The Shape of a City
Your city has a fixed number of building slots, and almost every one of them is a choice you can undo only by demolishing what you built. Here I've gathered what experienced players actually run, how the counts change as you grow, and where they still disagree.
Build one of every mandatory building, then spend what's left on barracks on the big slots and farms and mansions on the small ones. The split between farms and mansions is the whole game, and it changes at least twice as you grow.
Two sizes of space
City planning is slot management. There are two sizes of space and they take different things, so a lot of the arguing about layouts is really arguing about how to spend a fixed budget.
| Space | How many | What can go there |
|---|---|---|
| Capitol slot | 1 | The Capitol only. Sets your city level and caps everything else. |
| Large slots | 21 | Every main building: gatherers, barracks, warehouse, forge, temple, academy and the rest. |
| Small slots | 24 | Farms and mansions only. Nothing else will go on them. |
| Wall sections | 3 | Not really slots. They level separately and work as one defensive system. |
The 24 small slots are reported the same way by three separate players , and the 21 large slots come from one . Your city may look different across accounts or after an update, but the slot logic holds.
Must-Have Buildings
Every city needs a minimum set, one of each. Once those are placed, optimisation is whatever you do with the slots left over.
| Building | How many | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Capitol | 1 | Gates every other building's level. There is only one. |
| Academy | 1 | Research. You can't build a second one. |
| Lumberjack's House | 1 minimum | Wood. Wall upgrades require one, which is why nobody demolishes their last one. |
| Stone Cutter's House | 1 minimum | Stone. Same wall requirement. |
| Foundry | 1 minimum | Iron. Same wall requirement. |
| Warehouse | 1 | Sets your storage cap and the slice of resources a raider can't take. |
| Tar Workshop | 1 | Common tar for crypt exploration. Also gates the Forge's level. |
| Forge | 1 | Turns crypt materials, gems and enchantments into equipment. |
| Temple | 1 | Sacred potions, for reviving fallen troops. |
| Caravan | 1 | Moves resources between cities, friendly or otherwise. |
| Portal Master | 1 | Portal travel. Positioning rather than production. |
| Consulate | 1 | Health and strength bonuses, but only when your army is reinforcing or raiding. |
| Barracks | 1 minimum | Troop training. The count is a real decision, see below. |
Two players independently report the same trap: you can happily flatten every spare Lumberjack's House, Stone Cutter's House and Foundry once clan chests outpace them, but keep one of each or you can no longer upgrade your walls .
Your Choice
Barracks
Barracks set how many troops you can have in training at once. They do not make troops stronger , and the clearest test in the sweep says they don't make training faster either: one player timed a batch at 4 days 15 hours, added barracks, and timed it again at 4 days 17 hours .
That matters because rebuilding your army is a daily chore once you're farming epic monsters. Players who go heavy on barracks aren't chasing power, they're chasing turnaround. Counts in the wild run from 7 to 10, with ten recommended from the very start on one account .
Farms and mansions
Farms make food, mansions make silver, and they compete for the same 24 small slots . Food is an upkeep cost, so what matters is production minus what your army eats. One player at 14 farms was producing 67,000 food an hour against an army costing 50,000, netting 17,000.
Letting that net go negative is reported to raise the silver cost of training troops, which is the mechanism behind the whole late-game shift toward farms .
Spare gatherers
Early on, extra Lumberjack's Houses and Foundries are how you fund your own upgrades. Later they become rounding errors. One veteran put it in numbers: a single Stone Cutter's House making 2,500 stone an hour needs a day or two to pay for one mid-level upgrade, while an hour of clan chests covers what those buildings make in a week .
