Lord of Ultima Long Term / End Game Strategy

Lord of Ultima Tips and Strategy

Lord of Ultima – A new browser based MMO strategy game similar to Tribalwars.net

Well, I have played through many months of a game of Lord of Ultima. As far as credentials, I am ranked in the top 40 of what was (perhaps once, since many have been demolished out of the game) tens of thousands of players.

This article’s purpose will be to share what to expect in the mid to end game of Lord of Ultima, and how best you should prepare for it.

Alliance:

Honestly, this is the first and most important consideration. You MUST be part of the largest alliance on your continent. When I say largest, I mean the alliance with the most military power–NOT simply points. I found it surprising how many players never really built an army at all! 2-3 months into the game, when players in my alliance had multiple armies of 60,000 berserkers, many nearby players still only had about 5,000 troops TOTAL! These players won’t do much to help you except look intimidating to others. Ideally, you’d like to have players with their own offense and also a defense willing to send support to you.

While avoiding building castles and gaining points (coined playing “sim city”) is a good way to stay in the game, since uncastled (non-offense) cities can’t be destroyed or taken, you will never come out on top. An offensive military based alliance will always be able to expand far faster than an alliance that only founds new uncastled towns.

For the first 2-3 months of the game (out of an estimated 6 months total per game), your only focus will be on your own continent. Don’t worry about alliances on other continents or about attacks from overseas–it just is very unlikely to happen.

Bottom line: be a member of the most powerful alliance on your continent for the first 2-3 months (consider offense and defense, as well as willingness to work together). After that, consider merging with or switching alliances to one of the most powerful global alliances.

Overall City Building Strategy

Here on Daydull, I have posted a 7-day initial, in-depth tutorial, that lets you know what you should get done on each of the first initial 7 days of protection. After that, you are open to be attacked. However, despite what you would initially think, you are very unlikely to be attacked (or at least damaged) once your protection ends.

As long as you don’t create a castle in your first city, you are very unlikely to every really be targeted. Even a minimal defense will do heavy damage to any attacker trying to plunder you. And, keep in mind, all they can do is plunder you! (This is an attack type that causes little combat but attempts to steal maximum resources). For example, if you have just 50 weak city guards in an uncastled city. A nearby player tries to plunder your UNCASTLED city with 1000 berserkers (since uncastled cities cannot truly be attacked, only “plundered”). A likely outcome of his attack is him losing about 50 berserkers and you losing only a handful of cheap city guard! As long as you don’t have too many resources for him to steal, he will never attack you again since it isn’t worth it for him. (Use Hideouts to make your city’s resources impossible to steal).

If you do happen to be in a dangerous area, a few hideouts and city guard or rangers with ranger towers will easily deter any attackers for a long time.

What you need to gather from this is that, unless you build a castle, you really are in VERY little danger! So focus on building up your resources rather than an army early on. It will pay off, and you won’t have to log in every 2-3 hours to try to plunder over and over.

The main things I wish I would have known in my first few weeks, to maximize long-term growth:

  • Don’t try to get your first city’s buildings to maximum levels (lvl 10) or to get a perfect layout right away. Instead, be sure to take some time to plan, but place buildings around resources and get them to level 6 or 7 then start expanding to new cities. Your overall growth will end up being much faster.
  • Even 2-3 months into the game, with 30 cities, my first city still did not have many lvl 10 resource buildings. By this time most resources were level 9, but it really was hardly worth it to get to level 10. Doing the math, it would take at LEAST 1 full week to regain the cost to get just one building from level 9 to 10! These resources are best traded over to a newer town.
  • There is an ideal layout for resource towns (generally this involves destroying all resource fields then creating vertical, alternating lines of cottages and then woodcutters/quarries/iron mines, with specialty “efficiency” buildings mixed in with the cottages). (See the other 7-day tutorial for a sample city layout). However, for your first few towns, you will NOT want to attempt to build this. It simply takes far too long, takes too many resources, and only really becomes effective once you get all your buildings to level 7 or 8.

Mid-Late Game

A few months into the game you will have many cities to deal with. Unfortunately this is a highly debated aspect of the game is this sometimes becomes a chore. You must upgrade multiple buildings in many towns every day, or even multiple times a day. Hopefully you will be able to find a promo code to get some free diamonds and purchase the “building minister” for 30 days. This gives you 16 building queue slots and makes your life much easier.

At this point of the game, when you build a new town, you will want to simply start with destroying all resources that are in your way. The main place to start is the center section of your city. Usually you will want to destroy all the resources there. Look to the ideal resource layout building plan for how to set up your cottages and resource buildings. Again, for the first part of the game I do not recommend castling many cities. (Perhaps 1-2 military cities only–you will take over many other castles later). You will be happy that you only have a single castle to defend, rather than trying to spread a defense over many castles which can all be taken by opponents.

