Beginner's Guide - Wonders of the world by Curtain

[zinc bear]

Hello!
I’m Curtain and this is “Beginner’s Guide”. This guide is based on my experiences of the game and is aimed at beginner level players but feel free to read and comment on it even if you have more experience with the game.
As a disclaimer I want to mention that this guide is not the only or necessarily even the best way to play the game so experiment and enjoy this great game with your own style.

Today’s topic is wonders!

The guide is divided into four parts:
Introduction to wonders and how they work
Wonders for governors
Wonders for Kings, Dukes and other kingdom leadership
Wonder build strategies and example

Part 1: Introduction to wonders and how they work

When you are playing Travian you might have seen some strange tall mountains spread around the map. These mountains are what will eventually become homes for the wonders. The wonder itself is a large team objective, which when completed will end the server. Wonders can only be built in the village that exists on each of these mountains, these villages are covered in clouds at the start but “unlock” or become uncovered after a server has been going for 111 days making them ready to be chiefed. The appearance of Wonders signals the beginning of end game on a server, which is a time where all the remaining kingdoms start to seriously duke it out to determine the ultimate winner.

Each server has 7 of these mountains, each capable of housing a wonder so act fast if you wish to have one for yourself because these don’t last for long. There is one located at the center of the map at coordinates: 0.0, and 6 others around it at 22.45, 50.0, 22.-45, -22.-45, -50.0 and -22.45. When the first wonder is constructed to building lvl 100 the server ends, winners are declared and final scores calculated.

Things aren’t quite that simple though; one can’t just take and build a Wonder like it’s nothing for many challenges lie ahead. Firstly you must beat the Natars guarding the village and then defend it from rivals and angry Natars trying to take it back, construct it faster than competitors and finally prevent it from being destroyed by your jealous enemies!

Since the wonder is so important, here are some facts about wonders to help you on your way:

• The first wonder to complete will end the server; this doesn’t mean who ever completes it wins though. The server win is still handed out by the victory points but wonders give a hefty percentage based bonus at the end. This means that while being the first to complete the wonder doesn’t guarantee the win it’s a big advantage that is hard to beat.

• The wonder bonuses are as follows, 1st gains 50% more VP, 2nd gains 33% and 3rd 25% more. The last 4 gain 20%, 15%, 10% and 0% respectively. Wonders are ranked based on how high their level is when the first wonder hits lvl 100. If your kingdom holds multiple wonders, all the % bonuses get added together. For example if your kingdom has 5 million VP and holds wonders ranked 4th and 5th at the end, your end VP will be 5 million + 35% = 6.75 million VP

• ALL troops eat only HALF of what they normally eat while staying in the wonder. This makes wonders great places to park your defense. That being said when you do park troops in the wonder you must feed them. This is because unlike normal defense call or stationary defense, the wonder holder has no chance of feeding the hundreds of thousands of troops on his own.

• The wonder village itself is a 15 cropper, with all fields built up to lvl 10 just like ordinary Natarian village. Unlike normal Natar villages though, there is also a level 20 Mainbuilding, Granary and Warehouse to get you started on the construction.

• The village naturally has the wonder construction site as well. The wonder is so large it takes the entire inner ring of the city, leaving it with only 16 normal construction slots (compared to 20 of a normal village) + the wonder + rally point

• The wonder works like a Residence or Palace, meaning so long as it stands the village can’t be chiefed away from you. This is good so your enemies can’t chief the village so easily but also means once construction starts you can’t change the owner of the wonder anymore so choose carefully.

• Unlike any normal village or a city, the wonder village has access to Great Warehouse and Great Granary buildings, which can house triple the resources of their normal versions, up to 300k on lvl 20. This is extremely useful as the last level of the wonder requires a whopping 1 million of Iron, Clay and Wood storage to fit all the required resources.
• The wonder village is also the only village that won’t use your racial wall but instead has its own unique wall called “Natarian Wall”. The Natarian Wall entirely new graphics but regarding it’s stats it’s equal to a Teuton Wall (sturdy but relatively low defense %)

• No gold can be used in the wonder; this means no NPC or no instant finish on buildings to name the 2 most important implications. Plus account and resource boosts apply normally

• Natars will attack the wonder every 5 levels with 2 waves so don’t be surprised when you see the reports. Their forces get stronger as the wonder levels and during the last 5 wonder levels they will attack at every finished level as well. The Natars are unlikely to breach the wonder but if the wonder is managed poorly or the defense is too thin they will give significant casualties, especially on the higher levels.