What people actually run
Every documented layout from the sweep, in one place. The columns don't always add up to 24 and 21 because most players don't count their own city on camera.
| Build | Stage | Gatherers | Barracks | Farms | Mansions |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Month-one city | Capitol 11 | 4 of each | — | 14 | 10 |
| Early balanced | Low clan tier | ~9 spares | 1 | 8 | 16 |
| Silver-leaning | Mid | — | — | 6 | 18 |
| Main-account plan | From the start | 1 each | 10 | ~16 | 8 |
| War city | Capitol 20+ | 1 each | 10 | 23 | 1 |
| Max-food rebuild | Mid | 1 each | 7 | 23 | 1 |
| Endgame city | Capitol 44–45 | 1 each | 9+ | 21–23 | 1–3 |
| Silver alt | Second account | minimal | minimal | 1–3 | 21 |
The game's own channel has aired both ends of this. One player it featured runs every Farmer's House at 45 with a single mansion; another holds a 60/40 mansion-to-farm split until Capitol 20 and only then moves to food .
The arc, in three rebuilds
Nobody in the sweep is running the city they started with. The counts change because what's scarce changes, and it changes in a consistent order.
- Silver is scarce (Capitol 1–10). You can't train anything and everything costs silver. The common advice is to demolish starter farms for mansions, because at this stage a small army barely eats. Build gatherers freely: you have no clan feeding you yet.
- Build materials are scarce (Capitol 10–19). You're upgrading constantly and every upgrade wants wood, stone and iron. This is when spare gatherers earn their slots, and when a balanced split like 16 mansions to 8 farms is comfortable.
- Food is scarce (Capitol 20+). Your army is now large enough that upkeep dominates, and a decent clan supplies more silver and materials in an hour than your city makes in a week. Spare gatherers become barracks, mansions become farms, and you move to a food tile.
Buildings cost Architect's Blueprints at level 15 and 20. If you're going to demolish something, don't pay those. One player's rule: leave anything you plan to flatten at level 14 or below and do the whole conversion just before Capitol 20 .
One of Each
This is the single most useful thing in the sweep, and it's what makes the lopsided builds affordable. Raising your Guardsman tier means raising the Capitol, and the Capitol is gated by a chain of about twelve buildings that have to keep pace. But it's one of each, not all of them.
One player at Capitol 34 keeps a single Barracks at 34 and leaves the rest at 19; his farms sit at 9 and 15, his mansions at 22 . Another keeps exactly one mansion at 44 purely because Guardsmen IX needs it at 45, and is demolishing every other one.
| To upgrade | You first need | Kept at cap |
|---|---|---|
| Capitol | Consulate | One |
| Forge | Tar Workshop | One |
| Academy | Barracks | One |
| Barracks | Temple | One |
| Temple | Mansion | One |
| Caravan | Warehouse | One |
| Portal Master | Capitol | One |
| Farmer's House (the keystone one) | Capitol | One |
The order is sequential, so the chain unblocks itself one building at a time and you can't parallelise your way out of it . Everything else in your city, the other nine barracks, the other twenty-two farms, can lag as far behind as you like until you want the production.
What being wrong costs
Demolishing refunds nothing. Not the resources, not the blueprints, not the time . The control is deliberately tucked away: open the building, click the i at the top right of its panel, and Demolish is at the bottom. The slot becomes a ruin, and a ruin will take any building you like .
Levels 1 to 9 cost only resources. From level 10, and every fifth level after it, upgrades also cost Architect's Blueprints, which are bought with gold . The prices are the reason experienced players plan their layout years ahead.
| Upgrade | Blueprints |
|---|---|
| Anything, around level 25 | ~1,600 |
| Barracks 34 → 35 | 9,000 |
| Farmer's House 44 → 45 | 18,000 |
| Tar Workshop, Academy (high level) | 27,000 |
| Consulate (the most expensive building in the game) | 33,000 |
For scale: 15,000 blueprints cost roughly 150,000 gold, so a single Farmer's House going from 44 to 45 is about 300,000 gold, and you need twenty-odd of them. There are no blueprint discount events, not even at Christmas . One source describes a paying player quitting the game over exactly this bill.
