Tuesday, May 7, 2013



1. Lord of Ultima Guide for Beginners
by Osbourne

There are a few important points that need to be made about the game:
- It is a very time consuming game and you will be required to log in daily to maintain your empire
- In order to play on a competitive level, you need the “ministers” that cost Play4Free Funds which in turn cost real life money (oh the irony...)
- There are plenty of third party scripts and add-ons to the game that most experienced and skilled players use. The game is according to many people unplayable without these scripts so the first thing I will do is to guide you through how to install the most important ones and show what they are good for
- The game requires you to interact a lot with other players, your fellow alliance members in particular

1. The scripts/add-ons

There are two main 3rd party scripts that you’ll want: Tweak and MERC Tools
If you play on Firefox, you will need Greasemonkey in order to install them. If you’re on Chrome, you will need Tampermonkey.
Greasemonkey: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/greasemonkey/
Tampermonkey: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/tampermonkey/dhdgffkkebhmkfjojejmpbldmpobfkfo?hl=en
LOU Tweak: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/80532
MERC Tools: http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/150349

The scripts all add plenty of functionalities to the game which you’ll have to experiment with yourself. There are however a few functions that you need to know right away, like doing overlay layouts. This is something I explain in the section below on how to use the optimizers (2.3, 2.4 and 6.2).

2. Early Gameplay

What’s most important to say here is that the first weeks of the game honestly are boring as hell. It’s a tedious time where you have to do tedious work, all till you hit the title Marquess. Then you’ll be able to activate auto-build with your Building Minister (who’ll build everything for you).
Lord of Ultima is a complex game and there’s a lot to learn when you’re new to it. However, once you know how to play, it’s great. It takes time to learn though so try to be patient.



2.1 What is this game all about?

It is, as I already said, a complex game, so here follows a very brief summary of what it’s actually about. You build your empire on your own and create new cities and castles. You can have a maximum of 1001 cities, but most people stay at 50-600 or so. The first cities take a lot of time to produce and create, but later on you’ll be able to settle multiple new cities every day if you do it right. For every new city you make, you need a baron. Cities can either be “uncastled” or castled. Once you castle a city, there is no return, since you cannot demolish the castle building. The thing about castles is that they allow you to attack other players’ cities and castles. What’s dangerous about them is that other players can conquer and crush your castle. Therefore, you always need to make sure that you are able to defend your castles. Castles can later on in the game be enlightened by so called “Shrines”. Shrines are of 8 different virtues, and in order to win the game, an alliance needs to have a faith of 100% in each virtue. In order to gain faith, the alliance will have to build palaces in their enlightened castles by first filling them with resources. Once the alliance has 8 palaces at level 10 (one in each virtue), they win the server. It’s a long and fun way to get there, and it involves many different aspects, like for example warfare.

2.2 So... how do I start with my first city?

The first city is a special case, which you’ll understand later. There are 5 resources in LOU: Wood, Stone, Iron, Food and Gold. In your first city, you’ll want to produce most of Wood and Stone since those are the resources you use for upgrading buildings and therefore need the most of. Do however NOT forget about the other resources. Figuring out the “perfect” balance is a huge challenge even for the most experienced players. In other to get a second city, you need the following:

●        Level 10 Trinsic Temple (for recruiting a Baron)
●        Level 10 Moonglow Tower (for purifying resources)
●        250 Carts (or 25 merchant ships)
●        100k wood, 100k stone, 25k iron and 25k food as settlement costs for the 2nd city.
●        A baron (costs 50k iron, 100k gold)
●        To do a title advancement (costs 50k wood, stone, iron, food and 40k gold)

Here comes some advice on how to do the actual building of your first city. First off, the start-up guide (Lady Lyanna) is no good. You however DO want to complete it in order to get the resource rewards. Once you have completed the guide, start out by removing the hideout and the cityguard house that she tells you to build. They should be of no use in your first city. City guards are generally a shitty unit so stay away from them.


You’ll want your first city to produce as much resources as possible. Overall, troops that raid dungeons produce the most resources and give you plenty of gold that you’ll need. However, the troops themselves cost resources to recruit and since it’s your first city, you won’t have enough resources for that. Have a few barracks and training grounds in your first city and get some berserkers (or rangers) that raid a dungeon, but you want the city to mainly be a resource city.