• Lastly the wonder village can’t be made your capital

Here is an example on how your wonder might look at lvl 100 (Olympe - Com 2) 🙂

Part 2: Wonders for governors

In this section I will go over the 3 phases of the wonder construction from governors point of view and tell you what to do and how to contribute for the success of your kingdom.

2.1 Set up phase

This phase starts from the first day of the server and lasts till the day the wonders spawn (server day 111). During this time it’s important for the kingdom but also for the individual players to set themselves up for success. For a governor this means primarily 5 things:

• Pick a wonder you want to build up and settle at least one village near it. The more villages you settle near your chose wonder, the easier it becomes for you to contribute to it so don’t dally. You will want at least 1 well developed village with defense production and large market place capacity before the wonders spawn, ideally more than one. Don’t just blindly start settling your closest wonder at the game start though as there is no guarantee that your team will eventually go for that one. Talk with your team about wonders from early on and decide as a group which wonders you will attempt to take and settle near that one. Sometimes the wonders are quite far so remember that the village will initially grow much slower so settling too early could cripple your growth.

• Listen to what your team leadership is instructing you to do, especially if you are unfamiliar with the game. Team kings are often experienced players with multiple servers behind their backs so they have some experience on how the end game goes so listen to them. That being said bad kings do exist so don’t take everything what they say as a holy scripture. Talk with your other leaders like the dukes if you doubt what the king is saying.
• Train either a wonder hammer if you are an offense player capable of such a feat (it’s pretty hard) or alternatively train some defense with which you can help out on the wonder defense. Talk to your leaders and ask what you should do if you aren’t sure.
• Attempt to gather enough gold for a plus account as this is extremely important in feeding your troops and supplying the wonder with construction materials. Around the time wonders spawn the plus account for the entire round costs about 50 gold. This is easily doable simply by doing daily missions and selling adventure loot you don’t need as this gains you a lot of silver and silver can be converted to gold. Be thrifty with your gold and it will be more than enough. If you are purchasing gold then buy the plus account at latest when the wonders spawn.
  -If you are active or simply want more responsibility, ask your king for a special job. There are several things the team needs to succeed, all the way from training the wonder scouts to sitting some account. Be active and ask for more responsibility if you think you can handle it.

2.2 First days of the wonder
This is the time between wonders appearing and the essential buildings being completed inside the wonder village. This phase is very simple for you if you prepared yourself well for the wonders. Simply put don’t attack the wonder under any circumstance (the king has this part under control and any unanticipated attacks will at best be waste and at worst teamkill so don’t do it). Usually very quickly after the wonders have spawned the king will instruct when it’s safe to send defense, simply send some of your defense there after this time. IF the king doesn’t give timing for the defense, don’t send any until you see the wonder change hands into your kingdom. Half of your defense is a good rule of thumb but it could be higher or lower than that as well, ask your king if you aren’t sure how much you should send. Prioritize units that are slow to be sent to the wonder (infantry defense or defense from villages that are very far from your teammates) and leave the fastest troop’s home to respond to normal attacks (cavalry defense and defense based in a village which has a tournament square)

After you have sent your defense start up a trade route to the wonder (you did unlock your plus account right?) for at least half the crop value of the troops you send to defend it and you are done. So for example if you sent in 7500 phalanx and 1500 druidriders, the normal amount they would eat would be 7500 + 1500 * 2 = 10500 crop an hour, so in a wonder they would only eat 5250 so a good trade route (or trade routes from several villages) would be about 5500 an hour. More is always better but never send less than the amount of troops you have as that will quickly lead to either starving or your troops being kicked out.
This is the phase when you should stop settling new villages (chiefing is still alright) outside of strategic reasons (for example a new treasury if you are a duke).

