Forge of Empires: Build a City

Forge of Empires 🏰🗺️: Establish Your Empire and Voyage Across Eras 🔝💪

Erect a city 🌆, cultivate a hamlet 🌽, and delve into tribes 🏞️ in Forge of Empires! This strategic city-building 🏗️ game allows you to shape your own society. Here are some defining aspects of the game:

🏞️ Discover Various Epochs: Traverse centuries 🕰️ and uncover different civilizations 🌍 across ages. From the Stone Age to the Space Age, there's perpetually a fresh enigma 🔍 to unveil.

👥 Develop Your Clan: Amass resources 🌾 and construct abodes 🏠 for your populace 👥. Fuse tribes together and forge an idyllic town 🏡.

🎮 Urban Planning Games: Forge of Empires revolutionizes urban planning games 🎮, offering a distinctive playing experience with its diverse ages and economic management 💰 setup.

🚀 Journey Through Time: Ascend an empire on-the-move 🚀 with Forge of Empires. Seek adventure 🗺️, explore the wilderness 🌳, and nurture your culture.

🌻 Agricultural Livelihood: Reap your harvest 🌽 and stockpile resources 🌻 to fortify your village.

🏙️ Metropolis Development: Transform your city 🌇 into a bustling metropolis 🏙️ and emerge as the most influential sovereign in the region.

🎭 Strategic Operations: Strategy plays a pivotal role 🔑 in Forge of Empires. Control your resources, outline your expansion, and outmaneuver your adversaries.

🏘️ Alliances: Unite with a guild 🏘️ and collaborate with fellow players to construct a formidable coalition.

🔨 Sculpt Your Urban Landscape: Enhance your city 🛠️ to perfection through exquisite structures, embellishments, and more.

Guide:City Planning

The City is the main part of the game. You have to construct a variety of building structures to provide citizens, produce resource, and eventually build up an army. The city is composed of a large area of square grids. At the start, the arrangement of the buildings does not seem to matter much, but in the later game, the building area's limits become more constricting, and the player has to choose what type of buildings they should build or remove and how to place the position of buildings in order to maximize the efficiency.

The Reconstruction Mode is likely the simplest way to design/redesign your city layout.

Here are several suggestions that may help you to arrange your buildings:

    1. Move the Town Hall anywhere except a corner, since it is the hub of the city and all roads must connect to it. When you are required to have 2 laned roads, have your 2 laned roads down one side of your town hall and normal roads down the opposite side.

    2. Arrange your buildings in columns or rows, and put all buildings with the same width together. For example, all the buildings  having (3x3) area should be in the same column or row.

    3. Also, every building needs to be connected by a road to the Town Hall in order to function. Make your road as straight as possible; the less turns it has, the more efficient it is.

    4. Decorations don't need to be connected to the road; use them to fill up the leftover empty space. 

    5. Always sell outdated buildings to free up space or to replace them with new and more efficient buildings.

Tips for a Better City Layout

Determine Your Play Style

Before anything else, figure out what your play style is. This usually falls under one of a few of categories (or a combo of sorts):

    Goods-Based GE/GvG Goods Farmer

This play style will focus mainly on using goods to get by wherever possible. You probably negotiate most, if not all of GE; you farm goods for the treasury to help with GvG if you’re in that style of guild; and you might negotiate to gain sectors on the continent map. In essence, you hardly ever fight. Someday, you might even have enough of a goods empire amassed to be a seller of goods.

    Fighting-Based GE/GvG Fighter

This play style will focus mainly on brute strength to get by wherever possible. You probably fight most, if not all of GE; if your guild participates in GvG you like to tear up the maps fighting; and it would be unthinkable of you to negotiate the continent map. You might even be your neighborhood’s worst nightmare. In essence, the only thing you need goods for is the tech tree and certain quests. You rarely use them elsewhere, except to maybe trade with guild mates to help them out.

