Farming vs Gathering
Reading Time: 2 minutes So I ran an experiment today and tallied the results of attacking my farm against sending tanks out to gather.
Now, I need to expose my bias: I detest gathering. Every time I send troops out to gather, a treasure pops up, or somebody needs help with something, and then I have to recall a troop before the gathering is complete… And that really messes with my undiagnosed OCD.
Anyway, Remy’s recently been evangelizing gathering and is super-happy with his collections. His enthusiasm alone is enough reason to take gathering seriously.
But I notice that his farm is inactive. 36 days inactive as of this writing. In fact, a lot of our farms are either inactive or woefully neglected. So I was curious what we were missing and decided to experiment.
The Matchup
ZloyKoldun-II vs The Man, The Myth, The Legend Himself
| Stats | ZloyKoldun-II’s HQ |
| Power | 28,138,575 |
| Headquarters | Level 18 |
| City Walls | Level 18 |
| Formation I | Level 18, 871.8K |
| Formation II | Level 18, 419.5K |
| Formation III | Level 18, 264.4K |
| Military Center | Level 18 |
| Troops | Level 5 |
| Units | 9,300 |
| Stats | ZloyKoldun’s Tank |
| Power | 3,720,797 |
| Tank | Level 129 |
| Type | Cheetah |
| Troops | Level 8 |
| Units | 2,233 |
| Heroes | Level 90, Blue |
| Armor | Blues and Greens |
I attacked with my weakest 4th formation tank. Bottom-of-the-barrel heroes with the weakest weapons and armor (and in one case, no armor at all). In all I attacked 8 times, and after each attack, I returned to HQ to unload.
The Result
The results were interesting, in that every attack yielded progressively more. The first wave earned 1.6M Food, for example, while the eighth wave earned 2.9M.
In the end, the yield was spectacular. I gained 56 Million more total resources in 1 hour of farming than I did in 5 hours of gathering. Here’s the breakdown:
| Gathering | Farming | Difference | |
| Food | 6,000,668 | 19,600,000 | +13,599,332 |
| Wood | 6,000,668 | 19,600,000 | +13,599,332 |
| Zents | 0 | 10,000,000 | +10,000,000 |
| Electricity | 0 | 19,600,000 | +19,600,000 |
| Marches | 4 | 8 | n/a |
| Total RSS | 12,001,336 | 68,800,000 | +56,798,664 |
| Gathering Plundering | 5 Hours | 9 Minutes | +4 Hours 51 Minutes |
| Dailies & Collections | 0 | 15 Minutes | -15 Minutes |
| Repairs | 0 | 15 Minutes | -5 Minutes |
| Healing & Training | 0 | 5 Minutes | -5 Minutes |
| Miscellaneous | 0 | 10 Minutes | -10 Minutes |
| Total Time | 5 Hours | 0.9 Hours | +4.1 Hours |
I included some extra details about the farm because it does take some time to maintain. You have to log in. You have to do the daily collections, trucks, missions, etc. You might even send your farm troops out to gather.
And yes, repairing your structures after an attack takes time, and healing/re-training troops costs you speedups. But, what else are you going to use them on? Your farm isn’t participating in major events, and besides, you can get more than enough in the Glory Shop each week to feast and fix two or three times each week.
Final Thought
Yes, Remy is correct that it makes sense to send troops gathering when they’re not doing anything — or when you aren’t doing anything (like sleeping).
But it also makes a lot of sense to invest in your farms.
Taken to the logical conclusion, spending less than an hour a day on your farm could add significant sums to your overall yield. At my level, with my tech, if I gather twice per day, that would be 168M in a week. And if I farm twice per week, that would be 137.6M in a week.
The total for doing both: 305.6M/week (again, at my level with my tech)
And if you add in the rest of your rewards, treasures, and so on, there’s absolutely no reason why an average player couldn’t collect between 1.5 – 3 Billion resources every month.