You, as a builder, are the one who ultimately decides over win or defeat of your team. You need to have a strategic eye for the entire battle. A good overview of the map. A sense of gaining the upper hand by carefully constructing paths, infrastructure, map control and total dominance.

Here are some tips I gathered during my 190+ hours of addicted KAG-playing.

Your main responsibility is to optimize walking paths and reduce travel time. Both teams have good and inexperienced players. So even if there's this uber-soldier who kills an entire team, everybody dies all the time in the grand scheme of things.

Most games are won if one team gains map control and is able to put constant pressure on the other team. You want to give them no time to breathe. You want to occupy their forces, you want to have them deal with invaders, flying chicken-soldiers, ballistas, burning houses etc. They shouldn't even be able to get near your base.

How do you do it? By having your soliders get faster to the enemy base than the enemy soldiers to your base. They must waste less time doing nothing (except walking around). Here's how you do it:

1. Tunnels. The tunnel is the most important building in the game and thus, it always has to be placed right next to the tent. This way, your soldiers can travel the map really quick. If they have to walk 10 seconds to the next tunnel, you lose these 10 seconds. For every soldier. This is unnecessary.

2. Catapults. The second most important building is the vehicle shop. Why? Because ballistas and catapults are incredibly strong of gaining map control. They put a lot of pressure on the enemy team. If you have a ballista that spawns new soldiers or wrecks their base, the enemy team will do a lot to gain control of that ballista or try to destroy it. That means that they don't have any time to get your flag (or take your hall). Less pressure on your base, more pressure on their base. Build a vehicle shop fast. You need 110 gold for it. 50 for the shop, 60 for the bomb bolt upgrade. ALWAYS dig out 110 gold and buy the bolt upgrade immediately. Next:

• Combine catapults with a chicken farm for maximum map control. And have someone dedicated to shoot your soldiers across the map.
  
• Build hiiiigh. I'll get back to that later.

3. Front-builder. You need one builder who is coming to the front. There are guides here on Steam on how to play a front-builder, so I keep this short. Part of map control is to be able to conquer enemy walls (by placing ladders or destroying them with your builder).

4. Micro-optimization.

• Do you have any places in your base that make player stuck or have them loose time? Restructure these places.
  
• Is there a saw-mill somewhere? Build a pathway over it.
  
• Some weird blocks that don't serve anything? Remove them.
  
• Soldiers in your own base unable to climb the flag tower? Place ladders or trap blocks. Lots of them.

5. Obstruct the enemy.
So, the opposite of your effort to reduce travel times is to increase the time the enemy wastes to get to your base. Build doors, little walls, single blocks, a row of blocks. Build random crap. Make it from wood to have it cheap. These aren't structures to last. They are to delay the enemy, to give your own soldiers a few more seconds to fight and invade the enemy base. The more obstacles your enemy has to cover and the less your team has in its way, the better.


In one sentence: Where ever soldiers on your team loose time to get to the enemy, make that path better. Whenever an enemy has an optimal path, try to destroy or block that path. Every second counts, multiply lost seconds by amount of players on your team. That's a lot of time you're wasting there, if paths aren't optimized.

Archers are the lemmings of your team. Expect them to be completely brainless doing stupid things all the time. They only see the enemy. They have no sense of strategy or the grand scheme of things. Don't even try to teach them, because they are resistant to learning. They live in their own world. So let them. But build around their stupidity. Rules to mitigate archers-stupidity-induced defeat:

Never ever build ground-level doors. There's ALWAYS an archer standing in the door, thinking:"I'll only shoot this one arrow in the enemy soldier's chest." Next thing you see is a dead archer blocking the door and the enemy running away with your flag, tongue-smiley over his head. If you build ground-level doors, I guarantee you that your flag will be stolen. This is like a law of nature (I wrote this text before I took the following screenshot!!!).


Always build two layers of doors. Because archers also open doors that are not on the ground and happen to block them with their corpses. Invading chance is reduced by approximately 50%, but it's not zero. Prevent invasion by adding a gap and then more doors.


Build a second layer of everything. So, some inexperienced builder made ground level doors? Don't wreck them, because they are expensive and stone is limited. Just build a second layer in front of that door.

Give archers an incentive to not block the door by building an archer's nest or a little platform they can hang down. If they are out of the way, they can't block doors with their dead bodies and everybody's happy.

I noticed that many games are won by the team that has some sort of solid tower that's as high as the map. Combine this with a catapult and a chicken farm, and you get total map control, because your soldiers can fly everywhere.

• Build your high tower early.
  
• Don't build it at the front line of your base, but somewhere in the middle.
  
• Start out by placing wood or stone back-walls and put ladders on it. Go as high as possible, build a platform there. Then reinforce the whole structure.

For some reason, in some games, builders create anything but basic infrastructure. There are games where there's no archers' shop for 10 minutes. So, build all basic buildings at least once. Tips:

• Prioritize buildings and build accordingly. Tunnel goes next to the tent. Vehicle shop goes underground to protect it at all costs. Everything else should be protected by stone walls, because enemy bomb-jumping soldiers must not buy at your shops.
  
• Never build a knight shop in the open. If an enemy gets into your base and buys stuff, your defenses are done.
  
• Build a knight shop next to a safe front-tunnel. Because if you have more than 2 tunnels, knights can't carry kegs through the tunnel.
  
• Build a tree farm. Because wood is cheap, wood grows, wood helps to build several layers that cost time and gold to destroy. A tree farm saves time and gives more wood than chopping a tree down manually.

Examples:

There's your flag tower. How many layers are between your flag tower and the front line? Build layers in front of them so that the enemy will be stopped, has to waste bombs, fire arrows or time to destroy the layers. The more layers you have, the more effort the enemy team has to put into getting through. A layer burns down, because it is made entirely of wood? Doesn't matter. It served exactly that purpose: Waste time and fire arrows. Keep a bucket of water, if one wood-layer is extremely exposed.

I like it if people have an aesthetical sense and care to make the base beautiful. But please, do it once the basics are done and your base runs like a piece of well-oiled machinery.

Thanks for reading my guide.

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