Tournaments

The game rotates 2 tournaments, starting late Sunday night each week.

• Guild tournament (GT) - summation of project points for the week
• Player tournament (PT) - summation of your barges, train and market contract (points) sent

Can't do it all

By natural design, you can't do everything in this game. While not politically correct, there is lots of money to be made when you feel like a failure. The developer's hope is that you purchase solutions to be able to do everything. You can easily thrive in this game without spending a dime, if you understand this, define your own success, and narrow down your focus. (I'm not against spending. The 2nd construction crew is an amazing investment. I am currently outside of the supported area, so I can't buy yet. I will be looking for a deal on the second construction crew after the world wide launch.)

The game has 3 types of materials (more on getting them below)

• Upgrading - glass and bricks
• Expansion - saws and rakes
• Research (library) - books and ink sets

You can generally do 2 well, but not 3, so I would suggest you pick a first, second, and third priority. For me, based on return on investment, I did upgrading as my first priority, followed by expansion. This is fluid and change as your farm grows. Sometimes, I focus on expansion; the very odd time, I focus on research. You will passively collect your lowest priority items if you follow the strategy below.

Pay attention to the quest book, because it introduces new buildings and supply chains, but don't let it run your farm. Build what you need and be your own quest book. Look at the building menus and see what is coming up and plan your expansions accordingly. You really won't need 3 houses to start on Sundale Homestead, so build a 3rd and bulldoze it for the quest line. You won't have the fertilizer for 2 tomato groves, so build and bulldoze.

Land

Land is the most valuable asset in the game. It starts cheap and gets very expensive, very quickly. (10,000 rakes in stock is peanuts - don't sell them!) The more land you have, and the better you use it, the more your farm will thrive.

8 fields are better than 4.

You can't get a second feed mill, so you need to upgrade it.

(They reworked houses from its predecessor. I will need to dig deeper. Generally, upgraded houses are always better than multiple low level houses.)

Upgrade your homesteads when possible.

Leave your farm busy. If you are at work, plant the longest crops you can and sell them when you get home.

Use all of your land. If it's empty, put something in to make money, even if it's just decorations.

Expansions

Land on Sundale is the cheapest, and you don't really need it as much as you need expansions on Golden Hills and Copper Ridge. Practice discipline to save up and expand where needed the most first.

This also means being organized with your layout and using every inch you have. I will need to do a blurb on how to arrange your farm to make everything fit in the best possible way (there is a formula). If you can, expand your farm to make even numbers of expansions. (2x4, 2x6, 4x4) Your farm wandering through the meadow makes it really hard to organize and arrange a farm.

Happiness

Houses lower happiness, decorations raise happiness.

Happiness decreases your production costs and increases your PT points, up to a point of diminishing returns.

Anything between 40 and 80 is good for GT. 100 - 200 is good for PT.

The best decorations are the loyalty point ones, and can replace most of your little decorations.

Temping or Flex Space

So you want more land... it costs 150 coins to build a field, and you get 75% back when you bulldoze it. Same with a cow. So that means, if you have level 1 fields and cows, you could swap back and forth, based on what you need, for less than 40 coins each. So while you are sleeping, instead of your cows sitting idle after 5 mins, you could be growing 6 hours of sunflowers to fill your warehouse and have some to sell in the morning. If a ship needs milk, or the guild is doing a milk project, you could have no fields and 8 cows!

Now all level 1 buildings is fun, but it's not the best way to approach the game, so I recommend you leave some space that is 'flexible' based on your needs. If you have a level 1 field and suddenly need to expand to add the Caterer, just bulldoze a field.

Anything with a build time lower than 10 mins works well.

If you expand and don't know what to add - flex space!

Another great investment is the 200 gems for the production storage box. That way you can store a cow overnight, pancake house when you don't need it, too many pigs, don't have canned beans for your chili kitchen, etc.

Can't upgrade a house because you need a certain happiness? Bulldoze a level 1 field and place deco.

You do need to be mindful that you don't start a long upgrade when you are planning on flexing things around and lose access to your construction crew.

Library

I passively picked away at my library unless I had a clear goal like upgrading sunflowers, fertilizer, cow feed, train cool down, etc. Generally with the library, increasing your production will out perform increasing your delivery.

Fertilizer

Fertilizer is a huge bottle neck in the game. If you don't have the fertilizer, an idle grove does you nothing. Focus on upgrading your groves, silo, and researching grove products and fertilizer bonus in your library. A level 5 tomato grove with +12 bonus will give 74 tomatoes, compared to 2 level 2 tomato groves with no bonus giving 72. The former uses half the fertilizer. If you really need tomatoes, use helps or flex in a grove.

