Layout/strategy for Diamond farm

[DeletedUser26965]

I don't think we need a guide or that we should talk about it because if it gets too popular they'll nerf itBut since you asked I'll just follow up some.

Generally speaking it's about time management really so depending on how much you can dedicate will give you an idea of which way to go and how much you can get. There's really only two things you can do; a Wishing Well/Fountain of Youth city and/or a Guild Expedition/Chest reward city, and a third one that's not really all that useful, Random Rewards/Château Frontenac.

For a WW/FoY city you'll mainly just concentrate on setting up your city and preparing for events that have WW as rewards and do as much of the event as needed to get as many WW's possible. You can get FoY's only from the last GE chests in level 3&4 and Jade Relics. For a GE/Chest city, same principle, set up city tuned up for finishing GE to get diamonds from chests. Either way will take some time to really get going, like weeks/months.

Daily Challenges - You can also get WW's from the Collectors Chest and the final Challengers chest. I found with as many cities I have it was just too time consuming to do though. My First Attempt at Daily Challenge If you go that route then same principle as above, tune city to be able to complete DC tasks effiecently, always go for Collectors chest and maximize Challenger's chests.

GE Chest Rewards - Someone who does all of GE and keeps track of their diamonds can speak to this method better than me since I don't do GE on my alt cities and don't keep track of diamonds won on my main city. Given that the rewards in some of the chests change I imagine it's quite difficult to know with any certainty just how many diamonds are averaged over the long term per week. Think it's something like 625 diamonds as rewards total but each chest reward of course has their own % chances. http://forgeofempires.wikia.com/wiki/Guild_Expeditions

In the end you have to think in long term thinking, you're not going to be showered in diamonds any time soon and even after quite some time not really then either but it makes for some interesting play and can be worth doing to some degree. How much you get out of it depends of course on how much you can do and get. For me personally I can't imagine doing all of GE on my alts and I started doing the event thing on them really before GE4 so I just stayed with the Event/WW thing, once the cities are setup then it only gets time consuming for whatever event comes around that happens to have WW's in them. The fan wiki lists WW's as 1.25% for diamonds, I just say 1%, doesn't really matter all that much statistically speaking anyway. So say you had 100 WW's spread over how many cities you have and collect daily then over the long term you would average 50 diamonds a day so of course the more WW's the more diamonds, 500 WW's 250 diamonds per day. And of course statistically you could go one day with less and another day with more, streaks of good days, streaks of bad days, but over the long term it converges towards that average.

http://forgeofempires.wikia.com/wiki/Daily_Challenges
http://forgeofempires.wikia.com/wiki/Wishing_Well
http://forgeofempires.wikia.com/wiki/Fountain_of_Youth

 

[DeletedUser29726]

Generally speaking it's about time management really so depending on how much you can dedicate will give you an idea of which way to go and how much you can get. There's really only two things you can do; a Wishing Well/Fountain of Youth city and/or a Guild Expedition/Chest reward city, and a third one that's not really all that useful, Random Rewards/Château Frontenac.

Chateau Frontenac is certainly something you should do eventually - not for the recurrings but for the random events you'll run, and for the big piles of end of age diamonds you'll get when you decide you need to age up to get more expansions for wishing wells. It's also very useful for being able to afford the GE portion when you want to do it (goods source).

GE Chest Rewards - Someone who does all of GE and keeps track of their diamonds can speak to this method better than me since I don't do GE on my alt cities and don't keep track of diamonds won on my main city. Given that the rewards in some of the chests change I imagine it's quite difficult to know with any certainty just how many diamonds are averaged over the long term per week. Think it's something like 625 diamonds as rewards total but each chest reward of course has their own % chances. http://forgeofempires.wikia.com/wiki/Guild_Expeditions

While highly variable 200 diamonds a week is a good estimate for completing GE4. Note that not only is there different %s, in the 4th difficulty the first 3 'major' chests have a chance at diamonds being one of the two prizes selected from the prize pool as an option. It is a major time sink (realistically about an hour per world divided up into chunks - you can get it down to about 30 minutes per world if you can get a full auto combat setup working but that requires major infrastructure). You do also win Fountains this way of course so that one day you can be lazy.

 

[DeletedUser32973]

This is my most advanced diamond farm currently. All attack GBs at 10, and just got the Alcatraz. My other 7 farms are finishing up the last attack GB, but they all fight through 4. The plan is to remove all the smiths, all military except 1 ballista camp/1 rogue hideout, as well as the rest of the FP producers once my Alcatraz is leveled, then fully auto battle GE. I'm not sure GE can be completely auto battled with just the rogue hideout. Has anyone consistently done full auto battle with just the rogue hideout?

