Table of Contents

I've been playing LoU for about 2 years now under the name sleepmonster.  I've been very fortunate to be a part of some really good alliances in world 20, 38 and 69.  I learned a lot of strategies from playing the game and from other great players.  If you want to play with me, here's my link:  http://www.lordofultima.com/ref/2371748513

Beginner's Strategies

The starting strategies is to focus on resource and not military.  You can start the military path after you have a minimum of 5 cities.  Join a good alliance on your continent and you should be all set.  Look at the tutorials below:

• LoU Third Party Tools
• Your First City in LoU
• Your Second City in LoU
• Subsequent Cities 
• First 7 Days Tutorial
• Noobies FAQ
• Resource city
• Pure Gold City and Gold/Resource Cities
• Gold City/Hub
• Diamonds (They call it Funds now)

Intermediate

As you grow, you will shift focus from resource/gold cities to military and food cities.  If you have time, military cities/raiding produces 3x more gold/resources than resource/gold cities.  Ministers are a must at this point.  You will also start building and contributing to palaces.  The goal of the game is to get 8 level ten places, one of each virtue.  You should aim to grow your empire, contribute to palaces, protect your cities and removing threats on your continent.  Read the entries below:

• Food City
• Berserker Castle
• Mage Castle
• Settling Strategies and Palaces
• Level 10 Palace City Layout
• Palace Hubs
• Locking Palaces (outdated)
• Dungeons and Bosses
• Setting Ministers

Advanced

• System of Hubs for Palace Donation
• Other Millitary Cities
• Recruitment Times
• PvP
• Forcing Palace Enlightenment

Subsequent Cities

My third, fourth  and fifth cities will be resource cities, with equal amounts of wood/stone/iron and food (use the auto city planner to maximize resource production)

My actual cities on world 83:

Third city:  http://bit.ly/VNrqVQ
Fourth city: http://bit.ly/ZDzEpb
Fifth city:  http://bit.ly/VNrIfo

My sixth city will be a full zerk castle.  This city makes 3 sec zerks and has a max capacity of 300k troop strength (TS).  See http://lordofultimastrategies.blogspot.com/2011/09/how-to-build-kick-ass-berserker-castle.html.  This castle recruits zerks, and my second city will not switch to recruiting rangers.

Now I have 2 castles, my second and my sixth cities.  When I have enough purified resources to research my second city, I will get my 8th city for free.  

My 7th city will be another resource city and my 8th will be a castle.  When I have around 10 cities, I will go full military  This means I will stop building resource cities, unless I take a lawless that's a resource city.  Most of my cities will be military.  I castle both offensive and defensive.  They are always raiding, even the defensive once.  Raiding brings in about 4 -10 times more than a typical resource city, so in the long run you will grow faster with raiding cities.  I will also build food cities and hubs.  Zerks are the best for raiding, but I also build Knights and Mages for war.  For defense, I build rangers, pallies and xbows. Navy comes later.

My 10th city is a regional hub with baron launching capabilities.  This will allow me to launch 5 barons at once.  

Your Second City in LoU

Since the update of March 13, 2012, you get a "free city" (you don't need to spend purified resources to research title advancement) for every castle you own.  To take advantage of the free title advancement, my second city is a castled city.  WARNING: CASTLING YOUR CITY WILL SUBJECT YOU TO SIEGES AND ASSAULTS.  This is a risky move if you are not in the dominant alliance of the continent.  Even then, it is still possible that you get attacked or even loose your city.

I want to take advantage of the free title advancement, but it's very difficult to build a full castle at this point.  I don't have enough iron and stone resources, building a full castle will slow me down.  So my second city is a "pseudo" castle.  A hybrid between resource and military.  This is the only time I will recommend this type of castle.  Other than this city, you should always build full military castles.  A full castle packs a lot more punch!  My second city is a mixed resource city with about equal wood/stone/iron/food (use auto city planner for this.)  I also build a cluster of military of 2 training grounds and 10 barracks.   When I have enough purified resource to research  for my 3rd city, I will also castle this second city and found my third and fourth city at the same time.  [You may want to wait to castle your third city instead of your second city, but you will not be able to found your 3rd and 4th city at the same time, which can slow down your growth]

This is my actual second city in world 83. http://bit.ly/SFWxBU

Double Crown

We won in World 38!  If you're curious of what a top player empire looks like, check out my stats below:

Stats at time of winning:

- Rank: 1 

- Score: 10,607,533

- Number of cities: 1001  (that's max any player can have)

- Number of Castles: 442

- Number of Palaces: 33

- Palace Resource Contribution: Over 13 Billion!