IMPORTANT: Learn to distinguish between a resource city and a military city. We do NOT castle resource cities. That’s the ultimate noob highway.

You might be confident and think you understand and know how to build a resource city on your own, but that’s not a great idea. You’ll want to use one of the optimizers that are available in order to make your resource city as efficient as possible. Always strive for efficiency.

2.3 Optimizing a resource city using the LoU Optimizer

Link: http://city.louopt.com/

In order to do this, you need the LoU Tweak script. Go into the game. Press the “L” button and “Open in Flash City Planner 2”. A new window will open.



The page you’re at now is http://city.louopt.com/ and you will see your city in there. Below your city, you will see the following “menu”:

First of all, make sure that you’re in the resource “mode” (see the red rectangle to the left on the above picture). Secondly, look at “Optimization Weight”. This is where you decide what you want your city to produce (the most of). Experiment yourself! If you for example want more wood, you increase the “wood-weight”. Once you are done with this, you “Add” the buildings (see the red rectangle on the right above). You can choose yourself how many buildings you want to add (or remove). Again: experiment here! Getting the “perfect” resource city might take a few tries. Sometimes however, you don’t always want the highest total resource output, but more of a specific resource, say iron.

2.4 Early gameplay tricks

Here follows some brief advice of things to think of early on in-game. Some things are really obvious while some are not.

- Remove all buildings you don't need right now. Hideout, probably the warehouse, city guard house. If you want a military but don't have the resources, don't have barracks just standing. Better make a res building with that barrack(s) instead while you wait.

- Tweak your layout with louopt (http://louopt.com/) but place your buildings after what's the most profitable NOW. Also, if you upgrade manually, upgrade the resource buildings touching the most nodes first (before you upgrade the rest).

- GET SOME TROOPS AND RAID DUNGEONS. However, remember the command count. You can only send out 5 parties. The max troops you'd need to send at a level 1 dungeon is 20 troops. So 100 zerks is all you really need right now (when there are no lvl 2 dungeons out there) unless you are planning on boss-raiding. Other troops will be idle and therefore useless.

- Don't forget about producing food. It's a shitty resource that many, many people forget about and lack when it's time to purify or settle the baron.

- Don't piss off your neighbors if you can’t handle the consequences.

- Don't build townhouses. I wouldn't even build 1 or 2. They produce very very little gold, and cost very, very much stone. Raid instead (or early on, buy gold artifacts from the shop).

- Keep scanning the market for good offers from newbies.

- Don't neglect any of the resources from the start. It'll just bite you in the ass sooner or later.

- Don't over exaggerate your construction speed (CS). There is no point in being able to build fast when you have no resources to build with. Try to keep a balance between CS and resource buildings. You don't need many cottages until you're at Town Hall lvl 5-6.

- Don't upgrade your Town Hall above level 8 until after 5-6 cities. There's no reason for that and it just costs a shit ton of resources that you need elsewhere.

- Planning to use up all that mana of yours? Then be smart. For example, you hit baron once your Town Hall is at level 7. This means that you'll have access to way better artifacts than before. Instead of 5k resources per 1k mana, you get 10k resources. Consider if it's better to wait for the next level with using/buying some artifacts.

- Similar point here. If you want to speed things up, try to calculate whether a shovel (increases CS) or a medallion would save you the most time.

- A nice dungeon spawned next to you, but you don't have the troops quite yet? Send 1 zerk at it repeatedly to keep it "open" (if no one else is raiding it).

4. I am getting closer to my second city. What do I do with the rest of my cities?

This can be very tricky for both new and experienced players. First, you need to choose which path you want to go. Do you want to focus on military or just produce resources (through resource cities)? I personally prefer the military aspect of the game and therefore aim to make as many military cities as possible. However, that’s not everyone’s call and you can instead do the “merchant path”. Because of people wanting to play the game in different ways, it’s hard to say what exactly you should make as a second, third, fourth etc. city. I’ll however do my best.

