Anyways, when it comes to placement look for a landlocked spot close to as many forests and hills as possible, you can see on the screenshot further down in the post an example of this, this is my second city on server 59. Remember it is the hills that give you stone nodes, not the mountains, the mountains are for iron. You want the hills preferably to be directly north, south, east or west of your city, as they will give you the most extra resource nodes in your city. Having forests and hills diagonally, south-east, south-west, etc, will also give you extra resource resource nodes of wood and stone, but not as many. If you found the city next to water you will get less total resource nodes in it, so I suggest finding a landlocked spot to place it, preferably within 1 hour travel distance by carts from your first city.

If you are using Play4Free funds, getting a cornerstone to get your townhall to level 7 right away is a very good investment, it will speed up your city construction by several hours. If not, just start out with 10 cottages at townhall level 4 and increase it to 15 at townhall level 6, at townhall level 8 you could increase it even further to about 18 total. When it comes to planning your city take a look at my resource city guide.

The resources you want to focus on in your second city are wood and stone, just as in your first one. If you have lakes with open space around them, you should build some farms as well, but wait with building these till your townhall is at least level 8. Get 2 of these farms to level 10 over night, or at another time when you can’t log into the game for a long time. Farms produce little at low levels, but at high levels they have a huge production. The way farms increase their resource output is different from the other resources, that’s why you want a few of these at high levels. Only build iron if you have some great places for it, I pretty much buy all my iron at the market as it’s cheap.

Other buildings you should have in your second city are 1-2 markets, 1 warehouse, 4-5 barracks and 1 training ground. Train rangers or berserkers to raid nearby dungeons with, preferably level 3 dungeons or higher if you can find them. There is no need for a moonglow tower in your second city, you will send your extra resources to your first city to be purified. Don’t start purifying for your next level too early however, I suggest getting your new city to level 9 townhall and level 6-7 resources before you start purifying resources for your next title.

First to the moonglow tower construction, you should build this up to level 3 right away together with your other buildings once TH 8 is complete. The moonglow tower takes a long time to build at the higher levels, but it is pretty cheap. You can use this to your advantage by having 3-4 moonglow tower upgrades at the end of your building que at all times. Whenever you happen to run out of resources another level of moonglow tower will start so you are not wasting time. Also if you have to stay offline for a longer period of time you build on the moonglow tower. Another building you can build overnight or when you’re away from the game for long is townhall level 9, this building is quite expensive however at 60k wood and 60k stone.

When it comes to playing the market it’s basically selling wood and stone at high prices and buying in the other resources at lower prices. You need to buy the iron and food that you need from the market following my guide, as you won’t be producing any yourself, so check the market for good deals as often as possible. Make sure you sell enough wood and stone so that you always have at least 20k gold laying around for shopping, preferably more. If you manage to sell wood and stone for anything higher than 1500 gold you are doing good business. If you’re member of an alliance you can also ask other players to trade wood/stone for food/iron, don’t overdo it though and hurt your growth, you don’t need the iron and food until your moonglow tower is complete after all.

Now to my step by step guide for day 2.

• Once your TH 8 is complete build moonglow tower and 1 market if you don’t have it built already.
• Build cottages so that you have 15-16 total, try to organize your city so that each cottage touches 3 resource producing buildings.
• Get the market to level 4 so you can do some trading.
• Build on your moonglow tower whenever you run out of resources.
• Fill up any extra building slots with resource producing buildings.
• Upgrade woodcutters and quarries to level 5, starting with the highest producing ones.
• Upgrade all cottages to level 5, if you have lots of extra resources laying around you build cottages before you upgrade woodcutters and quarries.
• Upgrade boosters, stonemasons and sawmills that is, to level 4.
• Start construction of townhall level 9.

• With TH 9 you need to build the rest of the buildings you need to expand, I never get townhall level 10 until quite a while into the game as it is so expensive to build.
• Build the trinsic temple, 2 more markets to a total of 3 and a warehouse if you don’t have that already. The reason for 3 markets is to do more trading and also because 3 market at level 7, 8 and 8 is faster than 2 at level 8 and 9, you need 250 carts to build your second city.
• Build cottages up to a total of 20.
• Upgrade trinsic temple to level 4 and your 3 markets to level 5.
• Upgrade your 10 best cottages to level 6, that is those touching the most resource producing structures.

Anyways, I just started up like I always do following the quests quickly, building and blowing up buildings I don’t need. Stuff I don’t need is anything but woodcutters, quarries, cottages, training grounds and barracks. You also eventually need a marketplace and a warehouse. Feel free to blow up the training ground if you don’t want to train more berserkers.

Place the woodcutters and quarries where they produce the most, you can easily move them later on. Preferably go for a higher wood production than stone, as you will need more wood early on. This depends on where you start though, if you start on a bad location, going for more stone and just buying wood at the market is ok. I got a very bad starting location on this server, so I’m considering producing some iron as well.

