Upgrading Watchtower – pros and cons?

What are the pros and cons for upgrading your watch tower? Still kind of new and have heard a little but still seemed confused as to why I should or shouldn’t upgrade this building. Thanks in advance for any help.

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The benefits of the Watchtower are increased production of food and iron, which also increases to a greater degree as you progress in beating Season 1 and claiming Outposts from the end of each Province.

The Watchtower also has a nice logistical benefit that Farms and Mines don’t — it continues production while being upgraded.

And because the Watchtower uses food instead of iron for upgrades, it can be a useful building to work on when you’re also completing iron-intensive upgrades if you have VIP and a second builder.


Really the only potential downside of upgrading your Watchtower is that as your production and storage increases, the potential loot available for raiding you increases too. Since some players make a point of seeking out targets with large food or iron reserves available for raiding, it can in theory make you a little more of a target.

But in practice, if you’re online reasonably often and routinely collecting resources from your Watchtower, you’ll still net a vast portion of the food and iron produced.

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Thank you and this now makes more since to me lol. So this would also mean every time you are raided you ould also lose your cups as well? I am still working on my teams which consists of 1 - 5* and a few 3* so I would actually lose more than gain by upgrading right?

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Upgrading your watch tower won’t cause you to lose more cups per se, but it might have that effect if you end up getting raided more often because you offer higher food and iron rewards.

Glad it’s helpful!

I’m tired enough that it’s affecting my ability to write coherently. So I’m off to bed after this, but hopefully this makes sense!


You can always lose cups when raided, but that isn’t hugely affected by your Watchtower level in particular.

Even a good defense team will typically lose most of the time. And the more you win on offense and your cups rise, the more often you’ll get matched with players with strong enough teams to defeat your team.

Because of that, cup levels tend to hover around the same amount until you level your defense more, or do better on offense. You’ll rise and fall, but tend to end up about in the same place.

Upgrading your Watchtower isn’t likely to impact that much, since additional attacks against your team will drop your cups some, and then stronger players won’t be able to get as many cups from you (so they can’t knock you much lower), and weaker players may not be able to defeat your defense (so they’ll ignore you or end up adding a bit to your cups).

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As you get higher kevel, you’ll find food to be a great limiter - for heroes, troops, mana potions etc. Watchtower 20 with all the outposts adds a ton of food production. That leads to a stronger team.

Cups are transient. don’t worry about them. Do the thing that makes your team stronger.

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This is perhaps the most elegantly succinct advice about this game I’ve ever seen! :smile:

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Upgrade your watchtower all the way and don’t think twice about it. The food/iron you stand to lose from being raided is nothing in comparison to the food/iron your watchtower produces. It’s just a benefit, all upside. Don’t worry about cups. You gain cups from winning raids on offence not from defense raids. Your team will always comfortably be at the raid tier it should be. At some point you’ll sit comfortably in diamond and the amount of food/iron your watchtower produces and possibly gets raided for doesn’t even matter. Most people raid for cups not food/iron. If they see your defense team is worth 14 cups of they win and -50 cups if they lose they just won’t raid you. Food/iron isn’t a huge motivation to raid somebody. The most iron you can win from somebody on any given day with a maxed watchtower is like 17k. Food is like 50k. It’s nothing. Especially considering most people have full inventories of food and iron over 2 million, it just doesn’t matter. The watchtower will help you progress your game faster until you reach the point where you will never need food or iron.

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To throw some extra weight behind it; I’m on team upgrade.

There will be times when you don’t need to upgrade, basically when you have more food/iron than you can use consistently, but the ebbs and flows of your resources will fluctuate a lot during the game, and when you start to notice a resource is consistently not full, time to upgrade the production buildings, and if you’ve already done that, then it’s time to upgrade the watchtower.

Don’t worry about the cups. You will pretty much hang out in a 200 cup range once you have a stable team, as long as you keep up with daily raiding for chest purposes. It’s fine to just be in that range, getting to far beyond it makes your raid chest harder to fill, and getting too far below it means your rewards are slightly worse.

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Thanks to all who replied. I read the forum almost daily just to learn more about the game. I love it and can’t stop playing. Just hate waiting on everything to refill lol.

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The key is willingness to spend. I’ve had a friend who started playing E&P about the same time last october. While I am still stuck at XP level 35 with lousy five 5 * heroes, my friend already reach XP level 49 with thirteen good 5 * heroes. She spend over 2.5K Euro while mine was way under 1k.

The key is gems, you can buy your way up, speed up the raid or monster chest missions, doing tons of summon and being lucky, acquire those 5 *, but at the end of the day, the ascension materials like the compass, damascus blade, telescope, tome of tactics and royal tabbard is something the gems can’t buy. The only way is being active at every mission, titans and war. Pray that the loot will be some kind of ascension material for our heroes.

Btw, always empty your watchtower so the raiding enemies won’t get more.

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Thanks. I definitely play the game constantly. I am addicted lol. Thanks again. : )

Disagree. The key is patience. I’ve never spent a dime on this game, and I have actually enjoyed the process of slowly progressing my heroes, and I have very seldom been stuck. Took my a little while to pull my first purple hero higher than a two-star. Toward the end of season 1, I had some times when I had to grind and level to beat certain stages, but I always felt like there was something new to do. And when you finally make a breakthrough, it is that much sweeter knowing you put in the time and effort to make it happen.

  • Doing an epic summon and seeing the purple lightning that meant I was about to finally replace Layla in my lineup… excitement.
  • Pulling a yellow four-star (Danzaburo) to finally relegate Bane to my bench, on Thanksgiving no less… texted my alliance mates to say I was thankful for a little badger this Thanksgiving!
  • Beating the Dark Lord on Christmas night… apropos.
  • Pulling a four-star blue to complete my rainbow four-star team, and it being the one I had been hoping for (Grimm) to boot… shouted and scared my mother-in-law!
  • Seeing the “Bonus Draw” screen for the first time, realizing I was about to pull my first (and still only) five-star, then realizing it was super-beast Onatel, but not being able to shout for joy because it was 5:45 am and I was the only one in my family up… priceless.

The fun is in playing the game, not winning the game, which isn’t actually possible anyway. Enjoy the ride, folks. That’s where the fun is.

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Hello. Started a month ago or so. I keep the tower at 6 so i can empty it twice a day and have a supply of revenge raids for the chest. Hope you are having as much fun as i am.

Is this knowledge you gained from beta testing?

No I’m not in beta. Just experience.

Its all down to individual preference. Patience for the people who play the game for fun and money for the real gamers who want to be at the top of the game in shorter time, although getting those AM will be another headache. We will never know the insane amount of money those top ranked gamers put into the developer’s coffin.
One thing for sure, no one will ever be able to stay at the top for a longer time. No matter how good your heroes are, others will always be able to find a way past you. Different heroes, different characteristic, good or bad boards…and the list goes on.

The competition at the top is what makes the developer’s laugh their way to the bank.

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Patience is a key, but so is watchtower. It is the third leg of the stool. Keep grinding and you will see it pay off. I was 90th when stopped to check forum, and I always empty my tower before leaving which is habit to develop.

Good luck

When I started playing (not so long ago)
I read somewhere (don’t remember where)
That it was best not to level up the stronghold past 10. The assumption obviously being that the less you have the less you lose. So what I was wondering today was…
what real benefits are there for fully leveling up the stronghold? And, is there any real benefit to keeping it at 10 or below?
I’m wondering if I’ll even lose more cups on average, by leveling up any further.
Please, what you think,?

You may also check this one:

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