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CITY BUILDING
Before we really get in detail about how you should design your city I'd like to talk for a moment about value. Specifically, what has actual value and what has superficial value. When I speak about value I mean it in relationship to end strength or how strong you are as a result of your effort.
Many players hold “might” as a true measure of value. This is clearly a misguided view when you consider that one player with 1,000,000 might can easily lose to another player with 250,000 might. Do not get caught up in increasing your might just because it puts you higher on the fictional score board.
Others put value in resources which seems to make sense. The more resources you have the more you can build right? In fact ill even coin the term “resource value” to use throughout this guide. Resource value is the value of all of your resources combined. For example, if a troop costs 200 wood 400 ore 800 stone and 600 food that units resource value is 2000. An army of 5,000 catapults has a resource value of 10,000,000. The question then becomes would you defend 5,000,000 resources if it means losing 5,000 catapults?
Any logical person would say no to that question but what about 10,000,000 resources? Should you defend then? How about 15,000,000? The answer isn't so simple but as a general rule you still wouldn't want to defend against those attacks. Why though? What I'd like to show is that resources as well have very little value and that troops are more valuable then the sum of their production resources.
Now that must mean that troops are whats valuable in KOC. Honestly had you asked me this question a month ago I would have declared that true. What I've come to realize however is that troops have superficial value as well. Troops come and go, those lost can be replaced. If troops were so valuable nobody would ever attack. Troops do hold a lot of value however and that value comes from the one resource required to train them that we haven’t yet discussed. Time.
Time is money as they say, or in this case value. This is where we finally start to tie into city building. You should build your city to make the most use out of your time. This means that buildings and research that reduce the amount of time it takes to do something are the most important of them all. Specifically the barracks is the key player when it comes increasing your end strength.
The barracks reduces the time it takes to train troops. Each barracks increases your training speed by about 10% while each level of barracks adds an additional 1%. Because nothing is more valuable then time, having as many barracks as manageable is your ultimate goal in city building.
Before I continue I need to slow down to explain idle population.
There is a big misunderstanding with how idle population works. Many new players run out of idle population and their solution is adding more cottages. This is wrong. Idle population is basically the total population of workers minus the workers that you have already in your resource fields. So you have a bunch of workers standing around waiting for a job basically. You assign them a job when you train troops and once their training is done they are free to be used again.
So the big question is, how many cottages is enough? I know people that get away with as few as three. Most float around four or five. Personally I have six and that’s because I'm busy! Your idle population determines how many troops you can train at once. The less population the more time you need to spend keeping your training queue full.
Limiting your cottages is the main way you'll increase your barracks number. You should also know that both the Relief Station and Round Tower are unnecessary all together so that frees up a couple other spots. After that you can get creative. There are many ways you can eliminate a few buildings to get more barracks but I don’t wanna rob you of your own ingenious city design.
I will say this however. You should at the very minimum be able to train a single tier 3 unit, such as a catapult, in 11 seconds or less. I know people as low as 8, I float at 9 and 10.
RESOURCES
Resources are essential to maintaining a full training queue. There are a few ways you can make sure that you have enough. One is to simply farm other players for their resources. If you have enough time to do this then its the best way to get resources. Just remember what I said about resource value. If you spend more resource value in troops then the raid was worth then you're going to find yourself stuck in one place, essentially losing time.
The other way to get resources is to generate them yourself. This is what I do now, because of my limited time spent playing the game (generally less then an hour a day). Most people are going to have a balance of all four resources in each city. This is a horrible design when you talk about resource value. I'm not going to give out the exact numbers but the resource value of splitting the city up this way is around 600,000 per hour per city. The resource value if you only have one resource in each city is around 1,400,000 per hour per city. Big difference right?
The reason that there is a big difference is because of wilds. If you have 10 wilds of the same type you're now generating 500% more from each resource node of that type.
How can you possibly train if you're only producing two resources? Play with friends that produce the others. This is what I do and its worked amazing. If you want to be more self sufficient split your cities and have two resources each. That way you'll be around 1,000,000 per hour per city.
You guys got a bit lucky, I had the day off so I decided to write this up. I did it rather hastily however so I hope it makes sense and I didn't miss any important details. If you have any questions please feel free to ask them below and as always I like to hear what you think. The more feedback I get the more I enjoy spending time writing this for you.
