in the market (gives pp indirectly up to a certain point)
- Transferring troops between cities (only very limited chance to get pp)
- Upgrading city buildings (gives pp directly)
- Upgrading wall (gives pp directly)
- Building troops (gives pp directly)

Selling resources at the market gives you potential increased pp from winning fights. It is however only indirectly in the form of getting you money to faster get your techs maximised. I would only advise to sell resources at the market until you have achieved the following:
- maximised your techs for turrets research, marching skill and defensive skill.
- a spare stash of money e.g. 300k+ available, in case you are ever offered a level 15 item or see a high level item for sale, which again would increase your speed/defence attributes and thus pp in the long term.
- you could argue that maximising crop tech allows you to have a bigger army which again allows you to attack bigger targets and hunt more money both of which earns you more pp. I will leave that decision to you as it also depends on how big an army you want to have and how crop negative you want to be.
- if you are concerned about saving for rough times, you could put on sale a couple of batches of max crop and iron in the market for max price so they never get sold. If you ever get cropped or need iron for building wall, and don’t have time to farm for resources, you can cancel these trades at any time and the resources will return to your warehouse. Each batch will cost you 2.809 manpower. I don’t recommend storing many batches this way, because it blocks some of your 10 sell queues where you could sell items, and the manpower is lost, so you never get the potential pp it could have yielded. In the long run, as a lvl 3 you can roughly expect 1 manpower to yield 1,3 pp by building optimal troops, so a full batch stored this way “costs” you roughly 3.5k pp.

However once these 3/4 techs are maximised and you have some money and resources saved, you should stop selling resources in the market. You simply lose out on pp, because your manpower could be spent getting you pp instead of getting you money. If you are worried about money for the remaining techs, you will eventually hunt enough money and sellable items to get your techs maximised, and you could also try asking a rich member of your alliance for money.

Using manpower to transfer resources between your cities is just a waste of manpower. The only situation where you can get any bit of pp this way is if you upgrade to lvl 4, 7, 10 or 13 and then immediately build a new sub. You will then want to upgrade your main building asap and for that you need resources right away. However, I would rather advise you send some cav to your sub and farm the inactives in the area enough to start the upgrades. Apart from this one situation, transferring resources is just a complete waste of manpower and pp. For each 160 resource you transfer, it “costs” you roughly 1,3 pp which could instead have been spent on building optimal troops.

Spending your manpower on buildings, wall and troops are the ways in which you really have a chance to maximise your pp. Regardless of what you are building, the formula for gaining pp is the same:

pp = roundoff (total resources used / 300 * ( 1 – ( your lvl / 30 ) )

Before I go into details about the optimal strategy to spend your manpower, there are some points I will highlight:
- Buildings can only be upgraded once per level per city. If you lose a sub, you can of course start a new sub and again upgrade all building levels once per city.
- Turrets can only be upgraded once, after which you must get them destroyed before you can rebuild them.
- Troops can be built unlimited. Your only limit is the time it takes one batch to be built before you can start the next batch.
- The main building directly boosts your manpower / hour and must always be chain built as quickly as possible to level 20 from the minute you start your main city/sub.
- Your warehouse must be upgraded to level 13 to be able hold enough resources (107.000) to be able to upgrade main building to level 20. Your barracks must be upgraded to level 20 to be able to use the man power your main building will start to produce.
- At level 20, it takes your main building 10 hours to fill your max manpower capacity of 6.390. If you ever let it reach that max, it will effectively start “costing” you roughly 1 pp every 4,25 seconds in wasted manpower, which you could have gained from building optimal troops.
- Apart from your manpower, there is one more important factor, which must be taken into consideration when you are optimising for pp from builds: build time. A lvl 20 main building produces 639/3600 = 0,1775 manpower/second. To keep your manpower from even reaching max capacity you therefore need to always have a combination of build projects in progress which at least some of the time are draining more than 0,1775 manpower/second.

Building buildings for pp

Every building in your city can be upgraded 20 times. Every building type follows its own pattern in terms of resource cost, manpower cost and build time. Resource buildings of the same type, e.g. the four lumber mills, follow the same pattern.

Every city has 400 building upgrades, which can only be built once: 20x main building, warehouse, barracks, cranary + 80x lumber mill, stone mine, iron mine and cropland. Elsewhere on the forum there are guides, which show the exact resource cost, manpower and build time for each level. Using those numbers, it is possible to calculate 2 important numbers for each building project: pp and pp/manpower. Below I show these numbers for each building upgrade for a lvl 3 player.

Note: There are some numbers from the other guides, where I got the numbers, where I was unsure, if they were correct. Where missing or obviously erroneous, I have corrected based on estimate of the resource “pattern” for the other levels of the relevant building type. The upgrades, I have corrected are: warehouse level 15, cranny level 15, stone mine level 11, 17, 20. I haven’t corrected iron mine lvl 17 though I think it could be wrong too. The errors were the same across the guides, so I think they are copies of each other.

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Long-term, when your city and wall are fully built, the only place to spend your manpower is to build troops. As a lvl 3, the max you can hope to get from troops is 1,32 pp/men (I will go into detail on this later). When you compare this number to the numbers above, it becomes clear, that you are “losing” pp when you upgrade the following:

Main building lvl 7-11
Warehouse lvl 1-20
Barracks lvl 1-20
Cranny lvl 1-20
Lumber mill lvl 1-9
Stone mine lvl 1-9
Iron mine lvl 1-9
Cropland lvl 1-9

It also becomes clear, that you are “winning” pp when you upgrade the following:

Main building lvl 1-6 and 12-20
Lumber mill lvl 10-20
Stone mine lvl 10-20
Iron mine lvl 10-20
Cropland lvl 10-20

One other thing to notice is that for the 80 upgrades which costs coins, i.e. lvl 16-20 for 4x lumber mine, 4x stone mine, 4x iron mine, 4x crop, you are actually gaining the best pp/manpower you can hope to get at all in the game. Only upgrading lvl 14-15 of the same resource buildings are close to it.

Below I have listed the total pp for upgrading a full city to lvl 15 resource fields, 16-20 resource fields as well as total for lvl 1-20 resource fields. The “total” row does not include the “lvl 3” row, as lvl 0 is already covering your main city. I am merely showing it in case you decide to fully build your main city as lvl 0 or lvl 3. If you go for lvl 4, 7, 10, 13, I would strongly advise that you never level up until you are finished upgrading everything you can in your previous city. Otherwise you start degrading your pp, as your higher level is factored into the pp formula for your remaining building projects in your previous city. The numbers for lvl 3 are actually calculated based on the tables above regarding all the possible building options. Though I didn’t show numbers above for anything but level 3, I have calculated everything for all levels, and just show the totals below.

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