Total War - Resources

Long conflicts in Grepolis against big or skilled players and alliances are very demanding and you will have to focus on resources to be ahead of your enemy. If you read my guides about timing waves, organising them (including my famous manoeuvre), organising and planning operations and still have trouble winning then you will have to focus on your resources and prepare for a long war.

If you cant outsmart your opponent, then you need to outlast him - endurance is the key here. You should aim to have at any moment more army units available to fight than your enemy. This will let you to have control over the war. The goal is to achieve an advantage and hold it or even increase it - without an army nobody can survive for long.

This article is an ultimate guide focusing on all types of resources in Grepolis 2.0 (materials, favour points, time). It also introduce my super Units Calculator (and full verison with Mythical Units), which I think you will really like! I also added Production Time calculator and few nice tricks that you might have not been aware of. Enjoy and leave your comments.

Contents:

• Resources and farming
• Resources War
• Strength
• Battle mechanics
• The right type of attack
• City Walls
• Divine Powers
• Defending
• Research
• Endurance
• Recovery speed
• Favor Points (FPs) production
• Resources inflow
• Keep the pressure
• Research
• City composition
• Technique
• Mobility and flexibility
• Plan ahead (chose your battles)
• Confuse and make them waste resources and time
• Ambushes in enemy farms

Resources and farming

To win we need constant inflow of resources. Whenever we fight we lose troops and we need to be able to replace them as soon as possible. The faster we can produce our troops the bigger advantage we have over our enemies. RESOURCES are the most important thing to focus on when you want to grow and conquer. The goal is to gather maximum resources in the shortest time possible.

We can obtain resources in 4 different ways:

1. Farming other players - The most effective way of farming
2. Farming - demanding and looting non-player (farming) villages
3. By building production camps, like Timber Camp, Silver Mine and Quarry
4. Trading with non-player villages

The fastest way to gather resources in my opinion is to farm other players, then in order of importance are:  Demanding and Looting farming villages, production camps (Timber Camp, Quarry and Sliver Mine) and finally Trading with farming villages.

You can read the full guide about farming and resources here.

Resources War

If you cant outsmart your opponent, then you need to outlast him - endurance is the key here. You should aim to have more army units available to fight than your enemy. This will let you to have control over the war. The goal is to achieve an advantage and hold it or even make it bigger - without an army nobody can survive for long.

One way to do that is to inflict as much damage as possible while keeping your loses low. If you kill more units than you lose, then obviously you will be ahead. That basically means you should chose your battles and make an effort to always have advantage over your enemy on every battlefield.

Strength

Strength - always try to be the stronger side in every battle.

Bam! Bam! - Bamm-Bamm Rubble

Battle mechanics

In my guide about attacking I describe battle mechanics and give some examples, however I will shortly go over the main points of that guide here.

Size matters

As an attacker you should focus on making your offensive waves (nukes) as big as possible. As the exact battle formula is unknown, we cant calculate our loses yet but the main mechanism is known - we can deduct it from our observations.

The bigger Attack/Defense ratio (or the bigger difference between Attack and Defense) the better results for the attacker. If you are an attacker, then the bigger advantage in units total strength you have over your enemy, the more of your units will survive if attack>defense or more enemy units will be killed if attack<defense.

The battle formula calculating attacker loses is unknown but basing on my experience and thousands of in-game simulations I can say that it is not a simple linear function (rather some sort of linear regression function). We could get similar results by using simple formula: Defense/Attack (*100%) but results would not be accurate when operating on big numbers. With only few units it works though. For example if you attack 10 Swordsmen with 10 Hoplites,  it will be 160 attack vs 80 defense; so the formula will be 80/160=0.5, which means we will lose 50% of the attacking units.

However the real formula is not that simple of course. If we used the one I proposed above, we would always end up with the same amount of casualties but as we know from our experience, the more units we add, the less units we lose. Therefore I believe the real battle formula is altered by the growing difference between attack and defense. How exactly - I don't know, because its not as simple as (defense-(attack-defense))/attack.

