How I acquire diamonds in my city:
- Guild Expedition
- Wishing Wells
Guild Expedition
One can complete GE each week in 2 ways: fighting or negotiation. Fighting requires 1 or more leveled attack GBs, possibly military buildings, and a lot more time than negotiating. For this strategy we will be negotiating. If this is not your main city then you should already be familiar with how to negotiate, so I wont get into that here.
The only difficult thing about negotiating GE is building up your friends tavern in order to make enough tavern silver each week for 3-4 15 minute boosts.
Wishing Wells
Acquiring WWs can be tricky. It's easiest to get them in events. This is a totally optional part of this guide, but it is an alternative strategy I use since I am able to successfully negotiate GE 64 each week with the amount of goods buildings I have. I have 9 WWs and they provide me with extra supplies and coins that aren't affected by happiness, not to mention goods (10 per) and FPs (2 per). 10 goods from a 3x3 for no supply and coin investment isn't bad, especially since you can get all 5 goods, alleviating some of your need for trading.
Once you start clearing GE you will acquire a decent amount of fountains of youth, and these can be incorporated into your city along with your WWs!
Starting Your New City
- Pick a world with a friend or 2 from your original world, or maybe someone on the forums so you can at least shoot messages to them. Maybe down the road they can help you level some GBs or trade you some goods! My IA city is on W, US. Come and join me if you'd like!
- Guild hop and aid like mad while in Bronze Age to attempt to get blueprints for Tower of Babel. More on this later
- Build your city up to Iron Age. You can choose to research to participate in PVP or not. Doing so allows you to more easily complete daily quests and event quests. Not doing so prevents you from ever being plundered. I opted to research for PVP and with a full 8 person defense most people wont breach your defenses in Iron Age.
- You may choose to go past Iron Age, but if you want to have your GE machine running quickly and efficiently, IA is the age we are going to park in for this guide. You may, however, take the spirit of this guide and apply it to any age. (If you do let me know how it works out)
- Join an active guild with many members.
- Add only active people to your friends list (even if they are from your guild). You can look at the Great Building leaderboards and find people who have an arc--most that do are leveling it and active. Having a friends list full of active players is absolutely essential to the GE strategy for diamond farming.
- Build your city in a square. A 6x6 is a great shape for this strategy as it allows you to fit in houses and goods buildings very well.
- Clear your continent map to expose at least both of your goods deposits.
Turning Your City Into a Goods Factory
- Negotiating GE is all about goods production. I like to have at least 300 of each good (from both ages) for a full GE clear. More is always better. That means you need to collect 1500 Iron age goods and 750ish Iron age goods to trade down to bronze age for a total of 2250 per week. That's a lot! The reason for the 300 is sometimes negotiating will pick on one BA good for several encounters in a row, causing you to go low on that one good. If you run out of dye, you are toast for the rest of GE, so you want reserves.
- Since you probably wont use all 300 of each good every week, you don't need to produce that many each week. I produce about 220 each day, and that has been sufficient. So how do I produce that many goods?
- Get rid of all decorations, cultural buildings, and production buildings except for 2 butchers. If you are lucky enough to score a tailor, as I was, you can get away with just using a tailor. The goal here is to produce just enough supplies and coins each day to fund your goods production, then have a little extra for using supplies and coins in GE (but you earn supplies and coins in GE, so they kind of pay for themselves)
- This is where it gets tricky. Depending on your goods deposits on the continent map you may get lucky like me and get iron (3x3). There is also jewelry (3x4), cloth (4x3) and Ebony and Limestone (both 4x4). If you get Ebony and Limestone you have it rough, but it is still doable. You just might not be able to fit many Wishing Wells if you choose to do that as well.
- Choose the smallest good you have a bonus for and start building goods buildings. They require 230 population, or 3.15 cottages. Build up your population and your goods buildings. Your population should be less than 73 (1 cottage worth) if you built your city correctly.
- You can build your houses and then place them unconnected to fit more houses/goods buildings. They still provide population, but not coins. Since you will have a lot of cottages already, coins shouldn't be an issue and you should never be low. This can be a great way to build an efficient city.
- You may choose to put your goods buildings on a 24hr timer (20 goods/day), an 8/8/4 cycle (25 goods/day) or 3 8hr cycles (30 goods per day). Doing 3 8 hour cycles is difficult to do and can mess with your other collection times and make this city less hands off! I choose the 24 timers and collect everything at once.
- Collecting Supplies: Put your supply buildings on a 24hr timer so they get motivated. Fill any extra space with a couple blacksmiths if you have room/population. Don't put another cottage if you don't need the population. You might have to get a feel with how many butchers you will need for your city. If you don't have wishing wells putting out supplies (about 1k a couple times a day for me) you might need 3 or 4.
