Lord of Ultima Tutorial – Starter Gameplay Guide (Tips, Tricks, Strategy, Statistics)

This article is intended to teach you how best to start your game in Lord of Ultima-as with any game there are certain ideal ways to play for maximum efficiency. If you are able to outpace the players around you at the start of the game, you will have a huge advantage and can begin to take over the area.

Why should you listen to me?

Not only have I done (and continue to do) research, but I have a large alliance who shares their secrets and strategies with me. We often discuss specific game engine concepts to calculate the maximum efficient way to progress in the game. Basically, we do the work and you reap the benefits! Furthermore, myself and my alliance have past experience in a number of games, specifically browser based games like Tribal Wars (tribalwars.net), The West, Lunar Wars, and others. In Tribal Wars, which is very much like Lord of Ultima, I reached the #1 rank in kills for the World and was in the top 10 overall points rank. This is not to brag, just to share that I take these games seriously (perhaps too much so), so readers will believe that this is credible information.

If you find you have a question that is not covered in this article, here are two useful resources:

• Lord of Ultima Wiki
• Lord of Ultima Official Forums

Beginner Concepts

• Join a large alliance of active people near you geographically. Their support will be invaluable.
• You have a 7 day grace period where you cannot be attacked. Utilize this by focusing on resource-building early on.

Resources

Resources like the Woodcutter’s Hut receive increased production by being connected to any of 3 different things. Note that diagonal DOES count as being connected! A maximum of 8 squares can affect each square, but squares at the border walls of your won’t get the full number.

1. Resource fields – Forest, Stones, Iron Mines, Lakes, Farmland (empty grassland)
2. Manpower – Cottage
3. Processing – Sawmill, Stonemason, Foundry

Be sure to consider how best to use the bonuses provided by adjacent squares. For example, you should find a heavy collection of forests or stones in at least a couple places. There should be 1 or 2 squares which are touching 5-6 of the resource, be sure to build the correct production building at those squares.

Note that you CAN destroy resource fields, but you should almost never do this at the beginning of a game. When your city is nearly fully upgraded and your are completely out of room you may consider it then.

Step By Step Walkthrough Guide:

Day 1:

• Build your maximum amount of lvl 1 production facilities of woodcutter’s huts and quarries. Wood and stone are your primary resources needed for building up your buildings. Be sure to maximize placement next to resource fields like stones and forests for huge bonuses.
• Upgrade your town Hall a few levels (aim for lvl 4 or so) to increase your maximum building cap.
• At squares connected to 3, 4, 5, or 6 resource fields, begin upgrading the woodcutter’s huts and quarries to level 2, 3, and possibly 4.
• Depending on how often you will log in, build up to 2 warehouses (upgrade a little if necessary) so your resource capacity will not be reached before the next time you log in. Note that upgrading your Town Hall also increases your resource capacity considerably.
• Be sure to visit the “Quests” tab, there are some quests that will be easily completed that give you extra bonuses.
• Build 1-2 Iron mines at the best locations, no more.

Day 2:

• Upgrade your Town Hall 1 or 2 levels with the resources you have saved up
• Build a single farm, barracks, training ground. Start recruiting up to about 100 berserkers if you plan to play fairly often (multiple times a day). You can get a nice resource bonus by raiding dungeons with them. If you only plan to play once every 1-2 days, do not bother with army units yet.
• Be sure to keep building resource buildings. Again focus only on stone and wood at this point. You should always be at your maximum building cap; lvl 1 buildings are cheap and fast to build.
• Upgrade most, if not all, of your lvl 1 Woodcutter’s Huts and Quarries to lvl 2, and the best situated to lvl 3.
• If you have any super-great spots, with 4-6 forests/stones touching them, upgrade those further to level 4.
• By the end of day 2 your Town Hall should be about level 6. If you plan to raid, your barracks should be level 4-5 and you should have about 50 – 75 berserkers. You should have a ton of lvl 2 quarries and lvl 2 woodcutter’s huts, and a few at level 3, maybe 4. Your income should be around 2000 wood/h and 1500 stone/h
• Raiding: send 10-20 berserkers (more gives diminishing returns) to nearby dungeons to gather extra resources. Do this whenever you can, a raid should take any where from 1 to 3 hours round trip. Unless you upgrade, you’ll only be able to send out 5 waves at a time, which is okay for now.

Day 3:

• Upgrade all of your lvl 2 resources to lvl 3 immediately, if they aren’t there already.
• Keep enough resources to then upgrade your Town Hall to lvl 7 (requires 15,000 wood and 10,000 stone). This will take about 5 hours.
• Build more lvl 3 production (wood and stone) everywhere possible, up to your maximum building count.
• Start building cottages in ideal locations (4+), upgrade them to level 4-5 max, otherwise it is too expensive for now.
• Start placing Sawmills or Stonemasons  when you are able to build these (requires Town Hall 7 – o r 8?). Place them so they touch the corresponding resource production places. For now you’ll want about 2 of each, but a few more later.
• Before you stop playing for the day, upgrade your Town Hall to level 7 or 8.

