Basics of turf building:

Quick overview over some of the strategies towards building your castle. I would say there
are a few reasonable options which all firstly require you to rush to castle 17. You build
everything else only to the point that is necessary to upgrade the buildings needed for castle
upgrades. And the main reason to do is because you unlock Treasure Trove (more about this
in Gem Economy) and Academy Lv.17 at this level (Academy 17 allows you to start T3
research).

From here on you can either catch up a little – level your resource buildings (more on those
in Building Layout), focus on familiar buildings and manors or infirmaries. Or you can decide
that everything you build from now on will lead to either:

1) Castle 21 – the benefits of getting higher castle are tied directly to how high your
academy is. If your research does not ask for a higher academy level, you can plan to
sit on Castle 21 for some time. It also allows you to upgrade your Treasure Trove 4
times which will yield better gem investment results. The main reason to not
continue further until you decide it necessary is Hell Event difficulty. If you time your
projects with Hell Events for bonus goodies, keep in mind Hell Event difficulty is
increased for different Castle levels: 16-21; 22-24; 25.
2) Castle 24 – this allows you to have your maximum efficiency castle level, higher
Treasure Trove level, but also keep you in a good bracket for Hell Events if you are
planning to do them.
3) Castle 25 – maximum level castle. Rushing castle 25 main benefit is that it allows you
to get Workshop Lv.25 and this gives you the third accessory slot. However, this is
only beneficial if you have a third accessory to put in the slot. The Hell Event
difficulty jumps greatly and getting good points becomes difficult as the Hell Event
now expects you to do T4 research and similar difficulty projects.

Now that you’ve established how you will build towards your castle, you can plan ahead on
how will you setup the rest of the turf. It is typical to have 4 of the main resource buildings
out in the front of the castle. You typically level up these buildings first to the extent that
you need in order to upgrade towards your castle.

Important! Unless you’re a food farm, this should be the only farm you build. In this
game army units will not die when the food level reaches 0, and you will always have
negative upkeep, because you will always build more and more army.

The rest of your resource tiles is generally not a focus now, as you will likely get
enough resources early on by killing monsters, opening guild gifts, random events or buying
packs. With an outlook in the long term you should consider hypering from the very start. If
you try to produce all of your resources in an equally distributed mix, you will find that for
the lategame research (T4 and above) you are constantly missing resources. Because of this
you want to at least have one of the resources you need on a sufficient level, and hopefully
have a guild bank that can provide the remaining resources to you. To hyper means to
produce only one type of resource.

In the military building area you can have a mix of barracks, manors and infirmaries.
You only need one barracks, but you can choose to have more, usually two, but not more
than three. The only thing barracks impacts is how many of your units you can train at once,
and T3 army units already train over 14h with 1 barracks. The manors and infirms is a split
between whether you want more army training speed, or more infirmary healing space.
Typically you want to have enough infirmary space to heal your whole army, but as your
army grows, this becomes impossible.

Recommended mix for early-mid game (until t4) would be to have somewhere
between 8 manors & 7-8 infirmaries. This will allow you to retain some training speed, whilst
also having enough bed space to put your army in when you have it all deployed. Advanced
strategies are having only manors for maximum army training speed for when you train your
army, then demolishing all of the manors and building infirmaries for maximum army HP
increase. Every infirmary at level 25 increases Max. Army HP by 5%. Every manor at level 25
increases Max. Army ATK by 2%. Eventhough 2% ATK is stronger than 5% HP, it is much more
beneficial to have a lot of infirmaries to be able to recover your wounded troops instead of
losing them permanently.
 Finally we have the familiar area that opens after you beat Skirmish 8. In here you
work with familiars, which are support monsters that act like a stat boost. Familiars and
monster hunting are the best combination in the game to get a lot of resources and bonuses
for free.

Marked with 1 are Mystic Spires, which are required for you to merge pacts. The
amount of spires, and the level of spires determines how many pacts you can merge at once.
What are pacts and why do you merge them? There are in total 6 pacts, split into 1a, 1b, 2a,
2b, 3, 4. Each pact is a selection of familiar monsters and merging them is the process of
waiting for several hours until the pact is finished and drops you some of the monsters.
Getting the stuff you want means you have to continue merging and merging and merging.
You will always want to merge something, this should be a 24/7 process on your turf. How
many spires will depend on how much time you want to spend on merging (more = longer)
and how much space you want to allocate to the other buildings. I recommend 2-4 spires.

Marked with 2 are Gyms, and these are necessary for you to train the familiars that
you’ve obtained via merging. These buildings should also be doing something all the time.
You assign your heroes here to train your familiars for longer or shorter time periods. Each
gym can only train one familiar at a time, so if you want to train more than that, you need
more gyms. If you want to powerlevel one familiar you may need only one gym, and assign
all instructors (heroes) to that one familiar. There are diminishing results to experience gain
however, so optimally you want to train several familiars at once – I recommend 2-3 gyms.

Marked with 3 are Springs, and these are your sources of Anima production. Anima
is an additional resource that is required when you merge pacts. Leveling these up increases
Merging speed as well as Anima production. I recommend 2-3 springs.

There is a good resource for familiars HERE, however if you want to know where to
start with familiars then do this: Pact 1a = territe (merging speed); Pact 1b = aquiris (free STA
for sweeping of heroes); Pact 2b = Harpy (free VIP points, shelter capacity); Pact 2a =
Tempestite (faster energy regeneration).