During my mid-game (2 months or so in), I began taking over many castles. There will be a lot of players who do not know what they are doing. Their defenses will be weak, they won’t log in much, you should be able to attack them and destroy most of defense in one attack. Then take it over by sending a baron. Avoid attacking players in alliances at this point unless their alliance only has a couple of members.

End Game

To be honest, at the time of this article’s writing, I have not reached the end game of Lord of Ultima. The devs have stated that the end game will be roughly 6 months after a world starts.

I can see, at this point, that the only real players in the game at that point will be the 2 or 3 top alliances. Players who  never played offensively; never tried to build any castles, can still be playing the game, but really have no chance of competing with anyone else. (At that point it really seems to become a pointless Sim-City with no reward, but that’s just my opinion).

The actual end game of Lord of Ultima  consists of taking control of shrines which will appear toward the end of the game. 8 different shrines will appear on continents and the first player/alliance to control all 8 on a single continent will officially be the “Lord of Ultima” and will have “won” the game.

At this point I don’t think anyone has had a chance to see how this will all play out. I can say that I think there will be only a few hundred truly active players left at that point in the game–anyone else will simply not be able to compete, and you will need the backing of the strongest alliance to stand a chance.

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16 Responses

  1. von Billionz says:

    i was reading ur article on the “mid-game” and u stated that we shouldnt fear any sea attacks from other states i thought this was the name of the game dominate 1 state then migrate to dominate another thus continuing ur expansion for conquest , but u are right on controlling ur own state and i know every1 has said not to castle ur 1st city which im going to caz 1 this is a very new world and most will be to scared to castle to attack back and by castling 1st and early i can plunder the deadbeats around me creating tons of extra resources so i dont have to watch my production time all day 2 if i do decide to attack another rival alliance ill be able to keep them under control by 1 jacking their resources and reducing their troops i feel that if im going to expand fastest this is what has to be done caz if i can make 200k-300k resources a day compared to 100k on my own production rate i get their 2-3 times faster than my rivals since im not really worried about any1 from afar really taking over my city from a sea attack since i have a landfill base even though my alliance leader is a pacifist and isnt as aggressive as i am when it comes to taking it to the enemies i can expect threats that are much closer to home than from distance which she claims to be our alliances downfall when i told her that id be castling my 1st city she told every1 to start building hideouts , and i said forget building hideouts build troops ;)

    thats the difernce between an aggressor and a passive

  2. Albright says:

    mid game in a fresh world nobody is likely to have enough navy power via frigates or galleons to be attacking other continents. I never saw any true navy attacks until about 2-3 months after a world started

  3. von Billionz says:

    ok another question … how can a resource city that doesnt have any barracks or troop builders be able to defend an attack is it possible to defend a city without any troops spaces ? and whats the battle ratio when attacking ? is it exactly the stats or do attackers get an edge or defnce have an edge and i dont mean with towers or night protection but ive played games like lords online where defence has absolutly NO CHANCE to stop an attack unless ur a fkn madman who has about 10x the force of the attackers this is my 1st week and i come out of truce tomorrow and i could use all the bad azz advise any1 may share on how to do it right the 1st time :) right now im making paladins caz i decided that a balanced troop should be my best option but ive heard beserks and knights and warlocks are the best im an extreme aggressor and i will play defence but ill have counterattack in mind always

    ps if a city that doesnt have any food fields be able to hold a huge reinforcement ?? lets say some attack my gold city

  4. Albright says:

    Resource cities should never be castled since there is no point. Therefore the only risk is plunder attacks, which steal your resources. Plunder attacks do something like only 10% of the normal damage on both sides. Generally a modest city guard (requires no barracks) or hideouts are plenty to deter plunder attacks.

    Lords of Ultima gives a lot of bonus to defense – multiple cities can stack defense into one castle via support, walls give 50% defense bonus, and towers give a huge bonus.

    Berserkers are probably your best option for offense, though Knights are decent as well because of their speed. Warlocks are extremely expensive; if anything you should go with mages, but the gold cost is also a deterrent there.

    Rangers, guardians, and ranger/guardian towers will be your go-to troops for defense.

  5. von Billionz says:

    i appreciate ur advise on a solid starter setup , now i dont read to much on wall towers and traps, whats a good ratio that i should use , right now i was thinking of 1 lookout twr & 7 ballistaes for my inner wall and a split between all my trap towers for my outer wall which is 16 i with an overall wall tower & traps = 24 wall defenses any advice for all 3 types of cities res,castle,def cities it seems like every wall def will be the standard for all. unless u just go with 1 type of defense and is it good to divide up a defensive troop like build a variety in 1 city or should i just stay with the 1 specialized thats been advised from many experts ?

