The fortress tab at the bottom left will take you to your mighty (or perhaps not so mighty) fortress and all the other buildings and options!

The best tables I’ve found are here. Using those in combination with my notes, tips and tricks should help you succeed.

This is what my fortress currently looks like:

At the bottom left, it shows which resources I have, plus the maximums. Bottom middle is my options for knights, gems and smithy. Bottom middle shows my available units and has the Attack option. The main part of my screen shows my buildings. The resource buildings and the Academy show that I have small amounts waiting for me. The Fortress shows it’s under construction with a little over 5 days to go. The gem mine shows that I’ve only recently started the 1.5 hour search for a new gem.

Below, I will provide some information about the buildings and then I’ll speak about attacking.

Buildings

I’ll touch on each building and what it does. Where possible, I add some tips and tricks.

Fortress

You can build the fortress from level 25. Nothing else can be increased higher than your Fortress level, so make sure you level it up when needed. It also increases the maximum resources so it’s very handy. Note that the maximum resources only matters for the two resource buildings. When you attack, you can go above the maximum.

Knights are available inside the fortress. These are shared with your guild and are incredibly important, so please level up your knights as much as you can! When you have access to more knights, the gems you find are better, thus your overall power is much higher.

Quarry and Woodcutter’s Hut

These are your resource buildings. You need to click on them to claim the resources, so they work best when you’re fairly active.

Laborer’s Quarters

This helps speed up everything else, from buildings to gem searches. Each level makes everything 5% faster. At low level the bonuses aren’t huge, but at high levels they become amazingly important.

Gem Mine

The gem mine is absolutely vital to your success. Again, the benefits are directly related to the number of knights that you plus everyone in your guild has. When you search, you pay a fairly small amount of resources. After the time elapses, you get a gem of random colour, which gives you a bonus in one stat. The gem can be put into any item with a socket. If an item already has a socket, the new gem can be placed, but will destroy the previous gem.

Raising the gem mine’s level increases the quality of the gems you can find, but it takes much longer to find the gems so be very wary! I would recommend keeping a level 1 gem mine until you’re at least level 50, maybe even level 100. The current formula for the gem levels isn’t widely known, but the previous one says that every level of the gem mine increases the gem level by 1/3. So a level 4 gem has double the stats of a level 1 gem, and a level 7 gem has triple the stats of a level 1 gem. From my own experience the benefits seem to be less than that, so the known formula may now be incorrect. My theory is that you find a lot more items at lower levels, so you want to keep your gem search time quite low.

If one person in the guild has a level 15 gem mine, I’ve heard that everyone in the guild has the chance to find black gems which level up all stats. I haven’t seen this in action myself, however.

Academy

Frankly it’s debatable if this is even worth it as the XP gained isn’t that good, but free XP is free XP so you might as well build it. Like the resource buildings, you need to click on it to gain the free XP.

Treasury

The treasury is absolutely vital, especially once you start finding pets. Without it, you can only hold five items that you don’t have equipped. With the treasury, each level adds one more item. This is an example of my inventory with nine levels of Treasury, giving a total of 14 slots:

Barracks

Soldiers are your only attacking unit. They do not defend you at all, they only attack. Each level of Barracks lets you train three soldiers. Hire them by clicking the Soldier icon in the bottom row of the fortress screen. Each soldier takes 10 minutes to train and the costs increase when the soldiers are higher level. Every time you attack, al the soldiers you attack with are lose and you must retrain them! If you send five soldiers, you lose five, even if only one died during the fighting. For this reason, I recommend you start training soldiers as soon as you lose them, ensuring a higher availability of your soldiers.

Archery Guild

Archers are a good solid defensive unit. Each level of Archery Guild lets you train two archers. Archers take five minutes to train and the costs increase when the archers are higher level. When your archers die in combat, you should replace them when you log in next. If your archers and mages are all dead, you will be quite vulnerable. Don’t be too surprised so see you’ve been attacked several times.

Mages’ Tower

Mages are another defensive unit. Each level of Mages’ Tower lets you train one mage. Mages take 10 minutes to train and the costs increase when the mage are higher level. When mages are involved in a fortress attack, the number of them is hidden. This mages them a nice defensive option. As with the archers, if you lose them in combat, you should replace them when you log in next.

Fortifications

The wall is a good solid defence. When you increase its level, its combat level increases. Your fortifications never need to be repaired or rebuilt.