2.3 Finish strong
Your wonder is now secured, defended and supplied but now is not the time to rest easy as the true challenge is still ahead. Firstly you will need to make sure your own wonder goes ahead on schedule, this means sending steady stream of resources, crop and troops to it. As the wonder level gets higher and higher, the construction will need more and more resources so be vigilant and set up trade routes for some resources right at the beginning but pay close attention to what the wonder team tells you about the resource situation and adjust based on that. Especially at the start the resource need is typically very low but towards the end everyone needs to put their contributions to the pile for the construction to go ahead. Remember that the wonder is a team objective which means you should do your best but if the king asks for 300k iron that doesn’t mean you should just send that by yourself. Keep adjusting based on instructions and your account size, smaller players are expected to contribute less than big ones so take your position in the kingdom to account as well, don’t starve yourself out so much that you can’t train more troops.

Now that the resources are taken care of we need to keep the wonder defended. For this you should aim to continuously train and send more defense there both to replace the losses to Natars but also to strengthen the defense as the wonder rises. As time goes on you should also increase the % contribution of your troops to the wonder from the initial 50% up to the 90-100% of your defense for the last few levels when the threat of enemy all-out attack is highest. Listen to your king on that as well. Always remember to keep your crop trade routes updated with your increasing numbers of defenders. You should always cover at least all of your own troops but the construction itself will also need some crop so it’s a good practice to contribute bit more than what your troops eat. Think it like this: Pretend we have total of 10k defense which costs us 10k an hour if we keep it home. If however we send it to the wonder we only have to pay 5k an hour leaving a 5k “profit”. If you now set a 7.5k crop trade route to cover for your troops and construction you are still left with 2.5k crop in “profit” so don’t be stingy on the crop.

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During this phase, you should gradually stop all but essential spending on your villages and instead spend 95% of your resources to troops and resources to the wonder. Only add absolutely necessary buildings and repairs like additional barracks or smithy levels for more troops or bigger marketplace for more trade capacity to the wonder. It’s not worth it to do things like upgrade fields once the game is this deep as the payout happens after the game has already ended.

Last but not least; stay active, contribute to best of your ability, communicate with the team and listen to the instructions given by your leadership. Also remember that things might look tough but you never know how situations flip on the wonder phase so if you already made it to this phase of the game it’s usually best to just stick it out till the end if not for yourself but for your team.

Part 3: Wonders for Kings, Dukes and other kingdom leadership

First of all read part 2 as you will still need to do largely the same steps as anyone else when trying to contribute to the wonder and its success. That being said the responsibility lies much more in your shoulders than on the governors. For the purposes of this part I assume you have completed one server as a governor to qualify as a king. That being said, on with the show!

3.1 Set up the kingdom

It will be up to your responsibility to lead the kingdom to a successful endgame. For this purpose you will need to set up the kingdom early for the spawn of the wonders. This means instructing the governors on how they should do things but also to think long term and estimate your position in the end game and how realistic it is for your kingdom to hold a wonder. Sometimes it’s better to accept defeat and admit you aren’t strong enough on your own. This could mean you have to merge up with a stronger kingdom (or assimilate few smaller kingdoms yourself) to strengthen your team before the eventual wonder race. A good rule of thumb is to look at the current server player count and see if you and your alliance of friendly kingdoms have at least 1/7th of that. For every 1/7th of the population your group controls you can take 1 wonder.
Once you have decided to go for a wonder and decided which one (or which ones if you intent to take multiple) it’s time to start preparations for it. Here is a small list of things you will need (each is per wonder). It’s up to you to find players to fill these tasks.

• Wonder holder
• Wonder team
• Wonder cleaner
• 4-6 Chiefs very close to the wonder
• Several support villages from governors near the wonder

Additionally here are some optional but extremely helpful additions:

6. Teuton scout stack for defense
7. Roman scout stack for offense
8. At least 1 “granary” village from the wonder holder and possibly more from some of your other players

Here are some additional details about each.

