The following information provided by many individuals over many domains.
Tips for building
1. you only need about 3 ore and 3 stone fields. The rest should be divided about 2:3 btwn sawmills and farms - farms being the most important - you will need these to feed all your troops.
2. While you are still under the veil you should be upgrading ypur storehouse and your shrinking powder as quickly as you can. You will need to upgrade your Alchemy lab to lvl 6 b4 you can start researching shrinking powder. This is very important as this increases the amount of resources your storehouse can hold.
3. You need about 6 cottages and at least 10 barracks. As soon as you build a barracks you can start training your troops - just watch you dont train more than you can feed or you will go into negative food production and start losing food. You will need to upgrade one barracks to start with to level 7(end at 9) and then the rest can stay at level 4.
If you do go into negative food production – don't panic!!! This will happen the more troops you train. You can counter this by farming and attacking barbs as well as upgrading your wilds.
4. the most important troops to train first are:
militia, supply scouts,pikes
then once you get to level 4 barracks and lvl 1 eagle eyes - u can start training archers
5. the other thing that is important to start upgrading once you are getting to the end of your veil is your wall, your watchtower and you Eagle Eyes
6. just remember to always try to use up all ur resources b4 you log off including your gold.
Remember too, the more you train the faster you will grow in might!!
Great tips that i have followed from very high-might players:
How many barracks & cottages do the top players have?
This is quite easy. We have 6 or 7 cottages, and 13 to 14 (sometimes more) barracks per town.
Once you get to where you have a level 10 alchemy lab and you can't research anything in a level 9 anymore, destroy your other alchemy labs. Keep only level 10 lab.
Also, some people only train certain units in certain towns, for example some people might only build heavy cavalry in one town, meaning they don't need a stables in the other towns (once the relief station is done). Each of these decisions lets you open another slot for a barracks.
It's critical to have as many barracks as you can manage.
Cottages are only there to provide idle population for training. The fewer you have, the less you can train at a time. However, idle population grows back. If you had a LOT of time on your hands then you could probably get away with VERY few cottages. You'd have to queue a handful of troops, then wait for more idle population, then queue another handful. As long as the idle population grew faster than you were actually completing the training then you could get by.
My personal balance is 7 cottages per town because it allows me to queue a little more than 6000 archers per town at the same time. An hour later I can queue another 6000 archers. That's 18 hours of training per town off 7 cottages. I could probably go with even less if I really wanted to. I have 41 barracks across three towns.
Like I said, it's critical to have as many barracks as you can manage.
The first step to defending is being prepared.
1. make sure you have a level 9 or better Embassy
2. to help your alliance, make sure your Relief Station and Rally Point are each level 9 or better
3. get your Wall to level 9 or 10
4. Build as many wall-mounted crossbows as your walls can accommodate. Trebuchets don’t do anything useful. Make xbows.
5. Field defenses are fairly weak. Caltrops and traps are easily taken out with waves of militia, who happen to train fast too. Spiked barriers take out more expensive units like cavalry, but at the same time most people right now prefer ground troops, and against such units spiked barriers are useless. It’s pretty much a topic of debate what you should do in your field and to me today there is no right answer. I personally chose to go with 14000 caltrops and the rest spiked barriers; no traps. I think the usefulness of traps is limited to anti-farming, and hopefully none of us are in a position of trying to stop from being farmed.
Outside of the obvious “make troops,” those are the pre-defending instructions. Next we’ll cover active defending.
First of all, if you have scouted someone then there is a bug where your Impending Attack will sometimes light up. If you see an Impending Attack with no time, press F5 to refresh and it will probably go away. Maybe press F5 no matter what. It’s probably always better to refresh before starting an active defense.
1. So… you’re under attack? Press F5
2. Click the button that takes you to the list of impending attacks. Is it one or more attacks? If it’s one attack by one player then it might be a mistake. It might be an attack on a wilderness. There is no easy way today to know the difference between an attack on your wilderness or an attack on your town. (And no way at all if you didn't see the attack start, or are not good at geometry.) Also check the attack TYPE, is it a Scout or Attack type? Scouts might be checking for inactivity. Scouts on wilderness might be checking if you are under Mists of Avalon. There are many bugs with the game and half the time when you’re attacked only once it’s a mistake of some kind. If you are under attack by the same player twice then he’s probably really attacking you. If you are under attack by more than one player then you should start watching out for teleports, because it’s probably a blitz.
3. After you click the Impending Attack button, select the text of the attack and paste it into alliance chat. Also post the coordinates of the town it is referring to. The following is NOT the way to ask for help, “Hey I am under attack. Please send help,” followed by you logging off. You are not going to get support if you do it that way. People need more help with the coordination. The right way is “I am under attack at 123, 456 and this is the impending attack info I have 9 open embassy slots and I can be online for the next hour.” If you have trouble posting the details (I use Firefox so I don’t have this problem) then post the time before the attack hits and the numbers/types of the troops coming.
4. Listen to the advice of the veterans at this point. Once someone knows you’re under attack, someone who’s experienced with battle will be able to guide you as the attacks progress, assuming you don’t already know what to do yourself.
Finally, when you are helping someone defend, do the following:
1. stack all the troops you’re going to send into the town with the best rally point, and send them all from there (don’t send two half-stacks when you can send one full stack because each stack uses an embassy slot and most people only have 9 slots)
2. send the support along with your best knight (if your knight is higher level then it’ll help defend with its higher knight skill)
3. ask if the player will need food to feed the support, or if time is critical then just send food with the support without asking; no one complains when they get free food (it takes 810k food to feed a 90k stack of archers for one hour)