Forget about trying to calculate loses then and just trust experienced players like me, that the Grepolis battle mechanics reward those who manage to gain bigger advantage in strength of their units over the enemy. The bigger advantage you get, the better results you will achieve (doesn't matter if you are an attacker or defender, works both ways).

If you attack with many different units, then check attack/defense ratio for each type of attack (blunt, sharp, range) and the biggest number you get will indicate which type of attack provides the most effective force against that defense. It doesn't mean of course it will be the most efficient force (the cheapest one). More about it in my guide about Perfect Nukes.

If you would like to know more about specialising your cities into war factories then read my most popular guide about city builds.

The right type of attack 

Sometimes you might get a spy report and be able to prepare the right type of offensive forces. To do that I advice to use my Ultimate Units Calculator which will show you defenders weak points and suggest the most effective type of unit to be used in your attack. Check things using the in-game simulator and use my Calculator to count for you resources lost. You can also use it to acquire much more information (it will show you defenders weak points, resources used by both sides, calculate and compare attack and defense values, suggest the most effective nuke to break specified defense, estimate casualties and some more).

However be careful - if your travel time is long or the enemy player/alliance can quickly support your target city, the whole situation might change. If you send Slingers nuke, you can be surprised by arrival of many Swordsmen or Cerberi. When sending Horsemen nuke you can hit more Hoplites or Pegasi than you expected. You can know already your enemy well enough to guess what type of units he can use. One way to do that is to spy all his cities, which might be expensive. Take into account your enemy allies when sending an attack, they can support as well.

Hitting with "the right" nuke (the most effective one) might be not always possible but if you manage to do it, rewards will be great. Try also to guess enemy real life GMT or his playing-time. I wrote about it in my previous guide focusing on planning operations.

If you need more information about different type of units, their strenghts and weaknesses I recommend my guides about Land Army units and Mythical Units. The second one contains many different rankings which will help you to find units which are the most effective, efficient or both (actually there is only one unit in the 3rd category - a Slinger). By reading these guides you will learn that it is not always important how strong (effective)  but how efficient a unit is. Also production time matters but more about it later, for now just believe me when I say that Slingers are kings of attack forces (except situations when your enemy focus heavily on range defense).

City Walls

When possible, get rid of city walls - they add a lot of extra defense power (more about it in my guide about catapults and city walls) and cant be rebuilt fast, not mentioning their cost.

When my enemies were stacking their defensive units in one city (the one I wanted to take), I would use that opportunity and send slingers with catapults to their other unprotected cities and destroy walls over there.

When you plan a massive attack on one of the enemy cities (or plan to conquer it) send some clearing waves really early, hours before CS, before the enemy player manages to gather more units there. Send a Light Ships nuke and attach to it slingers+catapults nuke (so the time space between these 2 attacks is max 30s). More about organising waves you can find in my guide about ... yes, organising waves.

When my enemy was dodging a lot, avoiding fight, he would pay for it so called Dodge Tax - his walls would be smashed to the ground.

Some people believe its smarter to leave city walls because when they conquer a city, they don't have to rebuild them, but its all situational. If you can conquer a city without any resistance, then its not necessary to destroy walls. However this guide focus on long conflicts against skilled enemies who have many cities and big armies. These are hard fights where focusing on resources is your priority and should give you big enough advantage to defeat them in the long run.

Divine Powers

Always try to use spells on your attacks - that tip is a no-brainer. Favorable Wind on your LS nukes and Heroic Power or Return from the Underworld (which is very expensive though) on your land attacks. Regarding destructive spells like Zeus Rage or Sea Storm - it depends if you can afford it. If you don't know what is coming at you then its hard to make right decision - you might hit really small forces and waste your Favour Points. Therefore I rarely used these powers, unless I was pretty sure that I'm hitting something big or I had so many FPs that I could take the risk.

