Darth you should always max your plunder bonus before you do anything. If it's not maxed you're losing money every battle you win. Ray the point I was making is that it's faster, you get stronger with fewer hours spent gazing into your iphone or computer by pursuing subs before lands. Yes, you're in a higer bracket but that's not that big a deal, I'd much rather have higher plunder with have fewer targets than lower plunder and lots of targets. The method you described sounds very safe, but god-awfully long. But hey, everyone is free to pursue their own strategy, subs is the fastest, but not the only way.
This doesn't make sense to me you spend 1.33b to buy a sub for 182k more plunder over a forge instead of 988m for a lvl 3 guild and next land for 216k plunder am I missing something? Also level 4 guilds are better investsments for plunder then swithing to a sub and it costs less too am Misunderstanding this or does he fail?
Took I understand your point and will agree based on the chart. Theoretically your plunder would much higher. Tell me how is your success rate when ur battling at the higher levels? People at the higher levels have tons of potions and allies so your chance of success is harder. How does the higher levels success compare to the lower ones?
Cow, you meant to say "L4 guild" where you said "L3 guild". And I agree with what you're saying. At the $900m land and beyond, you should be adding guilds, not forges or factories. Personally, I would have already torn down forges and replaced many if not all with L3 guilds around land 15 or so. Building factories before land completion is silly, I think. Best route is to have a desired final build in mind from very early on, well before land completion. Let's say you wanted to end up with my build which is quite nice, 8 L3 factories and 16 L4 guilds. Build forges up until land 15 or so, then tear down 7 of those forges and replace with L3 guilds (one at a time obviously). Then add one land at a time, putting L3 guilds up on each. Then when you've bought the $900m land and put up a L3 guild on it, upgrade all your guilds to L4 one at a time. Then, after land completion, start tearing down those 8 forges you kept, one at a time, and replacing with factories. And don't tear down a forge and put up a factory until you have $480m on hand to build and immediately upgrade to L2. A L1 factory is crap compared to a L3 forge, much worse ally plunder cap. As was mentioned by Trex, you should at all times be keeping yourself in a position where you're earning max ally plunder off whoever you're attacking, and selling off allies to upgrade is a huge huge HUGE mistake if you're losing max ally plunder to do it. It will only make your progress much slower. You should always strive to stay at or above the required $ amount of allies to earn max ally plunder bonus from whoever you attack to make your money.
Just to clarify, where I said "many if not all" I meant "many if not all but one". The ATM build. Gotta have one forge if you wanna attack. Er, one of any melée building, I mean.
I thought I would give this build a go.. WOW what a difference.. I sold a couple forges and only built L3 guilds from 1.2b land and on. The plunder increase was awesome and helped me LC in 5 weeks and 1 day. Thanks for the awesome info..
There are a few reasons I didn't include spy buildings as a comparison. First, that's a different build you're going for. This graph was meant for those going for an attack build and it clearly shows you want subs before lc. You guys are right that spies give a better plunder for less money to upgrade but there are some serious costs to consider. First, as has been noted here, the higher your stats the more difficult your battle list. Well that's not a huge problem for an attack build because your attack stats are rising the fastest and you can take down the biggest prey to max your plunder. I'm sure you guys know that the stronger your opponent, the fewer allies you need to max your plunder bonus. So for someone who is growing in total stats but not in attack stats (from spy upgrades) it will get much harder to find those targets to attack (someone with good stats but a low enough defense) or you will be forced to spend a lot on allies and a lot of time earning that cash. Because of those two variables you can't do a horse-race type comparison for spy upgrade vs. subs. But really it seems obvious that if you want a strong spy build, by all means upgrade your spy buildings, but if you want an attack build, stick to subs.
I have had as many as 21 subs (before my first reset) and after my last reset built up 12 factories and 12 L4 guilds, though I had more guilds initially because they provide quicker, cheaper, better plunder. After a while, I have torn down more and more factories to replace with guilds. Right now I think I'm down to 6 factories and the rest guilds. If you're worried about your total power rising too much, what makes the most sense (before lc) is to keep maybe 10 forges or so, and the rest *L3* guilds. That keeps your power down and your plunder up, and is super cheap to build so gets you to lc faster. Fastest way to lc (by building gradually, I mean) is to go with L3 guilds for everything past land 10-15, and if you have an OSF to hit, tear down forges and replace with L3's as soon as you can make $75m quickly enough. Building T3's before lc will slow you down because of the cost, compared to L4 or even L3 guilds. Sorry. If you don't feel like that's enough atk power for you, use atk pots. With your plunder high enough, you can more than cover the cost. And of course, the best/quickest/easiest way to get to lc is to use an OSF, but not everybody is in a clan that has them. Inactives are good too, as their troops are often kept near zero so even if they have huge def, unless it's from towers, it's probably actually small cause they're continually being pinned at all times.
Attack pots cost money and so do all the allies you need to max your plunder bonus with a spy build. It really matters what type of build you want to end up with. I'm assuming you're not just aiming for lc for lc's sake. That should be obvious from the graph. Acknowledging we're aiming for an attack build it would take much longer to use a spy build to get to lc and then to switch to an attack build than to just start and stay with attack build. You're also a much easier and more attractive target as a mixed spy build so you have to buy def pots, which again, are not free.