Farming 101

Alright peeps, here I'm going to explain some of the basics of farming for rss and some suggestions on how to get the most from your farming.

What is farming? This has nothing to do with the food farms inside your castle, here we mean the farming of enemy castles to steal their rss. Your townhouses, mines and farms cannot keep up with demand, you will have to farm the enemy to grow.

Who do I farm? 99% of the time you will want to farm the castles of players who have quit the game. This is because they will have no, or minimal defences and will not attack you in return. There is no point in farming a castle if you're going to have to farm another castle for the rss to replace the units you lost farming the first castle.

Target selection:
Here is a map of a random location, as you can see there are 16 castles, but only one of these is a worthwhile target.

When selecting targets consider first their level. A reasonable result from a raid is 15k, approximately 5K gold/5K iron/5K food. Castles below level 30 are very unlikely to have this much. Sometimes you'll find one as low as level 28 but below that they will have left the game before building up their warehouses and barns to hold enough.
Right away we see we are left with 3 out of 16 targets.

The second consideration is if the castle is in a league. If you have seen that these castles haven't leveled up for a reasonable amount of time (a couple of days for castles below level 45, a week or more for higher levels) then you can check the league to see how active they are, if they claim to boot inactives or have a high ranking. If it looks like a dead or weak league then send some scouts and check it out. If it does have armies out then you might want to wait until the pvp global quest before you start using it as a farm.
For the purposes of this exercise we will assume that the two league members on screen are active, that leaves us with the one castle, a level 38.

The third consideration comes after scouting out the castle. Here is a scout report...

As you can see there is more than 5K of each RSS, so that's a go right!? Not quite.. you see every castle has a portion of it's RSS that can't be raided because it is safe and sound in the catacombs, so I'd actually only raid about 4.3K gold and iron respectively. To achieve that 5K figure I'd need to hit a castle of that level with 8K. If it were a level 50 castle I'd probably need to hit a castle with 10K or more, the higher the level, the larger the catacombs. So does that mean I shouldn't raid this castle? Well that is up to you, I'd certainly keep it in mind should I need extra food or if there aren't any other better options around.

My final consideration is When did I last attack it? There appears to be diminishing returns on multiple attacks in a day by the one player, my own experiences point towards a 24 hour period rather than an ingame day. Avoid attacking the same castle more than once a day or you might find you get nothing in return.


Tips for farming.

  • Always scout first, just because you haven't farmed it recently doesn't mean that someone didn't hit it an hour earlier.
  • Only farm the good stuff. You have a limited number of raids per day, make them count. Non rrs farming attacks can still be made once you have run out of attacks so leave your aggression at the door until then.
  • Go long. Looking only 20km away from home is a waste of time, your range should be at least 50km, and if you leave your pikemen and dwarves at home it won't take you an hour to get there.
  • Don't send everyone. Just send enough to get the loot and bring it home. If the empty castle you're attacking only has 25K in rss there's no point in sending enough units to bring home twice that.
  • Defence can farm too. Save time by sending your defence out to farm. They shouldn't be facing any enemies so what does it matter that you're only sending 10K in attack power?
  • Group your speeds. If you only have enough units for two farming forces then try and split them into a fast and slow group rather than two slow groups. That way the faster ones will get back sooner and you can send them out again.


Feel free to add any more farming tips in the comments.

5 comments:

  1. So if a castle is abandonded, but they purchased immortals before abandoning it, will the Immortals come back two hours,after every raid?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. G'Day Adrianna,
      Great question, and the simple answer is I don't know. Most castles of a high enough level to contain Castle Defence Units no longer have them by the time they become a regular farm, however I haven't been able to find what the mechanism is. It may be a set number of days or perhaps it requires the app to be uninstalled but I haven't been able to determine which it is. To avoid any losses to my raiding army I make sure I use a mixed force (bestiary, occult, cavalry) and avoid using weak attack units like the Thief. In most cases by the time I come around to raiding them again (5-8 days) the Castle Defences are gone.

      Delete
  2. So if a castle is abandonded, but they purchased immortals before abandoning it, will the Immortals come back two hours,after every raid?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Another good tip - up to about castle level 35, the amount of loot hidden in catacombs is usually castle level x100. After that, it gets a little more complicated but I have found from castle levels 35 - 60, either use castle level x150, or take the level of food divided by 3 (e.g. you scout a level 50 castle with 12000/12000/21000, count on about 7k of each locked in catacombs)

    ReplyDelete
  4. No, they do not revive unless the player logs back in and resets the 2 hr timer that resets automatically when you log in. That’s why it is important to spy every time no mater what.

    ReplyDelete