War Selection – Beginner Guide

Everything you need to know when starting War Selection.

A Note About Play Style

Note: Credit goes to Adult Lunchables

This is my personal play style. It can be vulnerable to getting rushed, and it doesn’t start taking off until the Industrial Age is reached. If you’re looking to play it safe, this might not be for you. But there’s going to be a lot of information that can help you no matter what style you like to play.

Stone Age

Before you start a new game, consider this. The smaller you keep your town in the early game, the safer you’ll be. Not only does a small town decrease the chance of animals killing you, it’ll also decrease the chance of being spotted by another player who may have his base close to yours. I suggest not venturing out in the early game for any reason other than finding a stone/wood pile. Do not venture out to harvest food from animals. You need to harvest berries and then immediately transition to farming before you run out of berries.

The very first thing you do is decide if you want the Stone Age worker upgrade called “Fur Shoes”. If you want it, activate it from your Altar immediately when the game starts. Personally I always get Fur Shoes.

Now start building workers and huts. Your goal is to get to 50 workers, but it’s up to you to decide when to make those workers. Send most of your workers to chop wood and only a few to gather berries. The first Temple upgrade requires only wood so you’ll need a lot of it. You only need enough food to keep making workers at this point, no more. While you’re building workers and huts, you need to spot a place to build your Temple. The Temple needs to be right next to a stone wood pile or else your workers will waste time bringing resources back to the Temple after gathering them. If you don’t have a stone/wood pile in your immediate view, you’ll need to venture out to find one. This is the only time you should explore the area before you have military units.

Before running out of berries to harvest, you need to stop making workers for a few moments so you can have enough food to build your Temple. While the Temple is constructing, resume building workers. As soon as the Temple is complete, you want to upgrade it to the Bronze Age.

Bronze Age

Immediately after upgrading to the Bronze Age through your Temple, you need to build a farm and upgrade all your workers. Don’t worry if you can’t immediately upgrade all your workers due to lack of food, first upgrade enough workers to build a farm (upgrade is required to build). Don’t just upgrade workers randomly; make sure you’re sending all your upgraded workers to the farm because they’ll speed up the rate at which you can upgrade other workers. As food starts coming in faster from your upgraded farm workers, then start transitioning your tree cutting workers by upgrading them and then sending them to the stone pile. The goal in the early Bronze Age is to simply get all your workers off berries and off trees and get them exclusively mining from stone/wood pile and gathering food from your farm. Also, you only need 1 farm. You’ll need more stone/wood and copper piles. But you can play the entire game from 1 farm only.

Once you’ve got a working farm, you’ll want to get to the next age as soon as possible, but that will require copper. It’s tempting to start gathering copper right away, but beforehand you need to do 2 things. First you need to upgrade all of your workers, and then you need to build a warehouse next to a copper pile.

While upgrading your workers and searching for copper, you’ll want to decide what upgrades to get from your Elder’s House before clicking to upgrade to the Iron Age. Personally I usually skip on “Extra Beds in Homes” because it requires so much food while you’re trying to use food to upgrade your workers. Instead, I’ll usually just select “Explore the area”. Depending on the timing here, you might be able to complete the “Explore the Area” upgrade to help you find the copper deposit you’ll need. This will help keep your workers safe because you’ll be able to see if there are animals in the way of your copper.

Once all your workers up upgraded, you’ve built a warehouse next to a copper pile, and you’ve selected an upgrade or two from your Elder’s House, it’s time to upgrade to the next age.

Iron Age

This is where you’re really going to notice how well you’ve been juggling resources, workers, and population. By the time you enter the Iron Age, you really want to be at 50 workers but if you’re not, make that your focus in the early Iron Age. Sometimes I’ll have about 40 workers going into the Iron Age then I’ll finish 10 more workers as soon as I can after entering this age.

There are 3 critical upgrades available that you’ll want to activate as soon as possible in the Iron Age, you’ll want to research the Sickle in the farm, and Metal Axe and Metal Chisel in the warehouse. You never want to waste time upgrading your workers and their abilities, the longer you wait, the less benefit you’ll get from these upgrades. You’ll also want to take a look at the Extra Beds in Homes upgrade if you didn’t already select it in the Bronze Age. Since you’re racing to get 50 workers and the population limit is 50 at this point, you won’t be able to make military units without the Extra Beds in Homes upgrade.

It’s personal preference, but the Iron Age is where I start building my first military units. However, they’re not for fighting other players, they’re just to help me push out into the map. Build just a single Barracks and make 12 or so of whatever military units you want. You’ll be doing other tasks while waiting for military units to build. But your ultimate goal is to use those units to push out to find another stone/wood pile and another copper pile. You’ll want your resources spotted out and cleared from wild animals before you need to use them. When you’re ready, you can even place warehouses near your future resources to make the transition even easier. Nothing’s worse than running out of resources while you’re juggling a million things and maybe even getting scouted by an enemy player. Always look forward.