Below is a step by step guide to what I’m doing on a new server.

• Get level 4 town hall right away, it is very fast and cheap to build.
• Fill up your 40 build spots with woodcutters and stonemasons.
• Get all your other buildings to level 2.
• Once all your buildings are level 2, upgrade townhall to level 5.

• Now it is time to build some cottages, as level 3 buildings take quite a while to build, I suggest building 5-6 cottages and upgrading them all to level 3, this doubles your production speed.
• After upgrading your cottages to level 3 you should get all your other buildings to level 3 as well before you go on construction town hall level 6.
• Build town hall level 6 which is about an hour build time with this many cottages.

• Build the sawmills you need, 1 tree + sawmill is better than 2 trees, so move your buildings accordingly.
• Use extra building slots for cottages. If you’re using diamonds you could also use a shovel to speed up construction speed.
• If you’re not a diamond player you don’t need more than 4-5 more cottages to a total of 10.
• After that you save up and start town hall level 7, don’t build any resources to level 4, it is better to build the level 7 town hall first.

• At TH 7 you build the stonemasons you need and move your buildings accordingly to maximize resource production.
• The rest of your build slots I suggest using for either woodcutters, quarries or cottages, build what you need the most.
• Upgrade all your sawmills, quarries and cottages to level 4, the sawmills and stonemasons should stay level 3.
• Start construction of town hall level 8.

This should be all for day #1, at least for me it was. For many players it will probably take longer and that’s ok, the building order is still the same.

I always get the minster bundle for 30 days, as this is the cheapest way to get all of the ministers. The ministers are not of equal importance, but you don’t save much on leaving out one or two ministers compared to getting all of them. If you can’t afford to get all of them, at least have the building minister. The building minister will build up your cities while you are away, eventually you will only build the first level of each building in your new cities and have the building minister take care of the rest.

The trade minister is really important as well, else you will eventually have to spend several hours every day just shipping resources around your empire. I usually have the trade minister leave 150k wood/stone in each of my cities and ship everything else into my warehouse cities. In addition to shipping extra resources to your warehouses, the trade minister will make sure to ship food to your military cities and iron to the cities that need that. The trade minister should also be set up so that it purifies extra resources once your warehouses get close to max capacity so that nothing goes to waste. I will write more in depth about warehouse cities and the trade minister in an upcoming article.

If you have extra funds left after hiring the ministers you can use them on resources. Make sure you always buy the highest level resource items to have access to, and only buy the type of resources that are most expensive in the market. Early on stone tends to be the most valuable resource, so use your funds on stone and just sell it on the market if you don’t need it. Selling on the market is much nicer than buying, as you get the gold from your sale right away.

If you have any comments one questions regarding the use of Play4Free funds in Lord of Ultima, please let me know by posting below.

The first and most important rule is to never mix offense troops in any city, the only exception is when training frigates, then you need other troops to fill them with obviously. You can mix defense troops of the same type in your defensive castles if you wish, but personally I specialize each city to one type of troops. The reason for not mixing offense troops is that defense troops are usually mixed, and a mixed offense force will then do much worse as each of them will fight the defense troop it does worst against. Also, mixing troop types in any city will mean your troop training time will be lower. There are 4 troop types, infantry, cavalry, magic and artillery.

The best troops on a new Lord of Ultima server are berserkers for offense and rangers for defense. The berserkers are the cheapest troops to train at only 150 iron, and they are also very fast to train. Their attack is pretty good and they are excellent raiders. My first offensive castle is always a berserkers castle, and I usually have 2-3 berserkers castles before I build any other type of offense castles.

Rangers are the most important troops for defense early on a new server. There are lots of reasons for this. First is that they are the best defense you can get against infantry, which is the most common offense early on. Secondly they are very cheap to train at only 160 wood each. Rangers are also pretty good at raiding being able to carry 10 resources each as loot and having 30 attack, which is very good for a defensive unit. I usually train 3000-4000 rangers in each of my first 10 cities, this is both for raiding low level dungeons 5x from each city and having them as defense against enemy berserkers if needed.

Guardians and ballistas are good defensive troops, and you really need these later on, but in the beginning it is a waste of resources training many of these in my opinion. These troops are slow to train and quite expensive, they are also really bad at raiding.

Templars however, have their use early on, say as your 2nd defense castle. Templars can raid even though they are not as good as rangers at it when it comes to attack points, they carry the same amount of resources. At 90 iron and 100 gold the templars are not that expensive to train either. Templars are excellent defense against magic, which is their speciality, but what is almost as important is that they are pretty good defending against cavalry as well. Rangers do ok against magic, but really suck against cavalry, so the templars will be really useful if someone decide to hit you with knights.