Heroic Power vs Return from the Underworld

I don't have any numbers here to show right now but I calculated it before using in-game simulator and Heroic Power was superior when attack>defense and inferior when defense<attack (when there were big differences between 2 forces).


A) When attacking with superior forces (attack>defense) and increased army strength (10%) I was losing less units than when attacking without it and then getting 10% back. This is not 10% of all units used but 10% of those which died

B) When attack<defense I was killing more enemy units when using Heroic Power but when I compared costs of those extra units killed to the costs of units which I could get back, then I realized that I lost more resources than defender. In that scenario it would be a better deal to use the Hades spell and get some units back than to kill few more enemy units.

C) When attacking and defending forces are very similar in strength then its hard to tell which spell it will be better to use, as it would require to know the real battle formula.

This is logical if we understand how the battle formula works. I discussed it above, when explaining importance of strength of your attacks. The formula favours bigger forces, so the player who has an advantage will gain more at the cost of the weaker one. The bigger the advantage the bigger gains. Therefore attacker gains more out of the Heroic Power (extra 10% strength) in the situation A than in the situation B, where the flat 10% refund (Hades resurrection spell)  might be a better trade off.

This subject requires more testing. I honestly haven't researched it well enough. If what I found out is true, then we should use Divine Powers accordingly. Waves that gonna hit first and face the strongest defense, should be boosted with the Hades spell and those which will be stronger than defending forces, should use Heroic Power.

Defending

Defending is a great way to gain big advantage over the enemy. I was attacked only few times and each time I managed to kill so many incoming units that another attack on me wasn't possible (yes, maybe I played against not the best players out there). Once the whole MRA decided to attack me - it finished with me getting 20k+ BPs. Another time the biggest player of enemy alliance attacked me with all his forces. However he didn't know what timing means and that there is no point sending land nukes before first clearing my harbor with LS waves - that one player gave me 20k BPs in one day and he couldn't recover for another weeks. He lost not only all his nukes but also transport ships, catapults, everything...

Why is it so easy to defend yourself in Grepolis?

• Defending units are superior to attacking ones. The best regular offensive unit is a Slinger with 23 attack which can be stopped by a Swordsman with 30 range defense. Blunt attacker, Horseman has 18.3 attacks/FS while Chariot has 19 blunt defense/FS or Hoplite 18. Sharp attack - Hoplites have 16 attack while Archers have 25 defense.
• Defender can add extra 140%  power to his defense by building walls which defended by troops are very difficult to destroy. For example Swordsman with 30 range defense behind full walls has 72 range defense (3:1 ratio against a Slinger).
• Defender can stack units from many cities in one place while attacker cannot. Attackers FS per attack is capped, where as a defender can stack as much as he wants in a city and it gradually reduces the effectiveness of the attackers strength.
• Defender can pick his battlefield in conquest worlds, which means he can decide not to defend (as he has only small number of defending units) and instead attack your Colony Ship just after it lands. Also if he has many cities he can decide where he wants to stack his defending forces and where to dodge.
• The maximum boost an attacker can gain in this game is 40%; that's premium, phalanx, and a spell added. Defenders enjoy a 181.9% boost with a level 25 wall, tower, research, and premium added in. 
• If you defend against much bigger player in worlds with morale then the attack power is lowered by 30%.

Therefore every massive attack on your city might be a turning point of the war.  Judge the situation and react fast. If your enemy is not that smart and cant properly organise his attacks (don't clear harbor before hitting with land nukes, don't use breakthrough or don't escort land nukes etc) then use that chance to gain as big advantage as possible. Yes it is possible that players with 50 cities still don't know how to fight! Maybe they were lucky or have good diplomatic skills or no moral values or didn't have to fight anyone smarter/stronger more organised than them. Don't underestimate your enemies but observe them and make the right calls.