What we need to say first here is something about the title advancements. For each new baron you make, you need to make a title advancement (TA) that costs purified resources. However, every fourth TA is free given that 25% (1/4) of your current cities are castled. This is something you really should take advantage of, so no matter if you’re going down the military or merchant road, aim for at least 25% castles so that you can get these free title advancements. It may sound like a lot of castles but it definitely isn’t. If you do the military way, 70-80% of your total cities might be castles (often even more than that). Another final point that needs to be made about the free TAs is that you cannot claim the free ones later. If you skip a free TA (i.e you pay for it since you don’t have enough castles), you can never go back and reclaim that free TA. Once you skip it, you lose it.

What all this babbling above actually means is that you’ll want one out of your first three cities to be a castle so that you can get your fourth city for free. Your first city should now be a resource city with perhaps some raiding troops. You now want to build something that you will castle. A very good idea for a first castle is a berserker castle. If needed, you can also produce rangers and guardians there (defensive units). Berserkers are great raiders and you therefore need to raid dungeons  with them once you have them. However, berserker also cost iron which you’ll want to produce. Therefore, make another resource city producing mainly iron. If you go to the region map, you can actually choose a spot that will give you the most iron nodes in your city. If you want lots of iron, you place your city adjacent to as many mountains as possible. They look the following:


If you click an empty field, you can always get to know how many nodes of each type there will be in it by scrolling down the left window once you’ve clicked the field. At the bottom of the page, you will see something similar to this:


If you, like in our case, want to produce as much iron as possible, it’s of course a good idea to find a spot where the number of iron nodes is the highest. You can also know how many nodes there will be by looking at where the mountains are placed. Each mountain directly next to the field (above, below, left, right) will give 8 iron nodes. Each mountain on a corner will give 4 nodes. See a demonstration of this in the picture below.


To summarize what’s been said: we know that you now have your first city as a resource city and that you’ll make a berserker castle and another resource city producing mainly iron. The two latter will be your 2nd and 3rd cities. In what order? That’s completely up to you, and it depends on your situation. Notice from before that your castle needs to be castled BEFORE you get the free title advancement. Therefore it can be good to make your 2nd city the castle so that you have time to actually build it up before you have to castle it. However, you might not have enough resources to make your second city a castle. In that case it might be good to let the 2nd city be the resource city. It all depends on your situation, and it’s up to your personal preferences and what you think will be most appropriate for you and your plans.

4.1 What about my 4th city?

I don’t know. That’s the thing with Lord of Ultima. You need to decide what YOU want since each player has his/her own style. Find out what you want and then what you need in order to get there. Do you want lots of military? If yes, remember that each unit eats food. You’ll want to make food cities later on as well as hubs (storage cities). To give you an idea, a standardized food city (without lakes that boost the farms’ production) can look like this.

There are plenty of variations of hubs, and it all depends on what YOU want and need. Examples of hubs can be found below:

Big storage, fewer carts
Less storage, more carts

Since I personally am a military focused player, I made my 4th city a food and hub hybrid.
This is an example of what such a city might look like.

Also notice that I’m talking a lot about so called hubs/storage cities.

4.2 What’s a hub?

It is, as said, a storage city where you store resources. See it as a center which all your resources pass through using the trade minister. The hub has a large storage and many carts. Roughly, you will, once you have the hub, set up all your other cities that produce resources to send surplus resources to it. Go into the trade minister settings and experiment from there and you’ll quickly figure out how. You need to manually set these settings in each and every one of your cities (tedious right?), but once you’ve done it, things should work very smoothly and without you having to do anything.

Now that your cities ship surplus resources to the hub, you’ll want the hub itself to distribute resources where needed. The best way to do this is to go into each city that needs resources and set them to request resources from the hub. Set a target resource amount and select the hub as the city it will request from. Save your settings and you’re done.
The above explanation for a hub is extremely basic and you’ll later discover your own way of how to set the trades the way you want them and the way they work best for you. I do however want to teach you a few more things:

●    You want your hub to be CLOSE to your other cities. That’s why we build in clusters to keep down the travel times for the units and resources. This way, the carts will also not be away for too long (meaning you need less of them)
●    It’s good to have the hub on water. That way, you can put merchant ships in it which will allow you to ship resources to other continents.
●    Later on, you’ll DEFINITELY want more than one hub. It all depends on what and where, but once you feel that you’re starting to stretch a hub’s capacity, it’s definitely time to make another one. Do your best to predict these kind of things in advantage though, and you’ll find the game a lot less stressful than you otherwise maybe would.

