In Empires & Puzzles, your base is where you can generate resources over time, recruit new heroes and troops, upgrade existing units, and create all kinds of battle items. To ensure that your core team is as powerful as it can be, you essentially need a strong base to back it up.

Just as you attack other players, however, so are they able to raid your base. You don’t want to lose your hard-earned resources while you’re offline, so you’ll have to put together an effective defense team in addition to your core squad. You’ll find more about this and all the buildings you can and should add to your base below.

How to Build a Strong Base

Developing a decent base is first and foremost a matter of erecting the right buildings. Although Empires & Puzzles is not as complex as base-building strategy games proper, it still features a considerable number of different constructions, each with unique functions for your progression. To help you plan the expansion of your base from the very beginning, we’ve put together a compendium of all the buildings, their roles, and their requirements.

The Stronghold

This building determines the level of all other constructions, as well as which other buildings are unlocked and how many slots you can use to erect them. As a general rule, no other building in your base can be levelled beyond the level of your stronghold. In addition, you can unlock new building slots with stronghold levels 3, 5, 8, 11, 15, and 20 (max). If, initially, you can only build 2 farms, 1 mine, 1 iron storage, and 1 food storage, the following constructions are added with higher stronghold levels:

• A mine, a farm, an iron storage, and a food storage at level 3.
• A training camp, an iron storage, a house, and a farm at level 5.
• A farm, a mine, an iron storage, and a forge at level 8.
• A barracks at level 10.
• A house, training camp, farm, and food storage at level 11.
• An iron storage, a forge, a farm, and a mine at level 15.
• A farm, a food storage, a training camp, and a house at level 20.

Resource Production

The farm and the iron mine are the only resource production buildings in Empires & Puzzles. Before you upgrade your stronghold, you’ll want to ensure that all such constructions are built and that they are maxed in level.

Resource Storage

Upgrading your stronghold and other constructions requires increasing amounts of resources with each level. To amass such reserves, you’ll need more iron storage and food storage facilities.

Houses

When you collect recruits from events, quests, or exploring the map, they are put up in your houses before being used to train heroes. Building and upgrading houses allows you to store more recruits at a time.

The Training Camp

This building allows you to hire new heroes in exchange for recruits, food, and special training items. Aside from the Summoning Gate, the Training Camp will be your main source of new characters and can even generate a legendary hero if maxed out. Once you upgrade the Training Camp, the option to research a different training process will become available. Although you have to upgrade the building to level 20 to make the most of it, you don’t need to research all the options you unlock on the way. The most important levels are:

• Levels 1, 2, and 4 during the early-game. These will only allow you to recruit 1- and 2-star heroes.
• Level 11 for the possibility to recruit a 3-star hero.
• Level 13 for a guaranteed 3-star hero and the possibility to pull a 4-star one.
• Level 19 for quickly generated heroes. This training process requires a lot of food, however.
• Level 20 for the possibility to draw 4- and 5-star heroes.

The Barracks

This building is different from the others in that it can only be placed on top of an existing, level 5 construction. In other words, you cannot place it over an empty slot, but once it is built, you can switch between it and the construction you used for its foundation. Many players prefer to build the barracks on top of one of their forges. Once in place, you can use the barracks to boost the level of your troops. As you improve your barracks, you can level up rarer troops to a higher level.

The Forge

Inside the forge, you can use materials farmed from the map or obtained from quests in order to create battle items with various uses. Levels 1 and 2 of the forge allow you to create HP and mana potions, while every additional level comes with the possibility to craft a new item. Notable battle items include:

• The super antidote at level 11.
• The revive scroll at level 13.
• The super healing potion at level 15.
• The super mana potion at level 17.
• The time stop item at level 18. This causes all enemies to lose their mana and suffer a 3-turn attack delay.
• The tornado item at level 19. This shuffles the board and grants 50% mana to all heroes.
• The miracle scroll at level 20. This revives all dead heroes and heals for 400 HP.

The Watchtower

This building unlocks the possibility to raid other players and opens your base to attacks from others. It becomes available very early in the game and should be built right away so that raids can become a serious source of food and iron.

How to Defend Your Base

As soon as you start raiding other players, others will be able to raid you. Although players can only steal the resources you have stashed in your Watchtower at the time when you are attacked, it’s still worth putting together a strong defensive team to prevent this from happening altogether.

When you create a defense team, you don’t have to worry about having one hero for each color, because the AI won’t be using gems to damage your opponents. Instead, your main focus should be to select your best heroes and abilities, as well as to position them correctly. For example, the hero placed in the center of your line-up is likely to take the most hits, which is why you should pick a tanky character for this position. Heroes at the far left and right sides are considerably less likely to get hit, so these are good positions for weaker characters or, later in the game, for your strongest damage dealers.

Like everything else in Empires & Puzzles, building a strong base can take a great deal of time and a generous amount of resources. However, if you build the right structures and continuously upgrade your resource generation buildings, you can ensure a steady development over several months. At the end of the day, the stronger your base is, the better your team will perform in combat, so the effort will be well worth the while.

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