Land defense gives you the biggest advantage, especially if you can hide your units behind lvl 25 walls. Defense prepared equally per farm space against all 3 types of attack should be made of 6 Swordsmen + 2 Archers + 5 Hoplites. However if you are being attacked more often by a specific type of units (usually it is range attack - Slingers) then adjust these numbers (vs range attacks make more Swordsmen, vs blunt make more Hoplites). More about it in my guide about defending.

Research

Other way to save your precious resources and units is to invest in technologies making your army stronger. That way you will kill more enemy units or save more of your own. Make sure that in every city you have relevant research done. In a land units city have researched Phalanx and even  Battering Ram, for your escorting LS.

Indirectly other research can help as well, like Plow and Bunks which let you to build bigger offensive waves (or simply more units).

Endurance

Endurance - keep the pressure, try to gain and increase your advantage over the enemy.

Come what may, all bad fortune is to be conquered by endurance - Virgil

Recovery speed

It is important to recover fast or at least faster than your enemy. If your forces get damaged or destroyed, you have to be able to rebuild them quickly. Therefore when building a city don't focus exclusively on the army size but also on its ability to produce units fast. To do that you will need:

• High level of Barracks / Harbor
• "High" level of temples which will gather Favor Points necessary for Divine Powers spells boosting speed of your production (like Population Growth or Call of the ocean)

For example the difference in production time of 1500 units between Barracks lvl 1 and lvl 30 is equal 7 days. More advanced players don't have barracks on level 1 but still, couple of days difference can be decisive and if we take into account many cities and weeks/months of war it all can accumulate to weeks. Here you can see and check it by yourself - Ive created tables calculating how much time you save by upgrading your barracks on example of 1 unit and additionally the number specified by you (in the pink box). You can also check there how much time you will need in total to build units (I only didn't add Conscription so if you have it researched it will be 10% quicker).

Favor Points (FPs) production
They make a huge difference as well, therefore its best to have high production of Favor Points. Although it doesn't mean you have to max all your temples. You will see the biggest boost in FPs production with your first temple and then it will start to slow down.


The formula to count FPs production is: Game speed x (square root of (building levels + divine statues). So it doesn't make any difference if you have 3 temples (all lvl 10) or only 2 temples (lvl 25 and lvl 5) or even 6 temples (all lvl 5). All levels are added and treated as 1 big temple.

The only thing to remember here is that for every additional level of your temple you are rewarded with less and less FPs/FS in comparison to the previous upgrade. It is something that we can call diminishing returns.

Here is the graph to help you to visualize it. The horizontal axis shows the sum of all temple levels, while the Vertical one, FPs you get with each extra level. Mind that this is not a sum of all FPs. The graph only shows efficiency of adding extra levels (without Divine Statue).

How many FPs per hour you need? It depends how often and how many units you have to rebuild. Lets say you have to rebuild 1500 slingers as soon as possible and you have only 80 FPs. It will take you roughly 6 days with Population Growth (which cost 80 FPs) and maxed barracks to produce that number of slingers. Lets assume that you have to make at least 6 queues, because to be able to produce so many slingers you need 150k stone total and your warehouse cannot store that much (only 25,5k). Therefore you will need to use Pop Growth 6 times during lets say 6 days (so 1 a day) - it is 80 FPs per day. Naturally you don't really need to do it 6 times, because the spell lasts 12 hrs and you can gather some resources in this time and put more units into the queue, so treat these calculations as an example.

To gather 80 FPs a day you will only need to have 3.3 FPs/hr, that's temple lvl 12. If you have more cities in which you have to rebuild your nukes that fast then naturally you need more temple levels. To be able to rebuild fast 2 nukes at the same time you would have to produce 160 FPs a day and that already requires the total temple lvl 45 or 35 with 2 Divine Statues (so for ex 20 and 25 or 15 and 20). To do the same in 3 cities is already impossible, because of the diminishing returns - simply FPs production doesn't rise proportionally to the increase of temple levels.

