Lord of Ultima Guide for Beginners by Osbourne (not

finished)
Link to the published version of this document. (Uglier-looking but easier to read through.)

There are a few important points that need to be made about the game:
- It is a very time consuming game and you will be required to log in daily to maintain your empire
- In order to play on a competitive level, you need the “ministers” that cost Play4Free Funds which
in turn cost real life money (oh the irony...)
- There are plenty of third party scripts and add-ons to the game that most experienced and skilled
players use. The game is according to many people unplayable without these scripts so the first
thing I will do is to guide you through how to install the most important ones and show what they
are good for
- The game requires you to interact a lot with other players, your fellow alliance members in
particular

PREFACE *READ ME*

Note that there is no index for this guide. I’ve tried dividing it up into sections to make navigation
easier, but if there’s anything specific that you want to find, say info about hubs, you have to search
for it yourself. (Press Ctrl + F and type the word “Hub” into the box that appears. It will show you
all places in the document where the word hub is mentioned).
Keywords to look for: scripts, first city, the different units, attacking, hub, optimizing a resource
city, clusters, military city, overlay layout, boss-raiding, dungeon-raiding etc.
The guide is aimed for complete beginners - especially the first sections, but I’m sure it can be very
useful for people who already have knowledge of the game as well.

1. The scripts/add-ons
There are three main 3rd party scripts that you’ll want: BOS, Tweak and TDK Extension.
If you play on Firefox, you will need Greasemonkey in order to install BOS and Tweak. If you’re on
Chrome, you can just install them right away. Edit: No longer the case for Chrome with the new
Chrome Store (or whatever it’s called).
Greasemonkey: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/greasemonkey/
LOU BOS: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/84343
LOU Tweak: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/80532
TDK Extension: http://www.senocular.com/chrome/extensions/lou/LoUDefiant_about.html

Ask an alliance member for help if you have any problems installing these.

The scripts all add plenty of functionalities to the game which you’ll have to experiment with
yourself. There are however a few functions that you need to know right away, like doing overlay
layouts. This is something I explain in the section below on how to use the optimizers (2.3, 2.4 and
6.2).

2. Early Gameplay
What’s most important to say here is that the first weeks of the game honestly are boring as hell.
It’s a tedious time where you have to do tedious work, all till you hit the title Marquess. Then you’ll
be able to activate auto-build with your Building Minister (who’ll build everything for you).
Lord of Ultima is a complex game and there’s a lot to learn when you’re new to it. However, once
you know how to play, it’s great. It takes time to learn though so try to be patient.

2.1 What is this game all about?

It is, as I already said, a complex game, so here follows a very brief summary of what it’s actually
about. You build your empire on your own and create new cities and castles. You can have a
maximum of 1001 cities, but most people stay at 50-600 or so. The first cities take a lot of time to
produce and create, but later on you’ll be able to settle multiple new cities every day if you do it
right. For every new city you make, you need a baron. Cities can either be “uncastled” or castled.
Once you castle a city, there is no return, since you cannot demolish the castle building. The thing
about castles is that they allow you to attack other players’ cities and castles. What’s dangerous
about them is that other players can conquer and crush your castle. Therefore, you always need to
make sure that you are able to defend your castles. Castles can later on in the game be enlightened
by so called “Shrines”. Shrines are of 8 different virtues, and in order to win the game, an alliance
needs to have a faith of 100% in each virtue. In order to gain faith, the alliance will have to build
palaces in their enlightened castles by first filling them with resources. Once the alliance has 8
palaces at level 10 (one in each virtue), they win the server. It’s a long and fun way to get there, and
it involves many different aspects, like for example warfare.