    Fighting-Based GE/GvG DA Farmer

This play style is one that enjoys fighting, but maybe not as much as the previous style. You like to fight as much of GE as possible, if not all of it; and you might even fight a lot of the continent map. Occasionally, you might ransack your neighborhood, but it’s not as common for you. If your guild does GvG, you’re likely to help by planting DAs because you’re not as keen to fight on the maps (or you’re mobile based and it’s too difficult to fight with your device). Troops and attack are important to you, but you’re not adverse to using goods here and there to help yourself along.

    Balanced (with a subtle preference to goods or fighting)

Likely the most difficult play style to achieve, a balanced player strives to use troops and goods equally. If this is you, you’re likely a jack-of-all-trades, master of none. This is a-okay in this game, because it means you’re far more self-sufficient usually than any other player. Despite that, you’re going to have a preference to either goods or fighting, however slight it might be. You want the troops to be able to fight as you please, and you also want the goods to toss around as you want and/or need.

Depending on how you play the game will determine what buildings are suitable for your city. If you’re someone who doesn’t need a lot of goods because you fight your way through everything, then you’re not going to want a lot of goods-producing items. If you’re someone who negotiates all of GE and doesn’t fight at all, then you probably don’t want barracks, and you definitely don’t need a lot of the buildings that boost attack bonus and nothing else. This makes a big difference, so deciding this first and foremost sets the tone for everything else.

If it isn’t Helping You, Toss It

This is the part where the tough decisions often come in, and no one is perfect at this. Start by accepting that there will likely be some building, at some point and time, that you absolutely have to have for aesthetic purposes only. You just think it looks really cool in your city, and you cannot bear to part with it. It’s fine. One or two of these won’t totally mess you up. A lot of them will.

So if you’re really lucky, you have some Store Buildings handy. That way some of these buildings that you need to be rid of but can’t purchase again (event or special buildings, basically) can be put back into your inventory… forever. The inventory has no limits, so keep those special pixels locked away where they won’t take up that valuable city space. Depending on where you’re at with your city, you may or may not have enough of these bad boys to pick up everything you want to store… so you have to determine: can you do it in stages as you earn them, or do you have to bite the bullet and delete something? It’s a tough decision. Knowing that it can happen, going forward into the future think about how the building might serve you in the long-run before planting it in your city; that way you might avoid the heartache of having to delete something you love but doesn’t stand up to the test of time, because you lack a store building.

How do you Know if it’s Worth the Space?

You’ll probably see this referenced elsewhere on the site, but knowing if something is worth the space comes down to how much it produces per square that it occupies. For example, a Shrine of Knowledge takes up four total squares and produces a certain number of coins (based on era) and potentially a FP (if it’s motivated). To give a good example, lets pretend we have a SOK from the Industrial Era. It makes 4,528 coins a day, and if motivated, a FP. So that’s 1,132 coins per square (4,528/4=1,132), and 1/4 of a FP per square. You would then compare this to a different FP producer, for example, to decide what one was better (if you were thinking of removing a few SOKs perhaps to put in something else).

The Farm is a 4×5 production building that makes 730 supplies an hour, base. So 4*5=20 squares used. 730/20=36.5 supplies per square an hour.

The Alchemist is a 3×2 production building that makes 180 supplies an hour, base. So 3*2=6 squares used. 180/6=30 supplies per square an hour.

Now, The Alchemist seems to be slightly worse off than The Farm, but by very little. So when it comes time to determine what to put in your city, you now know that it might be worth the trade-off to just run a few little Alchemists, instead of a a few large Farms. Or, if you don’t have the space for a Farm, you know that an Alchemist isn’t a terrible alternative. This is especially important once you start winning event buildings, because those often give supplies too and you don’t need to have as many era-specific producers around. Or, for preparing to do an event when you need to do all those 4-hour and 8-hour productions. Having a lot of little producers makes this easier than having a lot of big ones (and when you get up much higher in era, a lot just temporarily plant Blacksmiths).