By looking at the graph and analysing my example, its easy to understand that it makes sense to build temples fast up in the beginning (for the same god of course) but after you get less and less for your invested resources and population. Everything adds up and helps in production of Favour Points but not that much to really worry about it. If you have only one city then build up your temple as high as possible but it will be probably faster and cheaper to conquer another city and upgrade a temple over there to a reasonable high level.

• If you have 3 cities worshiping the same god, you can easily have lvl 20 temple in each of them, but as soon as you get more cities and make them to worship that god, you can stop upgrading temples to such a high level (or at least move it down on your priority list).
• You can also hold on with upgrading your temples to lvl 25 and instead save your population, make bigger army and conquer quicker other cities. First 10-15 levels are cheap and can be build fast.
• If you have like 15+ cities and each 3 of them worship the same god, then in your new conquered cities, don't really bother with temples.
  
• If you have way more than 15 cities then you can actually demolish them down to get back some Farm Spaces.

I don't say to stop your temples development, but once you get around level ~50, don't force yourself to upgrade temples to high levels, which are very expensive and take up population. These extra 5 levels from 20 to 25 will not change that much.

Favor Points management:
When you use divine spells that increase production speed, like Population Growth or Call of the Ocean, try to pump into that city as many resources as possible during next 12 hours. Those spells can last 12 hrs and to save some FPs it is better to use this time window as much as possible.

Resources inflow

You will need plenty of resources to be able to rebuild your army after each battle. I will not focus here on obvious advices like "farm villages and other players often", trade etc - you should know that already. If you don't just start farming everything around and read the first part of this guide.

It is a good idea to keep all of your production camps (Timber Camp, Quarry, Silver Mine) at the maximum level during long wars. At least realize that you will do better in any long conflict with your production camps maxed out. I say all, because resources in any of the 3 forms are important and by playing smart you can utilize them in 100%.

When you are left with some extra resources or your warehouse is full, then send them to the city which is rebuilding your army at that moment. That city can use these resources or trade them with villages for what it needs. For example LS city can send stone to Slingers nuke city or Biremes city can send silver to Slingers city which will then trade it for stone or Biremes city can trade silver for stone and then send it to the Slingers polis. The more cities you have, the more options and flexibility you get - be creative.

Therefore during my imperial age ;) in all of my cities I had Marketplace on at least lvl 20. That way, having many cities, I didn't even have to farm that much, it was enough to exchange resources between my cities and trade them. That requires bit of planning and some organisational skills but works great.

Keep the pressure

The most important thing to remember is to not let go. Once you gain an advantage, hold it. Rebuild fast and keep bombarding your enemy. Keep organising new operations and make them dance to your music. Why? Because once you get to the point where you have bigger army than your opponent then by forcing him to fight against your overwhelming army, you increase your advantage over him. Make him to move his units around, force him to use his small armies against your attacks by organising conquest attempts. Don't let him to catch up or recover - simply keep hitting, but do it smart. Next chapter focus on that part.

During my wars I was a factory of slingers and LS nukes - my enemies were under constant bombardment. I had so many slinger nukes that I didn't know what to do with all of them - after a while every enemy was forced to dodge. However I had in my team few other crazy guys (5-6) who had massive amount of LS and other nukes. We were constantly farming, rebuilding and organizing military operation every single week, throwing everything we had at some guy. The key is to keep farming, trading and moving resources around. All stone from LS cities was going to slinger ones. All my cities had marketplace on the max level and I was non stop sending resources around and trading them (with villages).

Research

Again, invest in technologies making your army cheaper or faster to be rebuilt. Make sure that in every city you have relevant research done. Remember about Conscription and Instructor even Navy technologies (if you rebuild often transport ships and LS escort, which honestly you shouldn't really need to that often) - Mathematics and Shipwright. 