Selling Goods

There are 3 ways to sell produce and get materials - market, train, and barges. You need to understand that if you send a contract, there is always another contract waiting, so you will never be able to completely satisfy the market.

• The market pays coins, materials, xp and tournament points during personal tournament.
• The barges pay the same* per product but half the materials, which are random, and more tourney points.
• The train pays 60% of market rate if you don't fill all the crates, and as you fill rows, the bonus makes it so filling a full train pays 4x more than the market, with fewer materials and more tourney points.

You only get the train bonuses and materials chest if you send the train. If it times out and leaves on it's own, no bonuses. If the train sucks, send it on it's way empty.

*market value decreases as you level up

• if you need materials - use the market
• if you need coins - use the train
• if you need tournament points - use barges and train

I personally send every train (unless it is brutal to fill) and run the market. I will send 2-3 barges guild tourney weeks.

Market Strategy - Rule of Three

You can trash/refresh contracts! This is your most powerful tool. If you can't fill a contract, trash it.

A very simple and easy strategy for the market is the Rule of Three. (My personal application is in brackets - yours will be different)

Divide all your materials into 3 categories:

• high focus (glass and bricks)
• medium focus (saws and rakes)
• low focus (books and ink sets )

Then dived all your products into 3 categories:

• hard to get (flour)
• medium to get (flour, tomatoes, cornbread, canned beans)
• easy to get (corn, milk, soybeans, canned corn, barley)

These categories are self adjusting. If you just sent a train with all your tomatoes, they are now 'hard to get'. If you have 1000 pigs in stock, they are 'medium or easy', until the stock level comes down.

Now the magic:

• use 'hard to get' to ONLY send high focus contracts
• use 'medium to get' to send high and medium focus contracts
• use 'easy to get' to send all contracts

I can pop onto my market and send all glass contracts without looking at the materials. Then I can trash all contracts asking for [hardest to get item - not released yet]. Then I actually look at my contracts.

What you will find is you start to build up a buffer of materials that makes it much easier to send trains and barges when needed.

Experience (XP) and Leveling up

In games like this, XP and leveling up hurt your progress in the long run. Leveling up decreases your market value and introduces new supply chains that need land and resources to build. If you are playing long term, don't buy XP bonus increases or collect completed quests. (My market and barge XP are +0% and I haven't collected a quest reward since level 15. I only do the chapters if I feel they are locking content.

If you are speed running the game for a cash for app or reward wall offer (get to level _ in x days), then you want the XP, and do the opposite of the above sentence. If you are aggressive with your market, it just means trashing more contracts and not having as large of a farm.

In this game, you don't compete by level (level actually means nothing in competition). You compete based on your farm and what it is capable of. People that delay XP will have larger farms that can produce more and will compete against higher level farms.

Leaving a Guild (or the game)

I will be honest that it sucks to invest into a person and then they disappear. The reality of the game is that roughly half of new players that stick are here for a reward of some kind and will be gone when it finishes. As a community builder, I want to help you accomplish that goal, but I also want you to respect those that helped you in the game. If you leave, tell your leader. It hurts your guild when you just quit playing because you tie up a spot and lower the chances of recruiting new players. You leader won't know if you have moved on or are having issues, so you make them leave you in the guild, or remove you with uncertainty. These people have helped you, at least say thank you by leaving well with closure.

Guild Projects

On the bottom of the HUD (Heads Up Display), in about the center, you may notice a guild project running. The button will show you what is being collected for the project and clicking on it will take you to the overview. To help/participate in a project, you simply need to collect the item required to get credit. The item goes to your inventory, so think of projects more as what can we collect, rather than what do we donate. There is no donation or giving. Each project also allows you to watch an ad to contribute. Guild projects give individual players loyalty points (used for the best decorations), tournament points during guild tourney, and guild wealth that we can use to buy guild upgrades.

I am of the philosophy that strong guilds are made of strong farms that love to play. Guilds grow best when people focus on their farms and we try to arrange projects to naturally collect what we are already doing.

Helps

When filling a crate (barge or train), you have the option to request help. You can ask for one item per row on the train or one per barge. If you go to the chat and click on the guild name, or the guild island and click on the guild building, you will get the guild list. Some members will have a yellow flag on the right with exclamation mark indicating they are requesting help. You can click on the member, visit their farm, view their barges or train, and fill crates if possible. There is an limit of helps per day, which is upgradeable. Use your helps! It's a way to help manage supply and demand.

More to come

There is so much more info that I can put down. I will pick away at this as I have a chance.