4.3 Building in “clusters”

As mentioned above, you’ll be wanting to build in clusters. As this is a beginner’s guide, I won’t go into any great details of how to organize a cluster. By building your cities close, you’ll need fewer marketplaces (carts) since the travel times for these will be smaller. Not only the resource shipments will take less time to travel between your cities, but also your troops, which is very important once you need to for example defend your castles. Building in clusters is also very important for when you want to set up hubs/storage cities. That will probably be difficult if your “cluster” is amoeba-shaped. Simply: having things close to each other means that you can be more effective and efficient.

5. Raiding

There are two types of raiding: dungeon-raiding and boss-raiding.

5.1 Dungeon-raiding.

You raid dungeons for resources with your troops using the war minister. All troops but siege engines (catapults, rams and ballistae) can raid. The best raiders are probably berserkers.

How to raid:
- Select your military city.
- Identify what kind of troops you are raiding with.
- Find a dungeon which is weak against the troop you are going to raid with (hills are weak against magic, forests are weak against cavalry and mountains are weak against infantry).
- Figure out how many troops to send to the dungeon. This depends on the dungeon type, its level and what troops you are raiding with. For numbers of how many troops to send to a dungeon click here.
- Set your war minister to raid the dungeon until “Dungeon Completed”. See the example picture below.


You should always try to keep all of your troops raiding when they are not out defending or attacking (or waiting to defend something). When they raid, they bring in A LOT of resources.

5. 2 Boss-raiding
You raid bosses to get artifacts (as well as some resources) that otherwise cost “funds” that you buy with real-life money. The best troops to raid bosses with are offensive ones (like warlocks, mages, knights and berserkers). I love raiding bosses with warlocks myself because of their high attack power and their fast travel speed (they travel at cavalry-speed).

There are four types of bosses: hydras, molochs, dragons and octopi (water ones). They all have a weakness each; Hydras: infantry, Molochs: magic and Dragons: cavalry.

To see how many troops to send at a boss, click here.

Example of bossraid window:


6. The Ministers

There are four ministers: build, defense, war and trade minister. Their names probably (hopefully) help you figure out what they do.

Building minister

Extends your building queue by 10 slots (from 6 to 16). Once you reach the title marquess, you can activate “auto-built”, which basically just means that once you have placed the buildings and turned on auto-build, the building minister will build for you, which is very VERY handy (especially when you’re building 100 cities at once...).

Defense minister

Once you are under attack or have incoming attacks, the defense minister will notify your alliance mates of this (as long as you have “enough” lookout towers that detect attacks). The best part of the defense minister however is the “target army”. To set this, go into a military city. Press the defense minister, and then change to the “Assistance: Target Army”-tab in the window that pops up. There, you fill in the troops that you want the defense minister to recruit for you, for example 280 000 berserkers, or 150 000 berserkers and 100 000 guardians. Once you have set your target army, you press “Apply changes” on the bottom right.

War minister

With the war minister, you can choose to raid a dungeon until “Dungeon Completed” which is very convenient since it means that you don’t have to do anything else but to set the raids. What you can also do with the war minister is to time attacks. This is something you often want to do when you are coordinating attacks against enemies together with friends/alliance members. Many attacks are often set for 10:00:00 AM servertime, or shortly thereafter (like 10:00:02 or 10:00:05).

Trade minister

When a city with a level 10 moonglow tower is full of resources, the trade minister will automatically purify resources in that city. The trade minister basically does all the trades for you after you have set your settings. This is something you need to do in each and every one of your cities however.

Hint: When setting a target resource amount (using the trade minister) or a target army (using the war minister), you can set a number which is above your current capacity. For example, if you can store only 80k wood, you can set your target resource wood amount to be say 200k.










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