2.2 So... how do I start with my first city?

The first city is a special case, which you’ll understand later. There are 5 resources in LOU: Wood,
Stone, Iron, Food and Gold. In your first city, you’ll want to produce most of Wood and Stone since
those are the resources you use for upgrading buildings and therefore need the most of. Do however
NOT forget about the other resources. Figuring out the “perfect” balance is a huge challenge even
for the most experienced players. In other to get a second city, you need the following:

●​ Level 10 Trinsic Temple (for recruiting a Baron)

●​ Level 10 Moonglow Tower (for purifying resources)
●​ 250 Carts (or 25 merchant ships)
●​ 100k wood, 100k stone, 25k iron and 25k food as settlement costs for the 2nd city.
●​ A baron (costs 50k iron, 100k gold)
●​ To do a title advancement (costs 50k wood, stone, iron, food and 40k gold)

Here comes some advice on how to do the actual building of your first city. First off, the start-up
guide (Lady Lyanna) is no good. You however DO want to complete the guide in order to get the
resource rewards. Once you have completed the guide, start out by removing the hideout and the
cityguard house that she tells you to build. They should be of no use in your first city. City guards
are generally a shitty unit so stay away from them.

You’ll want your first city to produce as much resources as possible. Overall, troops that raid
dungeons produce the most resources and give you plenty of gold that you’ll need. However, the
troops themselves cost resources to recruit and since it’s your first city, you won’t have enough
resources for that. Have a few barracks and training grounds in your first city and get some
berserkers (or rangers) that raid a dungeon, but you want the city to mainly be a resource city.

IMPORTANT: Learn to distinguish between a resource city and a military city. We do NOT castle
resource cities. That’s the ultimate noob highway.

You might be confident and think you understand and know how to build a resource city on your
own, but that’s not a great idea. You’ll want to use one of the optimizers that are available in order
to make your resource city as efficient as possible. Always strive for efficiency.

Below are the two best optimizers:

1. LOU Optimizer
2. Loof78's Optimizer (for resource cities only)

2.3 Optimizing a resource city using Loof78’s Optimizer

I’m assuming that you have the extensions by now. If you don’t, see Section 1 before reading this
part. Go into the game and select “City” in the menu. Press the “L” in your Building Queue that
looks the following:

A new window will pop up. You press “Open in Flash Planner 1 / 2” on the bottom right. This time,
press the Flash City Planner 1 link.
A new window will open in your browser. This is the LoU Flash City Planner. Go up to the URL
bar and copy (Ctrl + C) the whole link.

Go here. You will see the big box in which you paste (Ctrl + V) the URL of the city which you just
copied. Then you’ll want to tweak the city the way you want it. There are several different ways you
can do this. I’ll show you the most simple ones that you really need. The rest is up to you to read
through and learn yourself.

There is one commando that decides how many buildings slots the planner will use. The maximum
is 100 building slots. The planner will only put in resource buildings and cottages. It is no good with
food since that’s a “special” resource. Therefore, you’ll have to put it in yourself together with the
trinsic temple, moonglow tower, barrack(s), training ground(s) and marketplaces which you must
have in your first city. A good number to put in might be 88.
You write the following below your URL:
use_slots=88

Again, the “88” can of course be switched for any other number. It’s just the number I choose to use
right now.
Second thing you want to put in is the amount of cottages that you want your city to have. Cottages
increase the speed at which you build your buildings. Write the following to adjust the amount of
cottages:
num_cottages=19
The “19” is also a number I chose out of the blue here. There are plenty of other things you can
change manually apart from the number of buildings and cottages, like the ratios between the
resources. I won’t explain that right now though.

It should now look the following:

Press “compute!” at the bottom. If everything has been done correctly, a link will appear at the
bottom of the page. Click that link and a new window will open with your tweaked new city in Flash
City Planner 1. However, you will also want to put in the rest of the buildings that you need in order
to get your second city. Put in (AT LEAST) a trinsic temple, a moonglow tower, two marketplaces, a
barrack and some food (farms).

Finished? Now save the layout. In order to do so, you need to register at the page. This doesn’t take
more than a minute. Once it’s saved, copy the LONG URL at the top of the page. (It’s also possible
to get a short link but that won’t work for what we’re about to do).

Go back into Lord of Ultima and press the same “L” button as before. This time, change to the
“Overlay layout” tab. Paste the long URL that you just copied in there, press “Apply layout” and
“OK” (see picture below).
Now look at your city.. VOILÀ!