To sum up, the 3 troop types you should train the first few months on a new server are berserkers, rangers and templars. I usually have 2-3 times more rangers than templars, and about the same number of berserkers as I have rangers. How much defense you have compared to offense really depends on your neighborhood. If you’re surrounded by an angry enemy alliance you need a lot of defense, if you are member of the most powerful alliance with no treats nearby you hardly need defense at all.

If you have any comments or questions to the article I would be happy if you took the time to post below. I really enjoy hearing what people think of the stuff I am posting here.
Later on you will use lots of other types of troops, but

First thing you need to be competitive in Lord of Ultima is a decent amount of time to play the game, you don’t need to online every hour of the day, but you need to be able to log in at least twice a day for an hour or two. This assumes that you are paying to have the ministers, if you don’t do that you need to be online a lot more to be competitive. I suggest everyone who plays Lord of Ultima seriously to spend the money to get the ministers, it makes the game way more fun and less repetitive, and it is also good to support a game you enjoy playing.

You need to optimize the first 10 cities you build well, so they reach a high production, focus on building the resources that are worth the most in the marketplace, from
experience that will be stone and wood. Place your cities smart so that they are close to forests and hills so you get a lot of rocks and trees to build your resource buildings next to.

Don’t build any food or gold cities as your first 10, food is cheap in the market usually and you will get gold from raiding and selling resources. Only build castles to get free titles, the first one a defense castle as 3th city so that you get 4th city free, the second one either defense or offense at 7th depending on how safe your neighborhood is. Focus on building up your resource cities first, castles are expensive and slow to build. If you build castles to high levels too quickly without proper defense they are also at great risk of being conquered.

Raid dungeons as much as possible, from all of your first 10 cities. You don’t need many troops in each city as the dungeons in the beginning of the server will all be low level. 3-4 barracks and one training ground in each resource city. In your castles you will obviously have a lot more barracks. and from the castles you can raid the higher level dungeons that starts popping up later. Unless you have no castles or your continent is very peaceful, I suggest you train rangers in your resource cities. Rangers are decent raiders and excellent at defending early infantry attacks coming at you.

Follow the market, there is a lot of resources and gold to be made here. You produce the most expensive resources and sell them on the market, the cheapest resources, most likely food and iron, you buy at the market when you need them. You will get most of your gold from raiding, and the rest you need from selling wood and stone.

Build city 2 as soon as your first city reaches around 1000 points, build the highest levels of the Moonglow Tower and Trinsic Temple over night when you’re not able to log in. Don’t build level 9 town hall in your first city until your 2nd city is built. Whenit comes to city 3 however, don’t stress that, as it is very expensive. Your first two cities should be around 2000-1500 points before you build city 3.

Click city notes in the city you just created and click on City Planner. Click “Yes” in the external link popup while holding down Ctrl or Command, to open the link in a new tab. Copy the link to the page you are taken to where you can see your city, it should look something link this:
http://www.lou-fcp.co.uk/map.php?map=LAA000000A0C00000A000AAA2000000
00000AA2AAA00000000B0C00000A00BB000A0B0C0000000A000C0BBB000000A00000B0B
000000000000000000BB00000D0B0C00000000C0D0CC0X000D00000000000000B000A0
0000AAA0CC0BB00AA0002A00C0000AA000O0A00000D0000000CCC000000C0000D00000
0000AA00000000C000000CAA00D00B000D00C00000000A00000C

Now you go to http://loof78.appspot.com/lou_city – which is the city optimization tool that I prefer to use. It is made by loof78 and is very easy to use. Paste your lou-fcp url in the big white text field. Hit enter and paste the following on the next 3 lines:
use_slots=90
num_cottages=20
placement_schedule=WSI

Use slots is how many slots will be used for the wood, stone and iron resource buildings and cottages, change this as needed. Cottages should be anywhere between 15 and 25, usually the lower means more production but lower construction speed. Placement schedule is what resources to focus on, “WSI” means all 3 resources apart from food, “WS” is wood and stone only and “W” means wood only. If you want to focus on wood and stone but have a little iron as well use “WS,WSI”.

Click the long blue “result as tcp link” on the bottom of the results page to go back to the city planner and see your optimized city.

I don’t use the optimizer to place my farms. Usually I place farms anywhere there are 2 or more lakes close together manually, assuming this doesn’t conflict with any of my high producing other resource buildings. Use the city planner to test out where the farms you place produce the most.

I usually have 2 warehouses and 2 markets in each of my resource cities, in resource cities that produce extremely well I drop warehouses and markets and use a Moonglow Tower to purify everything instead. In resource cities next to water I use one market and one harbor. The resource cities with markets ship everything to the closest resource hub, more about hubs in another article coming soon.

If you have any questions or comments please post below.

I’ve reached the #1 on every Lord of Ultima server I have played on, and hopefully some of you will do the same putting the strategies I share here to use. If you have any comments, suggestions, questions, whatever really, you can leave a comment to any of the articles here and I’ll get back to you as soon as possible. Please also share or +1 any of the articles here that you really like, thanks!