jsc29
Active Member
If you are new or just starting out in Forge of Empires, there is some basic strategy you should know so that you grow your city efficiently. Below I have listed many of the key elements of city planning and growth strategy to help you make your decisions as you progress.
(1) The three basic resources in the game are diamonds, forge points and goods. 1 FP ~ 5 Goods ~ 50 Diamonds is the rough approximation in value between these items.
(2) Tiles in FOE tend to yield about 1 FP or 1 Good each for the better quality buildings. From this you can see that buildings that produce forge points are about 5x better than buildings that produce goods. Therefore, you want to almost always prefer buildings that produce forge points.
(3) Higher level players get most of their goods from fighting in Guild Battlegrounds (GBG), not from making them. If you are in a guild, you can buy goods from your higher age guildies using forge points. This is far better than trying to make the goods yourself.
(4) If your guildmates are high age and do not have the low level goods you need, buy the goods they have, then trade them down to what you need using the market system. This can be very profitable. For example, if you buy 50 Explosives for 10 Forge Points, you can trade the 50 Explosives for 90 Rubber, then trade that for 170 Coffee, then trade that for 320 Silk, then trade that for 600 Ropes, then trade that for 1100 Honey, then trade that for 2000 Iron, then trade that for 3600 Lumber. You got 3600 Lumber for 10 FP. Kind of crazy, huh?
(5) Sniping and Sabotage are important techniques for farming goods and FP from your neighbors. Your neighbors are big, fat cows. Milk them! I wrote a separate guide to sniping which can get you started doing that.
(6) When you build your city use all the tiles for something. Don't leave empty tiles doing nothing.
(7) Different buildings have different efficiencies. So you might have 3x3 = 9 tiles building that makes 160 production in an hour, and another that is 4x5 = 20 tiles and makes 220 production in an hour. Try to maximize your production per tile. Often event buildings like the Airship and the Governor's Villa have the best efficiencies, so you should focus efforts on events when they arise.
(8) Roads produce nothing, so you want to minimize roads. You should try to arrange your city so that all the buildings are touching as few road tiles as possible. Usually the best way to do this is to put things that do not need roads on the outside, then place buildings in an outer ring inside of these and finally put a smaller ring of roads inside of these. Put big buildings in the corners of the city. Never put a road around the outside of your city, because half of the road would be wasted in that case since no building touches the outer side.
(9) The best shape for a city is a fat rectangle, for example, about 10 expansions by 6 or 7 expansions. This shape is the most flexible for achieving the goals of (7) above. The problem with a perfectly square city is that the roads have to turn more often, and that is inefficient. The rectangle allows you to have long avenues, which is what you want.
(10) Try to place your town hall in the center of the city or the center of one side. That will make it easier to minimize road use because you can use all four sides of the Town Hall to send out roads. Putting a town hall in a corner is bad because you lose the use of two of its sides.
(11) Do not use decorations, like trees. Decorations will get buffed by random chance when your friends aid you and such buffs are usually worthless. You want your production buildings to get buffed, not decorations. If you need happiness, use one or two big buildings and upgraded roads to get the happiness.
(12) Do not spend resources on city defense. Your tiles are much better spent getting more forge points. The amount of stuff that you might lose by getting plundered is more or less meaningless. You can minimize losses to plundering by collecting from your buildings every day.
(13) Friends are important as a source of aiding and tavern silver, and more importantly as trade partners. Work hard getting good friends. Friends that produce a lot of goods are especially valuable. You can prune inactive players out of your friends list by going to the Town Hall, selecting News, then Event History. Enter in each friend's name into the search box. This will show you everything the friend has done in the last week. If they haven't done anything, replace them with a better friend. Avoid friends that are "campers" meaning that they stay in a low age. You want to have friends that grow with you.
(14) Everything is centered around Great Buildings (GBs). You earn forge points and then use them to level GBs. That's what the game is about. However, some GBs are much better than others, so choosing which GBs to level at what time is a crucial part of your strategy. You can tell which GBs are the most useful and worth developing by looking at the cities of successful players.
(15) The Oracle of Delphi is only good at the very beginning of the game. As soon as you complete the quest for it, it starts to lose value. Many people delete it as soon as the quest is done because there are more efficient ways to get happiness. Buildings like the Colosseum are worthless and resources should never be spent on them.