2.4 Optimizing a resource city using the LoU Optimizer

Link: http://city.louopt.com/

In order to do this, you need the LoU Tweak script. Go into the game. Press the “L” button and
“Open in Flash City Planner 2”. A new window will open.

The page you’re at now is http://city.louopt.com/ and you will see your city in there. Below your
city, you will see the following “menu”:
First of all, make sure that you’re in the resource “mode” (see the red rectangle to the left on the
above picture). Secondly, look at “Optimization Weight”. This is where you decide what you want
your city to produce (the most of). Experiment yourself! If you for example want more wood, you
increase the “wood-weight”. Once you are done with this, you “Add” the buildings (see the red
rectangle on the right above). You can choose yourself how many buildings you want to add (or
remove). Again: experiment here! Getting the “perfect” resource city might take a few tries.
Sometimes however, you don’t always want the highest total resource output, but more of a specific
resource, say iron.

2.5 Early gameplay tricks

Here follows some brief advice of things to think of early on in-game. Some things are really
obvious while some are not.
- Remove all buildings you don't need right now. Hideout, probably the warehouse, city guard
house. If you want a military but don't have the resources, don't have barracks just standing. Better
make a res building with that barrack(s) instead while you wait.

- Despite what I just said above about the barracks, it isn't always a great idea to temporarily build
resource buildings like that. It takes time for a resource building to "regain" its building costs.
Level 1: 0.32 h
Level 2: 0.81 h
Level 3: 1.83 h
Level 4: 4.33 h
Level 5: 9.21 h
Level 6: 15.53 h

Small edit: The above values are not 100% accurate as I for example for the lvl 6 don't take its
production on lvl 1-5 into account.. if you know what I mean.
- Tweak your layout with louopt (http://louopt.com/) but place your buildings after what's the most
profitable NOW. Also, if you upgrade manually, upgrade the resource buildings touching the most
nodes first (before you upgrade the rest).

- GET SOME TROOPS AND RAID DUNGEONS. However, remember the command count. You
can only send out 5 parties. The max troops you'd send at a level 1 dungeon is 20 troops. So 100
zerks is all you really need right now (when there are no lvl 2 dungeons out there) unless you are
planning on boss-raiding. Other troops will be idle and therefore useless.

- Don't forget about producing food. It's a shitty resource that many, many people forget about and
lack when it's time to purify or settle the baron.

- Don't piss off your neighbours if you can’t handle the consequences.

- Don't build townhouses. I wouldn't even build 1 or 2. They produce very very little gold, and cost
very, very much stone.

- Keep scanning the market for good offers from newbies.

- Don't neglect any of the resources from the start. It'll just bite you in the ass sooner or later.

- Don't over exaggerate your construction speed (CS). There is no point in being able to build fast
when you have no resources to build with. Try to keep a balance between CS and resource
buildings. You don't need many cottages until you're at Town Hall lvl 5-6.

- Don't upgrade your Town Hall above level 8. There's no reason for that and it just costs a shitton
of resources that you need elsewhere.

- Planning to use up all that mana of yours? Then be smart. For example, you hit baron once your
Town Hall is at level 7. This means that you'll have access to way better artifacts than before.
Instead of 5k resources per 1k mana, you get 10k resources. Consider if it's better to wait for the
next level with using/buying some artifacts.

- Similar point here. If you want to speed things up, try to calculate whether a shovel (increases CS)
or a medallion would save you the most time. I have a calculator for that in some other thread in
this forum.

- A nice dungeon spawned next to you, but you don't have the troops quite yet? Send 1 zerk at it
repeatedly to keep it "alive" (if no one else is raiding it).

3. The different units/troops

There are only two types of units: offensive and defensive.
Offensive units: Berserkers, Knights, Scouts, Mages, Warlocks, War galleons, Catapults, Rams
Defensive units: Rangers, Guardians, Templars, Paladins, Crossbowmen, Ballistae, Frigates and
Sloops

Two out of the units listed above are “special”, namely scouts and frigates. Scouts you use to scout
your enemies’ castles. Depending on their defense, you can get to know how many troops, resources
and what buildings they have in that city.

