So I currently have 13 lvl2 guilds. Would it be better for me to tear em down and put up some forges for now to get more land/save up more gold? Or shoul. I just keep going with what I have just been stealing and banking.
Money is very hard to come buy as a pure spy. I once had 20 lvl4 guilds and 4 lvl3 guilds and the most I received was 6M full spies. To spy the people that can give you 10M you must use pots. With that in mind your losing money instead of making money. Further, the top two spy defence pots can block a fully upgraded pure spy.
Also if you have all spy defence pots and a pure spy is spying you, that means you've done or said something to really piss them off.
Always a good idea to have at least one level 3 forge with allies to make max plunder. So you can farm an OSF and spy inactives.
What KP just said. Tear down one guild, put up forge at L3. Regen troops to full, whatever quest is the easiest "very difficult", do it 3x then regen troops and repeat for a long time. Use your spies to steal cash, ideally from an inactive so you don't get pounded when u fail. Take the money you make doing that and either 1) bank it in atk pots until u have $100m u can cash out to get $75m to upgrade a guild to L3--upgrade all guilds to L3, or 2) leave the cash sitting out until u have $75m for guild upgrade, do all of em one at a time, but this route requires strong def pots to protect your money while it's sitting out. Then once you have all guilds to L3, keep doing that same process for making $ but put all of that money into allies for quite some time, until you have at least a few hundred million invested in allies. At that point, you'll have a build with 1) good spy income 2) good attack income, once you max your ally plunder, though you'll only be able to win against OSF's easily or against weak-defense kingdoms if you use attack pots to beat their def. Trying to progress as a pure spy is BRUTAL. Much much easier to get to land completion and upgrade guilds to L4 as an attack build, and then go pure spy afterward, if you still want to. Only reason to be a pure spy, I think, is if you wanna be an OSF, or for some very specific war functions that require a very specific set of circumstances.