 

[DeletedUser29726]

View attachment 10561 This is my most advanced diamond farm currently. All attack GBs at 10, and just got the Alcatraz. My other 7 farms are finishing up the last attack GB, but they all fight through 4. The plan is to remove all the smiths, all military except 1 ballista camp/1 rogue hideout, as well as the rest of the FP producers once my Alcatraz is leveled, then fully auto battle GE. I'm not sure GE can be completely auto battled with just the rogue hideout. Has anyone consistently done full auto battle with just the rogue hideout?

I did successfully do one full 64 full autobattle week on H. I run 1 rogue hideout + 1 drummer camp + traz. 109/90 boost, no tavern used. A lot of dead rogues - but that just means i'd need more traz levels to sustain doing that every week.



It's not really a diamond mine, rather just a casual permanent age camp world for something different for me. Once i get some more expansions i have a bunch more stuff to fit in there.

 

[DeletedUser29623]

I started my second city with the idea it would be a diamond farm, but it turned out to be better than my first one because it has benefited from all the mistakes I made the first time around.

If you just make it all or mostly wishing wells, then you just need enough stuff to get the wishing wells (via quests) and sync them up to collect on time. I admit I am curious about how people with primarily-WW cities do this

If you want to do Level 4 GE, it seems more complicated to me and you would have to think about it. To do level 4, you need a guild that opens it every week— not always easy to find. You’ll need an Observatory or Arc so the guild has the goods to unlock all the levels. Then you’ll need either the military to fight the levels or the goods to negotiate them, neither of which are insignificant. At that point, what distinguishes a farm city from a regular city? I don’t have farms, but I’d be interested to see someone explain this.

 

[DeletedUser26965]

Chateau Frontenac is certainly something you should do eventually - not for the recurrings but for the random events you'll run, and for the big piles of end of age diamonds you'll get when you decide you need to age up to get more expansions for wishing wells. It's also very useful for being able to afford the GE portion when you want to do it (goods source).

Oh I agree with that, I was just thinking of it in terms of the route of using it strictly for diamonds from rewards, compared to doing GE or doing Events for WW's it pales in comparison to those. Also I'm always thinking in terms of time regarding this stuff because with 26 cities I have I really can't imagine doing the GE thing and/or the reward/chat thing, rather just get the WW's from events, put em down, collect and go. I have done other stuff on a few of them for fun though as they haven't all always been just about diamonds, I like the idea of trying different things out and playing in various guilds and alts are a great opportunity to do that.

This is my typical alt city;



I've had a lot of them since 2016 but deleted a bunch of cities and started them over because I didn't know what I was doing with the original cities so most of them have been really going since Feb 2017. I only just started building and leveling the GB's since last May on most of them in case one day I decide to do something else. I like seeing that play out in graph form on forgedb, here's that city above;

 

[DeletedUser26965]

If you just make it all or mostly wishing wells, then you just need enough stuff to get the wishing wells (via quests) and sync them up to collect on time. I admit I am curious about how people with primarily-WW cities do this

Pretty simple actually and better nowadays with Oracle of Delphi and PvP tech locked. I'll try to list how I see it. I put it in a spoiler because it's long.

Spoiler

The first thing to keep in mind is do as little as needed to just do events, especially cMap of course but also tech as well. Mainly because you'll want to keep quest requirements as low as possible. So staying in IA as long as possible is a good strat.

The second thing to keep in mind is it all takes time mainly because you're waiting for an event to get WW's but in that time you can prepare for them so patience is a virtue.

One of the best things you should do is get a beta account to do the events, write down the quests and plan accordingly. If they don't have WW's in them then clearly they can be skipped. If you don't have time for that the fan wiki is pretty good about getting the quests up prior to the event going live so that's an alternative but not as good as running the event yourself to get a good feel for it and what you'll need to do.

It used to be you had to get to IA so you could do the "contribute fp to a GB" quests but now with OoD you can just use that. Of course you can get rid of it eventually if you like once your doing other GB's.

There's a lot of "Spend FP" quests in some events so a good thing you can do is get to IA(Architecture) and just sign in daily to your alts and dump fp's on active players GB to build up a bank of fp's for the quests. This isn't entirely necessary but helps timewise as you can knock out a lot of the early quests that don't have a timer on them.

Goods will still be needed because of the "donate to treasury" and gather goods quests but with PvP locked now to IA(Military Tactics) you don't have to worry about plunder anymore, so you still have to build up some goods for those quests which is good because better that then researching tech or advancing the cMap. Once you get to a point where WW's are producing enough goods you can get rid of the goods buildngs.

