boost training size or increase training speed?

[Ariel Greensleeves]

I'm considering building a new ancient wonder to increase the speed at which I can make (replace) troops. What is the difference (mathematically) between increasing my training size and increasing my training speed? Right now my Barracks can finish all five slots in about 2 hours (a benefit from Needles), which is inconvenient bc it doesn't match 3 hour factory productions. So is it worth it to start a new wonder that will increase training speed or should I stick to one that increases training size? I am leaning toward Shrine of Shrooms (vs Dwarven Bulwark) bc it is smaller and will also make my favorite unit, elven archer.
I have gotten to chapter 14 with a mix of bribing and fighting, but more emphasis on fighting lately. Battles are hard bc I have an extra large amount of expansions and explored provinces (none bought with diamonds!) I have fully leveled barracks, training grounds, and merc camp, and 3 armories, Needles 21, and Dragon Abbey 17. I also have a fully evolved fire phoenix that I feed regularly to get the 50% damage boost.
Your advice is welcome

 

[crackie]

Training size increases how many gets trained per stack (slot). The bigger the stack, the longer to train so armories/Shrewdy/Bulwark will increase your queue time. Upgrading military buildings and wonders like Needles, Victory Springs, and Flying Academy increases speed of production and will bring the queue time back down. Note that Needles and VS not only increase training speed but also buffs certain units as well. Hence, they will not just give you more troops, but helps them fight better too.

It will depend on your playing style at the end of the day, but if you find yourself perpetually running out of troops, then you'd want to extend your training time for 5 slots to cover however your longest period away from the game is. If you're a daily player, that's overnight. Otherwise, if your training size is super speedy, the queue time is really short. You'll need the schedule flexibility to reload the queue and you'll miss out on many hours of production overnight when you're asleep.

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

It depends on what troops you are trying to produce. Needles only speeds up production in the barracks, Victory Springs only speeds up the Training Grounds, and Flying Academy only speeds up the Mercenary Camp.

For the ones that increase production size, Shrooms gets more powerful, the more armories you have and the higher level they are, while the Bulwark uses your world map squad size, meaning the more Squad Size research you do, the more powerful it gets.

 

[Henroo]

I'm considering building a new ancient wonder to increase the speed at which I can make (replace) troops. What is the difference (mathematically) between increasing my training size and increasing my training speed? Right now my Barracks can finish all five slots in about 2 hours (a benefit from Needles), which is inconvenient bc it doesn't match 3 hour factory productions. So is it worth it to start a new wonder that will increase training speed or should I stick to one that increases training size? I am leaning toward Shrine of Shrooms (vs Dwarven Bulwark) bc it is smaller and will also make my favorite unit, elven archer.

If you only have 2 hours of total training time, you desperately need to increase it. I try to maintain 10 to 12 hours training time in all my buildings. That way my buildings keep training troops overnight and on days when I am busy and can't log in mid-day. I have both Dwarven Bulwark and Shrine of Shrooms. The goal is to make sure you are constantly training troops, no matter what.

If you are trying to decide between them, be aware that they are calculated in different manners. Dwarven Bulwark uses your total map province squad size to calculate how much extra training time it gives. It starts as a small percentage of your squad size but every time you upgrade it, you get a slightly larger percentage. Shrine of Shrooms uses the total number of armory levels in your city in its calculation. In my experience, unless you have at least 5 or 6 max level armories Dwarven Bulwark will give more benefit than a Shrine (assuming both are the same level). If you are on PC it will tell you what a level 1 AW will give you before you build it so you could compare how the benefits of the 2 stack up before deciding which to build. I am not sure if mobile does this or not.

 

[Zoof]

I personally wouldn't accept a total training queue of under 5 hours. I can accept maybe 3-5 hours of lossage due to sleep, but I won't accept even a minute of loss if I time boost my army and waste parts of a 5h time boost spell (the seemingly most abundant time boost spell) because my queue wasn't long enough.

@Henroo : Mobile lets you examine every AW, researched or not, in detail as well. The one thing mobile lets you do that PC doesn't is shows you the benefit of the AW across all 30-35 levels that that AW can be upgraded to. What mobile doesn't tell you is what it'll cost (both resources and land) to build the dang thing until after you fill the rune wheel and attempt to place it.
Reading those descriptions of benefits was how I passed my time when I got bored back when I first started playing the game

 

[Henroo]

I personally wouldn't accept a total training queue of under 5 hours. I can accept maybe 3-5 hours of lossage due to sleep, but I won't accept even a minute of loss if I time boost my army and waste parts of a 5h time boost spell (the seemingly most abundant time boost spell) because my queue wasn't long enough.