Indirectly other research can help as well, like City Guard thanks to which your militia will kill more enemy units (for free) and bit controversial Breakthrough, which I strongly advice to use in conquest worlds when sending all land nukes (more about it here). Of course Breakthrough is still very useful when used properly in revolt worlds as well.

City composition

There is no single the best city model to follow. Your cities should be specialised in order to serve its purpose. Because of the mentioned before population cap and inability to merge offensive waves you are forced to be very efficient with your farm spaces and not waste population on constructions that are useless for the chosen specialisation/role of your city.

I wrote a guide about City Composition which will help you to build cities in the way that will maximise your army size, while still making them functional (producing units fast). This is the most popular guide on my page so far.

Technique

Technique - use your resources wisely and get the most out of them
What the lion cannot manage to do the fox can.

Mobility and flexibility

Because of the battle mechanics that I explained before, never attack an overwhelming forces defending from high city walls. If you see many defensive units stacked in one place, hit another city. Make your attacks unpredictable or try to trick the enemy (I wrote more about it in the guide about organising operations).

Don't be stubborn - you really don't need "THAT" city or to attack "THIS" player - everything in the right time, when you have the advantage of surprise.

Plan ahead

When you plan things ahead you decide when and where battles will take place. You can prepare fake attacks, lure a player and his team support away and hit his undefended cities. Before acting - think, analyse locations of your enemies, their cities and all information about their army you have. Again for more details I direct you to my guide about organising operations.

Confuse and make them waste resources

Lets say you're sending LS nuke at your enemy but have no more Favour Points to protect it/boost it with any Divine Power. Sometimes lucky Sea Storm and you lose 70 Light Ships! If that happened to one of my few nukes that I sent, it wouldn't hurt that much, but when it is the only nuke I sent (for different reasons), well then I am pissed off. There is a way to protect your nukes without Divine Powers.

There was a time when I was fighting against a guy who was always online, constantly dodging my clearing waves and sinking my CS. It was before the time when I was able to send many waves and had to rely only on 1 or 2.  Therefore when I was sending an important LS nuke, I split my forces into 3 parts - 8 LS, 8 LS and ~220 LS. I was changing this order each time I sent my LS (and I was molesting him everyday for couple of weeks). So sometimes it was 8,220,8 but another time 8,8,220, then 220,8,8 etc. You should get the idea.

Is it a bulletproof tactic? Not at all, but it does increase my chances to not get hit by the stupid Sea Storm. Its like the game where you have 3 cups and 1 ball ;) pretty entertaining for both sides I must say.

This tactic can be used in many situations, whenever you cant protect your nukes and are worried about being hit by Zeus Rage or Sea Storm. It does reduce the attack power of your main wave though and in some situations its not such a great idea to use it.

The alternative to that in revolt worlds and in some extent in conquest worlds as well is to start a revolt on the enemy city and then make a fake attack on it 12 hours after the clearing waves hit. The enemy will want to know if the (fake) attack has a Colony Ship (CS) and cast Wisdom or some other Divine Power on it, wasting Favor Points in the process. You can repeat that few times or use this technique on few cities at the same time.

You can also prepare a "fake" operation which will confuse your enemies, waste their time and additionally redirect their defensive units to the place where they wont need them.

Keep the pressure and set up ambushes in enemy farms

Another tactic to drain enemy resources is to support his possible farms. Locate ghost towns in his area or small players and support them. First you can send 1 swordsman to each town and wait for your trip wire to be activated. Once you know which cities are being farmed, send your defensive army there - nothing hurts so much when you need resources like losing your farming party. Remember that you will lose some of your units in a ghost town which will be collapsing every now and then burring more and more units. You should not send too many units into a ghost town and before sending them, send 1 unit to check if it is actually being farmed. Of course use common sense and notify your teammates or even coordinate it with them.
To not alert your enemy you can also spy those farms and observe changes but its more expensive option. The only requirement is that you need to have some spare defensive units, so its not for people who are under pressure but for those who try to press somebody else and don't care about losing some of them.