There are also frigates. These are boats used to CARRY your “landtroops” if you want them to
travel on water. Each frigate can carry 500 units. Siege engines (e.g catapults, rams, ballistae) can
NOT travel on water/frigates.

(There’s also a troop type called city guards. They’re however no good in my opinion and not worth
wasting resources on. The only exception can be in palaces.)

What follows now is presumed knowledge but I’ll say it anyways. You ATTACK with offensive units
and DEFEND with defensive units. What this means? Never attack with your defensive units. Each
unit has a fixed attack power and variable defense powers depending on what they’re defending
against. Rangers for example defend very well against berserkers, but are terrible against knights.
Another example is templars. They are excellent against magic units (mages and warlocks) but
defend pretty badly against most other offensive units. And what does this mean? Well, you always
want a balanced defense that can withstand attacks from all offensive units. Sometimes you know
what’s about to attack you, but most oftenly you don’t. Therefore, you need to make sure that you
at all points are able to defend against everything and anything. Early on in game it’s difficult since
you don’t have a lot of cities, but start planning ahead from the very beginning.

3.1 What units should I make?

As mentioned above, you need a balanced defense. However, only let each military city produce
ONE type of unit. What you want is EFFICIENCY. You do NOT mix plenty of training grounds
and stables in the same military city. Since berserkers, rangers and guardians all are recruited from
the training ground, those troops are ok to mix, and the same goes with for example the templars
and paladins (from the trinsic temple).

When deciding what troops to make, you need to ask yourself a couple of questions:
- Do I want offensive or defensive units? If both, in what scenarios can I mix offense and defense?
(Answer: training grounds).
- What resources do I have? This is a very important question. Without enough resources, there’ll
be no units, or at least not very quickly. Make sure you are able to recruit the units you want, and if
you don’t think it’s possible, you either pick another unit or you find a solution to the problem.
- What is needed? Does the enemy keep attacking you with mages? Get some templars. Look
around in the area you’re in, ask your neighbors/alliance members what’s needed overall. Think for
yourself. It’s always good to be one step ahead of the enemy. Do they have a lot of rangers? Get
some knights to kill them with.
- What position am I in? You might need ballistae because the enemy has catapults and rams.
However, those are units that cannot raid and will therefore slow you down in comparison to if you
had recruited berserkers that are great raiders. Can you afford making units that cannot raid or
raid poorly or will that put you behind everyone else? What will be the most beneficial?

The table below shows the attack and defense powers for some of the units. You might want to study
this table and get a picture for yourself of what the different troop types are good for and what you
need.

3. 2 How do I know what’s about to attack me?

Unless you have gathered data from previous attacks or been explicitly told, you cannot know what
is about to attack you. However, there is a smart and really easy thing you can do to check what type
of unit that’s coming your way. What you need for this is enough lookout towers to spot the attack
from the moment it is launched. What’s recommended is two level 10 lookout towers in landlocked
cities, 3-4 in cities on water.

Once you see that you have an attack against you, go into the city that’s going to be attacked. Look
at the times for when the attack was spotted and when it will land. I will give you an example:
Attack spotted: 08:00:00
Attack lands: 09:12:06

The difference between when it was spotted and when it lands is the travel time/move time for the
units. In our example, the travel time appears to be 1h 12 min 6 sec.

What you do now is that you go into the city that is going to be attacked. Then, SELECT the castle
that is attacking you on the region map.
The trick here is that the troops from the enemy’s castle will take just as much time to get to YOUR
city as your troops will take to get to HIS/HER city. (The exception from this is later on in game
when you can research/improve your units’ travel speeds, but let’s keep it simple here).
We recall from before that the move time is 1h 12 min 6 sec. If we look at the example picture
above, we see that INFANTRY takes 01:12:06 for YOUR troops to get to the enemy’s castle. This
must mean that you have infantry coming towards you. Easy huh?

Note: The above explanation is how to do it manually. There are nowadays many calculators and
scripts that will calculate for you.