Smithy

Once you build this, you can increase the level of your soldiers, archers and mages. It’s a fairly expensive process in terms of wood and stone, but it’s incredibly worthwhile. I recommend keeping your soldiers at the maximum level possible, and at least one of your archers and mages. Note that your smithy level can’t go above your fortress level, and your soldiers can’t be levelled up more than your smithy level.

Attacking other players

Attacking other players does get you higher in the hall of fame, but more importantly it gets you resources!

Your Fortresses rank is mostly determined by the number of attacks that you win. Your Honor increases by 1 for each successful attack you make. I believe something else also gives you some points, perhaps the level of some buildings, but I haven’t been able to confirm this.

The most important thing about attacking is that you can get a lot of resources by attacking. You may attack as often as you like, just as long as you have soldiers! You can click Change opponent for free once every five minutes. You can also spend gold to do the same thing while the timer is ticking down.

Here’s a basic guide that you can follow:

• Click Attack at the bottom right of the screen
• If you have no soldiers, do something else and come back later. Mouse over the soldiers tab at the bottom to check how long before the next soldier is available.
• Click on the first marker that’s green. It there’s no green section, do not attack.
• Mouse over the face to check what the treasurer says
• Click Attack now! if the treasurer thinks the loot is good enough. If not, do not attack.
• Note that the general will also say the chances are good, because you clicked on a green section
• Watch the attack or skip it and get loot!
• Train soldiers to replace the ones you lost
• If you can’t attack your current target, wait until you can Change opponent for free and then do so. Then check if you can attack that opponent.

And that’s it! By following those steps, you’ll make a good number of successful attacks and you’ll hardly ever fail.

Here’s a simple attack where the chances of success are good and there’s good loot waiting. I have already clicked on the first marker that’s green.

Here’s another example, where the loot isn’t great:

I clicked on the first marker that’s green and moused over the face. It shows that the chances for loot are miserable! When it says “Your councelors recommend an attack” please don’t trust them unless they all individually recommend you attack! Even then, their logic isn’t flawless.

Once you’re happy with all of that, here’s a few more advanced tips:

• To work out the true cost/benefit of an attack, click the soldiers button on the fortress screen. It will tell you how much it costs to train soldiers. When considering an attack, your treasurer might tell you the rewards are meagre, but it still might be worth attacking as long as you make a profit!
  • If it costs you 1298 wood and 428 to train a soldier, but you gain 2000 of each for a victory, this might still be worthwhile.
  • If you have all your soldiers, losing one or two isn’t a big deal.
  • On the other hand, if you only have a few left, and you normally get 10,000 wood and stone per soldier you send, then you probably don’t want to send them off to get 2000!
  • If you’re going to log off and go to sleep soon, there’s no point having them waiting around. You might want to send your troops off to battle, as long as you can get something out of it!
  • In the example above, I would gain 5790 wood and 2465 stone if I win. Training nine soldiers would cost me 11,683 wood and 3852 stone. That’s definitely an example of a bad attack!
• Remember that mages are hidden! When you attack someone with mages, their mages aren’t considered at all when the victory chances is considered. This means attacking someone with mages is a very risky thing. If you attack when the bar has just changed to green, you’ll likely lose if they have a few mages. I’ve only ever launched one attack against someone with mages, after I understood the mechanic that is. before I understood the mechanic behind mages, I was really confused because I kept losing! Well, that one attack gave me a huge amount of resources, so I just sent everything! Massive overkill, but I got a huge haul of wood and stone.
• Sometimes you’ll still lose when the bar is green and you send the recommended number of troops. The most common scenario I’ve found is when your soldiers are within 10 levels of the enemy’s fortifications. If the enemy fortifications are level 77 and you send a soldier of level 85, there’s a fair chance you’ll lose, despite the bar being green. To compensate for this, I usually send two soldiers.
• If you really need resources and you have several soldiers available, you may find it’s worth paying money to change opponent. This is particularly useful for players who are going to log off soon, as it’s useful to send most of your soldiers off before starting the training and logging off.
• If your Fortifications, archery guild, mages’ tower, smithy and unit training are all at maximum or near maximum, you’ll be pretty safe. If you hoard resources, however, you’ll still be a tempting target for those who are much higher level than you are.
• If you want to know how much you can lose when you’re attacked, the official manual goes into detail. Essentially it’s a portion of the wood and stone waiting for collection in the resource buildings, plus a smaller percentage of what’s in their fortress. Fortress level also matters and there’s a level of protection after being attacked.