- Offense TS:  77 Million

- Defense TS: 34 Million

- Total Fame: 6.5 Million

- Plundering: 345 Billion!

- Units Defeated: 36 Million

- Passive Income Rate: 8.3M wood, 8.2M stone, 6.8M iron, 7.8M food, and 269k gold PER HOUR

- Unused Purified Resources: 13M Darkwood, 11M Runestone, 15M Veritium, 14M Trueseed, and 17B Gold

Noobies FAQ

What are the biggest 3 secrets to becoming a awesome LoU player?
1.  Auto City Planner.  2.  Ministers.  3.  Lots of  time.   The computer is way faster than you at planning a great resource city.  For military, hub, and food cities, use premade layout or design your own.  Ministers cost money because they do a great job at managing your empire when you're no there.  You'll save so much time.  The more cities you have, the more of a need for ministers.  If you have the auto city planner and ministers, you can install other extensions to add shortcuts and save even more time.  The more time you spend on the game, the higher score you have.


What's the ideal Construction Speed (CS) in a city?
2000% is what's recommended for a resource city.  That means 19 cottages.  When you increase your CS from research and shrine bonus, you don't need to build cottages for CS.  Just build the amount that gives you max resource according to the auto planner.  For military, food, gold, and hubs, build 35 or so cottages and level them to lvl 6 first.  Then build the rest of the city.  Then demo cottages and replace them with permanent buildings.

What's the ideal production or hourly rate should I be producing in each resource city?
80k/hour.  Food counts as half.  Build mixed resource cities (wood/stone/iron/food) as recommended in the auto planner.  Aim for 80k/hr of total production.  Minimum 70k/hr.  Some cities can get over 90k/hr if settled in a good spot and has good natural resource layout.

When should I build my first castle?
Since the update of March 13, 2012, the rules has changed.  Ideally, you should castle your third city so you can get a free fourth city.  In other words, you don't have to research title advancement every fourth city if you have X number of castles out of 4X total number of cities.  However, castling your third city is hard if you're not in a major alliance that can protect you during this vulnerable time.  You will also be limited by resources to build a full castle.  So your first castle (third city) will be a "pseudo" castle.  A hybrid between resource and military.  This is the only time I will recommend this type of castle.  You can, optionally, change it into a full castle (all military) later, although I don't because it would require too much time.

[Your 10th city.  10 is an arbitrary number, but you basically need enough wood and especially stone to build a full castle, towers and walls.  You need iron or wood to recruit troops, food to feed them, and enough defense in case your castle get attacked.  I would build 5 resource cities, 1 gold city/hub, 1 food city, 2 defensive cities before I build a castle.  My first castle is not used for attacking but for raiding.  I don't attack people for fun.  I usually only attack when they are a threat to me or my alliance.]

How many men should I send to a dungeon or boss?
Depending on the level of the boss or dungeon.  See my post here.

If you want to know anything else, ask me.

Ideal Recruitment Times

[This came from headlessheep in World 20.]


If you want to master layouts, ideal recruitment times is one thing you should keep in mind.
What's an ideal recruitment time? The higher the better, right? Not always.

The game will round recruitment time to the nearest second, and you reach a point where no matter how many more stables/temples/etc, the recruitment time will not get better.

You can use this to your advantage in 2 ways:
1) Do not bother to increase recruitment time if it will not get you close enough to the next second.
For instance, if you need a min of 8000% for 2sec, and a min of 7000% for 3sec. Then don't bother adding extra buildings to go over 7000% unless you can go pass 8000%.

2) Cheat. Kind of. As I mentioned earlier, the game will round recruitment to the nearest second. This means that 3.4999 will be rounded down to 3 secs ;D So, this potentially helps you reduce your number of buildings even more.