4. I am getting closer to my second city. What do I do with the rest of my cities?

This can be very tricky for both new and experienced players. First, you need to choose which path
you want to go. Do you want to focus on military or just produce resources (through resource
cities)? I personally prefer the military aspect of the game and therefore aim to make as many
military cities as possible. However, that’s not everyone’s call and you can instead do the “merchant
path”. Because of people wanting to play the game in different ways, it’s hard to say what exactly
you should make as a second, third, fourth etc. city. I’ll however do my best.

What we need to say first here is something about the title advancements. For each new baron you
make, you need to make a title advancement (TA) that costs purified resources. However, every
fourth TA is free given that 25% (1/4) of your current cities are castled. This is something you really
should take advantage of, so no matter if you’re going down the military or merchant road, aim for
at least 25% castles so that you can get these free title advancements. It may sound like a lot of
castles but it definitely isn’t. If you do the military way, 70-80% of your total cities might be castles
(often even more than that). Another final point that needs to be made about the free TAs is that
you cannot claim the free ones later. If you skip a free TA (i.e you pay for it since you don’t have
enough castles), you can never go back and reclaim that free TA. Once you skip it, you lose it.

What all this babbling above actually means is that you’ll want one out of your first three cities to
be a castle so that you can get your fourth city for free. Your first city should now be a resource city
with perhaps some raiding troops. You now want to build something that you will castle. A very
good idea for a first castle is a berserker castle. If needed, you can also produce rangers and
guardians there (defensive units). Berserkers are great raiders and you therefore need to raid
dungeons with them once you have them. However, berserker also cost iron which you’ll want to
produce. Therefore, make another resource city producing mainly iron. If you go to the region map,
you can actually choose a spot that will give you the most iron nodes in your city. If you want lots of
iron, you place your city adjacent to as many mountains as possible. They look the following:

If you click an empty field, you can always get to know how many nodes of each type there will be
in it by scrolling down the left window once you’ve clicked the field. At the bottom of the page, you
will see something similar to this:

If you, like in our case, want to produce as much iron as possible, it’s of course a good idea to find a
spot where the number of iron nodes is the highest. You can also know how many nodes there will
be by looking at where the mountains are placed. Each mountain directly next to the field (above,
below, left, right) will give 8 iron nodes. Each mountain on a corner will give 4 nodes. See a
demonstration of this in the picture below.
To summarize what’s been said: we know that you now have your first city as a resource city and
that you’ll make a berserker castle and another resource city producing mainly iron. The two latter
will be your 2nd and 3rd cities. In what order? That’s completely up to you, and it depends on your
situation. Notice from before that your castle needs to be castled BEFORE you get the free title
advancement. Therefore it can be good to make your 2nd city the castle so that you have time to
actually build it up before you have to castle it. However, you might not have enough resources to
make your second city a castle. In that case it might be good to let the 2nd city be the resource city.
It all depends on your situation, and it’s up to your personal preferences and what you think will be
most appropriate for you and your plans.

4.1 What about my 4th city?

I don’t know. That’s the thing with Lord of Ultima. You need to decide what YOU want since each
player has his/her own style. Find out what you want and then what you need in order to get there.
Do you want lots of military? If yes, remember that each unit eats food. You’ll want to make food
cities later on as well as hubs (storage cities). To give you an idea, a standardized food city (without
lakes that boost the farms’ production) can look like this.

There are plenty of variations of hubs, and it all depends on what YOU want and need. Examples of
hubs can be found below:
Big storage, fewer carts
Less storage, more carts

Since I personally am a military focused player, I made my 4th city a food and hub hybrid.
This is an example of what such a city might look like. That one is not tweaked yet so I am sure that
it can be improved to produce more food.

Also notice that I’m talking a lot about so called hubs/storage cities.
4.2 What’s a hub?
It is, as said, a storage city where you store resources. See it as a center which all your resources
pass through using the trade minister. The hub has a large storage and many carts. Roughly, you
will, once you have the hub, set up all your other cities that produce resources to send surplus
resources to it. Go into the trade minister settings and experiment from there and you’ll quickly
figure out how. You need to manually set these settings in each and every one of your cities (tedious
right?), but once you’ve done it, things should work very smoothly and without you having to do
anything.

