Perhaps not long awaited, but certainly long planned…my post on farming in Kingdoms of Middle Earth. Farming resources from other players is on of two ways of gaining resources, the other being producing it yourself in your cities. Farming other players however, is vastly more profitable than producing, and so will quickly become essential for your might growth, if done properly of course.

In this article, I will explain to you my method of farming. I know there are many methods and styles to choose from, so if you don’t like this style that’s ok. I’ve just found that it nets me more than enough resources in a short time, trying to be as efficient as possible. It will take some effort to set up, but once working, will really ease your farming trips.

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For farming efficiently, we need to answer four basic questions:

1. Where and who do we farm?
2. How do we keep track of our farms?
3. When do you farm?
4. What units do you farm with?

Once we answer these, we can start pillaging the neighborhood.

1. Selecting your farms

The key to farming is of course finding profitable farms. Exactly what you call profitable is up to the individual, but above around 600k resources per trip, I deem a farm profitable. But how do you find them. Lets first look at what types of players/cities you want to farm. How much these tips affect you depends on your alliance, your level and you might, so please just take from it what applies to you best.

1.1 Going after big alliances and hostiles

When players farm, most will stick to their immediate neighborhood instead of searching the entire map for the right players. This method is more for the casual player and will be detailed more in 1.2.

A bit easier but also a bit more time consuming is going after big and/or hostile alliances. This method is usually done by more experienced players, but essentially, everyone can do it. The pro’s of this method is that the larger players could have enormous amounts of rss laying around, but there are also reasons why they would not (building, non-stop training). Another advantage, and this is probably why most people do it, is that you can check for any opens or walls these players might have. It is not uncommon to find open cities with no RoI burning, or with heroes with low gear, or even no hero. So when you’re TK minded, or want to retaliate against losses you suffered at the hands of said alliance, you might want to give this a try.

The downside is that this can be very time consuming. First you need to get all the coordinates, but with all the websites spitting these out this shouldn’t be hard. Next is the fact that players in an alliance tend to scatter across the map, increasing marching times tremendously. As hourglasses are not unlimited, even for spenders, only farming like this is unsustainable, unless you only farm once in a while.

1.2 Going around the neighborhood

The more general (I think) method of farming is simply by selecting the right targets around your own city/cities and farming them. This method is more accessible to even the lowest of players. Now, you can go about every day to farming random people around you, but if you wanna save time and farm more efficiently, you need to look for some good targets/farms. So here are some considerations to take into account before farming. If you do not care AT ALL who the hell you attack for resources, you can skip these considerations.

Player level and cities

If you’re not comfortable or mighty enough to tackle every opponent you see, you might want to start filtering for player levels. I usually only farm players above level 20, although farming gems below that do exist. Reason for that is that lower level players usually do not produce enough resources to make farming them attractive. Make sure to check out all cities of a particular player, to avoid hitting a troop city and stopping there, while there might be 3 more rss producing cities nearby (I’ll leave the method of acquiring coordinates up to the individual player).

A real upper level I do not have. At higher levels this number doesn’t say much anymore. You can have expert level 60-70 players and level 100 n00bs. Good players will keep rss under vault or can retaliate against you taking their resources, so if you do not want that to happen, that’s a consideration.

Alliances

Alliances also plays a role in selecting farms. Rule number one of course is that you shouldn’t farm alliances that are friendly to yours. Secondly, attacking big alliances is sure to provoke counter attacks, or may even start wars between your alliances (though not likely, and really, what does war even mean in this game??).

I tend to look for medium to big players, preferably in small to medium alliances. And there are plenty of those. Many players are way below me in might, sometimes I even ”out-might” their whole alliance. Safe to say, these kinds of players usually don’t attack back.

Active or inactive

The best players to farm are those which conform to the above descriptions and are inactive. They might not play the game everyday, or be on vacation, or quit altogether, but if they have reasonable production, they will be over vault constantly. Make sure to visit them every day! To notice if someone is really inactive, you have to keep track of level and might ideally, and I will come to that later on.

Wall and retaliation

Most people don’t build walls, but some do. If you encounter small walls, you should immediately follow up an attack (if unsuccessful) with fighting troops and tear it down to see what rss they have behind it. Be sure to send small waves the next time first, just to check if there is a wall again, some people love to keep building small walls to destroy carts and wagons. If the wall builder does not yield much rss over multiple hits, leave them alone. If you encounter a wall too big for you to handle, notify alliance and let team members take it down for TK’s and possibly rss.

Besides walls, some people are happy to attack you back immediately to try to steal back some of their rss. They may even start farming you on a daily basis. If this becomes too annoying, just leave them alone, especially if they don’t have much rss to begin with. If they are small players, defend against their attacks a few times if you have the opportunity and they will likely stop hitting you back. In general, with wall builders and retaliation, keep farming them if they yield a good amount of rss. Also ship out and/or use any rss above vault a.s.a.p., to prevent attackers from stealing back money.

Production and vault level per city

Important to farming are the vault levels and production levels of a city. In general, scouting is waste of time in my view, but sometimes it pays off to scout a city to check for resource production levels and vault levels. It can give you some idea on how much rss this city may yield you, but dont value a report too much though. As mentioned in the first point, try to find the rss producing cities of a player for best farming results.

Distance

This one is simple for me: Try to keep distance to a minimum. It will greatly increase farming efficiency if you don’t go to farms an hour away from your city. My farms are all within a few minutes march with wagons, and I have around 200 (profitable) farms I can go to at the moment.

Keep in mind that although distance factors in in that it is not efficient to have all your farm an hour away, some of your best farms might decide to port to another location. For such top farms, it might be worthwhile to hunt them down again and spend some time marching to their cities.