(16) The Lighthouse of Alexandria is a good GB for early age development. Once you get to EMA, it starts to become less important.
(17) The Castel Del Monte is very useful because it generates forge points. In general, the three key military buildings are the CDM, the Cathedral of Aachen, and the Statue of Zeus. When you get to around Colonial, you should add an Alcatraz if you are doing military activities.
(18) The Temple of Relics is an incredibly profitable building at the low levels and you should work to get it as soon as you reach EMA and have enough room for it. Note that the efficiency of the TOR rapidly decreases after level 5. So, when you get your TOR, level it to 5 or 6 as soon as you can, but then it has less priority because each additional level past that does not give much benefit. You should never level a TOR past 10 because it loses money at that point and beyond.
(19) The Arc is the most important GB in the game because it magnifies your FP contributions to GBs. However, it is a really big building and comes from an advanced age, so it is expensive to get. By the time you get to HMA or LMA, you should try to join a bigger guild so they can help you build an Arc and do GBG (see next topic).
(20) The fastest way to progress in the game is to do Guild Battlegrounds (GBG), because it returns relatively large amounts of forge points and goods. You should seek to get into an active guild that does well in GBG because it will greatly increase the number of forge points you get. Guild Expedition is also useful for getting goods, units and forge points.
(21) When you are aging up, try to save up most of the FP and goods you will need to research the new age ahead of time. As soon as you age up, the military units against you get stronger, so you want to be able to rapidly make units that can fight on equal terms, or you will get stuck in a rut. Also, buildings get bigger as you age up, so you want to have as many expansions as you can before you age up. Don't try to age up a tiny city, because you will not be able to fit all the buildings you need .
(22) Once you get to the Progressive Age or thereabouts, you can start planning your career in the more advanced aspects of Forge of Empires. There are three basic routes. One is to focus on doing a lot of quests and events. In that case, you should aim at getting a Chateau Frontenac. The second is to focus on the military in which case you want to work on getting an Arctic Orangery and Terracotta Army. The third possibility is to become a goods trader and wheeler dealer, in which case you should get a Truce Tower.
Planning your journey in Forge of Empires will help speed your progress and help you achieve a city you are proud of.
(1) The three basic resources in the game are diamonds, forge points and goods. 1 FP ~ 5 Goods ~ 50 Diamonds is the rough approximation in value between these items.
(2) Tiles in FOE tend to yield about 1 FP or 1 Good each for the better quality buildings. From this you can see that buildings that produce forge points are about 5x better than buildings that produce goods. Therefore, you want to almost always prefer buildings that produce forge points.
(3) Higher level players get most of their goods from fighting in Guild Battlegrounds (GBG), not from making them. If you are in a guild, you can buy goods from your higher age guildies using forge points. This is far better than trying to make the goods yourself.
(4) If your guildmates are high age and do not have the low level goods you need, buy the goods they have, then trade them down to what you need using the market system. This can be very profitable. For example, if you buy 50 Explosives for 10 Forge Points, you can trade the 50 Explosives for 90 Rubber, then trade that for 170 Coffee, then trade that for 320 Silk, then trade that for 600 Ropes, then trade that for 1100 Honey, then trade that for 2000 Iron, then trade that for 3600 Lumber. You got 3600 Lumber for 10 FP. Kind of crazy, huh?
(5) Sniping and Sabotage are important techniques for farming goods and FP from your neighbors. Your neighbors are big, fat cows. Milk them! I wrote a separate guide to sniping which can get you started doing that.
(6) When you build your city use all the tiles for something. Don't leave empty tiles doing nothing.
(7) Different buildings have different efficiencies. So you might have 3x3 = 9 tiles building that makes 160 production in an hour, and another that is 4x5 = 20 tiles and makes 220 production in an hour. Try to maximize your production per tile. Often event buildings like the Airship and the Governor's Villa have the best efficiencies, so you should focus efforts on events when they arise.
(8) Roads produce nothing, so you want to minimize roads. You should try to arrange your city so that all the buildings are touching as few road tiles as possible. Usually the best way to do this is to put things that do not need roads on the outside, then place buildings in an outer ring inside of these and finally put a smaller ring of roads inside of these. Put big buildings in the corners of the city. Never put a road around the outside of your city, because half of the road would be wasted in that case since no building touches the outer side.