Now that your cities ship surplus resources to the hub, you’ll want the hub itself to distribute
resources where needed. The best way to do this is to go into each city that needs resources and set
them to request resources from the hub. Set a target resource amount and select the hub as the city
it will request from. Save your settings and you’re done.

The above explanation for a hub is extremely basic and you’ll later discover your own way of how
to set the trades the way you want them and the way they work best for you. I do however want to
teach you a few more things:

●​ You want your hub to be CLOSE to your other cities. That’s why we build in clusters to
keep down the travel times for the units and resources. This way, the carts will also not be
away for too long (meaning you need less of them)
●​ It’s good to have the hub on water. That way, you can put merchant ships in it wchih will
allow you to ship resources to other continents.
●​ Later on, you’ll DEFINITELY want more than one hub. It all depends on what and where,
but once you feel that you’re starting to stretch a hub’s capacity, it’s definitely time to make
another one. Do your best to predict these kind of things in advantage though, and you’ll
find the game a lot less stressful than you otherwise maybe would.
●​ This is not really a beginners advice but still something that’s worth saying early on since it
becomes very important later. By now, you should know that you need to fill enlightened
castles with resources in order to make palaces and win the game. For a level 1 palace, 10
million each of wood and stone is needed. For a level 2, it’s 30 million of each. This number
increases a lot for every new level. You’ll need to set up hub systems with the sole purpose of
shipping resources to palaces later on. This isn’t something I’ll guide you how to do.. but it
can be important to keep in mind.

4.3 Building in “clusters”

As mentioned above, you’ll be wanting to build in clusters. As this is a beginner’s guide, I won’t go
into any great details of how to organize a cluster. By building your cities close, you’ll need fewer
marketplaces (carts) since the traveltimes for these will be smaller. Not only the resource shipments
will take less time to travel between your cities, but also your troops, which is very important once
you need to for example defend your castles. Building in clusters is also very important for when
you want to set up hubs/storage cities. That will probably be difficult if your “cluster” is
amoeba-shaped. Simply: having things close to each other means that you can be more effective and
efficient.

5. The different (attack) commands

There are a couple of different commands; assaulting, plundering, scouting, sieging, supporting and
raiding, all which I will briefly explain.

Assaulting
You assault enemy castles with your offensive troops with the purpose to clear(kill) their troops.
The assault has a high battle intensity, which basically means that you’re at high risk to lose many
(if not all) of your units if they’re faced with a good defense. When assaulting, your surviving troops
loot and bring home resources. You usually assault before attempting to baron-siege or crush an
enemy castle. You can only assault other castles with a castle.

Plundering
You plunder enemy cities (both castled and uncastled) with the purpose to steal resources.

Scouting
You can only scout using the unit scouts. If successful, you’ll receive intel about your enemy’s city,
such as troops, resources and buildings. You can scout both castled and uncastled cities. There’s one
trick that you can do if you don’t have enough scouts in your city to scout another city. Select the
city you want to scout, press “Plunder” (yes, plunder), select the scouts AND another unit that you
have, just to fill out so that you reach the minimum troopstrength (TS). Plundering, you’ll get the
same info as when you scout (given that the outcome of the battle is positive).

Sieging
Basically, whenever you siege, you send troops that will stay in the attacked castle and hit every
hour till they die or are withdrawn (or the target castle no longer exists). Always make sure that the
castle you want to siege is empty/cleared out of troops before you siege it. The siege has a low battle
intensity. There are two main types of sieges:

Baron-sieging: you want to capture/take over the enemy castle. Send a BARON along with offensive
troops to the castle. They will hit once every hour. If faced with no or little resistance, the baron’s
power of claim will increase every hour by a certain %. The % depends on your baron capture
research, the time of the day and the amount of resistance. If too much resistance, the power of
claim will remain or fall to 0% and the baron will probably die.

