Empires And Puzzles – AndyBSG’s Levelling Strategy
Empires and Puzzles – best leveling guide
So, this little document is all about my latest levelling study, in an effort to maximise feeding without running out of food, swords, packs and recruits… The holy grail in other words!
For me, this strategy works because the balance between how quickly I can pump out feeders and the amount of resources needed is fairly well balanced. Of course, your mileage may vary.
The document consists of two parts, the first one is how I set everything up and rotate things and the reasoning and theory behind it and the second part is a study of exactly how quickly I can level a full set of five 4* heroes with daily progress shown
Training Camp Levels
Yes, there are many more but these are the ones you’ll need to have researched.
| Training Camp Level | Feeder Level | Time Taken To Train | Recruits | Food | Materials |
| TC2 | 1* 2* | 30 minutes | 5 | 2,000 | 1 Backpack |
| TC3 | 1* | 2 minutes | 5 | 5,000 | 1 Wooden Sword |
| TC11 | 1* 2* | 2 hours | 2 | 1,000 | none |
| TC19 | 1* | 1 minute | 2 | 5,500 | 1 Rugged Clothes |
For this to work you will need 1 training camp at level 19 and your other 3 at level 11.
Any ‘bonus feeders’ you get from farming, summon tokens, trainer heroes, etc do not get touched until during the ‘daily feed’
Farming
Farming is as simple as it gets. Farm the zones that produce the most food, recruits, swords and backpacks. My preference here is Season 2, Province 9, Zone 10.
There may be better zones but for me I can auto farm this zone. I also take plenty of breaks from this for events, trials, quests, etc. Any recruit quests that pop up are a definite priority.
Any food and recruits you need to get rid of just go straight into your ‘Storage Camp’(explained below)
Training Camp Setup & Rotation
First step, I load up each of my TC’s as follows and run in 2 ‘phases’.
Phase 1 is as follows and is how your camps will be set up the vast majority of the time.
- Camp 1 – This should be loaded up with 22 hours worth of TC11, no more, no less. This should be your TC19 camp
- Camp 2 & 3 – These are also loaded up with 22 hours worth of TC11
- Camp 4 – This is your Storage Camp. This one runs TC11 for 24/7
As soon as the 22 hours is up all 4 camps will be emptied of any feeders produced(if you don’t have room to store them you can feed them to your heroes now)
Now you will have 3 empty camps and we go into phase 2 by filling those 3 camps with TC3 and TC19 feeding.
The purpose of this stage is to burn off ALL swords and clothes you have managed to farm in the last 22 hours. To do this you will probably have to pull food and recruits out of your ‘Storage Camp’
This should really not take more than an hour unless you are some sort of farming demon in the preceding 22 hours!
FEEDING TIME!
As soon as this is finished, you empty the camps and go into a feeding and levelling frenzy and this is when I will also feed any trainer heroes, feeders from pulls, summon tokens and farming.
The idea is you just do this one daily feed so you’re not constantly spending time levelling heroes
Now all 3 camps are once more filled up with another 22 hours worth of TC11 as in phase 1, pulling recruits and food from your storage camp as required.
Rinse & Repeat
NOTE: When I first started this my storage camp had a respectable 30 days of feeders in it. By day 8 this has increased to over 45 days worth. So, even with this constant training you should find that the amount of recruits and food will increase on a daily basis(this comes in handy at ascension time as you can just pull food out if needed)
Do I Need 9 level 20 Farms?
The amount of food needed to run this strategy will vary as you progress, feeding unascended 4* heroes is very different to feeding 5* heroes on final ascension so here are some numbers.
- To populate all 4 TC11’s with 24 hours of feeders costs 96,000 ham
- On day 8, when all my 4*’s were on their 3rd ascension but not at final ascension I used 589,000 ham to burn off all my TC3 and TC19 mats for the day and feed them all
- So, my daily food usage was 685,000 ham.
- Running some rough numbers, 9 farms producing ham at level 13 will generate over 690,000 ham during a 24 our period. That does not include ham produced by stronghold, watchtower bonuses, ham from chests, map farming, quests, titans or wars.
- So, I would say that if you have all your camps at or above level 13 then this strategy is viable
Pro’s & Con’s
The question now is why does this work so well for me?
- The biggest bonus for me is the time saving. I am now spending just two small chunks of time each day maintaining all my training camps and levelling my heroes – When I empty the TC11’s and when I do my quick binge of TC19/TC3 training
- None of my training camps are ever sitting their idle
- By feeding just once a day I can maximise the number of single colour 10 feeds I do to get those annoying skills levelled.
- For me, this is the most efficient way of levelling I have tried and the least time consuming.
- I am a huge believer in levelling 5 heroes at a time, 1 of each colour. I don’t understand how anyone thinks giving up a 20% XP boost is a good idea and this training method works very well for 5 hero levelling.