1. Wonder holder should be very active, preferably experienced player who is willing to use gold. While gold has only limited benefits in the wonder the occasional instant merchants can be invaluable. Plus account is mandatory and crop bonus highly recommended as well. The player can be of any tribe but roman players have a slight advantage for they can improve the fields in the wonder to raise population at the same time as they are building the actual buildings inside the village. This is a small advantage though so don’t feel forced to choose a Roman, activity and experience are the most important things. Another must is for the chose person to unlock some if not all of the extra building queue slots; this will lessens the need to micromanage the wonder and helps to keep it building around the clock. Gold using account also has access to the extra building slot cards which are quite helpful; if you choose a non-gold user, see if he can save any of these he finds to be used in the wonder.

2. The chosen account needs a wonder team as well. The wonder could run out of crop in as little as an hour so it’s important to have access to the wonder around the clock. This means 2 sitter’s minimum. Additionally you can set up a secret society with village details being shared so more people can keep an eye on the crop levels as well. If the wonder holder is the king or one of the dukes they automatically have this ability as well. Duals are a plus as well. A good wonder team hence is minimum of the king + 2 sitters + the dukes, but can sometimes include more people as well, such as experienced governors. Make sure that at least one person of the wonder holder and his 2 sitters has actually built a wonder before, so if it’s necessary he can instruct the other two on what to do and what to build.

3. You will need a wonder cleaner very close to the wonder to snatch it before your competitors have the chance to mess with your wonder. A perfectly executed wonder grab is over in less than an hour after the wonder has appeared so keep that in mind.

Above you see an example of the Natars and the wonder cleaner I used. The pictured example is a siege, with 20% hero attack boos, best Natarian Horn and T3 Swordsman weapon troop levels were around 10. You will need rams but not catapults so keep that in mind. In the case your wonder is already secured from all sides by your own team and enemies are far, it’s alright to use a cleaner that is bit farther away but even still the best option is always to instantly secure it with a custom built hammer from very close to the wonder. You can make a custom hammer like this very fast in few weeks in one of the support villages that should be there in the first place anyways. The village can be converted to defense or keep pumping offense afterwards as well. The amount of Natars can vary a bit on what you see in this image though so don’t cut it too close and train enough to clear bit stronger Natarian defense as well.

4. Naturally you will need chiefs as well. 4 Chiefs armed with great celebrations is enough to take down the wonder. Naturally the intended wonder holder will need 1 but the 3 others can come from other players as well. I suggest ordering construction of 6 chiefs though as there is always the chance some of the chiefs die or the players go inactive or simply have something very important to do that particular day so it’s good to have few backups. Simply ask some medium or large players who have villages close to the wonder to train a chief or alternatively ask those players to settle a village for the purpose of training a chief. Coordinate with all the chief holders who will eventually send if more than 4 are ready when the wonder spawns, don’t send more than 4 as that might result in the wonder being chiefed from yourself lowering the building levels. Remember all 4 need the great celebration to guarantee you succeed (even if they are all Romans).

5. Probably the most important task is to get several support villages near the wonder. These villages are important as close by villages can respond to threats faster so their defense can defend the villages, the kingdom core and the wonder itself. Try to encourage every governor to settle at least one near the wonder for this purpose and to build defense from there.

6. and 7. Scouts are important, but optional. Ultimately world wonder attacks tend to be all or nothing business so knowing their defense tends not to be as important as you send everything anyways. But if you aren’t the biggest kingdom around or otherwise not confident on your defense it pays to have at least some scout presence in the wonder, if for nothing else than to confirm that you have indeed been scouted. Ideally though you would have at least 10k Teuton scouts parked in the wonder at all times. This means selecting few Teuton players to provide these scouts for your wonder. Ask around in advance so they are done by the time the wonder is chiefed and ready to go. Similarly having one 10k roman scout stack to scout and enemy wonder could provide unexpected opportunities as well so having one around can be invaluable but not necessary. See if you have a Roman player that is up to the task and if so have him train a stack like this in one of his support villages. Gaul scouts are unfortunately not as good as the other two so they have to pass on this task. 😄

8. A granary village is a village that has at least lvl 20 Marketplace, lvl 10+ Trade Office at least 300k crop capacity (preferably more) and at least 200k Resource capacity. This is another reason why wonder holder should be a gold user, even though NPC in the wonder itself is impossible you can have one granary village like this very close to it and NPC there when ever needed, since the transport duration is so small the village can push very large amounts on crop to the wonder in a pinch. Ideally these granaries would be kept full until there is a need in the wonder. Having more than one is also nice, though the best user of this is the wonder holder as only he can instant send resources between his own villages but having few active players have one near the wonder is also recommended for that extra security.

