Lords of Ultima City and Strategy Guide

Build cities blazing fast and annhiliate your opposition with these proven city layouts, tips and army techniques.

How to build your first city

Your first city must produce resources and gold so that you can expand. By following a proven layout you can cut down on production time, make more resources and expand sooner so you will be more powerful later on and a more desireable member to the best alliances. To expand your city must be able to produce moonstones, a baron and have 250 carts or 25 merchant vessels. Always build and level cottages first, try to get up to 1500% construction speed.

You can double gold production in your first city by creating a training ground and barracks and recruiting 200 beserkers. Send your group of beserkers out on repeating missions to the nearest level 1 dungeon in 5 separate groups of 30. With a war minister you can send your beserkers out non-stop to get additional gold and resources for your city. Use the remaining beserkers to replace lost troops. Tear down your training ground and barracks for other buildings, even town houses to produce gold. Your raiders will keep working for you and by the end of protection you will have an extra 75,000 gold and at least 25,000 extra resources! Wipe out natural resources in the middle of your city to follow the recommended layout. Place the buildings you can while following the template and delete resources while you are away, sleeping or stockpiling resources. Building around natural resources will leave you with a crippled city that doesn't produce nearly enough to be effective.

Make your first city unplunderable by having enough hideouts to match your storage maximum and it can be an invulnerable moonstone factory to fuel your conquest! Anything that you are building will expose resources, if a plunder attack is coming your way, cancel all production and hide your troops and goods. You can hide troops by sending them to support any other city, even your enemy's city. Town guards are useless because they eat up your food supply, have low defense and cannot be moved.

If you don't have an army in your city and your resources are hidden in hideouts your enemies will never be able to get anything out of your city or profit by attacking you in any way. Never castle your first city as it is not designed for military and when you lose it you will start over from scratch.

First city builds:
T. Smith's first city
http://bit.ly/9HVsoV

My first city build features two trinsic temples and barracks for a small army. You will produce barons faster and can use the temples to make paladins who can bring in enough income for you to keep expanding rapidly or help a seiged castle.

The Lords of Ultima Wiki First City:
http://www.lordofultima.com/en/wiki/view/standard+first+city+layout

This layout is nice but I would rather have the support army.

Your second city:

You can choose to build another resource base for even faster expansion or you could produce a military city and get raiding income while you get ready to build up a castle. I do not recommend that you castle your second city because it takes tens of thousands of troops to hold onto a castle if you live on a continent with aggressive enemies. In my opinion a military city that can raid is better than building a second resource town. To expand quickly while having military muscle, build 1 resource town per 3 military towns and raid dungeons until you have the support you will need to hang onto a castle.

Use resources from your first city to build the second. Spam massive amounts of cottages and build your second city with a 3,000-4,000% construction speed to get powerful fast.

How to militarize:

Specialize in one kind of troop per city so that you can quickly build armies. If you build too many kinds of troops you will make them too slowly to be effective against a smart opponent. Troops in Lords of Ultima have two functions only defense and offense. Defensive troops are made to protect cities and castles. When attacked by an enemy defensive troops survive based off of their defense against the attacker's offense. For example 70,000 mages attack a city with 70,000 paladins. The paladins will win because of their high defensive score against magic. If 70,000 mages attack a city garrisoned by 70,000 rangers the mages will inflict massive casualties on the rangers due to their low defense against magic.

Defensive troops: Rangers beat beserkers, Paladins/templars beat mages, Guardians beat knights and calvary, sloops beat other ships, ballistae beat catapults, rams and ships

Offensive troops: Beserkers are the cheapest and easiest to replace offensive troops and make up the backbone of a seige army and decent plunderers. Knights are more expensive but travel twice as fast, inflict huge damage and carry away more loot. Mages and Warlocks inflict huge damage on most types of defensive troops but are expensive and slow to train. Ships do massive damage and carry away the most loot but are the slowest of all units to train and the most expensive.

Types of military support cities:

Trinsic Support: Makes paladins and templars. Paladins are great for raiding because of fast movement speed, double loot capacity and slightly more damage that beserkers. Paladins and templars are excellent protection against mages and warlocks which are often used for assaults to destroy the troops protecting a castle. Your military town is optomized to produce and house troops. You should be able to produce troops a 4100% or higher speed and house up to 90,000 non-castle or 300,000 castled. For more about troop speeds visit: http://www.louforum.com/forum/recruitment_calc.php?

Infantry Support: Built for producing rangers and guardians, the infantry city can quickly produce beserkers as well, making it a viable choice for raiding local dungeons and bosses.

Navy Support: Produces sloops, sloops count as much for defending as a galleon, if you have a castle on the water which is subject to ship attacks consider a navy support town

Military town builds:

This town uses mages, you can substitute any kind of troop you would like to specialize in for the moonglow towers.

http://bit.ly/cmHc3I

Castles:

As a member of a large and aggressive alliance, I can tell you that a lone castle doesn't stand much of a chance. If you want to castle, seek out a powerful alliance on your continent and make sure you have support. Decide what your purpose is for building a castle. Generally there are three kinds of attacks: plunder, assault and seige. If you want to plunder, I recommend beserkers because they are cheap. Plunder inactive players who don't defend their goods with ruthless abandon.

Knights are also good plunderers and a calvary based castle can also quickly produce scouts. Assault forces are designed to decimate defenders and soften up a castle before a seige. Knights and Warlocks generally make up assault forces because they are fast and inflict massive damage. Seige castles should have the ability to produce a baron, seige engines or ships and troops to protect the baron, most of the time beserkers are the troop of choice.

To protect your castle, go with a full stack of troops and level 10 wall and towers. Build 4 pitfalls, 4 barricades, 2 camo towers, 1 scout tower, 1 ballista tower and 2 arcane traps for a good defense.

Attacking:

Time your attacks so that they do not land during night protection. Work with your alliance to send out multiple small attacks to confuse your enemy so they do not know when or which attack is the real thing. A smart enemy will send his troops out of his castle if he suspects an assault. So send mixed signals and you will have a better chance to inflict casualties or succeed by luring his protectors away from your intended target so that your seige can prevail. An enemy can look at the movement speed of your troops to determine what kind of an attack you are sending but a clever ruse can still hide which city you are about to seige and conqueor if you send out more than one baron. To have your baron conqueor a city you must outnumber troops in the target city and gain a percentage of power over time to conqueor.