- Despite that view, this method will work equally as well for just levelling a single hero
- The other big bonus is that I now have plenty of food for crafting battle items.
- One big drawback is that ascensions often occur very close together meaning you may find yourself waiting a day or so to build up enough food to ascend a lot of heroes at once
- My main aim for this was to allow me to clear my huge backlog of unlevelled heroes with the plan being that as soon as I had maxed everyone I could then switch all 4 of my TC’s to TC20. The theory is that as soon as my TC20’s had then pumped out enough 4*/5* heroes for another rainbow levelling team or I had pulled some from summons I could simply switch back. This was mainly to stop me spending real life money!
It All Sounds Good But Does It Work?
So, to show this in action I decided to start levelling a full rainbow team of 4*. So, I had Boldtusk, Agwe, Buddy, Cyprian and Gretel.
The only slight anomaly was that Boldtusk was already level 11 when I started. I did have other red 4*’s but I was in need of a 6th healer for wars and as the rest of the guys first day results show those 11 levels were probably barely a 1 day head start for him.
The below table shows the starting level and what level they were at after each daily feed.
Day | Boldtusk | Agwe | Cyprian | Gretel | Buddy |
| 0 | 1.11 | 1.1 | 1.1 | 1.1 | 1.1 |
| 1 | 1.26 | 1.17 | 1.12 | 1.9 | 1.18 |
| 2 | 2.13 | 1.39 | 1.36 | 1.30 | 2.1 |
| 3 | 2.29 | 2.21 | 2.14 | 2.2 | 2.18 |
| 4 | 2.48 | 2.31 | 2.29 | 2.29 | 2.35 |
| 5 | 3.20* | 2.48 | 2.40 | 2.40 | 2.4 |
| 6 | 3.29 | 3.7* | 3.8 | 2.47 | 3.19* |
| 7 | 3.34 | 3.18 | 3.20 | 3.6 | 3.28 |
| 8 | 3.43 | 3.25 | 3.32 | 3.21 | 3.35 |
| 9 # | 3.55 | 3.39 | 3.45 | 3.41* | 3.48 |
| 10 | 4.11 | 3.47 | 3.49 | 3.49 | 3.54 |
| 11 | 4.22 | 3.56 | 3.53 | 3.54 | 3.58 |
| 12 | 4.32 | 4.7 | 3.59 | 4.23 | 4.20 |
| 13 | 4.39 | 4.21 | 4.17* | 4.33 | 4.32 |
| 14 | 4.46 | 4.37 | 4.36 | 4.44 | 4.39 |
| 15 | 4.56 | 4.45 | 4.47 | 4.56 | 4.49 |
| 16 | 4.60 | 4.48 | 4.50 | 4.59 | 4.53 |
| 17 | 4.64 | 4.53 | 4.53 | 4.64 | 4.57 |
| 18 | 4.69 | 4.57 | 4.56 | 4.68 | 4.63 |
| 19 | 4.70 | 4.62 | 4.63 | 4.70 | 4.70 |
| 20 | * | 4.70 | 4.70 | * | * |
*Shows the day that the heroes skill was maxed
# Day 9 Note – On day 9 I made a slight deviation. As I had been doing so much farming I found myself sitting on over 1,500 backpacks and my food storage was at capacity. So, to speed up levelling a bit and burn off some of that excess food I switched all three of the daily TC11’s to the half hour TC2 for 24 hours
Cyprian was a real pain as by day 12 his special was only at level 4 and he had only had 1 skill up from feeding, the others all coming from ascensions, but apart from that all the heroes were maxed on skill on or before the final ascension.
Day 3
Day 10
Day 15
Day 20
Conclusion
For me, 20 days to max a full 4* rainbow team without spending a penny is quite an achievement.
Looking back, there is definitely room to improve the levelling guide with the main change for me being the use of the half hour TC2.
My plan for adding that in going forward will be to switch 1 of the 3 TC11’s over to a 24 hour TC2 every 3rd day. That may need tinkering depending on how recruit and food levels go to see if it is genuinely sustainable.
If it does work I think I could shave at least two days off the whole levelling process.
Since finishing these heroes off I have now started levelling a team of rainbow 5*’s but there have been stumbling blocks on that front.
As the amount of food needed to feed a 5* is higher I have found myself running out of food a lot more and also hitting ascensions is really painful.
In reality, for a 5* version of this you simply won’t be able to fit any TC2’s in and realistically I would recommend feeding one or two 5*’s along with three or four 4*’s. If I was to do a full 5* version I would also try to stagger it as much as possible by starting with a mix of virgin and half levelled 5*’s so you don’t suddenly have 5 heroes all hitting ascension at the same time and the whole thing grinding to a halt as you wait for food