1.3 Selecting your farms

Now that we know what kind of players to look for, it comes down to selecting your farms. you can do this by randomly scrolling around the map or more orderly. I used to do this randomly in the beginning (although I did keep track of the players), just going around the map looking for suitable cities/players (per the above mentioned points). After a while though, I went at it more systematically, dividing the plots around my farm city in 20×20 squares which I would systematically go over for finding farms.

This was just for me personally to make sure I covered every angle around my cities, and didn’t miss certain patches. I attacked players that fit my “farm preference” and noted them down. I even went so far as to make a small map in Excel (below) which showed me immediately where my farms were (or potential farms). Purple dots were initial farms, red dots after I expended my farming routines. Whether you want to do this yourself I’ll leave up to you, it at least helped me figure out which areas I hadn’t covered yet.

2. Keeping track of your farms’ yields

Keeping track of your farms is really important, as it gives you a much better overview of what they net you on average, and can give you clues on how active a player is. Some of my top farms gave me virtually nothing the first few farm rounds, but after a while they gave me more and more. It could be you hit a player who is normally over vault, but just this day used his rss to train or build. It would be a waste to discard such a farm on the basis of one or a few failed attempts. Besides this, you need of course a way to store the location of your farms.

2.1 Using in-game bookmarks

Now the game does offer you an option for keeping track in the form of bookmarks. I have never been a huge fan of the bookmark system and rarely use it. It is too cumbersome and offers to little options to store your information. When you have over 200 farm addresses, keeping track of them in the bookmark system is nearly impossible, and there is no way to neatly order them on for example the amount of rss they yield.

2.1 Use Excel to store addresses

If you have access to Excel to store and keep track of your farms it will help you a lot. Like I said, I really really do not like the bookmarking system, especially when you have potentially 200 farms to keep track of.

So in my case, the above shown map is accompanied by a farm list. I actually do not use the map anymore to be honest. What you keep track of  of your farms is up to the individual, but I did/do it quite extensively. I noted down coords, name, alliance, level, might and resources gained for a number of farming trips, but if you want less work, just strip it to name, coords and rss gained. The list looks as follows:

Please note this list was compiled months ago, when the server was still much younger 🙂

On the right is a number of farming trips. Each trip I would record what I gained in resources (yes I know it is tedious). On the far right was the average amount of rss gained from each player, sometimes grouped by alliance. After each trip I ordered the list from highest to lowest gain, making the next trip more profitable.

2.2 Discarding farms

Now of course, whatever way you do it, you cannot know in advance which farms are profitable, perhaps not even on the basis of a few visits. Hence why I kept track of my designated farms for a number of farming trips.

And after you have visited a player or city a number of times, you get a gauge of what they will likely offer you in the future. And assuming you do not want to waste time farming, you should remove really bad farms from the list.

2.3 Using the farm list

Now once established, the list itself needs little maintenance. The main worry is people porting away, but it is not a big deal. Look for new farms every now and then and the list should be fine. When ordered to profits, it is very easy to first go to the most profitable farms, so if you do not have much time, that’s a real relief.

3. When do you farm?

Preferably you want to farm when your farms are asleep for a while. Assuming your farms produce rss, they will be over vault the most just before waking up and using the rss for alliance trading, training or building. So when this is differs with where you are from. In my server, by far most players are american. I’m from Europe, so when I wake up, America goes to sleep and I have all day to farm at my own pace.

When you’re from America, your best bet is to farm as early as possible. Remember though, there is no ‘wrong’ time to farm, it’s just that it’s easier to do when the enemy is asleep 😉  .

4. What units do you farm with?

Also here there is no one answer, and everyone uses their own strategy. Factors to keep in mind are marching time, load and possible might loss. What you also need to decide is whether you want to farm for gold or not. Farming for gold is usually slower than not, as you need to send along fighting troops, which march much slower compared to supply troops, but if you need the gold, send fighting troops.

4.1 Scouting

Very few people use this actually, but you can. Use the scout function to first check whether a farm has any rss or wall, and send supply and/or fighting troops accordingly. But like said, not many people do this.

4.2 Scout troops

More usual is scouting through sending a few units. Usually 1 cart or wagon, or a Lyncaen Raider. This provides fast intel on possible rss or wall. As with normal scouting, you need to follow up accordingly. Personally I do not see the use of this, and when I farm I just send the whole bunch the first time, but if you’re in a server where lots of people build walls it can be helpful.

4.3 Supply troops

Self-evident. Whether you use 4.1 or 4.2, you need to send supply troops to get the rss. The higher tiers provide better speed and load, but are more costly to lose to wall, but hey, do you really care? Also try to send a number of supply troops that will guarantee you get all rss in one go from most of your farms, to prevent unnecessary return trips.

If you happen to stumble upon a really big target or even alliance bank, immediately send and speed the biggest supply troop wave you can, filling it up with Mammoths first to T1 last.

4.4 Fighting troops

As said, you need to send these to get gold or breach walls, so if you farm for gold or know someone has a wall, send them. But in general, it’s up to you if you want top send them with every farm attack.  Most people on my server who build walls are medium sized players and so are their walls, so I tend to send in fighting troops with every attack, just to be sure. The downside is that you sacrifice the speed of the supply troops, but if you farm really close by the differences are marginal…..Also, higher tier = faster of course.

 5 Wrap-up

So that’s it for now. As I said in the beginning, this article is mainly useful for beginning players, and gives an overview of the basics of farming. If you don’t like or have your own strategy, please use that. And if you have any tips or missed points, please comment below. Cheers!