5 hours is not enough if you are really serious about making troops and fighting. If you have 2.5 hours of dead time a night, then you are losing 5 hour's worth of troops every 2 days. Which means you would have to use a 5 hour booster every 2 days just to catch up and make the same amount of troops you would make naturally with a longer training queue.

 

[samidodamage]

My preference is even higher than most here are reporting. I try to manage both a weekly Spire climb to the top and 8300 weekly tourney pts by combat wherever possible. 100% fighting in Spire and ~90-95% combat in tourney. That may make my schedule a bit of an outlier, but here goes:

I try for a total training queue time of 15hrs, balanced by a training size of 3+ squads worth of troops/slot. That translates neatly into each bldg training 1 squad/hr, or 72 squads/day. I don't know how fast you'd have to have training times to keep up with that level of troop production once you accounted for idle time not training anything.
I achieve that by alternating upgrades on the training bldgs themselves, the AW's for each bldg that increases speed, Bulwark and Shrewdy for increased troops/slower speed, and Armory upgrades (increases the armory training size plus adds a Shrewdy boost). Then I throw out smaller temp armories to boost Shrewdy when I need to balance things a bit. I use lvl 15 armories (Ch16 and Ch18 cities). Some folks in lower chapters limit it to whatever level keeps them at either 2x2 or 3x3 (can't remember which is more efficient); lvl 15 keeps them at 4x4, small for my chapter size. The 15 lvls is an additional multiplier of 15 per temp armory for Shrewdy, a lot of extra troops/slot.

 

[Smooper]

@samidodamage @Henroo @Zoof Can you tell me your best ways to keep plenty of supplies for training 24 hours a day? I have 8 fully upgraded workshops and it is not enough for my setup. I suppose I could stop dropping enchantments all the time though.

 

[Zoof]

5 hours is not enough if you are really serious about making troops and fighting. If you have 2.5 hours of dead time a night, then you are losing 5 hour's worth of troops every 2 days. Which means you would have to use a 5 hour booster every 2 days just to catch up and make the same amount of troops you would make naturally with a longer training queue.

My statement was mostly to establish the lowest bound that I'd find acceptable before deciding to eschew fighting altogether and keep to a catering style.

I love my lv 30 Dwarven Bulwark, but for all it's majesty, I also keep an SSS lying around to upgrade. It's just particularly painful during FA where I feel the need to put away those Armories and be reduced to a queue time just above five hours. I typically enjoy a queue time of between 8 and 11 hours with 11+ hours being ideal (so that I can use two 5-hour boosters at a time)

 

[Henroo]

@Smooper What chapter are you in? The advice I give will depend on this.

 

[Zoof]

@samidodamage @Henroo @Zoof Can you tell me your best ways to keep plenty of supplies for training 24 hours a day? I have 8 fully upgraded workshops and it is not enough for my setup. I suppose I could stop dropping enchantments all the time though.

I have three fully upgraded Magic Workshops that I won in Spire, which is always under Power of Provision spell while I'm awake. My lv 19 Prosperity Towers (which is overleveled for purpose but accidents in KP exchanges happened) keeps that one PoP spell active for the entire time I'm awake while its effects are also additionally boosted. Having high culture (which my lv 30 Martial Monastery helps with) improves the output from those Magic Workshops even further.

The high-effort part of the equation comes from my numerous lv 1 regular workshops which are always pushing out Advanced Tools to fill the related to a generic quest, coinciding with neighborly help time. This keeps me afloat as long as I'm regular with doing that.

 

[samidodamage]

The biggest thing that made supplies no longer an issue for me is weekly trips to the top of the Spire since about 4 months after it launched. Over that period of time I've gotten plenty of magic workshops and only generally run with 2. I also get a bunch of supply instants. I drop enchantments on the WS usually 2-3 times/wk. I have 3K+ WS enchantments in my inventory, again from consistently increasing tourney performance over the years. The other thing I do is try to use my temp boost bldgs as extra storage for more supplies when they expire. I sell them off as I need supplies. I fed the brown bear routinely about once/week before they introduced the separate training queues for each bldg. Since then, I've used it sparingly. In the last 6 months I haven't used it at all except for when rl interferes with my time in-game and I resort to auto-fighting and the much higher losses I experience with that.