COMING SOON... CHAPTER 3, TROOPS
Before we really get in detail about how you should design your city I'd like to talk for a moment about value. Specifically, what has actual value and what has superficial value. When I speak about value I mean it in relationship to end strength or how strong you are as a result of your effort.
Many players hold “might” as a true measure of value. This is clearly a misguided view when you consider that one player with 1,000,000 might can easily lose to another player with 250,000 might. Do not get caught up in increasing your might just because it puts you higher on the fictional score board.
Others put value in resources which seems to make sense. The more resources you have the more you can build right? In fact ill even coin the term “resource value” to use throughout this guide. Resource value is the value of all of your resources combined. For example, if a troop costs 200 wood 400 ore 800 stone and 600 food that units resource value is 2000. An army of 5,000 catapults has a resource value of 10,000,000. The question then becomes would you defend 5,000,000 resources if it means losing 5,000 catapults?
Any logical person would say no to that question but what about 10,000,000 resources? Should you defend then? How about 15,000,000? The answer isn't so simple but as a general rule you still wouldn't want to defend against those attacks. Why though? What I'd like to show is that resources as well have very little value and that troops are more valuable then the sum of their production resources.
Now that must mean that troops are whats valuable in KOC. Honestly had you asked me this question a month ago I would have declared that true. What I've come to realize however is that troops have superficial value as well. Troops come and go, those lost can be replaced. If troops were so valuable nobody would ever attack. Troops do hold a lot of value however and that value comes from the one resource required to train them that we haven’t yet discussed. Time.
Time is money as they say, or in this case value. This is where we finally start to tie into city building. You should build your city to make the most use out of your time. This means that buildings and research that reduce the amount of time it takes to do something are the most important of them all. Specifically the barracks is the key player when it comes increasing your end strength.
The barracks reduces the time it takes to train troops. Each barracks increases your training speed by about 10% while each level of barracks adds an additional 1%. Because nothing is more valuable then time, having as many barracks as manageable is your ultimate goal in city building.
Before I continue I need to slow down to explain idle population.
There is a big misunderstanding with how idle population works. Many new players run out of idle population and their solution is adding more cottages. This is wrong. Idle population is basically the total population of workers minus the workers that you have already in your resource fields. So you have a bunch of workers standing around waiting for a job basically. You assign them a job when you train troops and once their training is done they are free to be used again.
So the big question is, how many cottages is enough? I know people that get away with as few as three. Most float around four or five. Personally I have six and that’s because I'm busy! Your idle population determines how many troops you can train at once. The less population the more time you need to spend keeping your training queue full.
Limiting your cottages is the main way you'll increase your barracks number. You should also know that both the Relief Station and Round Tower are unnecessary all together so that frees up a couple other spots. After that you can get creative. There are many ways you can eliminate a few buildings to get more barracks but I don’t wanna rob you of your own ingenious city design.
I will say this however. You should at the very minimum be able to train a single tier 3 unit, such as a catapult, in 11 seconds or less. I know people as low as 8, I float at 9 and 10.
RESOURCES
Resources are essential to maintaining a full training queue. There are a few ways you can make sure that you have enough. One is to simply farm other players for their resources. If you have enough time to do this then its the best way to get resources. Just remember what I said about resource value. If you spend more resource value in troops then the raid was worth then you're going to find yourself stuck in one place, essentially losing time.
The other way to get resources is to generate them yourself. This is what I do now, because of my limited time spent playing the game (generally less then an hour a day). Most people are going to have a balance of all four resources in each city. This is a horrible design when you talk about resource value. I'm not going to give out the exact numbers but the resource value of splitting the city up this way is around 600,000 per hour per city. The resource value if you only have one resource in each city is around 1,400,000 per hour per city. Big difference right?
The reason that there is a big difference is because of wilds. If you have 10 wilds of the same type you're now generating 500% more from each resource node of that type.
How can you possibly train if you're only producing two resources? Play with friends that produce the others. This is what I do and its worked amazing. If you want to be more self sufficient split your cities and have two resources each. That way you'll be around 1,000,000 per hour per city.
You guys got a bit lucky, I had the day off so I decided to write this up. I did it rather hastily however so I hope it makes sense and I didn't miss any important details. If you have any questions please feel free to ask them below and as always I like to hear what you think. The more feedback I get the more I enjoy spending time writing this for you.
COMING SOON... CHAPTER 3, TROOPS
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