Investing in Great Buildings - Locking a reward

6:40 AM 6 Comments

One of the most important features in Forge of Empires is the ability of players to donate forge points to other players' Great Buildings. This is limited to other players of the same world that belong in the same neighborhood, the same guild or in the friends list. Donation rewards include forge points, medals and GB blueprints. All three of these are very important, especially for the newer players of the game:

Forge points is the most important currency in the game. It is the currency that determines your research progress and your GB level at the same time. Investing in improving tech or improving GBs is one of the most important choices affecting your playstyle. Obviously more FPs = better!

Medals are useful for unlocking expansions. Space is probably the most limiting factor early in the game and having some extra expansion medals is going to help a lot.

Last, but not least, getting GB blueprints via donating is the easiest and fastest way to get your own GBs. Sure you can do that by relying on motivating/polishing or quest rewards, but donating to GBs allows you to target specific BPs and makes overall progress a lot faster.

Donating, thus, is very important and most players compete for getting the top rewards in each GB. It is important when donating to only invest forge points in such a way that you are going to get a guaranteed reward. Let me illustrate this with an example:


In the GB above, we can see that the top reward is 55 FP, 886 medals and 2 blueprints. This GB requires 460 - 307 = 153 more FPs to level. In this case, if we want to lock the 1st spot, we need to invest 77 forge points. If we do that, then the building will go from 307/460 to 384/460 and will have 76 forge points remaining to level (i.e. noone will be able to surpass us).

How can we calculate this number? Well there is a simple formula:

Points needed to invest = (Points remaining for next level + Points of highest competitor)/2. [rounded up]

Now in this particular scenario, if we invest 77 FPs, we will get back 55 fps so we have a total loss of 22 FPs. For these 22 FPs, we get as payment 886 medals and 2 blueprints for Innovation Tower! Of course it depends on our current situation if this tradeoff is worthwhile.

If the 77 FPs are too much to invest now, we can do the following:

Invest only 1 FP in the building. This will allow us to view its current progress in our town hall easily every time we login (along with all other GBs that we are interested in investing and have allocated 1 FP). This way we can search for opportunities to perform investments that are beneficial to us and many times get even an FP profit (in addition to medals and BPs).

At first, this will take some time to get used to doing calculations, but after a few days it will become a natural habit.

Using this strategy, starting a new account on an advanced server, I have managed to earn more than 1500 FPs profit, blueprints for all GBs up to 2-3 ages higher than I am and several thousand of medals in less than 2 months!