Day 4:

• You should have the maximum buildings built always. You get 10 for every level of Town Hall. At this point, most should be woodcutter’s huts or quarries (roughly 4 WC to 3 quarry ratio). All of your WC and quarries should be at least lvl 3, many level 4, and ideal location ones at level 5.
• Continue to send out raids to close dungeons if you have time. 5 waves of 20 berserkers should be fine for lvl 1 dungeons.
• Start utilizing cottages to increase your construction speed, aim for at least 200-300% construction speed around this time.
• You should be hitting 4500+/hr wood and 3500+/hr stone at this point.
• Don’t bother building other buildings right now. No Trinsic Temple, Castle, Marketplace, Towers, Moonglow Tower, etc. They won’t be of use until after your 7 day grace period is up.
• Upgrade to Town Hall lvl 9 overnight. This should take around 10 hours with the cottage bonus.

Day 5:

• Build up to your maximum limit of buildings again. Look around you on the region map to see if there are any lvl 3 dungeons within 2-4 hours travel time. If so, you will probably want to recruit more berserkers — 200+ total. This will require upgrading the barracks or building another barracks. Keep sending berserkers out to these lvl 3 dungeons, the rewards begin to be worth it at this point.
• Again have all your resource buildings at lvl 3 at least, and start upgrading to lvl 4.
• Start utilizing cottages more to increase construction time (now that almost everything will take 2+ hours otherwise). Upgrade a bunch of cottages to about lvl 6 or 7 for now for a good bonus without spending too much time or resources. Note that a cottage built anywhere gives a construction speed bonus for everything, not just the surrounding squares. However, cottages act like forests to boost resource production, so place them so woodcutter’s huts and quarries will benefit. You can see your overall construction speed bonus in your building queue. Aim for at least 400% or so for now, maybe more.
• You should aim to have lvl 4 resource buildings by the end of the day
• Start upgrading a Moonglow tower, go for lvl 5 or so today
• Upgrade Town Hall to lvl 10 at the end of the day if possible, otherwise on the next day.

Day 6:

• By now you’ll want to be looking at having well over 500% construction speed (ideally 600-700%, possibly more). Be sure to place the cottages so they border and boost resource production. Try to find a sweet spot where you are able to build fast enough to constantly spend your resources.
• Begin to build some iron mines (you should have only needed 1 until now). Iron is needed to build up your armies.
• Start building and upgrading barracks.
• Continue upgrading your Moonglow tower (requires lvl 10 to get a baron).
• Be sure to upgrade to Town Hall lvl 10 today.
• Continue raiding whenever possible. Again, depending on how often you play, close dungeons can be ideal.

Day 7:

• Your last day of protection. Use today to build up defenses so you don’t become an easy target.
• Important defenses: Towers and Traps (can easily and cheaply cut invading army strength in half and boost the defense of your own troops).
• Defense Troops – city guards are cheap and recruit very quickly, but are fairly weak. You will want defense of all kinds: infantry, cavalry, magic, artillery. The tooltips of units in the recruit tab will tell you the defense power of each unit to each type. Generally, you will want a lot of infantry and cavalry defense and a much lesser amount of magic and artillery defense.
• Wall upgrades – fairly cheap way to raise defense % of your entire army.
• Continue upgrading your moonglow tower, aim to be able to make a baron in 2-3 days to start a new city.
• Here is where you will really want to start building a ton of cottages and maxing them out. When you have a high construction speed (1000%+) you can even start destroying resources to create an ideal resource layout. See below for cottage layout.
• The ideal building layout for resources: in the center section of your town create vertical lines. On the left, start with a vertical line of woodcutter’s huts. Next make a vertical line of cottages, then repeat this pattern all the way across your center section. Then go back to your first line of cottages on the left and create a sawmill at the top and the bottom of the vertical line. Then go to your next vertical line of cottages and create a sawmill directly to the left of your Town Hall. You’ll note this connects almost all of your woodcutter’s huts to a sawmill. Repeat this pattern again for the right half of the inner city section. You can swap the 6-square sections around a sawmill with the correct buildings for stone or iron, etc. This appears to be close to the best, if not the best layout for maximum income.
• See the below picture for an example, for your first town I would suggest only using the center section for resources then the spare building placements for troops/barracks stuff.
• Offense: Crossbowmen and Paladins are fast and carry a lot of loot so are ideal for plundering if you will be playing often. Berserkers are cheap and fast to make and will likely be the backbone of your army. Be sure to scout before attacking, use “plunder” unless you actually want to take over a town, and be careful not to piss off any big alliances!

Ideal building placement for resources

More to come! Lord of Ultima is currently in an open beta mode and is free to play. As a comparison, it is similar in a way to the Civilization game series, but is less intensive and can be played for only minutes a day from any internet browser. Sign up to play at lordofultima.com

If you have any tips or comments you’d like to share, please do so in the comments section below!