The high-effort part of the equation comes from my numerous lv 1 regular workshops which are always pushing out Advanced Tools to fill the related to a generic quest, coinciding with neighborly help time. This keeps me afloat as long as I'm regular with doing that.

I did that in lower chapters as well. As I got my training queue times longer, it was no longer needed. I think that was somewhere around Ch9-10 for me, though I was in ?Ch14/15 when I reached the 1 squad trained per hour goal I set.

 

[Smooper]

@Henroo I am in chapter 10. fully evolved brown bear, newly placed Shrine of Shrewdy Shrooms and 3 armories and a bulwark

 

[Henroo]

@Henroo I am in chapter 10. fully evolved brown bear, newly placed Shrine of Shrewdy Shrooms and 3 armories and a bulwark

Ok then, you have Prosperity Towers unlocked. It is the best supply AW in the game since it gives supplies directly and enhances your Power of Provision spells. If you do not have it built yet, I would say build it. If you already have it, consider leveling it up further.

As Zoof and Samidodamage both already mentioned, Magic Workshops are considerably better than normal workshops. Check your inventory to make sure you do not have any unplaced ones you might have won in the spire. And if you do have any Magic WS already in your city, always target them with Power of Provision spells before standard WS.

Enchantments will really help with supplies. The highest culture value buildings in your city always receive the most help visits so prioritize them when casting Ensocrelled Enchantment spells. If you have a big enough supply of EE spells, try to keep them on the 4 or 5 highest culture buildings in your city at all times. Also every few weeks, do a full help visit sweep of your complete world map. This will ensure you are exchanging visits with all active neighbors. If possible you want to have enough visits so your culture rating is consistently maxed out.

In a few more chapters the issue of supplies will cease to be a problem for you. Somewhere around chapter 14 or so workshops receive a massive upgrade to their capacity. Once you reach this point you will likely be able to cut back on how many you have.

 

[Henroo]

The biggest thing that made supplies no longer an issue for me is weekly trips to the top of the Spire since about 4 months after it launched. Over that period of time I've gotten plenty of magic workshops and only generally run with 2. I also get a bunch of supply instants. I drop enchantments on the WS usually 2-3 times/wk.

I have 4 magic WS and I enchant each of them daily. However I have a high level Blooming Trader Guild and I am trying to make a massive excess of supplies daily so I can make lots of wholesaler purchases. Once you get BTG past level 20 or so, a single wholesaler purchase is roughly equal to the daily output of a boosted manufactory. Doing this has let me get rid of almost all my manufactories but still produce a high amount of goods daily.

 

[samidodamage]

Doing this has let me get rid of almost all my manufactories but still produce a high amount of goods daily.

I haven't had a regular factory out other than for FA's/events in over a year. I get all my goods from event/evolving bldgs. That's probably another reason I am an outlier case along with the fact that I run with zero houses. Right now, I have 133K+ excess population. All my sentient factories are stored for the FA and 6 lvl 31 marble are out in the city. After the FA, I'll store all the marble and place one each of S2 and S3 factories, but those don't require supplies to produce. I'll also put out my stored fully upgraded armories (5) and then I'll be using some supplies for the 12hr orc productions there again. Those armories take a bit over 10K pop each as well, but those 6 marble take over 15K pop each that I get back when they go into storage.
All of those things do impact my not needing supplies like the average player...

 

[Sir Squirrel]

I always craft the supply instants from the MA when I see them and will use the ferris wheels won in events and such to produce supply instants as well so I always have some when supplies run low from speed training troops.

 

[Smooper]

@Henroo Ok, I removed a workshop and replaced with the prosperity towers. I probably have over 700 enchantments I can use on my workshops so let me see how I like this setup. Thanks for all the help from all the experienced players I meet here.

 

[Sir Squirrel]

Yeah that will help. I don't have the prosperity towers anymore, but throwing enchantments on when collecting still helps a lot.

 

[crackie]

My lv 19 Prosperity Towers (which is overleveled for purpose but accidents in KP exchanges happened) keeps that one PoP spell active for the entire time I'm awake while its effects are also additionally boosted. Having high culture (which my lv 30 Martial Monastery helps with) improves the output from those Magic Workshops even further.

Btw, several elders in my tribe have warned me about not needing to go overboard on PT. Eventually the workshops get ridiculous. I'm putzing around the end of Constructs cause I'm way underscouted and need more provinces. My magic residence will go from 62370/hr to 177k/hr next chapter! That is more than double the production! I respect my elders. They also foretold the seed crisis that is the bleak future I am in now. Since you can't undo a wonder level, proceed with discernment.