(9) The best shape for a city is a fat rectangle, for example, about 10 expansions by 6 or 7 expansions. This shape is the most flexible for achieving the goals of (7) above. The problem with a perfectly square city is that the roads have to turn more often, and that is inefficient. The rectangle allows you to have long avenues, which is what you want.
(10) Try to place your town hall in the center of the city or the center of one side. That will make it easier to minimize road use because you can use all four sides of the Town Hall to send out roads. Putting a town hall in a corner is bad because you lose the use of two of its sides.
(11) Do not use decorations, like trees. Decorations will get buffed by random chance when your friends aid you and such buffs are usually worthless. You want your production buildings to get buffed, not decorations. If you need happiness, use one or two big buildings and upgraded roads to get the happiness.
(12) Do not spend resources on city defense. Your tiles are much better spent getting more forge points. The amount of stuff that you might lose by getting plundered is more or less meaningless. You can minimize losses to plundering by collecting from your buildings every day.
(13) Friends are important as a source of aiding and tavern silver, and more importantly as trade partners. Work hard getting good friends. Friends that produce a lot of goods are especially valuable. You can prune inactive players out of your friends list by going to the Town Hall, selecting News, then Event History. Enter in each friend's name into the search box. This will show you everything the friend has done in the last week. If they haven't done anything, replace them with a better friend. Avoid friends that are "campers" meaning that they stay in a low age. You want to have friends that grow with you.
(14) Everything is centered around Great Buildings (GBs). You earn forge points and then use them to level GBs. That's what the game is about. However, some GBs are much better than others, so choosing which GBs to level at what time is a crucial part of your strategy. You can tell which GBs are the most useful and worth developing by looking at the cities of successful players.
(15) The Oracle of Delphi is only good at the very beginning of the game. As soon as you complete the quest for it, it starts to lose value. Many people delete it as soon as the quest is done because there are more efficient ways to get happiness. Buildings like the Colosseum are worthless and resources should never be spent on them.
(16) The Lighthouse of Alexandria is a good GB for early age development. Once you get to EMA, it starts to become less important.
(17) The Castel Del Monte is very useful because it generates forge points. In general, the three key military buildings are the CDM, the Cathedral of Aachen, and the Statue of Zeus. When you get to around Colonial, you should add an Alcatraz if you are doing military activities.
(18) The Temple of Relics is an incredibly profitable building at the low levels and you should work to get it as soon as you reach EMA and have enough room for it. Note that the efficiency of the TOR rapidly decreases after level 5. So, when you get your TOR, level it to 5 or 6 as soon as you can, but then it has less priority because each additional level past that does not give much benefit. You should never level a TOR past 10 because it loses money at that point and beyond.
(19) The Arc is the most important GB in the game because it magnifies your FP contributions to GBs. However, it is a really big building and comes from an advanced age, so it is expensive to get. By the time you get to HMA or LMA, you should try to join a bigger guild so they can help you build an Arc and do GBG (see next topic).
(20) The fastest way to progress in the game is to do Guild Battlegrounds (GBG), because it returns relatively large amounts of forge points and goods. You should seek to get into an active guild that does well in GBG because it will greatly increase the number of forge points you get. Guild Expedition is also useful for getting goods, units and forge points.
(21) When you are aging up, try to save up most of the FP and goods you will need to research the new age ahead of time. As soon as you age up, the military units against you get stronger, so you want to be able to rapidly make units that can fight on equal terms, or you will get stuck in a rut. Also, buildings get bigger as you age up, so you want to have as many expansions as you can before you age up. Don't try to age up a tiny city, because you will not be able to fit all the buildings you need .
(22) Once you get to the Progressive Age or thereabouts, you can start planning your career in the more advanced aspects of Forge of Empires. There are three basic routes. One is to focus on doing a lot of quests and events. In that case, you should aim at getting a Chateau Frontenac. The second is to focus on the military in which case you want to work on getting an Arctic Orangery and Terracotta Army. The third possibility is to become a goods trader and wheeler dealer, in which case you should get a Truce Tower.
Planning your journey in Forge of Empires will help speed your progress and help you achieve a city you are proud of.
