Lords and Tactics - A Basic Guide to Economy
It’s difficult to play Lords and Tactics without understanding the core mechanics of succeeding in the game. There are many sectors that will require your attention once you start playing and the best way to ensure that you can work on all of them is by investing as many resources as possible to improve them. However, that can also prove to be a problem if your economy isn’t stable because you’ll eventually run out of supplies to upgrade buildings or train new soldiers to defend your kingdom.
Learning how to manage your economy can be a tough task, especially if you haven’t tried playing any other real-time strategy game before Lords and Tactics. We’ve already introduced some helpful tips in our Beginner’s Guide so check that out if you want some general knowledge about starting the game. In this guide, we’ll be talking more about the economy and how players can take advantage of all resource-generating features that the game has installed for the players.
Production Buildings
Production buildings are where you can mostly gather resources in Lord and Tactics. These structures can be built inside your kingdom and passively generate a specific amount of resources depending on what type of building they are. The income generation may seem slow, but constructing multiple production buildings and upgrading them to the highest level will dramatically increase the economy of your kingdom until you’re able to constantly log in to a large number of resources.
Even though production buildings are the primary source of supplies for your kingdom, they are still not capable of stabilizing your economy alone. The kingdom requires too many resources for the production buildings to generate, especially since they have extremely slow rates of production. Regardless, the production buildings should be where you are getting a good number of resources especially if you take long breaks between login sessions when playing Lords and Tactics.
Resource Packs
Resource packs are like stockpiled supplies that players receive from the game as a reward or gift. Players acquire a large number of these supplies during the early stages of the game, giving them a lot of resources to spend while they’re trying to develop their kingdom. This is the most abundant source of resources in the early stages of the game and can basically boost your kingdom into the middle tiers even if your economy is still unstable, so you should definitely take advantage of this feature.
Lords and Tactics provides a good amount of free resources early on but players shouldn’t think that they can keep relying on these resource packs throughout their playthrough. Players will quickly learn that these resources diminish quickly and once your kingdom is left in a state that still has an unstable economy despite using up all the packs, it can quickly crumble below the weight of its own progress. It’s a good idea to develop your economy using these resource packs to reach an economic state that’s independent.
Resource Nodes
Resource nodes are places around the overworld that contain gatherable resources. Players can send their army to collect these resources for free, but it’ll take a certain amount of time before they can return since they’ll need to stay on the node to gather. This is the fastest way to acquire free resources without any drawback and the amount you get from doing so scales according to the size of your army and the level of the resource node that you’re trying to collect.
Gathering resources is still a military endeavor so it can still have its risks. For one, aggressive players can attack a node that’s being occupied for gathering, dealing damage to the army that originally occupied it if they succeed in the attack. Another risk is that you’ll be leaving your kingdom with fewer defenses because your army is busy gathering resources. When gathering resources, it’s a good idea not to send your army too far away from your capital and always have them ready to return to the base when you need them.
Military Raids
Military raids are also great ways to get resources but only if you have more experience in combat. These raids revolve around using your army to attack an active or inactive player to acquire their resources as a prize of the siege. This method is extremely dangerous and is often not worth it unless your army size is significantly higher than the enemy player. By that, we mean having at least double the size of their base troop count. This is because the game is designed to give defenders a significant advantage when being attacked.
We do not recommend using this tactic to supplement your economy if you’re not an experienced player. This is because there are many factors to keep in mind such as knowing your opponent, understanding the mechanics of attacker/defender bonus, and structural defenses or buffs. The raid is considered a failure if you lose more troops as compared to the resources you acquire. Developing your own army is a tough task, so don’t throw it away by recklessly sending your troops to die.
Researching Upgrades
Researching upgrades is not a direct way to gather resources but it encompasses all of the methods that we’ve already discussed so far. In the academy, players can improve their economy to boost the production rate, gain more resources from other sources, and make it so that the player is spending fewer resources when doing an action. While the values in the academy may seem small per upgrade, it’s still significant to max them all out because the stacking bonus will be impactful in the later stages of the game.
Players need to upgrade all economic branches of the game as the top priority. It takes time to complete specific research points so it’s understandable if a player feels like it may not be worth it to keep investing resources and time to do so. However, it’s good to remember that all the top players probably have all their technological branches upgraded very high since they want to get all the bonuses they can have.