Once you have 50 workers, a barracks, are scouting spots for more resources, and have upgraded to Extra Beds in houses… It’s time to upgrade to the Middle Ages.

Middle Ages

The beginning of the Middle Ages is a lot like the beginning of the Bronze Age in that your main focus is getting those workers upgraded, and starting with farm workers if you can’t upgrade them all at once. I really can’t stress enough how wasteful it is to not upgrade your workers on time.

Similarly, you’ll want to upgrade your Farm, your Warehouse, and your Barracks. Then get Cleavage Wedges, and the Supertough Pickaxe from your newly upgraded Warehouse.

After upgrading all your workers, you’ll probably want to get the Intelligence Agency upgrade in your Guildhall. The reason for not researching Intelligence Agency while you’re upgrading workers is that the food requirement will slow you down. Do them one at a time, upgrade workers, then grab Intelligence Agency. This is where things start to get interesting in my opinion. You’re going to use those troops you used to scout new resources to start scouting enemy players. I’ve noticed a lot of players scout earlier than this, which is probably smart. They’ll build a Stable and send horsemen to scout the map. While this does give those players an advantage in time, I find it difficult to manage at a point when you can be focusing on more important things. I like to just wait until I get “Intelligence Agency” then I know exactly where I’m heading to scout.

The Middle Ages is also where a lot of players choose to build more military units, build walls, and other fortifications. It’s all preference at the end of the day, but I skip right by this age. I don’t build walls, towers, or more units. I simply gather more resources while pushing my few scout troops to strategic places (explained next).

Once Intelligence Agency is running I start to take note of the player positions on the map. If 2 players are close to each other, you can pretty much assume they’ll be worried about each other and not worried about more distant players. 9 times out of 10 in this stage, I can decide on a target I would like to attack first.

Once you’ve identified your target, start moving your scout troops and a couple workers toward their base. See if they have any towers up, and see how close you can get some of your own towers without risking damage. If you want to be a real jerk at this point, you can move some of your scout troops near wild animals and lead the animals into your enemy’s base. This won’t cause that much damage, but it’ll slow your enemy down as they have to use workers to kill the animals and your scout troops. Send some workers in and start the process of building towers near their base where you would like to start your future attack. This can take a long time (especially if you want to build your towers without provoking your enemy to attack you), that’s why I start in the Middle Ages. You can easily be in the Industrial Age by the time you get your scout troops and workers to an enemy base to start tower construction. The reason is the map is large with a lot of obstacles. What appears a short distance might take 15+ minutes of killing animals and going down dead ends. Not to mention your enemy might spot you and start attacking. Remember, your enemy has better vision nearer his base. You can find yourself in a place where they can see you, but you can’t see them. Another reason towers are so important is that they’ll let you bomb your enemy without exposing your troops to his defenses once you’ve reached the Industrial Age.

Although I’ve said a lot about the Middle Ages, you really don’t want to spend a lot of time here. As I mentioned, I skip by this age as soon as possible. Your goals are simply to upgrade all your workers, upgrade your buildings, get Intelligence Agency, start scouting, start planning a future attack. As soon as you can get away with it, hit that button to upgrade to the Late Middle Ages

Late Middle Ages

This is the highest risk age for this play style. Other players tend to have built a lot of towers and fortifications by this point. Sometimes players have large armies of Middle Ages units. If you’ve exposed yourself to a powerful player, you can get destroyed at this point. Through keeping my base small, and only scouting with a purpose and direction, I tend to avoid detection throughout the game. I’m simply noting that this is when things are starting to heat up.

With all that being said, you don’t want to stay in this age. I spend as little time here as possible. At this point I’ll consider getting the Spacious Houses upgrade, and then it’s on to the Industrial Revolution.

Industrial Revolution

We’re finally at the Industrial Revolution and unfortunately we can’t just start kicking ♥♥♥ and taking names. We’ve got to get all our workers upgraded. Also upgrade your farm and barracks. Upgrading your workers is going to hurt your food supply pretty bad at a time when you also need tons of food to upgrade your maximum population through the Spacious Houses upgrades. You just have to wait it out and try balancing your resources as well as possible.

Once things steady out and all of your resources aren’t immediately being using for upgrades, you can start building the Arsenal and more Barracks and a Factory or two. You want to get Industrial Revolution level military units as soon as possible.

If conditions are favorable, I’ll start moving my IR troops up to the attack point I scouted earlier and start an initial attack.

This is basically it guys. The rest of the game is just military strategy. I’ll revisit this and talk more about end game stuff another time. I wanted to give new players an idea of how to get through these ages and into the endgame.