3.2 First days of the wonder

So you have prepared yourself well, have all the pieces ready and now the wonder just unlocked. Your wonder team sent the cleaner siege on schedule and 4 chiefs with 30 second gaps are now on their way to the wonder with the wonder holders chief coming in last. Make sure to remind your governors to not send any attacks or chiefs you haven’t planned for. Accidental chiefing from your own team might cost you building levels at best, killed chiefs rage and anger at worst.

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Make sure to notify your governors when it’s safe to send defense. This way you minimize the time your wonder has to be in your hands but without defense. This is especially important if you have enemy villages near the wonder. If the wonder holders own chief is set to arrive at 15:05, you can tell your team to start sending defense 15:06. Defense sent too early will just “bounce” as the Natarian village automatically sends all def home but it’s important to get the wonder defended as soon as possible after it’s taken by your team.

Now it’s time to build. While there are several build strategies (presented in Part 4) the start is always similar. Remember that the wonder village has less building slots (16 with 3 being already used). The first thing you have to do is immediately build the following:

Residence lvl 1 – prevents chiefing from enemies and your own team

Embassy lvl 1 (if grain oasis in range) and Grain mill lvl 1 – cheap crop bonus

Great Warehouse lvl 1 and Great Granary lvl 1 – we need these for the wonder

All other slots full of lvl 1 granaries and warehouses – decoys against enemy catapult attacks aimed at our wonder early when its defense is still low

All of this takes only few minutes to complete and is well worth it, after this comes the first big project

Wall to lvl 20

At this point defense should already be flowing in and crop might be temporarily an issue so be prepared to top off the Granary couple of times yourself before the trade routes really start to bring in food.

3.3 To the end

Once the wall is complete the resource demand / hour of the wonder increases significantly, the wall is cheap to build and takes long to finish so usually during this time resources are plentiful. Warehouses and Granaries are medium cost medium time buildings and wonder is massive resource hog. Balance the building of wonder against the support buildings depending on your strategy and resource flow. The wonder village should be building something around the clock, either the wonder itself or support buildings like warehouses. This ensures that no construction time is lost, which is important considering that gold can’t be used to instantly finish buildings.

MAKE SURE to keep your governors updated on how much resources is needed and if the crop if going steady or if it’s going down / starving. Keeping governors motivated and informed so they can keep the res flow going is probably your biggest challenge outside of enemy hammers coming your way.

Keep building to your best ability, defend properly and finish the wonder (or attempt to do so) remember that sometimes your wonder doesn’t have to get to lvl 100 to win either so best to keep building the wonder and building troops till the end.

Some general build tips:

• Once you have your first lvl 20 Great Warehouse or Great Granary, place down at least 5 GW lvl 1’s and 3 GG lvl ‘s this way you will have the ability to build more of these in case the lvl 20 gets catapulted
• Keep all the slots you aren’t directly using full of decoy Great Granaries and Great Warehouses. This way enemy has more catapult targets to strike.
• Keep the unnecessary building to minimum as they cost building time but it’s better to build something cheap like an iron field to lvl 11 instead of idling the wonder when resources are low. This way once the wonder gets attacked there is a higher chance the wonder village stays as a city saving you wateditch build time.
• Save a CP slot for the city upgrade! City upgrade allows the construction of a waterditch which will increase your defenses against Natars but also provides unkillable defense power when the real rammers start to queue up to attack you in the end game.
• Depending on the danger level you can build few levels of the ditch, a level or two of the wonder and repeat. This way you are less likely to overflow resources, if danger level is high then rush build the waterditch as it’s too late to start once the attacks are already coming.
• It’s better to have full granary and slight overflow than empty granary and starvation but you don’t have to panic immediately when crop drops slightly. Consider the hour to hour changes in the granary levels and act accordingly, either by kicking the govs to send more, kicking out the troops of those who aren’t feeding or have someone NPC and send more.
• Demolish the lvl 1 decoy normal granaries and warehouses, residence, embassy and grain mill as you need space