Friends Tavern is still needed as there are quests related to it. Being in BA/IA though it's pretty easy to get friends. The unfortunate side effect I found though is I simply don't have time to Aid/Sit so it kind of puts ya in a bad position but you can get over that, just pretend they're not real people lol. But it's good to get your tavern built up some and have enough friends to complete the quests.

Still good to be in a guild for trades, aid and treasury quests but I suggest an open casual guild with no requirements, and a guild with a lot of members and a TH that gives FP's all the more better.

Blacksmiths are great as there are many production related quests. I usually have enough of them and have them pre set in anticipation of the first couple quests then set them for the next quest. Good to be ahead of the game in this regard as I find them to be probably the most agitating aspect to it all lol. But once you get it down it's not so bad.

Space is not all that much of an issue for quite some time, of course depending on how many WW's you get. You'll just again only want to get as much as you need in order to place what WW's you have and to do events. I haven't gotten to the point of worrying about WW's building up in the inventory wondering how I'll get more space for them but it's coming eventually. However with the bigger events that may contain WW's they usually have the alternative to doing tech and cMap so I've advanced some in both for the expansions. That's a risk you'll have to take if you want more space sooner because if a quest ever comes that doesn't have the option then you'll be stuck having to advance more than you intended.

Regarding time I managed it by opening a city when I had the time, takes less than 10 minutes to get through the tutorial. Then just slowly built from there, only a few minutes per day really. Then open more cities while fp's are building up on the other cities and repeat. Sign in to them when you can, build up what you need and move on, doesn't take much time at all but takes a while over the long run for a city to be efficient and prepared for events. The only time it becomes time consuming is when the events start. If you have 20+ cities it's madness running through the first however many quests of the event until it gets to the timed quests but if your fully prepared it's pretty smooth going and once it gets to the timed quests it's not so bad. In the off event times all I really do is collect WW's which I think takes like 10 minutes to go through 25 cities. If I need to build up some fp's it doesn't take much to run through the hood to see who's building up whatever GB and dump the fp's on them, after that it's just a matter of opening the TH to the GB and keep dumping fp's for the win, then go find another GB to do.

Well, geez, I think I just about covered everything, if something comes to mind I'll add it in. Cheers.

 

[DeletedUser29726]

If you want to do Level 4 GE, it seems more complicated to me and you would have to think about it. To do level 4, you need a guild that opens it every week— not always easy to find. You’ll need an Observatory or Arc so the guild has the goods to unlock all the levels. Then you’ll need either the military to fight the levels or the goods to negotiate them, neither of which are insignificant. At that point, what distinguishes a farm city from a regular city? I don’t have farms, but I’d be interested to see someone explain this.

1) Create a guild yourself. Invite only
2) Invite noone - you don't need others to run GE4 - only for the championship which has no real value to you if you're farming for diamonds
3) You don't need an obs or arc to cover the goods because you can donate
4) If you want a week off, you take one off. There's noone you owe anything to other than yourself.

As for the stuff to actually do it, that gets more complicated yes. You either do it by goods which needs
1) A tavern that generates 3000 silver a week to be safe (2x 15 minutes of 4 turn negotiation) - this is perhaps the worst part for a world you really don't want to care about. You need friends who care enough to sit in your tavern but not to have to spend too much time upgrading it and not to have to do a lot of sitting of your own.
2) A chateau frontenac to supply missing goods with unbirthday quests and medals for extra attempts during your tavern window and negotiations
3) Posting some downtrades weekly at friendly rates that neighbors will take to get age-before goods

Notes :
- as you get more wishing wells and fountains of youth they'll start covering more and more of the goods so your amount of quests needed will decrease.
- you probably can fight the first two difficulties weekly on auto saving time and some goods with minimal boost

or...

You do it by military which involves engineering a situation where you can fight all 4 difficulties weekly. My two best examples, the first requiring lots of gb work, the second requiring a fair bit of teching and manual combat each week :
1) Iron age with full 'regular' military GBs levelled (Zeus, Aachen, CdM, Traz)
2) Industrial age with PE units from fighting the germans (2 snipers + 1 RFC) and fighting on manual - doesn't require much boost or a traz though as you won't be losing many rogues. You can auto the first two difficulties at a cost of some units to save time, just don't risk your precious PE units on an auto.

The good news here is you can run a prohibition town - no need to build up a friends list or a tavern cutting a lot of the mindless clicking.

 

[DeletedUser32973]

I did successfully do one full 64 full autobattle week on H. I run 1 rogue hideout + 1 drummer camp + traz. 109/90 boost, no tavern used. A lot of dead rogues - but that just means i'd need more traz levels to sustain doing that every week.

