Forge of Empires Alcatraz Great Building

I’m writing this guide because I realize most people who have an Alcatraz fail to maximize it’s offensive and or defensive potential.

For the offensive minded Alcatraz owner:

There are essentially three stages to maximizing the offensive potential of an Alcatraz.

1.) The Build Phase:

First you must delete or sell all military buildings except for your Rogue Hideouts.

This does not mean destroy premium event buildings like Champion’s Retreats, But keep in mind you should always make sure you will have more Rogue Hideouts then other premium event military buildings so that your Alcatraz during this phase will make more rogues than any other units.

The length of time you spend in this phase largely depends on your Alcatraz level and/or how depleted your unit reserves are. I personally aim to have a reserve of  at least 1,000 Rogues at any given time.

Once you stockpile the amount of Rogues you believe you need you can move on to the 2nd phase.

2.) Specialized Unit Production:

Pick a specific age that you want to target for fighting, and then build enough military buildings of that age to skew the results when collecting from your Alcatraz to produce those specific age units.

Once you have 50 to 100 of the two or three units from that age that you normally fight with, you can move on to phase three.
(Remember you never need to build more than 2 or three units for any specific age)

*note: You will continue to accumulate a few unattached rogues each day during this phase.

3.) War:

After following the above guide, you should be in good shape to go to war on your preferred map.

When you are finished with your days or weeks of battle, you should be able to look at your troop count and evaluate if you need to build up a Rogue reserve again, or other units.  If so, you should start back at step one.

If you find that you still have a healthy amount of Rogues in reserve, then you should delete the military buildings from the age you were targeting, and start building units from other ages that you plan to use in the near future.

(Keep in mind to keep a reserve of unattached units of the last age so you can fight off sieges, when needed)

For the Defensive minded Alcatraz Owner:

There’s no reason to have Rogue Hideouts unless you will occasionally want to dabble in Guild vs Guild, or Player vs Player fighting. So save the space and don’t build them.

1.) Talk to your GvG leaders and find out what ages they need support in, then find out what type of armies they would like to have placed for defense in your sectors.
Some armies are much better at defense then others.

For Example: In the Contemporary Era 7x Assault Tanks and 1 CE Champion is better than 8 Anti-Air Vehicles or 8 Strike Teams placed in defense.
2.) Build the corresponding barracks, and do daily maintenance and check up of the map.

As your Alcatraz levels up and your city grows, and you get ahead of that particular (GvG age) map’s upkeep, you can likely expand to covering more than one map.

Usually the best armies in defense for any age are also good armies for offense also. Even though you may not have Rogue’s you’ll be able to fight off several sieges on your own after following this model for a few weeks.  But, at the very least, with the daily checking of the maps, you will be able to send out an alert to your guild, and the fighters will jump to fight off any sieges that may be up.

If you play many worlds, you surely have lost track of where you were at in a FP swap/trade with a friend.  I have found the most effective way to keep track of these is using a Spreadsheet with conditional formatting.

Forge of Empires FP Swap Spreadsheet

In the above picture you have a few elements, you have the days of the month running across the top, and then you have each of your swaps, whether it is just 1 daily swap, or multiple across worlds, and then a GB group or two.

In this example, there are 3 daily swaps, and 2 GB groups.

The green fields represent that the day was completed, the yellow means partial, and the red means it’s near the low end of the scale.

When the month is up, you copy the sheet to a new tab, delete the data, and change the dates out at the top and start over.

On my GB groups, I also re-color the cells red when I am done, so I don’t get mixed up, so when starting over, you would want to make all of those cells blue again at the beginning of the month.

You can right click the cells in Google Sheets and choose “Conditional Formatting” and use a Color Scale and then input your minimum as 0, middle as 5, and max as 10, for a 10 point per day trade.  You then assign the 3 colors you want, and you will get the same results as I do.

Excel version of above Spreadsheet with flags and check marks.

If you use Microsoft Excel you can even use flags, or check marks to represent if you have fulfilled your amount for the day.  I have uploaded a sample of the spreadsheet I use to Google Docs and you are welcome to try it out!

You can view or download the Google Docs spreadsheet at https://goo.gl/9C8128

You can download the Excel version of the spreadsheet here.