Part 4: Building strategies

I would consider there to be 4 distinct strategies with of course each having their own small adjustments to the general flow plan. Here I will introduce the 4 main ones I have seen be used and explain their strengths and weaknesses. Here are the minimum required buildings for a level 100 wonder:

Wall lvl 20
Waterditch lvl 20
Mainbuilding lvl 20
200k Granary Space (1 GG or 2x G)
1000k Warehouse space (3x GW + W)

Regarding the warehouse space, there exist some sub strategies on how the warehouses should be built. Some prefer the 3x GW lvl 20, some use 1x GW lvl 20 + 3x GW lvl 18 some split it up even more. In any case the general idea is that the more and lower level buildings you use, the more catapult proof the warehouses become but the trade-off is less other buildings such as Granaries. Each uses their own strategy here, calculate the desired space and make sure your combination gives enough. I personally tend to use the 3x lvl 18 + 1 lvl 20 for my wonders but feel free to use any other combination so long as it totals at least 1000k capacity.

Regarding the Granary space, the more diligent your wonder team is and the more reliable and selfless your governors are the less you can get away with. My personal recommendation on this is to build 1 lvl 20 GG (alongside the one normal granary you start out with) so you can place down some seed GG’s but not level those unless it becomes necessary. This provides 400k crop space which lasts about an hour; bit less in the super late game which is still enough so long as governors set up proper trade routes. There of course will always be governors that don’t pay up or who don’t have plus account and hence play up less often than once in an hour which might cause problems if the granary space is too low. I recommend using 400k Granary space, but building more isn’t bad choice either if the situation calls for it.

For all these I assume you completed the previous step of having lvl 20 Wall ready

Infrastructure first:
In this strategy our goal is to complete the entire required infrastructure first and only then focus on the wonder, the priority hence becomes

Granary space > Warehouse space > Waterditch > Wonder

In the case of the waterditch, you usually have to build some wonder levels to reach the required 500 population to upgrade the village to a city. Once you upgrade switch focus back into the waterditch. You can alternate the last 5 levels of the WD and the wonder in case you are overflowing resources and don’t have immediate threat of attacks

Pros and cons:
+Since your wonder is last to start gaining levels you are focused on less
+Distinct low resource consumption and high resource consumption phase which will help keep overflow at a minimum
+Building the infrastructure first allows your governors to pile in more defense which will help reduce losses to Natars

-Governors might be demotivated and think you are falling behind, resulting in lot of explanations to people questioning the building situation
-Can overflow resources since resource consumption is very low at the start if governors aren’t properly informed
This is my preferred strategy to use, the polar opposite of this is

Wonder first:
Attempt to build as many wonder levels as you can and only increase warehouse space when you can’t build more wonder levels

Granary space > Waterditch > Wonder > Warehouse space

This strategy has relatively the opposite pros and cons of the infra first strategy

+Good morale on governors as they see your team speeding to the lead
+High resource demand from start so least likely to overflow

-Warehouse space is low so less buffer size for resources in case people send more than needed anyways
-Will be focused more by random attacks as the wonder is leading the race
-Natars will hit harder as your defense might not be developed yet.

Hybrid:
Mixture of the two above, simply build enough warehouse space for a set number of levels at a time (say 20 levels could be 10 or 15 or 5 or whatever you choose.) then build the levels followed up by warehouse space for the next 20 levels.

Granary space > Waterditch > Wonder > Warehouse space > Wonder > Warehouse space

This ones props and cons are relatively a mix of the previous two. You will get hit by Natars bit less than Wonder first but generally be behind on that strategy in wonder levels while having higher morale than infra first with higher target chance as well.

Remember that the total build time will be the same in all 3 so long as both strategies use the same granary and warehouse numbers, miss no build time and build no extra buildings. The difference is in the order not in the end result essentially.

This last one is for the wonder builders who answer “Purple” when asked about their favorite food, it’s uncommon and controversial yet it has its points.