So, how do you calculate the absolute minimum required?
I use: roundup ((basetime / (secsyouwant + 0.5)) * 100 + 1)
So, for 7 secs mages: roundup ((600 / 7.5) * 100 + 1) = 8001

Realistically, that means 8025 because of the building bonuses work, but I like raw numbers. Bottomline, as long as you're not too far above 8001, you're not wasting buildings on recruitment rate.

I'll be happy to share my spreadsheet, but for reference, here are the minimum recruitment rates for the usual # of secs used for all units:

City guards: 3335 (1s), 2001 (2s), 1430(3s), 1113 (4s), 911 (5s), ...
Berserkers: 8001 (2s), 5716 (3s), 4446(4s), 3638 (5s), 3078 (6s), ...
Rangers: 7144 (3s), 5557 (4s), 4547 (5s), 3848 (6s), 3335 (7s), ...
Guardians: 8573 (3s), 6668 (4s), 5456 (5s), 4617 (6s), 4001 (7s), ...
Mages: 8001 (7s), 7060 (8s), 6317 (9s), 5716 (10s), ...
Warlocks: 8389 (15s), 7880 (16s), 7430 (17s), 7029 (18s), ...
Rams: 8476 (29s), 8198 (30s), 7938 (31s), 7694 (32s), ...
Ballistas: 8435 (41s), 8237 (42s), 8047 (43s), 7867 (44s), ...
Catapults: 8423 (47s), 8249 (48s), 8082 (49s), 7922 (50s), ...
Templars: 7779 (4s), 6365 (5s), 5386 (6s), 4668 (7s), 4119 (8s), ...
Paladins: 8237 (8s), 7370 (9s), 6668 (10s), 6088 (11s), 5601 (12s), ...
Scouts: 8573 (3s), 6668 (4s), 5456 (5s), 4617 (6s), ...
Knights: 7694 (6s), 6668 (7s), 5884 (8s), 5265 (9s), ...
Crossbowmen: 7060 (8s), 6317 (9s), 5716 (10s), 5219 (11s), ...

For ships: Max recruitment rate maxes out at 1900%. but it can still be boosted with research, and from faith. Best you'll ever get is still: 3900% (1000% from max research and 1000% from 100% Humility)

Take advantage of this.

sure, but the equation I used is in the post, so you can easily make your own...

Better yet, check out this google doc sheet:
https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Anyaav0-uapTdHZjZWFJdmxCMkphWEVDOURkR1lENEE&hl=en#gid=2

Raiding Dungeons and Bosses

Lou wiki provides some good info on dungeons and bosses.   But they're also lengthy and not optimized for advanced stage dungeons.   My recommendations are optimized for ministers.  You can set an army of a certain size to repeat raids on a dungeon until it reaches 100% and closes.  I mainly use berserkers to raid, but any type of unit (except city guards, scouts, catapults, rams and balistas) can raid


Dungeon Level      1        2         3 4        5       6         7         8         9        10
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Recommended    15     200     1k     3k     6k     15k     25k     40k     60k     100k
Zerks

Boss Level             1       2        3 4        5         6         7         8         9      
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Recommended    50     300     2k     4k     10k     15k     20k     30k     45k
Zerks

Berserkers, Knights, and Mages are strong offensive units so they can be used to raid any type of dungeon.  However, each type of dungeon has a weakness against a type of troop.

Forest DungeonWeakness:  Calvary
Best troops to send: Knights, Paladins, or Xbowmen (Knights and Xbows carry 1.5x the goods as a zerk. Palies carry 2x as much as zerks so adjust the number of troops accordingly.)

Hill DungeonWeakness:  Magic
Best troops to send: Mages or Warlocks  (I use zerks here too because mages and warlocks are not good raiders and does not carry as much as zerks.  If you send mages, send 2x as much as zerks)

Mountain DungeonWeakness:  Infantry
Best troops to send: Berserkers, Rangers, Guardians, or Templars 

Sea DungeonWeakness:  Artilery
Best troops to send: War Galleons or Sloops