Which Great Buildings Should You Build?
- Tower of Babel: This is the best GB you can build (unless you can score an inno tower) for this strategy. Not only does it provide goods, but it adds population in a 4x4 block that you can shove into a corner of your city. It's important to note that you can fit 4x cottages where a ToB will go, so your ToB needs to provide more than 292 population to match the houses it replaced. Once it starts providing more than 292, you can start deleting some houses and adding more goods buildings. Keep this GB at max unlockable level.
- Statue of Zeus: This is such a small GB that there isn't really a reason to not build it. I've found that in most designs I came up with for my city I was left with a perfect size slot for a 2x3 building, and plopped my Zeus in it. I wouldn't prioritize leveling it until ToB is max.
- Lighthouse of Alexandria: I pushed to build my LoA before I came up with this strategy. I think building it is personal preference. Once leveled to 100%, it acts as a full happiness boost. Once it's at 140% it will act as enthusiastic. You can look at that the same as having a GB that provides enough happiness for enthusiastic--and it also provides goods! You could, however, not build it and just put another production building down and probably cover your goods production easily.
- Colosseum: Just don't. It's huge and useless. You don't need happiness, remember?
- Oracle of Delphi: You might think this is a good idea, it creates supplies after all. Well the happiness is useless for this strategy and you really don't need any more supplies.
- Temple of Relics: I'm still not sure about this one. I really want to build it because I think more FPs, more units, more goods will help in the long run, but it's fairly large. If I did build it I would level it to 10 before LoA or Zeus. What do you guys think about building ToR for this strategy?
Trading for Other Goods
- This can be a difficult task, especially when trading down for Bronze Age goods. Not a lot of BA players will be able to drop 200 dye for 100 Iron. So you have to put out a lot of smaller trades, and sometimes take unfair trades (in their favor) in order to get someone to take your trade. If 50 dye for 25 Iron doesn't work, try 50 for 30. Keep bumping it up a little bit until people consistently take your trades.
- Getting 1:1 for Iron Age goods shouldn't be an issue, really, especially if you are in an active guild where some people (for some reason) have thousands of IA goods. They will take your trades immediately, alleviating the need for unfair trades.
Leveling the Friends Tavern
- It's important to keep pumping your tavern silver back into your tavern upgrades. Only upgrade your chairs and tables as this is the most cost effective way to increase your silver income. Some people might not like that you don't have a tablecloth, so you can appease them by buying the first one (1000 TS) once you get your table to 8 or 10 people.
- Do not use any Tavern Silver on GE until you have your table built up to the point where you are making around 1k TS per day. If you start negotiating GE too soon with TS you will slow down your tavern upgrade process significantly, leading to less ability to use TS to purchase boosts.
- For this reason you might need to just negotiate GE without the boost each week and get as far as you can without blowing through too many goods or getting too frustrated. I think the farthest I got was the beginning of GE3. At that point it's futile to try it without the boost. But, that's okay. It's worth a couple weeks of crappy GE for subsequent endless weeks of GE64'
- Once you get a table maxed with size and chairs, try and keep a supply of 6k TS (4 boosts) at all times. Any extra can be reinvested into other table components of you choosing until your table is maxed.
Acquiring Medals for GE
- When purchasing a 15 minute negotiation boost in your tavern, if you run out of attempts while there is still time on the clock is it important to maximize your TS while it is still scarce. So it's okay to buy attempts to last you through the 15 minutes or until the medal cost gets too high. The medal cost in IA is super low, so you should be able to buy quite a few.
- Since FPs aren't the most useful currency in this city, it can be wise to find a guildmate or 2 who will let you pay over the reward amount on a GB to get a 4th or 5th place spot. Getting 5th on a mid level arc will net you around 1k+ medals, which is enough to get you through probably months of buying attempts in GE. Try to keep 1k medals on hand for this purpose. The rest can be spent on expansions.
Land Expansions
- Spending diamonds on land expansions is counter productive in a diamond farm city, so don't do it!
- Travel as far as you wish on the continent map. You may be able to go a couple ages past IA and negotiate if you have access to those goods. That could be a good way to nab land expansions
- Acquire medals from investing in GBs.
- I am able to clear GE64 and have only purchased up to the 3k medal expansion.
Event Buildings
- Build these at your own discernment. If they produce goods, that's good for you! I would stray away from filling your city with too many FP only buildings though.
Quest Cycling and CF
- This is a totally valid strategy for generating goods for a GE focused city, but it also takes a lot of time and effort to acquire a CF in IA and to level it high enough to really work for you. That's not what this guide is about!
That covers it, I think I'll add anything I missed. Please feel free to ask questions! Here is a picture of my city. I have 10 blacksmiths in it for doing event quests, but will replace them with cottages, foundries, and WWs as the event unfolds.
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