Where you put the city
The tile under your city grants a permanent bonus, and it's large enough to outweigh several buildings. The two richest are plains and quicksand desert, at +90% each . Moving is a teleport, not a rebuild, so this is the cheapest lever in the whole system .
| Terrain | Bonus |
|---|---|
| Plains, dry meadows | Food and religious tractates +90% |
| Quicksand desert | Silver and scientific tractates +90% |
| Dense forest, endless thicket | Boards and lumber up to +90% |
| Mountain forest | Fortification health and strength +70%, iron and steel +20% |
| Swampy forest | Mixed, and reportedly where the +90% fortification tiles are |
| Wasteland, dry endless desert | None at all |
Two adjacent mountain tiles gave +70%/+20% and +50%/+40%. Check the tile you're actually landing on, not the terrain type .
The common pattern is a silver tile up to roughly Capitol 20 or Guardsmen VII, then a 90% food tile for the rest of the game . One player moved to plains and watched food production jump from about 54,000 to 127,000 an hour before touching a single building; the farm rebuild then took it to 315,000 .
Clans scout tile clusters deliberately, claiming territory that has 90% food in one direction, 90% silver in another and 90% lumber near the clan buildings. It's worth asking your clan where they want you before you teleport.
Other Multipliers
Your production figure is a stack, and the buildings are only the base of it. This is worth knowing before you demolish anything, because a shortfall can often be fixed outside the city.
- Tile bonus. Up to +90% on one resource pair.
- Academy research. The economy tree; silver production fully upgraded at its third level is +50% .
- Talent points. Food production, construction speed, research speed, warehouse capacity and the tile bonus all live here, and talents can be reset freely when the city's purpose changes .
- VIP. Level 6 gives +6% production of all resources on top of free construction speed-ups .
- Captain equipment. Economy captains carry production bonuses. Swapping two of them out for combat captains dropped one player's displayed food from about 321,000 to 278,000 an hour, which is a nasty surprise if you don't know to expect it .
The warehouse, and why your city stops producing
The Warehouse does two jobs. It sets the maximum you can hold, and it sets the slice a raider can't touch. Both scale with its level .
Hit the storage cap and production simply stops. A silver alt at a 360 million cap makes nothing further until it ships some out. And anything you're holding above the protected figure is exactly what an attacker walks away with, so the standard habit is to keep on-hand resources at or below that number and push the excess into troops or clan buildings .
The silver alt
It comes up in almost every serious discussion of city layout, because it's how experienced players resolve the farm-versus-mansion fight: they stop choosing. A second account is built as nearly all mansions and caravans its silver to the main, which is then free to be all farms .
Reported output: 21 mansions at level 39 make about 2.86 million silver an hour against a 360 million cap , and 23 mansions at level 45 are estimated at 100 to 150 million a day . Keep one or two farms so the alt can support a small army of its own.
Two things for day one
- Spend the free-build window. The first 24 hours complete every construction instantly, and it can be extended by two more days. Once it lapses, the same upgrades need boosters that are rare and expensive at low level .
- Kill monsters for blueprints. The first week is the cheapest blueprints you will ever get, and you need them for the whole climb.
Open Questions
The sweep found real disagreement here, not just different play styles. The Atlas doesn't pick between them.
Still open
Do more barracks speed up training, or only widen the queue? One creator states plainly that they only add capacity, and his own test showed no speed gain. Two others say directly that barracks improve training speed. It's possible both are true of different stats and the wording is collapsing them.
How far above the Capitol's level can a building go? One source says a building can never exceed the Capitol. Another, at Capitol 35, has mansions at 39 and says they'll be stuck there until the Capitol reaches 40. A third says to hold the Capitol at 10 and push everything else to 19.
How many mansions does a main account actually need? Documented answers run from 1 to 18 out of 24 slots, and the people giving them are all experienced. Clan quality seems to be the hidden variable: the better your clan's chests, the fewer mansions you need.
Is 23 farms a real cap or one player's number? The figure comes from a single commenter and was then filmed being built. Nobody in the sweep explains why 23 rather than 24, beyond keeping one mansion for the upgrade chain, which would explain it exactly.
Does negative food really raise training costs in silver? Only one creator says so, though he says it more than once. It would explain a lot of late-game behaviour if true.
Claim reference
City structure
The city has 24 small building slots, and farms and mansions are the only buildings that can occupy them.
