A couple of times I’ve heard people ask, both in GC and AC, what the best building to spend a Hobbit Building Crew on is. Although I recognize that for many players this question will be obsolete by this point in the game, some newcomers might find my views helpful in deciding where to spend their HBC’s.

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So first, we have to make a distinction between two situations: Having one or two HBC’s, and having many HBC’s. As stated in the opening paragraph, this article will be mostly for beginning players, so the focus will first be on the former situation. Later on I’ll discuss the latter, which is handy for when you’ve saved a couple of HBC’s, or won a few in the Premium chance sale.

Note: Please take the dependancies on other buildings into account when deciding what to use your HBC’s on. If for example you plan to Runecraft you Musterfield, remember that you will also need to HBC and Runecraft 1 Quarry and 1 Lumber Mill. See this article for normal construction, and this article for Runecrafting flowcharts.

Single HBCs

So here are a few of my suggestions for spending your first single HBC’s on, in no particular order:

Academy. Research in your academy is one of the best ways to speed up construction, training, and resource gathering. It is an essential part of each player’s strategy (should). Problem is that level 10 research takes quite some time, and if you are not willing to spend hourglasses on research, it is best to upgrade academy to level 10 and start researching. This will improve your cities no matter what, and helps prepare for training Tier 4 units.

Sage Tower. The Sage Tower helps increasing drops from Goblin camps, and this can be useful when farming for city relics for example. I suggest upgrading your Sage Tower (you can only have one, its effects count for all cities though) to level 10 just to be sure if you have a spare HBC, but it is is not the highest priority building in my opinion.

Vault. Resources are invaluable in constructing your city and training troops. But without spending an HBC on a Vault, the maximum protected amount is 1.8 m resources, given level 10 Strongbox. If you are farming quite a bit to queue up loads of troops, you’ll soon find it is very easy to go over vault limit, even with multiple cities/vaults. Upgrading the Vault to level 10 however, opens up runecrafting as well. With the current maximum level being *7, this raises protection to 3.4 m! Makes it far easier to protect your hard earned resources! I upgraded my vault with one of my first HBC’s.

Watch Tower With the introduction of Gem Mining and Embedding, the Watch Tower gained a new function in searching for Goblin Caverns. The area searched in is related to the level of the Tower, so for more advanced players I suggest constructing a Watch Tower in each city and upgrade it to level 10 if possible.

Keep. The keep is one of those buildings that, in itself, doesn’t really benefit from an HBC, but it allows higher level Homes, but gives no extra wilds or something. But one thing is sure, it does look cool on the map view, showing your enemies you have runecrafting unlocked. Seems like a silly reason, but still was enough for me to spend one of my HBC’s on my keep 🙂 . Also, it helps prepare for training Tier 4 troops.

Update: I cannot believe I didn’t add this sooner, but in your third and fourth cities, upgrading the keep to level 10 does indeed open up 3 more city plots and 3 more resource plots, making this a very valuable option for those cities if you want to get the best rss production/troop training times!

MusterField. The Musterfield was also one of my first buildings to be upgraded to level 10. Benefit is simply 10,000 more troops per wave, and one more wave at your disposal. This comes in handy when transferring large numbers of troops between cities and when attacking other players, when you want to send out as many troops as possible in one wave. It doesn’t help in training Tier 4, and runecrafting requires runecrafted Lumbermill and Quarry, so this is probably the least important one, along with the Keep.

With Runecrafting, the march capacity can be expanded even more, which can be useful for attacking other players for TK’s or for farming.

Great Hall. The Great Hall used to be a no-brainer, as it opened up the possibility of leveling your heroes to level 200-212, and gave you one extra Hero. If you are in a relatively new server in which heroes are still leveled using ‘Train with’ items, this upgrade will be needed to be able to get to lvl 200+. If you haven’t done so yet and already have most heroes at higher levels (212-250), only bother when you need th extra hero for for example farming routines.

Barracks. Barracks are used for training troops, and what troops they can train is dependent on the highest level barrack in a city. For this reason it is highly advised that, if you want to train higher Tier troops, or even Tactical Troops, you upgrade at least 1 barrack per city to the highest possible level. Once completed, the options to train the higher unbits will also appear at the lower level barracks in that city alone.

Multiple HBC’s

So now on to when you have saved multiple HBC’s. One of the best reasons to spend them is to open up Tier 4 units for training. But beware, you will need 10 HBC’s to completely open this option up, and you will need to runecraft a number of buildings, so make sure you have the runes to do this as well.

If you dont have 10 yet, but really aim to go for Tier 4 asap, try spending what you have on buildings needed to accomplish this, such as the Academy, Barracks, Keep, Wall, Forge, Stables etcetera. Especially the Academy is useful as it gives access to research level 10, which of itself will keep you entertained for quite some days, even weeks.

I you don’t aim for Tier 4 training, by far the best buildings to spend the HBC’s on are Barracks and Homes. These increase the troop training speeds and available population, allowing much faster might gains, which can be especially crucial during Tournaments of Might or Train-a-thons. With a proper number Barracks/Homes, it is quite easy to train over 1 million might per day, and multiple times that if you can speed queues constantly and have enough resources.

If you don’t intend to go for Tier 4 or fast troop training, it is difficult to say what to use multiple HBC’s on. You could upgrade all your Vaults to give you massive resource capacity. You could build an Academy in each city and upgrade it to 10 to research multiple lines simultaneously and drastically reduce research times. Or you can upgrade field buildings if you produce your own resources.

That’s about all I can think of. No single building is really outstanding aside from the above, IF you don’t intend to go for troop/Tier 4 training. Embassy perhaps a bit interesting for war time? Tavern, does anyone really use these and want to spend an HBC on?

Advice

So in the end, my advice is to use single HBC’s on your Academy and Vault, and to do Keep and Musterfield if you really want to. But you should really aim to get either Tier 4 units available or reduce Tier 1 training times, so save them up or start upgrading the necessary buildings, although many will not pay off before all are upgraded. Once again, see my post on training Tier 4 troops to see what you have to upgrade. Good luck!