Lumber/Iron Castles

[Mandarius]

This is a format that I use for lumber and iron castles. This is a guide, and can be changed to meet your play style better. In my opinion, the lumber castle should be your 2nd and the iron your 3rd castles. The first should be a food castle so that no matter what, you can always feed your troops. The lumber and Iron castles will help you produce more archers, and everyone should know the importance of archers by now. So without further ado, the specs:

Lumber Castle
Idle population with no comforting:7154
Inside:
6 Cottages, level 9
Rally Spot, level 9
Marketplace level 2 (Not past 2 - important!)
Academy level 9
Beacon Tower level 9
Feasting Hall level 9
Relief Station level 9
Town Hall level 9
20 Barracks level 4+
Outside:
36 Sawmills level 9
1 Farm level 9

Now for the fun part, the specs. This castle is producing 942,940 lumber every hour with 6 lv10 forests, 2 lv9 forests, and 1 lv8 forest with a politics hero of 183. Once the forests are done, it will be over 1m/hr. It is producing 4253 archers with a population raising before, and it takes 3h22m with attack 151 on the hero.

Iron Castle
Idle population with no comforting:6122
Inside:
11 Cottages, level 9
Marketplace level 2 (Not past 2 - important!)
Academy level 9
Beacon Tower level 9
Feasting Hall level 9
Relief Station level 9
Town Hall level 9
16 Barracks level 4+

Outside:
36 Ironmines level 9
1Farm level 9

This castle is producing 920,260 lumber every hour with 4 lv10 hills, 4 lv9 hills, and 1 lv8 hill with a politics hero of 183. Once the hills are done, it will be over 1.1m/hr. It is producing 4052 archers with a population raising before, and it takes 4h with attack 151 on the hero.

Combined numbers from the 2 castles:

approx 1m lumber/hr
approx 1m iron/hr
approx 2.5k archers/hr

The iron mines require more population to run than the sawmills do, and take longer to upgrade, this is why I recommend the lumber castle as the 2nd castle, and the Iron as the 3rd. The Iron castle requires more cottages and has less barracks for this reason as well.

These castles are best constructed next to each other to transfer resources for production. As for food, you can either transport food from your food production castle, or sell Iron/Lumber to buy food.

Population raising: You can use the comforting population raising to raise your population, then immediately click your barracks and produce the troops. This will allow you to have more troops per que.

The farm I put in these castles to support the transporters that stay there. It can be replaced with a sawmill for more lumber production, but use at your own risk. I leave around 250 transporters in each for a quick 2.5m resources to either castle.

On the relief station: the relief station is not needed, but I do prefer to have one in either castle. Mine is in the lumber castle, but as the lumber castle produces archers faster because of the population requirements of iron, it would do better in the iron castle.

The reason the Marketplace is not upgraded past level 2 is that 2 offers on the market should be plenty to accomplish what you must do, and if needed it can be destroyed quickly to build an embassy within a few minutes.

If you do not want the marketplace, it can definatley be turned into another barracks for faster troops.

Don't have defending troops in these castles while you are online, just move them to the castles before you log off with enough food to last till you are on next.

The barracks can be upgraded past 4 to provide more troops to que, but this should be the last thing you upgrade on these castles.
I am probably leaving things out but you get the general idea, feel free to comment with suggestions.

-Mandarius world12