Your central building is the Capitol—not a castle or citadel. In Total Battle, a Citadel is a high-level monster stronghold out on the map. And there is no Hospital or Prison: troops that fall in battle die and are revived at the Temple.
Unique buildings
| Building | What it does |
|---|---|
| Capitol | Sets your city level and gates everything else; unlocks building lots. Never rush it ahead of your support buildings. |
| Academy | Research. Widely considered the most important building in the game; gates troop tiers and nearly every permanent bonus. |
| Barracks | Troop training. Guides recommend growing from 2–3 barracks toward ~10 late-game, with your main Barracks kept at Capitol level minus 1. |
| Temple | Passively produces Sacred Potions, which substitute for Gold when reviving fallen troops. Your revival economy lives here. |
| Warehouse | Caps resource storage and protects a portion of your resources from raids—the vault mechanic that determines what attackers can actually steal. |
| Forge | Crafts and upgrades hero/captain gear from crypt materials, and combines gems and enchantments in its Workshop. |
| Consulate | Enables reinforcements from other players. Available from Capitol 10. |
| Portal Master | Portal travel to distant targets. Available from Capitol 10. An open portal is the one hole in a peace shield—close it when you shield. |
| Caravan | Resource trading and transfer between players. |
| Watchtower | Map search tool—finds crypts, monsters, and any object on the Kingdom Map. Activated in 6-hour to 30-day windows. |
| City Walls | Your fortifications. Attackers must break them first—except portal attacks, which bypass Walls entirely. |
Resource buildings
Resource production comes from multiple small-lot buildings: Farmer's Houses (food), Mansions (silver), Lumberjack's Houses (wood), Stonecutter's Houses (stone), Foundries (iron), and Tar Workshops (tar).
- Early split: roughly 2/3 Farmer's Houses, 1/3 Mansions. Food and silver are the two resources you can never have enough of.
- Keep Lumberjack/Stonecutter/Foundry buildings at low levels—clan gifting and map gathering typically cover wood, stone, and iron.
- Upgrade the Tar Workshop more aggressively if you run crypts heavily. You should be running crypts heavily.
Upgrade priority
- Before each Capitol upgrade, bring Academy, Temple, Warehouse, and your main Barracks within 1–2 levels of the Capitol.
- Forge stays behind the core four—important, not urgent.
- Resource buildings follow the 2/3 food, 1/3 silver split; let clan gifts carry the construction materials.
The Academy: research trees & priorities
Research costs resources plus Valor Points (earned from combat), with some trees drawing on Clan Points (earned from clan activity). The trees: Economy, Guardsmen, Archeology, Specialists, Logistics, Blacksmithing, Army Modernization, Monsters, and Engineers.
- Early (Capitol under 10): push Map Resource Gathering, Guards Training Cost, and the first two Crypt Exploration nodes to around level 10 each. Economy and Archeology compound into everything else.
- Mid-game (Capitol 10–24): alternate deep pushes on gate nodes (the ones that unlock new sections and troop tiers) with cheap horizontal leveling of support nodes to level 3–5—you get roughly 50–70% of a node's value for a fraction of its full cost.
- Clan Points: community consensus says spend CP on the Army Modernization line first—it retroactively boosts troops you already own.
Event difficulty scales with your highest unlocked Guardsmen tier, not your hero level. Unlocking a new tier before your economy can actually train and revive it makes every event harder while giving you nothing.