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[Buildings] What levels they should be?

 Building levels:
The standard practice of someone who just started on tribal wars, is to upgrade everything in a village until it can't be upgraded any more. This is based on ignorance.

A second practice is those players who should know better, they may have read a guide or two, or perhaps heard it from one of the tribes they've been in, and yet they ignore the words of others and do as they please. They maximise the building levels in their villages because it gives them more points, makes them look more intimidating (they assume), and in general a higher rank. This is the typical pointwhore. Sure, they may have reasonable troops, but by upgrading buildings for the points factor, or intimidation factor, they are pointwhores, whether they'd admit it or not.

A third practice, one that is almost as ignorant and stubborn, are the guide followers. They will riggedly set their headquarters to level 20, downgrade their hiding places to level 0, (the old settings players would downgrade their smithy's to level 15), and these players will stick to this pattern, even if someone points out that it is not ideal.

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One of the types of players that has stood out most to me, is those who learn, but refuse to 'unlearn'. Such players can never hope to be the best. One of the primary reasons I play is to strive to play as best I can. I understand that some players are just playing casually, but by modifying how they play, they can do so much better, with minimal effort.

Back to building levels, there are several situations that you must take into account:

1. At any point you could find yourself under heavy attack, a situation that will put you under enormous pressure, will challenge you to change your ideas on defending, and unless you get to grips with this side of things, you will turn into cannon-fodder for your enemies. In this situation, you may well be losing most of your walls. Yet you must rebuild and fight on. You're going to wish your headquarters were a bit higher, so that you could rebuild your walls faster.

2. Catapult warfare - against a skilled opponent, or in a large war, you may find yourself the target of fanged fakes, or many catapult attacks. By catapulting just a few of your buildings, your opponent can quickly reduce a village into a useless mess that will take weeks or months for you to upgrade into a productive village again. In a large war you won't have the time, resources, or energy to upgrade all your level 20 headquarters in preparation for imminent catapult waves, or continued catapult waves. A village that is catapulted to uselessness for 3 weeks is often worse than losing a village. If it happens to you on a large scale, your opponents will pick you apart. You're going to wish for higher headquarters.

3. Dodging - you'll find yourself in a situation sooner or later where one of your offense village is under attack, and you don't have enough defense available to cover it. However the attack is not nobles, which means you can dodge. This means that the wall will be lowered easily, and all your resources may well be stolen. How can you start rebuilding a wall if you have no resources? In most cases you'll move onto another village, planning to come back after getting some resources so that you can rebuild the wall. Instead of returning in 30 mintues like you planned, you could easily forget for several hours, or even days. That does you no good if the village is suddenly attacked again. You're going to wish that you had your hiding place at maximum level, and that you queue'd several low-level walls immediately after the first attack landed.

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Continuing our earlier statements, that players who learn but don't 'unlearn' will eventually fail at some point, we have now gone though the stages of learning, unlearning, and then re-learning new things. I will now give you an indication of what optimal building levels should be. You can ignore them if you like, but chances are, you may regret that.

HQ: 23 - 25 (Higher HQ for catapult warfare, or high numbers of incomings)
Barracks: 25
Stables: 20
Workshop: 4 - 7 (Emergency catapult defense may require a faster rebuild time)
Academy: 1
Smithy: 20
Market: 18 - 20 (Despite the nay-sayers, lower market levels will NOT balance resources fast enough)
Timber: 30
Clay: 30
Iron: 30 (Neccesary for emergency HC defense, or rebuilding nukes often. More resources is better than less)
Farm: 30
Warehouse: 30
Hiding Place: 10 (Better than market dodging)
Wall: 20

Final notes:

The few farm spaces saved for troops by having lower building levels is not worth having villages that are less efficient in all situations.

Neither is the fraction in moral increase by having lower building levels worth having less than efficient villages. A few more of your troops may survive, but when you have 1000+ incomings, 50+ fanged fakes, and several dozen noble trains coming at you, you are going to wish you had opted for more efficient villages.