The city has 21 large slots, plus a reserved Capitol slot and three separately-levelled wall sections.
At least one Lumberjack's House, one Stone Cutter's House and one Foundry must remain standing, because wall upgrades require them.
The mandatory set is Capitol, walls, Lumberjack's House, Stone Cutter's House, Foundry, Warehouse, Caravan, Tar Workshop, Forge, Portal Master, Consulate, Barracks, Temple and Academy.
Only one Academy can be built per city.
Barracks
More barracks raise how many troops can be in training at once. They do not make troops stronger.
Adding barracks did not shorten a training time in a filmed test: 4 days 15 hours before, 4 days 17 hours after.
Ten barracks are recommended from the start, on the grounds that Guardsmen III and above train too slowly without them.
Queue capacity scales with barracks level and count; one player trains 21,321 mounted troops per batch at level 45.
Farms, mansions and food
Farms produce food and mansions produce silver; both occupy small slots only.
Food production net of army upkeep going negative raises the silver cost of training troops.
Moving to a 90% food tile and rebuilding to 23 farms took one player from roughly 54,000 to 315,000 food per hour.
The game's own channel has aired both a 23-farm, 1-mansion build at level 45 and a 60/40 mansion-to-farm split held until Capitol 20.
The upgrade chain
Roughly twelve buildings gate Capitol level and therefore Guardsman tier, but only one of each needs to keep pace. Duplicates can sit fifteen levels behind.
The chain is sequential: Consulate gates the Capitol, Tar Workshop gates the Forge, Barracks gates the Academy, Temple gates the Barracks, Mansion gates the Temple, Warehouse gates the Caravan, and the Capitol gates the Portal Master.
Blueprints and demolition
Levels 1 to 9 cost resources only. Architect's Blueprints are charged at level 10 and every fifth level after.
Blueprint costs: about 1,600 around level 25, 9,000 for barracks 34 to 35, 18,000 for a Farmer's House 44 to 45, 27,000 for Tar Workshop and Academy, and 33,000 for the Consulate, the most expensive in the game. 15,000 blueprints cost about 150,000 gold, and there are no discount events.
Demolishing a building refunds none of the resources spent on it.
Buildings intended for demolition should be left at level 14 or below, and the conversion done at Capitol 19, so no blueprints are wasted at levels 15 and 20.
Demolish sits behind the information icon at the top right of a building's panel. The slot becomes a ruin and will then accept any building.
Tiles and placement
The tile a city sits on grants a permanent production or fortification bonus, and the city can be teleported to a different tile at will.
Plains and dry meadows grant food and religious tractates +90%. Quicksand desert grants silver and scientific tractates +90%.
Adjacent tiles of the same terrain carry different values: two neighbouring mountain tiles gave +70%/+20% and +50%/+40%. Wasteland grants nothing.
Common practice among featured players is a silver tile up to roughly Capitol 20 or Guardsmen VII, then a 90% food tile thereafter.
Storage and multipliers
The Warehouse sets both the storage cap and the amount protected from raids, and production stops once the cap is reached.
Anything held above the protected figure is what a successful attacker takes; the standard habit is to keep on-hand resources at or below it.
Displayed production includes captain equipment bonuses. Swapping economy captains for combat captains dropped one player's food from about 321,000 to 278,000 per hour.
VIP level 6 grants +6% production of all resources alongside free construction speed-ups.
Academy silver production research fully upgraded at its third level grants +50% silver.
Talent points can be reset at will, so the economy tree can be re-pointed whenever the city's purpose changes.
Silver alts and late game
A silver alt is a second city built almost entirely of mansions, caravanning silver to the main account so the main can run all farms.
Twenty-one mansions at level 39 produce about 2.86 million silver per hour against a 360 million warehouse cap.
Twenty-three mansions at level 45 are estimated at 100 to 150 million silver per day.
The first 24 hours complete all construction instantly, and the window can be extended by two further days.
In a strong clan, chest income dwarfs city gathering production, which is why veterans demolish spare gatherers. A single Stone Cutter's House at 2,500 stone per hour needs days to fund one mid-level upgrade.