Sieging with the purpose to crush. This is done with either a mix of catapults and rams or war
galleons. A synonym to crushing a castle is to 7’n it, since it when crushed will have only 7 points
(Town Hall and Castle level 1). You basically destroy the buildings and fortifications in the city
when you siege it this way. For a successful siege, make sure that there are no or little defensive
troops in your enemy’s castle before the siege starts.

Hint: Be careful about sieging during Night Protection (22:00-10:00 servertime).

Supporting
You support a friendly player (if not yourself)’s cities with defensive units in order to help it defend
against attacks. One important thing: If you support Castle A with troops from Castles B and
Castle A suddenly is under siege, Castle B will no longer feed its own troops. Castle A will, when
under siege, feed ALL troops that are in it as support. This is one of the reasons why you want large
food storages.

Raiding
You raid dungeons with troops. Nearly all troops (the exception being rams, cats and ballistae) can
raid, however not as well. The best raiding units are berserkers and paladins. When raiding a
dungeon, you battle the different creatures in it and bring home loot. Raiding dungeons is a great
(and the best) way to gain gold.

6. Building military cities

In military cities, you mainly have two buildings: barracks and recruitment buildings (training
ground, stable, workshop, moonglow tower, trinsic temple, shipyards). However, you want each
castle to produce only one type of troop. What this means is that you do not mix for example stables
and workshops in a castle.

Barracks increase the troopstrength of your castle. Troopstrength (TS)= how many troops you can
recruit. A good castle has somewhere between around 230-310k TS once finished. One important
thing to note is that the faster you can recruit your troops, the less TS you will have. In order to
recruit troops quickly, you need a high recruitment speed in your castle. This you achieve by having
many recruitment buildings, which means that you will have less barracks (=less TS). Recruitment
speed is measured in percentage (%), whereas we measure recruitment time in seconds.

For example:
Berserkers is probably the troop that you will have the most of. In nearly all cases, you want to
recruit your berserker at either 2 or 3 seconds (meaning that each berserker takes 2 or 3 sec to
recruit). Remember me saying earlier that you want to strive for efficiency? This is something you
really want to do when building military. The thing here is that the recruitment times are rounded.

Important:
Any recruitment speed that gives a recruitment time between 1.51-2.49 sec will give you 2 sec
berserkers. However, you need a much higher recruitment speed in order to get 1.51 sec than you
do for 2.49 sec. What this means is that you will be inefficient if you build at 1.51s speed. If you
want to recruit troops at 2 sec, you strive for 2.49 (and it will be rounded down). Similarly, strive
for 3.49 when you want 3s, 4.49 when you want 4s etc.
6.1 How to build a military city from scratch
The higher the construction speed (CS, %), the faster you will build your city. Each city has a CS of
100% to start with. To increase your CS, you build cottages. A level 10 cottage gives a CS bonus of
100%. When I build a military city, I usually:

- Upgrade my townhall to level 4.

- Place 39 cottages and 1 warehouse
- Set my trade minister to pull 130k wood and 250k stone from my hub
- Turn on auto-build for my building minister
- Wait until the cottages have reached level 7-8.
- Uncheck cottages in auto-build
- Clean the center of my city from resource nodes. You can do this whenever you want; from the
very beginning, in between when the cottages are building, after they are done etc. Whenever!
- Put in an overlay layout and start building (see 6.2)

6.2 Putting in an overlay layout and building a military city

As explained earlier, you build your layouts in http://www.louopt.com/

I take my military layouts from the Cheat Sheet. For layouts on land, click here and for layouts on
water click here. Pick the layout you want and copy its long URL.
Go in-game and press the “L” button in the Building Queue:

1. In the window that pops up, change to the “Overlay layout” tab.
2. Paste the long URL into the big empty box.
3. Press “Apply layout”.
4. Press “OK”.
(See picture below).
Now look at your city, and you will hopefully see the layout “above” your city (if you know what I
mean). Now you know exactly how to build.

Hint: Save the long URL into the citynotes of your city.

