Speed Settling

Speed settling is to settle the second village as quickly as possible. Many players want to settle their second village quickly to secure important 15c or 9c villages with good oasis boni to make it their capital to maximize their capital production later. Since good spots are quite rare, being able to settle faster than the others is quite important.

History

In the beginning, the fastest settling strategy was to upgrade the resource fields a bit, then build residence, settlers, townhall, celebrate a party, then settle. This changed however, when rubble was introduced. Rubble returns one third of the building cost, after destroying a building in the main building. This combined with the quest, that upgrades your residence to level 10 for free if you build it to level 5, allowed to rush residence level 5 with very low resource fields to train three settlers, demolish the residence and use the residence's resources to upgrade academy, townhall and celebrate a party for culture points, if the quests were done in the correct order. With the culture points from quests, that was enough to settle. Magus published THE guide for speed settling in the forum in October 2016.

A few years later, menhirs were introduced. They had a specific mechanic, that basically destroys all resource fields giving back almost all of their investition cost. This could be used to extend the resource fields to level 3 (higher compared to the original speed settling), to obtain the quests rewards for several "all/one of each resource fields to level x" quests and getting the resources back by using a menhir stone later. With this, the time between starting on a gameworld and settling the 2nd village was only the building time for the residence to level 5 + training time for three settlers + travel time of the settlers. So basically, by abusing menhirs to settle quickly, the best (reasonable) time to settle could be achieved.

On Halloween Hunt 2020, you can buy 18k resources in the beginning with gold. This could be used to upgrade the residence to level 11 or 12, to shorten the settlers' training time by a few minutes to get an even better time. However, there is no experience in the praxis with this.

Birthday Bash 2021 allowed a similar strategy. You can not only buy 24k resources in the beginning there, but also due to the larger warehouses for speed servers introduced in patch v0.100, you could spare 1-2 warehouse and granary levels, which could be re-invested in residence or main building levels.

Due to the larger warehouses on speed servers, warehouses and granaries may be 1-2 levels below the number given here. The spared resources can be invested in a higher main building (reduces residence building, demolish and dismantle time), higher residence level (reduces settler training time).

Original Speed Settling

This section bases heavily on the original guide from Magus: https://forum.kingdoms.com/index.php?thread/11471-governor-second-village-in-24-hours/

1. Play the tutorial
2. Upgrade all croplands to level 3
3. Build Warehouse level 6
4. Build Granary level 5
5. Build barracks level 3
6. Build cranny level 1
7. Build embassy level 1
8. Build marketplace level 1
9. Upgrade main building to level 5
10. Train 25 of the cheapest units (clubswingers, legionnaires, phalanges)
11. Build residence level 5
12. Train 3 settlers
13. Start demolishing the residence, such that it finishes right after the third settler is done. It is important that the residence is gone after the third settler is fully built.
14. Dismantle residence's rubble. Pay attention to the warehouses to prevent resources from overflowing.
15. Upgrade main building to level 10
16. Upgrade warehouse to level 7
17. Upgrade granary to level 6
18. Build academy level 10
19. Build workshop level 1
20. Build townhall level 1
21. Demolish the academy
22. Dismantle academy's rubble.
23. Upgrade granary to level 8
24. Celebrate a small celebration (you might need to wait a bit until you have enough resources)

During that, you should pay attention to robber hideouts and clean them as soon as possible and as quickly as possible. As soon you have at least one settler, you can send the settler plus at least 2 troops to the hideout after you killed all troops in it to farm the resources quickly.

If you need resources, you should:

• Dismantle the rubble, that is in the village from the beginning
• Play the card game and use the resource chests (don't forget to adjust the hero production accordingly before using one)
• Do all quests, that do not require resources to fulfil (e.g. renaming the village, chosing a production for the hero, annecting an oasis after building the embassy, ...)
• Obviously, but for sake of completeness: Fetch quests reward as soon as you need it, while paying attention to overflowing warehouses.
• You can demolish literally every building in the end, except for townhall, warehouse, granary and rally point to get a few extra rubble resources. You can even destroy the main building after you demolished everything else. The main building gives just below 3k resources in rubble.

Menhir Speed Settling

This section bases heavily on the guide from Be2-e4: https://forum.kingdoms.com/index.php?thread/21087-how-to-speedsettling-on-steroids/

1. Play the tutorial
2. All croplands 2
3. Warehouse 2
4. Granary 1
5. All croplands 3
6. All other fields 1
7. One wood, clay and iron 2
8. Warehouse 3
9. Granary 3
10. All fields 2
11. All fields 3
12. Main building 5
13. Embassy 1
14. Cranny 1
15. Marketplace 1
16. Residence 1
17. Warehouse 6
18. Granary 5
19. Barracks 3
20. Academy 5
21. Residence 5
22. Relocate using a menhir
23. Train 3 settlers
24. Main building 10
25. Demolish residence and time it, such that it's finished right after the third settler
    • This takes 04:15:00
26. Warehouse 7
27. Granary 6
28. Dismantle rubble from residence now, not before
    • This takes 0:33:43
29. Academy 10
30. Workshop 1
31. Town hall 1
32. Demolish academy
33. Demolish workshop
34. Demolish barracks
35. Granary 8
36. Celebrate small party

As in the original guide, you are supposed to do the following:

• Dismantle the rubble, that is in the village from the beginning
• Play the card game and use the resource chests (don't forget to adjust the hero production accordingly before using one)
• Do all quests, that do not require resources to fulfil (e.g. renaming the village, chosing a production for the hero, annecting an oasis after building the embassy, ...)
• Do adventures only while your hero is not busy clearing robber hideouts. Hideouts have priority.
• Obviously, but for sake of completeness: Fetch quests reward as soon as you need it, while paying attention to overflowing warehouses.
• You can demolish literally every building in the end, except for townhall, warehouse, granary and rally point to get a few extra rubble resources. You can even destroy the main building after you demolished everything else. The main building gives just below 3k resources in rubble.
• You can train two base units to complete the 5 unit quest after you started the training of the settlers.

This order of actions results in the quickest possible second village (unless you manage to build residence higher than 10 to reduce settler training time or main building earlier/higher to reduce residence building time):

Best possible times are:

Roman	12 hours 35 minutes
Gaul	11 hours 15 minutes
Teuton	13 hours 55 minutes

The differences origin from the different training times for settlers.