Specialised and Feeder Villages (Guide) [by Rastus]

One thing to bear in mind is that you do not want to duplicate functions across all your villages. Every building you create in a village chews into its hourly crop production and reduces the amount of troops you can maintain. You only build the buildings you explicity need and only where they are needed, never build blindly.

It is good to specialise your villages for a certain function, and then surround these specialised villages with feeder villages whose sole purpose is to ship resources to the specialised villages so they can continue to perform that function continously without needing to wait for it's own resources to build up.

You may have a cavalry attack village, defensive cavalry village, a artillery village, a scout village and so on. What you don't want to do though is to make every single village of yours into inefficient 'all purpose blobs' whose population is so large that they cannot feild an effective fighting force because there is not enough crop surplus.

Each specialist village only builds the "skeleton" that each village has and the additional buildings needed for it's dedicated task. The "skeleton" village you build on is actually the blueprint for your feeder villages.

A completed feeder village only has all buildings needed for production, storage and shipping of resources, plus the ability to quickly produce it's own defensive infantry plus a level one stable to produce scouts.

My own completed feeder villages have the following:

• - Level 10 Main Building
• - All resource feilds at level 10
• - Grain Mill, Bakery, Sawmill, Brickyard, Iron Foundry all at level 5
• - Level 20 Granary
• - Level 16 Warehouse
• - Level 20 Market Place
• - Level 5 Armoury
• - Level 5 Blacksmith
• - Level 10 Academy (to enable town hall)
• - Level 10 Barracks - Level 1 Stable (for scouts)
• - Level 1 Town Hall (I am continuously CP capped)
• - Level 10 Residence
• - Level 14 Palisade (will be raised to 20 eventually)
• - 3 different Level 10 crannies
• - Level one Rally Point

And that is it - that is both a feeder village and the skeleton used to build your specialised villages. If you choose to specialise the above village, you only add the additional buildings needed for the added functionality. When you specialise a village, you demolish the crannies if you need extra building spaces.

Non specialised feeder villages are also used to build and store vast quantities of defensive infantry. Once you run low on hourly crop production in them then ship all extra wood, iron and clay into your specialised villages. It does pay to leave 200 or so free crop production in each village.

You also want many more feeder villages than specialised villages, given that they are also your defensive troop storage and allow your specialised village to operate at full capacity all the time.

Note - having a 9 cropper or 15 cropper is an exception to the rule, especially if it is a capital. You can specialise mutliple or even all functions into a single 9 or 15 cropper capital village and use all other villages as feeder villages until you reach a very high village count.

Another point is that your capital village should be your (only) artillery attack specialised village. Because this village can take resource feilds (crop!) to level 12 it will be able to support the ridiculous numbers of attack infantry needed to punch your artillery through defenders. If you have access to a cropper capital, this is absolutely perfect.

Rise players should not have multiple artillery attack villages unless they are friggin huge, and neither Galaxy or myself are near that large yet. Artillery is useless without a singular huge force of attack infantry to punch them through a target's defenders.

All Rise players though should end up with a huge amount of feeder villages, with their full stockpiles of defence infantry.

Also, never forget they should be all be very close together to enable them to all be able to mutually support each other. When you add this to the fact that all Rise players are close together, once we get our sh_t together we will be a force to be reckoned with.

********* Note - Teuton Feeder villages should build level 5 stables to enable the research and training of Paladins, as every Teutons should always defend with a mix of spearman and paladins into a balanced force. 4 spearman to 1 Paladin is a good defensive ratio.

*********Note - in a capital 15 cropper you do not need to build the Brickyard, Sawmill or Iron Foundary so gain 3 extra spots by omitting these. 15 croppers make so little of these resources the extra 25% means very little. A 15 cropper has feeder villages nearby to supply it with all it's lumber, clay and iron.