View attachment 10562

It's not really a diamond mine, rather just a casual permanent age camp world for something different for me. Once i get some more expansions i have a bunch more stuff to fit in there.

About how many rogues did you lose?

 

[DeletedUser29726]

About how many rogues did you lose?

somewhere around 60-70 i think

 

[DeletedUser30312]

Well here's an updated view of my Wishing Well farm on Parkog:



In addition to collecting from the Wishing Wells, I run the GE. Since this city produces a lot of goods, I usually negotiate rather than fight. I also to DC and run the recurring quests, but I've already tapped out the RQs for diamonds, so they're mostly goods production now.

 

[Cleavus]

Hi Guys, I know this thread is old, but Im going to try anyway, I have four worlds, and I want to make a diamond farm on this one on Xyr as I dont have a lot of time, and this might help. Looking at the image of my town, what DONT i need to make this just a diamonf farm. I have 8 wishing wells in storage, but no shrink kits for them. I do 64 encounters in GE every week. ANy help appreciated

 

[DeletedUser33179]

Hi Guys, I know this thread is old, but Im going to try anyway, I have four worlds, and I want to make a diamond farm on this one on Xyr as I dont have a lot of time, and this might help. Looking at the image of my town, what DONT i need to make this just a diamonf farm. I have 8 wishing wells in storage, but no shrink kits for them. I do 64 encounters in GE every week. ANy help appreciated

You currently have a lot of GBs you'll no longer need for only only doing GE64 & completing events to win WWs/shrink kits - FOD, SMB, Arc, LoA, RAH. Defensive buildings like St Basils aren't really necessary either if you're comfortable with that, as you'll not have much plunderable to protect. If you fight all of GE64 or all but very last few encounters (negotiated if att/def not strong enough yet), then you don't need CF either. The WWs you accumulate will provide plenty of goods for your limited needs for them. It can be hard to delete well earned GBs. I know, as did so for 3 of my alternate worlds that I'd changed over to GE only + events for WWs a few months ago. But it was well worth it.

You won't need anything near what you have now for FP-primary buildings, so consider storing/deleting the SSWs & TFs (yes, many folks love their TFs, but they're too big + plunderable) - you're event buildings, the CDM, a few SOKs & fps from WWs will be plenty.

 

[Woody*]

You also don't need current aged goods and supply buildings. You should also get enough unattached tanks from GE that you can delete your tank factory. That reduces population and cultural requirements, and means you can get rid of your 2-lane road (unless you want to do event quests to get WW shrink kits, in which case you might need some current age production buildings later).

 

[Woody*]

Here is the layout on one of my PE-diamond farms. I suggest you replicate the green area to attach 3 GBs with one road square to your town hall. The red area represents the "slop" area I keep flexible for events. All my 2-lane road requirements are met here with a single 2-lane road when necessary (I have extra space elsewhere where I move the things I won't delete like Zeus, my 1 rogue den and the SoK)

 

[DeletedUser38379]

Lots of discussion, and rightly so!, on strategy. But unless it's just stupidly obvious, how should I set up my diamond farm?

Today is wishing well day for winter event, so that seems great? and other than that just get goods to negotiate GE?

So how do you get them. I’ve never seen one.

 

[DeletedUser30312]

I agree with getting rid of the Terrace Farms, the Sky Watches, and the goods buildings. The TFs and goods buildings are just jacking up your population and by extension happiness needs. The good buildings also have a need for the two lane roads which eat up more space, where WWs don't. You probably don't need the Ponds of Fall either. If you're not exploiting RQs, you may be able to live without the CF, it's a good GB, but Inno's been cutting back on event quests that reward random stuff.

 

[Cleavus]

thanks Guys! sorry for delay in thanking you! awesome stuff, I appreciate the time you put into this

 

[Woody*]

When I first started doing diamond farms from scratch I decided to set up my towns with rows instead of columns. Now that I have more Wishing Wells than I can fit on all my farms, my focus has shifted to getting WW shrink kits. As they are 3x2, a column layout is more efficient and I am slowly changing my layout on all diamond farming worlds.

 

[RazorbackPirate]

When I first started doing diamond farms from scratch I decided to set up my towns with rows instead of columns. Now that I have more Wishing Wells than I can fit on all my farms, my focus has shifted to getting WW shrink kits. As they are 3x2, a column layout is more efficient and I am slowly changing my layout on all diamond farming worlds.

Not sure how you're determining row vs. column, but the most efficient layout will have the 2x side of all your shrunken WWs touching the roads.