7. Raiding
There are two types of raiding: dungeon-raiding and boss-raiding.

7.1 Dungeon-raiding.
You raid dungeons for resources with your troops using the war minister. All troops but siege
engines (catapults, rams and ballistae) can raid. The best raiders are probably berserkers.

How to raid:
- Select your militarycity.
- Identify what kind of troops you are raiding with.
- Find a dungeon which is weak against the troop you are going to raid with (hills are weak against
magic, forests are weak against cavalry and mountains are weak against infantry).
- Figure out how many troops to send to the dungeon. This depends on the dungeon type, its level
and what troops you are raiding with. For numbers of how many troops to send to a dungeon click
here.
- Set your war minister to raid the dungeon until “Dungeon Completed”. See the examplepicture
below.
You should always try to keep all of your troops raiding when they are not out defending or
attacking (or waiting to defend something). When they raid, they bring in A LOT of resources.

7. 2 Boss-raiding
You raid bosses to get artifacts (as well as some resources) that otherwise cost “funds” that you buy
with real-life money. The best troops to raid bosses with are offensive ones (like warlocks, mages,
knights and berserkers). I love raiding bosses with warlocks myself because of their high attack
power and their fast travel speed (they travel at cavalry-speed).

There are four types of bosses: hydras, molochs, dragons and octopi (water ones). They all have a
weakness each; Hydras: infantry, Molochs: magic and Dragons: cavalry.

To see how many troops to send at a boss, click here.

Example of bossraid window:

8. The Ministers
There are four ministers: build, defense, war and trade minister. Their names probably (hopefully)
help you figure out what they do.

Building minister
Extends your building queue by 10 slots (from 6 to 16). Once you reach the title marquess, you can
activate “auto-build”, which basically just means that once you have placed the buildings and
turned on auto-build, the building minister will build for you, which is very VERY handy
(especially when you’re building 100 cities at once...).

Defense minister
Once you are under attack or have incoming attacks, the defense minister will notify your alliance
mates of this (as long as you have “enough” lookout towers that detect attacks). The best part of the
defense minister however is the “target army”. To set this, go into a military city. Press the defense
minister, and then change to the “Assistance: Target Army”-tab in the window that pops up. There,
you fill in the troops that you want the defense minister to recruit for you, for example 280 000
berserkers, or 150 000 berserkers and 100 000 guardians. Once you have set your target army, you
press “Apply changes” on the bottom right.

War minister
With the war minister, you can choose to raid a dungeon until “Dungeon Completed” which is very
convenient since it means that you don’t have to do anything else but to set the raids. What you can
also do with the war minister is to time attacks. This is something you often want to do when you are
coordinating attacks against enemies together with friends/alliance members. Many attacks are
often set for 10:00:00 AM servertime, or shortly thereafter (like 10:00:02 or 10:00:05).

Trade minister
When a city with a level 10 moonglow tower is full of resources, the trade minister will
automatically purify resources in that city. The trade minister basically does all the trades for you
after you have set your settings. This is something you need to do in each and every one of your
cities however.

Hint: When setting a target resource amount (using the trade minister) or a target army (using the
war minister), you can set a number which is above your current capacity. For example, if you can
store only 80k wood, you can set your target resource wood amount to be say 200k.

Summary of the entire guide:

- It’s a very time consuming game that will require you to log in daily and interact with other
human beings
- Learning the game requires a lot of time and patience
- The game is honestly very boring early on (the first few weeks) until things get started for real
- When building military, NEVER mix different kinds of troops in a single castle (ex: knights and
rangers)
- If you want 2s rangers, strive for a 2.49 s speed. For 3s rangers, strive for a 3.49 s speed etc.
- Castle at least 25% of your cities in order to get the free title advancements
- When building resource cities, optimize them using www.louopt.com
- Build in clusters - because it simply is best that way!
- Unless your troops are attacking, defending or waiting to defend, RAID with them.
- Raid dungeons for resources, bosses for free artifacts (that otherwise cost funds = real life money)
- Learn to figure out what is going to attack you by calculating the traveltime (or using a script that
does it for you)
- Build at least one hub/storage city for every cluster