Depending on how resources are in your city center, you want to build using a horizontal or vertical pattern.

Vertical


Hortizontal



The green lines are where you look at the resources. If you have a lot of stone or wood in those areas, then you choose that alignment and resource type.

For example, lets say you have 3 trees on the left wall and 2 stone on the right. You will want to go with a vertical patten, wood on left and stone on right.

When fully upgraded, this layout will bring in over 20k stone and wood per hour.

Making Gold



This is the best layout for creating gold with town houses. Harbor's give a lot more bonus than Markets. The markets are optional.

Castle Cities

Once you have about 3 cities, you should build the next one with the intent to castle it. A castle city should focus on unit production only. How do you know when your city is ready for a castle?

Building a War City

Okay, so you are ready to settle your first war city. This city is going to be your main attack force. The first thing you want is something with water access. It is important to be able to ship those attacking units anywhere.

Initial Construction

When your city is settled, you want to build like this: Keep doing this until you hit level 8. Between each level you should spend time upgrading cottages to level 5. All the while you are shipping over resources. It is a good idea to build one warehouse so you can store even more.

Barracks and Training Grounds

At level 8 you start making barracks and training grounds. Make them in this configuration:



At some point you should have shipped over iron to max out what you can hold. Now start making Berserkers and never stop. Well you will eventually stop. But you want to get up tens of thousands of them.

Food

When you begin recruiting, you need to also start producing the only resource this town will gather: food. It is important to have food produced in city for two reasons. The first is if you are sieged, you will not be able to send any in. The second is if someone successfully raids and steals all your food, your troops won't start comitting suicide at an obscene rate.



Place your farms in the outside rings, but not near the harbor. You want them positioned like above if 2 lakes are near each other. Basically you want up to 4 farms attached to 1 windmill. It is important to have open spaces around your farms, each will give a 25% bonus.

While building your initial Berserker force, upgrade your wall and towers. Don't build any city guards, rangers or other defensive troops.

Advanced Construction

When you have everything upgraded, it is time to start tearing down those cotteges one at a time and replacing them with barracks and other recruitment buildings. More details will be added on this later.

Wait a second, how do I defend this?

Easy, you build a second city like this one, except it will never be castled and replace Berserkers with defensive troops. Send all troops to defend your war city. Settle this city right next to your war city. Don't worry about water access for this one.