That’s just one example for supplies. You can use it for any building in the game. In fact, the comparison was made for defense buildings too, if you want to look at that breakdown for space. It seems like a lot of math, but after a while it becomes intuitive, promise.

Less is More when it comes to Roads

The good thing is, you don’t have to stay a slave to your roads forever! There’s no one right way to put your roads in, but the first thing to remember is that you can put your Town Hall anywhere. This means you can position it so that the start point of your roads works best for the buildings you have in your city. So experiment with its placement, see how it goes, and don’t be afraid to move it around as you reorganize your city again, and again, and again…

Next, remember that if it needs to be connected to a road, you only need one piece of road touching it to make it work. This is even true with the two-lane roads. So long as one square of that two-lane highway touches your building, you’re golden; even if the building has to be on a two-lane road to survive. Speaking of that, items that need a two-lane road have to be placed on the highway, but items that just need a road (aka the stuff that’s a 1×1) can be placed on either kind of road. So if it buts up to the two-lane highway, you don’t have to also place regular road for it. You’re good as-is.

As far as the two-lane roads go, too, you don’t need to use all highway in your city. You can use just a few squares of two-lane road for the few buildings that absolutely have to have it, and then the rest can be regular old 1×1 road. You’ll save a lot of space by not using all highway all the time. Seriously, rip out all the roads in your city in reconstruction mode and see all the wasted space you could maybe get back for a shiny new event building. You’re welcome. 😉

Finally, with roads, less is more and straight is the name of the game. Try to use as few, straight pieces of road as you can. Again, you only have to have a building touched by one piece of road, so be creative with this as you’re able.

Decorations are Awful for Multiple Reasons

Every decoration or cultural building you have in your city is not only taking up valuable space, but it gets to be motivated too. Sure, they look pretty and it’s fun to fill in gaps, but at what expense? Eventually, you will tear them down for something else, so why waste the supplies and gold building them now, or the store building later to put away something special?

Here’s a concise list of why your decorations need to go:

    1. They will suck up your aid. This isn’t as big an issue in the early eras when you don’t have as many buildings and everyone is eager to aid you to get BPs for their first GB, but as you age-up and get more and more special buildings that require aid to produce the good stuff… you’re going to feel the pain of too many decorations. For every decoration you have, that’s an aid that maybe could have gone to motivating something better, like a Tribal Square or a Hall of Fame instead. You know… things that do something for you. Not that happiness isn’t important, but if you’re relying on having decorations aided to maintain your citizens being enthusiastic, you need to make some changes anyways because that’s no way to run a city.

    2. They are space hogs. Seriously. There are plenty of fantastic GBs that serve the purpose of giving you happiness and providing something else that can be leveled up to provide far more happiness than any decoration can hope to hold a candle to. Replacing useless decorations with useful GBs should be a goal.

    3. It’s far more work to rearrange your city. It may seem ridiculous that this is a concern, but as you age-up and the buildings you need get bigger and weirder in shape, this really matters. You’ll find yourself doing reorganization more frequently, and having to click on all those little decorations and move them around and squeeze them in gets really old, really fast. It’s obnoxious enough moving a ton of SOKs around, let alone all your Wind Turbines.

Aside from the aid, this also holds true for things like Victory Towers and even Watch Fires/Ritual Flames. There are some out there who, for the sake of valuable space, don’t have any home defense boost outside of maybe some passive set bonuses. Those are the people who believe a good defense is a good offense, but it’s certainly an option. So really, really think about all those little space hogs, do you really need them?

Is there a Great Building for that?

It was touched on briefly, but many times there’s a GB that can take the place of one or more items in your city to do the same function, but better. Houses can turn into Habitat and/or Innovation Tower. Tons of decorations can be taken care of by Alcatraz, Frauenkirche of Dresden, Hagia Sophia, and more. Usually, you can roll a whole spread of buildings into one better GB which can be leveled up with FPs to just get more and more impressive.

