Being a farmer is an essential role for a guild regardless of if it’s GvG based, or GE based, because farming helps put needed goods into the treasury. There are treasury GBs to do this, but sometimes you need that extra kick. This could be because your guild is active in an era, or perhaps there are too many mates in an era and not enough goods to unlock GE. Whatever the reason, a treasury cannot feed itself. It should also be noted, that this style of town is a good way to go if you’re also someone who prefers to negotiate GE and the Continent Map instead of fighting it.

To start, you’ll want to have setup a good foundation to build on, because without that foundation you’re going to struggle. This is equally true whether you’re a fighter or a farmer, and should be anyone’s first step. Now, whereas a fighter is going to go after the trifecta of CDM/COA/Zeus, a farmer will have a different set of priority GBs. Optionally, if you choose to fight GE but farm for GvG, you will still want that trifecta. However, it doesn’t have to be your main focus.

Farmers are typically looking at two things: Farming goods, and farming troops.

Farming troops is easy. Get Alcatraz, and produce troops for GvG DAs. There’s really nothing more to say about this one. It’s honestly that simple.

Farming goods takes a bit more forethought. There are a few GBs that will produce goods for you, and until Modern Era they’ll be of your era. Modern Era and later they’ll be unrefined goods, but that can work out, too. It all depends on what your team needs. In addition to GBs, there are your own personal goods boosts that you can work with.

The main GBs you’ll want to look at are Lighthouse of Alexandria, and St. Mark’s Basilica to start. Aside from producing random goods once ever 24 hours, they also boost supplies and coins, respectively. You need both supplies and coins in order to produce goods yourself, which means that they feed two of the needs of a farmer simultaneously. Getting both of these GBs and leveling them to 10 as soon as possible will be to your benefit.

Additionally, and especially if you’re not getting Alcatraz, you’ll want to think about Frauenkierche of Dresden. FOD provides goods and happiness, without taking up a ton of room. You’re going to have to get a lot of happiness eventually as you progress through the eras and age up, so this GB will help to fulfill those needs a bit. It may not be enough to cover all of your happiness needs, but it will certainly help while also giving you goods.

Beyond GBs, you’ll want to put down multiple goods buildings for any era currently in need as far as your guild’s treasury goes. While a fighter might put down one of each boosted good for their era, you’re going to want to consider putting down two or three of any boosted good of an era in need, plus perhaps your own era. This is especially true if the era in need is lower than your own, because you can trade goods down to get more for the treasury. So not only can you make goods for an era, you can trade goods down to a specific era.

This may seem really simple and easy, but it’s truly an art to master it. Mastering goods takes a particular finesse, because you need to walk a delicate balance between your own needs, and guild needs. If you negotiate GE, for example, you will need the goods yourself for that. In addition, you will need goods to unlock tech, and that can be very expensive. No guild that cares about its mates will ask you hinder yourself to help the guild, but with goods it can be very easy to unbalance yourself quickly if you don’t pay attention.

Once you do master the goods game though, not only can you do a fabulous job at feeding the guild treasury, you are likely to be able to really help out other mates who need trades, thus helping to strengthen the team overall. A team is only as strong as its weakest link, and an unbalanced team can never be strong, so farming is just as essential as fighting for these two reasons.

So in summary, for the basic foundation of goods farming you want to:

  • Get LOA, St. Mark’s, and FOD
  • Plant multiple of each boosted goods building for current era, and current guild needs
  • Work the trades to maximize goods

Once you get this down, you’ll be ready to be an advanced farmer. But better than that, with these three/four GBs (depending on if you’re farming troops or not), even if you should choose to change over to a fighter at some point (people do change) all of these GBs will still serve you well. So nothing you do here will be a waste that you might have to tear down at some point.

The only GB to consider beyond this, if you’re truly set in your ways even at this basic stage, is the Tower of Babel. It’s not a great population GB beyond EMA, but it’s a very small footprint and really produces a ton of goods. So if you know for sure that you want to farm goods, this is not a bad basic GB to plant. It’s the subject of a lot of controversy on its usefulness though because both GB benefits don’t stand up to the test of time, so this one is definitely up to personal choice.