Resources truly are the life blood of this game. In this article, I will tell you about the different kinds of resources and how to get and manage them.
By now, everyone should be familiar with the difference between safe and unsafe resources. If you have any doubt as to the difference, see this article .
There are 4 aspects of resource management: Getting resources, using resources, conserving resources, and protecting resources.
Safe resources are the easiest to manage. For a list of where to find safe resources, check this article. The important thing to remember here is, once safe resources are opened, they become unsafe. You want to use every source of unsafe resources before you turn to your safe resources. Once you do resort to opening the safe resources, try to choose the most appropriate amount to open, and don't open more resources than you are going to use right away.
Now for the unsafe resources. There are many ways to get unsafe resources. Gathering and farming are most important ways to obtain resources. These are ways that can work for you all the time. There are ways to make both of these common methods more efficient and productive.
Farming is absolutely the most important way to obtain resources, because your farms will produce resources for you even when you are not on line or don't have time to manage your gathering. First of all, make sure all to have all possible farms, lumber yards, and mines in your castle, and have them all at the highest possible level. It is truly shocking how much difference you have in output, between just a couple levels of a farm or lumber yard. Multiply that by the maximum number of farms, lumberyards, and mines in a castle, (8 each for a Lv. 10 castle!) and you will have the difference between feast and famine in your estate.
In order to gather effectively, you need the maximum number of march slots and the troops to fill them. You can get additional march slots be researching in your Academy at level 6, 12, and 20. You can also get an additional slot when you activate VIP Level 8 or higher. Obviously, the more slots you have, the more resource tiles you can harvest at once. Make getting those additional march slots a high priority. Then make sure you have the troops to fill them. Artillery levels 1, 3, 5, etc. are the most efficient gatherers because they have the best load capacity.
Both gathering and farming can be enhanced in a number of ways. You can use Gathering Bonuses or Farm/Mine/Lumberyard extra labor from your inventory, but once you use an inventory item, it is gone. Instead use your Forge, Academy and Recruitment Hall. You can forge equipment and recruit or enhance guards to increase your production and gathering speed. You can also do research to increase gathering speed, production, and troop load, which is the amount your troops can carry home. In addition, your Airship can be tweaked to increase gathering speed and troop load.
Gathering in the Alliance Farm (or lumberyard or mine, whichever is active at the moment) has 2 advantages. 1) It is almost bottomless, so you can send your troops to gather and they will not come back until they are totally full. 2) Troops cannot be attacked while they are gathering there.
Now let's look at some of the more advanced ways obtain resources. Except for the donations bonus these are all unsafe resources.
Daily Tasks: By completing all the daily tasks you can get about 180k food and wood, plus a reasonable amount of iron and silver if you castle is big enough. These are all things you should be doing anyway, including several activities that produce their own safe and unsafe resources.
Donations: Besides being a daily task, donating regularly will give you a weekend donation bonus of 400k food and wood, plus iron ans silver as appropriate, every Sunday night. If you are in the top 3 donors for the alliance in the week, you will get additional prizes. First prize is 1M food and wood. You do not have to open the resources until you are ready to use them, so these are essentially safe resources. Once you open the package, however, it goes directly into your unsafe resources, so do not open the bonus until you have a project ready!
Munitions Exchange: Keep your munitions exchange at its highest level. This will give you both more free trades, plus more resources per trade. In addition, you get more resources per trade each time you trade for the same resource. So you might get 10k wood the first time, then 10.1k, then 10.2k, and so on. Even better, sometimes you can get lucky and get 2, 5, or even 10 times the amount of a normal trade.
Quests: Regular and epic quests provide resources. The resources get better as the quests get more difficult. Keep an eye on what needs to be done and you will always have a quick source of resources.
Floating face in your castle: There is a round portrait of a woman's face, that often appears over your castle or airship dock. When you click on her, she gives you some (usually terrible) advice. Click again on the down arrow at the bottom of the advice, and a few thousand resources will appear.
Plunder: When all else fails, go steal resources form somebody else! Before you go, make sure to tweak your airship to include Cloud Storage, which increases troop load.
Talent: When you level up your lord, you get talent points to assign to different skills. By assigning points to the Economy talents, you can earn the Instant Yield talent. Every 12 hours, you can activate this talent to give you an instant harvest equal to 5 hours worth of your harvest inside your castle. There is also an Instant Gather talent, which is harder to earn, that will cause all troops to return from gathering with a full load.
Those are all the ways I know to make the most of your resources, If I have missed anything let me know and I will add it to this list.
Next I will tell about how to conserve resources as you are using them, and how to protect your resources from your troops and the enemy.