  6. Albright says:

    As far as traps vs towers, early game and late game are different:

    Early game: focus on traps. mostly pitfall traps, with 1-2 of each of the other kinds. also have at least a couple ranger/guardian towers

    Late game: traps are worthless. when your opponents have well over 100,000 berserkers in a single army, negating maybe 5,000 of them means nothing. You’ll do more damage and help any reinforcements more by focusing ranger with a few guardian towers. towers will also give you a defense bonus regardless of which type of unit is attacking you. something like 60-70% ranger towers, 20% guardian towers, 2-3 scout towers, 1 ballista tower, 1 camoflauge trap etc was what I usually went with.

    If people on your continent happen to be massing mages or knights, alter tower and troop defenses accordingly (this is where info from your alliance comes in handy), but I was in heavy battles with top ranked players in the top 5 ranked alliances and more often than not you will see mass berserker armies.

  7. This article on end game strategy appears to be missing an end game strategy. ;)

  8. Popsalad says:

    There is a conspicuous absence of end-game strategy in this end-game strategy article – I agree with Da’ Whip.

  9. Albright says:

    Hi, thanks for taking the time to read. You are correct, unfortunately I no longer play Lord of Ultima and had stopped playing before truly reaching “end-game” in the world. By end-game I’m referring to when things would turn into mainly global wars over the shrines that would be appearing then.

    If anyone would like to post a comment or some information about this, I’d be happy to add it, but otherwise I think this article does still help players understand what to expect about 3-4 months into a world, which is pretty late game too.

  10. TheIndigo says:

    thanks for your tips Albright– great to get a new player jump started; specific question for a relatively New World;

    my first city is a somewhat generalized city (not planned too well as I started b4 reading your articles!) focused on Cavalry; the continent does not seem too aggressive as I am only the 100th ranked player on the island but have the 10th largest military already at only ~2400 points; so I believe everyone is loading on resources, but I’m supplementing heavily with daily raids… although in hindsight, since the island is not aggressive, I probably should have also focused on resource building…

    anyhoo– what might you recommend for my 2nd city if I don’t plan on having to build up defenses for a while?

    I was thinking stone-only or gold-only city? or if you could suggest a possible hybrid that would be great; not sure if I plan on being an Uber player with 30+ cities as 1-city is already draining 24-hrs of my time hah.

    thx again for taking the time to write your articles Albright.

  11. nobwobble says:

    Some of those ‘sim city’ players can be pretty vital in an alliance too.

    They feed you & your palaces and they can be used as tile blockers to prevent invading armies getting clusters together on your continent.

  12. Terry Jones says:

    Does beg the question Allbright, why no play no more?

  13. Albright says:

    I felt like I had gotten the full experience of the game. After playing 3 or 4 months, myself and my alliance had accomplished what we set out to do. We controlled our continent (there were no active, living players left on our continent) and had taken over a second continent through a big invasion where we defeated that continent’s biggest alliance. Moving on from there would have required a massive time investment in order to coordinate attacks on the remaining continents. Maintaining 30-50 cities took a long time and started to feel like a chore. At that point the end game shrines that allow you to actually “win” had not started appearing yet, and we had no information on when the developer might add them.

  14. Jake says:

    Damn Albright you should have kept playing. The part of the game that makes it feel like a chore, is about mid game before the shrine wars because there’s not TOO much action, although some still exists. But on my world, they just opened up the shrines a few weeks ago, but our first shrine hasn’t opened on our island yet and we’re massing huge armies getting ready to take some. There are 4 “super alliances” with mainly already Lord of Ultima players. (people who are already Lords of Ultima) and their 4 alliances are ranked number 1-2-3 and 4 of course, with two having max members. Besides those 4, the next top 6 (so it’d be top 10 total) have -( #5- 2mill points)( #6- 1.9m points )(#7- 1.7m points) (#8- 1.4m points) (#9- 1.3m) and (#10 – 1.1m)

    Yet the super alliances, the first place holds 15 mill, second place holds 14.5m, third place is 8mill, and 4th is 6.5m.

    I hope to get on the super alliance as they continue to take over everyone in the game. A little unfair in my opinion, but then again this is supposed to simulate war, which is never fair. Idk why I just gave all that random info lol, but you should try to get back in the game if you ever need a time waster, and instead of controlling 30 cities (holy shit) I try to control around 10-15 because it’s not too hard, and you still have the stuff needed for a good 2-3 castles that can pump out zerks, mages etc in about 5 seconds, to 15 seconds each.

    Thanks for all of these tips though, I love reading from expert players and getting their info on the game.:)

  15. Ovoborus says:

    I need a bit of clarification regarding shrines and enlightenment.

    Once a shrine activates, does it stay activated, as in every cycle it enlightens a new city and keeps being an active shrine… then later on another shrine will go active, Meaning we’d have 2 live shrines going at once?

    Until we have all 8 live? Or do they only go live one at a time? Please mail to me, as I don’t check websites often. Any help appreciated! Thanks!

  16. KristinaNo1 says:

    Multiple shrines are active at once. Right now, my alliance has 3 enlightened palaces – lit up from 2 separate shrines on the same continent. : )

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