Likewise, there are some specialty buildings that can take the place of other items to do a task better in your city. For those who don’t need as many goods, you might get away with just Tribal Squares and questing to supply yourself. If you’re a fighter who is going to take Alcatraz to new heights, you might find Terrace Farms are better than Hagia Sophia for FPs.

Depending on your play style, there are a slew of buildings you can earn to take up less space while doing a better job than everything they’re replacing. You just have to determine what those switch-outs are. It’s especially awesome when the building you pick to replace others doesn’t need to be motivated to give you all the goodies.

Roads are necessary for connecting almost all buildings to the Town Hall., and as you build organically you’re going to end up putting in a lot of roads. It’s like a rite of passage, we’ve all been there. The question is how long you stay there. Roads are one of the biggest space hogs in the game, especially when you hit Progressive Era and have to account for a two-lane road that also has to connect directly to the Town Hall. How obnoxious.

One of the best examples comes in the form of production buildings. For this example lets look at the first era that offers a really large production building, and a really small one: High Middle Ages.

Description of content

Guild Continent Map

All action takes place via the GvG continent map, which is a special map designed for inter-guild battles and warfare. The map is split up into provinces, which you can see are separated by rivers and mountain borders. Each area represents a different age.

The GvG continent map allows you to see a quick overview of your guild's influence in different provinces and also serves as the entry point into those provinces, where your guild will do battle. In the image below, you can see your own guild's area of influence highlighted in green, with enemy territory shown in red. White areas indicate territory which is owned by NPCs, in which player guilds have yet to expand.

Your guild can fight in a single province, or all of them... the choice is yours! However, you can only do battle using units and goods from the same age as the province you are fighting in (with the exception of the All Ages Map, but let's ignore that and give it a section of its own)... so, for example, in the Iron Age map, you can only use units and goods from the Iron Age.

Hovering over one of the provinces in the map will display a tooltip containing information about the province which includes: The name, the province's age, the top guilds, the number of guilds participating, the support factor, and the average power of all the sectors in that province. At the top left of the screen, you can also see your guild's current ranking, and clicking the area will open the guild ranking window.

Clicking a province in the GvG continent map will take you to the province view.

Provinces

It's in the province map where battles are fought. From here you are able to conquer new turf by laying siege to a sector and then attacking it, with help from your guild members.

Sectors

Sectors are represented by hexes in the province map. Your guild must conquer sectors - and defend them from invasion - to expand its territory. Conquering a sector is in two stages - first you lay siege, then you must attack!

Sectors are colored according to who owns them:

    Red - Enemy guilds.

    Green - Your guild.

    White - Neutral (NPCs).

Landing zone

When you open the Guild province map for an era, you may notice that some of the map is dark, which indicates unexplored, unclaimed territory. The active area is where you can land your first army and establish your guild's headquarter.

Which sectors to attack

When you initially enter a province map, you are able to place a siege army in any of the sectors in the landing zone sectors (indicated by a bouncing golden arrow). Once you have your guild's headquarter set up you can only attack sectors neighboring your headquarters or any of your unshielded sectors.

Sector status

You can see in the map above if a sector is under siege, as it has an icon with crossed swords above it. A shield icon above a sector means that the sector is protected, as it was recently conquered and cannot currently be attacked. Protected sectors also do not count for attacking and placing siege armies. This means that if you only have one, protected sector next to an enemy sector you want to attack, you will need to wait until the protection is lifted from your sector before you are able to deploy your siege army there.

Event log

The event log records actions made by your own guild members and enemy guilds. You can access it from the province map by clicking the event log button in the menu at the bottom left of the screen.

Three different tabs are available in the log:

    Important events

    Your guild actions

    Enemy guild actions

Forge of Empires embodies a journey across epochs 🌍, where you can erect a city 🌆, cultivate a village 🌽, explore tribes 🏞️, and mold your own civilization 🗺️. Enlist in the game now and commence your expedition!