Lord of Ultima (LoU): Raiding for Resources

In a previous Lord of Ultima (LoU) article, I went into how you should build resource cities. As with many other aspects of the game, resources are something that you can deal with in multiple ways. You could build nothing but gold cities (see the building layout article) and buy from other players, but that's risky. What happens when no one is selling iron and you desperately need some to re-build your defenses after an attack?

A third way to go is raiding. Raiding isn't as risky as trying to buy your resources, but it's not as stable as building your own. So why do it? Mostly because it gives you the flexibility to use your troops to defend your cities and castles and you have more opportunities to kill bosses, giving you artifacts. This guide is definitely an optional one in our series, but follow along if you want to learn how to use an uncastled troop city for resources...

First off, let's look at a layout. I'll focus on trinsic temples for now, but there are many types of troop building that work. Here's a simple raiding plan. Notice that there's a fair amount of storage and carts. You'll want this because raiding is very "bursty" in the way that resources come in. Also, notice that we kept the build time down to just 7200%. This is deliberate. You're not going up against other players, for the most part, so you don't need to replace troops super-fast. The important thing is to build as many as you can, and 68,000 is definitely a good number.

If you're not familiar with how to build this sort of layout, you start by building your town hall and 19-25 cottages, somewhere off away from where you want your other buildings. Also build one market and one warehouse along with the cottages, just to have the ability to move resources around. Only upgrade your town hall as needed to make room for buildings or allow for resources. Upgrade these starter buildings all the way to level 10, and then start building all of your other buildings at once. All of the required resources for this build will have to be brought in from somewhere else until you have enough troops to raid with.

Once you have all of the buildings upgraded to level 10, you start demolishing the cottages, one at at time, building one of the remaining buildings from the plan, after each cottage is gone. Eventually, you will each a build speed of 100% and you will have all of the buildings from the plan (it might help to use an amulet or two at the very end).

Raiding for Resources

In order to raid, you need to know how many troops you need. There is a great wiki page for dungeons and another for bosses on the official LoU Wiki. Let's focus on dungeons for now. There is a listed number of Berserkers required to raid each level of dungeon. If it's a range, take the largest number. Now, multiply that number by 1.2-1.3 in order to account for deaths and additional opponents that will show up after you've cleared some of a dungeon. If you're using berserkers, then you now know how many troops you need, but our example uses trinsic temples, so we're going to build paladins. Use this table:



Look up paladin on the left and scroll over to the column labeled "Multiply required units by n". Take the number of berserkers that you would send and multiply by that number. For paladins, the number is "0.92" this is how many you need to carry the same loot and do the same damage as a zerk. Multiplying the required number of zerks for a level 4 dungeon (1330) by 1.2 for safety and then by 0.92 for paladins tells me that I need about 1500 paladins for an ongoing raid.

This sounds complicated, but after a while you get used to it. Having minsters also helps, as you can set up a raid for continuous runs and forget about it. If there are troops available, the minister will even replenish those that are lost before sending them back out.

Distance

One of the hardest things about raiding for resources is deciding what dungeon to go after. For example, in this situation:

Distances between a city and the nearby dungeons.

The level 7 dungeon is closer, but the level 9 dungeon is going to yield more resources. Which do you go for? Well, if you select your city, switch to it, and then select either dungeon, you are given a list of travel times for each type of troop. In this case, the level 7 dungeon is 1 hour, 19 minutes (79 minutes) from our city and the level 9 is 1 hour, 29 minutes (89 minutes)  for cavalry. We can quickly determine that our city will need 15,400 paladins to raid the level 7 dungeon and 38,600 paladins for the level 9 using the information in the previous section. Since the wiki tells us that a level 7 dungeon gives 117k loot and a level 9 gives 297k loot, this is an easy comparison to make. You just multiply the number of troops times the number of minutes travel and divide the amount of loot by that product. So for the level 7: 117000/(79*15400) = 0.096 and for the level 9: 297000/(89*38600) = 0.086, so you get slightly more loot from the level 7 dungeon for the same number of troops over the same amount of time.

There is one major problem with this: cities can't send out more than 5 groups of troops, so a very low level dungeon might not work out because you have more than 5 times the number of troops required per raid.

As new dungeons appear, you should periodically check to see if you're raiding the best dungeon for your troops. Perform this check at least once every 3-5 days for each city.

Troop Types

Raiding for resources is definitely more time-consuming than building resource cities, but the major advantage is that you can use hybrid offensive/defensive troops to raid with and then, when needed, recall them and send them out to support your castles or those of your alliance mates. For this reason the ideal troops for resource raiding are:

• Ranger
• Templar
• Crossbowman
• Paladin
• Sloop

Each of these are capable raiders and defenders. The knight is a poor choice for defending, but it's not terrible, and it's the most powerful land-raiding unit (in terms of carrying capacity and attack) outside of the berserker, so you might also consider them for some but not all of your resource raiding. They also use stables, which allows you to recruit some scouts as well.

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