Military wonder (also known as City first wonder):
This strategy takes advantage of the fast building but high population military buildings to hit city before anyone else. The idea is to build barracks, smithy, academy and stable each to low levels, unlock some defense (or offense for you really crazy folk) units. For the actual wonder the construction can follow any of the 3 previous plans as that is secondary to getting the city (and the military production) rolling in early. The Academy is first to be removed, followed by the smithy and then the production buildings when the space is needed by something more important.

Barracks, Stable, Academy and Smithy > Granary space > Waterditch > Wonder/Warehouse space

+Can control the resource levels by queueing troops up
+Can build troops to have home in the only half crop cost village
+First to city which means first to waterditch, which means secure wonder with least Natar losses of them all
+Some people will respect you

-Units are pointless as offense you can’t build properly and defense will be low in numbers and levels compared to the total def (or you could have simply built it somewhere else)
-Some consider it a dick move if you use their resources to build troops for yourself
-Some people laugh at you
-Takes more slots than normal
-Higher total construction time than the 3 previous ones

Really though this strategy is not that bad as it might seem and has its place. It’s just a more unconventional approach to wonder building that often raises eyebrows as you see one of the wonders speeding away in pop. I would recommend very small kingdoms should try this as it maximizes your defenses survivability but of course sacrifices overall build time.

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Here are some additional buildings that can give you an edge in certain situations.

Grain mill and Bakery – These buildings won’t really make or break the crop economy but if there is a time when you can’t queue up something more important, building these can give you a bit of extra crop later. Especially useful if the wonder holder is Roman as he will most likely level all crops to lvl 12 anyways

mbassy – Much like the grain mill and bakery before, this building is cheap to have at lvl 1 and if the space isn’t needed for anything more important consider keeping it for that small extra crop boost. Don’t bother with the embassy if there is no crop oasis in range though. If there is 2 crop oasis in range, pumping the embassy to lvl 10 could be considered but again only if you can’t build anything more useful because of crop or resource shortage.

Residence – While typically only needed right at the start and demolished as soon as loyalty hits 100, sometimes enemies will attempt to take your wonder to their own (especially infra first strategy wonders). During these times plopping down lvl 1 residence can be the difference between losing and keeping your wonder so don’t hesitate to do so

Level 1 Wonder – Much like the residence this will also act like a residence to prevent wonder chiefing. If you experience an attack before you have properly started building the wonder (perhaps during the first days when you are still working on the walls) build a lvl 1 wonder alongside the residence, this way it doubles up your chief safety.

Level 1 warehouse, granary and their great variants – All slots that aren’t used by anything else should always be filled with these. They server a double purpose in taking catapult hits for you possibly saving something more important and serving as a backup in case your lvl 20 building gets taken down preventing you from building more lvl 1’s till you have finished another lvl 20. And if nothing else give you that 1 population.

Fields if nothing better can be afforded

Any buildings during a mass siege – When you smell that the enemy is going all out, build any building that gives the highest population / time. This is so that your wonder survives the hit as a city and saves you from losing the waterditch in the middle of their siege waves. This of course is only relevant if you have the waterditch to begin with. If the enemy is going all out before your wonder is a city, continue like normal with the possible exception of adding more granary space in case your main granary gets taken down.

Don’t hesitate to take down any of these (well except the wonder) if you need more building space

More building strategies exist but these are the 4 main ones I want to highlight. I should also mention that if your main building gets taken down it’s almost always to build it right back up as the wonder itself takes so long that the main building more than pays for itself. Always optimize all building for the time it takes, not the resource costs as resources are essentially infinite, you just need to ask for more from the governors.

To give you a bit of context on late game wonders here is a selected example that shows a well defended wonder (the same one as in the first image) getting attacked by a low end world wonder hammer.

Attacker Pasam, defender Olympe in their wonder – Com 2

As you can see the defense and offense numbers grow to be quite large so one player can’t hope to defend all by himself. This is to give some sense of scale on how the end game wonder fights happen. Typically the largest single hammers are in the ballpark of 200k crop consumption so prepare to see one of these knocking at your door as well.