Studius' Guide to Building in GoR

V.1

First off, I want to thank folks like Dominantis, Edwinus, Xylia and Noriega in Augustus1 for teaching me the game. A lot of what I know originates from them, so they deserve a lot of credit. However, I am BY NO MEANS the end all expert, I just have played enough domains and built enough cities to know how to build fast cities designed to be pretty self-contained with maximum troop building power. 

Question One: what buildings should I build?

·         There are building you must build in order to play the game correctly, and these should be obvious: villas, barracks, embassy, forge, stable, workshop, generals’ quarters, academy, watch tower, rally spot, and relief station.

·         However, there are some buildings that are completely optional—you can play the game just fine without them. The buildings that are unnecessary are: Storehouse, Museum, Coliseum, and Forum. You will find very little use for these buildings later in the game.

·         The two buildings that are good at low levels but unnecessary at higher levels (over about 1mil glory) are the storehouse and coliseum. If you are just starting out, you will want a storehouse because it will keep your resources safe, up to about 1mil of each kind. The other exception is the coliseum, only because this can be your primary source of silver—which is required for research and for training praefects (generals). It is a good idea to keep your Coliseum at level 1-2 for a while until you can farm for resources once you are higher level. Eventually, you will replace each of these buildings with barracks. (See below). 

Question Two: how many of each building should I build?

Here you have some options, but note that the only buildings you can build multiples of are villas and barracks. The ratio of these depends on your style of play.

1.      For maximum troop building power, increasing your barracks to 17-18 per city is the goal, thus you will keep your villas to 5-6. Keep in mind this will limit your max population, and therefore your max troop training batches--for some builds (such as cavalry, which require 3 population for each cav built) this will limit batch size quite a bit. This means you will have to build CONSTANTLY—as in every hour, set up a new build in your queue when you are building basic troops--which is also why having lots of barracks is important--large queues.

a.       A good way to "power build" with limited population is to have short builds—cons, cav, skirms—with long builds every once in a while—scoprios, legs or cents. This will allow you to fill your queues while the long builds are ongoing. This assumes you adopt a certain troop philosophy, which is Skirms, Cav, Legs as the primary troops (this is a topic for another post).

b.      Also, have a nice, high level general as your Praetorian Praefect, this can decrease troop training time dramatically.

2.      Second option is to build 7-8 villas and less barracks (15-16). This will make builds slower, but you can have a greater population per build. This is for casual gamers, not for the hard core player…just my opinion.

Question three: What order should I build?

·         This is a difficult question to answer. You will be required to build certain buildings in the order specified by the quests, and your own uses—for instance, if you want skirms, get your barracks to lvl 2, If you want to send 90k troops at a time, build up your rally spot, etc. But if you want a higher level wall, you will need to upgrade your workshop along with some other things. Order is not super-important; just try to build your academy, palace, walls, embassy, and watchtower up pretty fast.  

                    

·         And as a final pointer, your rally spot should be the last building you build to level 9, and I mean the very, very last. It is a 5-day build, and you can have all level 9 barracks in that amount of time.  With that in mind, your lvl 9 walls should be low priority also until everything else is leveled up. The difference between lvl 8-9 walls is not that huge. But the difference between lvl 1 and lvl 9 barracks is pretty significant for troop building times.

•          The most important thing to remember is GET ALL BUILDINGS TO LEVEL 9 AS FAST AS POSSIBLE!  You should be building CONSTANTLY… research, buildings, troops and temple until they are   maxed out. (This requires constant resources, so make sure you are in a good generous alliance).

Here is my typical city:

Once you get all your primary cities built, including 6 or so villas, fill all empty city spots with barracks. I like to have all my barracks on one side of the city. Here is my THIRD city. Notice I have no academy (third cities don’t require academies, you don’t need to build it unless you want to power your research levels up faster), coliseum, forum, or storehouse, and I have only five villas, but 18 barracks.

 Buildings: Academy, Embassy, Forge, Generals Quarters, Palace, Rally Spot, Relief Station, Stable, Temple, Watch Tower, Workshop, Villa x6(or 5), Barracks x17(or 18)