Deneron's Attempt at a Commercial Empire Stratagey Guide (with pictures)

Section 1: Getting Started
1.1 10 things you shouldn't do
1.2 10 things you should do
1.3 Resource Buildings
1.4 Market
1.5 Castle Leveling
1.6 Skills


Section 2: Getting into it
2.1 Terraforming
2.2 New Castles
2.3 Heroes
2.4 Cloudport
2.5 Dock Emplacement Defense
2.6 Resource Income
2.7 Part Manufacturing/Selling
2.8 Miracles


Section 3:Finishing it off, leaving the rest to you
3.1 Treasure Boxes
3.2 Blueprints
3.3 Levy Taxes
3.4 Gold Deal
3.5 Sky Points Purchase
3.6 Why not to specialize
3.7 No Calc
3.8 All the Bonuses
3.9 HELP ME
3.10 Final and #1 Tip
3.11 Your Turn
3.12 Credits


Well, here goes.

Ehem... ehhhhhhem... -clears throat-

[b]1.1 I'll start with 10 things you shouldn't do

1. You shouldn't make all your towns based on just 1 type of resource (e.g. All refineries)
2. You shouldn't focus on 1 town
3. You shouldn't use all of your skill points for 1 skill
4. You shouldn't make enemies, or you shall be plundered!
5. You shouldn't eat dirt, your sandstones are invaluable so don't sell them because you'll need them at 1 point or another
6. You shouldn't only focus on upgrading 1 type on resource in a city that has more than 1 resource
7. You shouldn't wait until the last minute to upgrade your castle, great hall and inner city resource buildings (e.g. Brick Kiln, Food Workshop)
8. You shouldn't EVER, use all your sand stone at once
9. You shouldn't be only commerce, and army-less
10. You shouldn't be alone, always have allies and friends beside you to help you out

1.2 Now I'll list 10 things you should do

1. Start with the newbie quests, they give free gold and are a great starter guide for anyone
2. In the time you don't need to upgrade resource buildings, upgrade market or cloudport
3. Try to upgrade your castles and cloudports when you are about to log off, so you can make the time fly by
4. If at all possible, move to a territory of an all powerful military based ally, or friend so you will be protected and before you build to much resource
5. Terraform new cities until you have 2 types of resources at most, and sparkles are always good to!
6. ALWAYS, ALWAYS, ALWAYS... BUILD/UPGRADE! Never stop upgrading stuff, or you'll fall behind everyone else who reads my guide
7. Know your limits, don't try to terraform for a perfect 1-type of resource town unless you already have 5 or 6 working towns (e.g. 8 sand fields AKA island (hehe))
8. Build up your military rep, even though you don't want to become military, it's good to have a few thousand in military rep from scouting towns you don't own, it scares away some attackers
9. Build emplacements, they are the easiest way to defend your town when you have low military skills and a bad army
10. Get your freebies, level 2 treasure boxes and taxes can make your day, so never forget to collect them

*SUPER SECRET TIP THAT JUST HAPPENS TO BE BOLDED: suck up to the pros and don't be afraid to ask for advice*

Well that's a nice set of tips but here's the actual guide you'll follow along with tips.

First of all, you'll want to upgrade your resources, resource buildings, market, cloudport and castle.

1.3 Resource Buildings
You'll need to start with the resource buildings and if they take less than 8 minutes to build than you can click the "SPEED UP" button and they'll be done instantly. Once you've got one, you can build, and upgrade an outer city resource building corresponding with the inner-city one. You also need to remember that you can build an inner and an outer city resource building at the same time, but you can't upgrade 2 of the same type of building at once (e.g. 2 outer city resource buildings can't be upgraded at the same time and 2 inner-city buildings can't be upgrading at the same time, regardless of type)

Inner City= Outer City (resource)
Food Workshop= Farm (food)
Brick Kiln= Sand Field (sand stone)
Smelting Workshop= Mining Center (metal)
Timber Center= Forestry Center (wood)
Crystal Workshop= Refinery (crystal)


With each level of the inner city resource buildings, you can upgrade the corresponding outer city resource buildings 1 level. So if you have a level 4 crystal workshop, you can upgrade all the refineries you can build outside the city to level 4.

You'll always want to have your inner city resource building ready before you finish upgrading your outer city resource buildings to the max level, so you can constantly upgrade the ones outside.

1.4 Market


When you have time to upgrade an inner city building aside from resource type, you'll want to build a market. A market is used for selling and buying resources to and from the computer and other people. It's also used for transporting resources between towns (can transport 2000 at a time at the start, more with higher level cloudport). You'll want to level the market to as high as possible in your downtime so you can transfer your resources between towns effectively (with every 2 levels, your market can transport 1 more "package" at once to another town). When you are selling resources you can either choose to sell to the empire for the standard price (selling the the computer), which is usually pretty fair, or to people for a little bit higher, which may take longer. When you are buying resources, you can only buy from people, but the system is automatic so you just offer a price for a certain amount of the item you are buying, and the system will match it with someone who is selling for that price or cheaper. You can check the current market prices for both buying and selling by clicking on the icon of the resource while in the Market Condition List (get to there from clicking "add a trade"). Another thing is the alliance market, which is basically just a market that only your alliance can sell or buy from but it takes a while for new alliances to get.


1.5 Castle Leveling
You'll also want to upgrade your castle. The good thing about upgrading your castle, is that when you upgrade it, you can still upgrade other inner city buildings at the same time so it won't stop you from upgrading the market, resource structures or other buildings. However it is very time consuming and costs a whole lot of sand stone and gold. Some of the benefits of upgrading your castle are that you can get higher level buildings (you need it to upgrade market, and even great hall for leveling resource buildings), and it multiplies the resource income by the level of your castle (e.g. you get +500 metal with a level 1 castle, with a level 2 castle you would get +1000 and with a level 3 castle, you would get +1500).


1.6 Skills
You'll also want to build institutes to level up skills. You'll want to focus on natural institute and cultural institute. The skills you will be learning are:

Cultural Institute:
Dominance: One more castle can be build each time this is upgraded 1 level
Ambition: One more hero can be recruited each time this is upgraded 1 level


Natural Institute:
Planting: All cities food yield will be upgraded 5% each time this is upgraded 1 level
Digging: All cities sand stone yield will be upgraded 5% each time this is upgraded 1 level
Smelting: All cities metal yield will be upgraded 5% each time this is upgraded 1 level
Lumbering: All cities wood yield will be upgraded 5% each time this is upgraded 1 level
Extraction: All cities crystal yield will be upgraded 5% each time this is upgraded 1 level

2.1 Terraforming
Terraforming is a feature that allows you to change the land outside of your castle using the crystal located under your castle. Terraforming will always cost 500g and 2000 sand stone so it becomes easier to afford and re-do once you are a higher level. I recommend you wait until you have 2 castles until you start terraforming for really good results, unless of course you have a ton of money and extra sand stone. You can terraform by going to the city view and clicking the button that says "Terraform". Terraforming takes 40 minutes so you have to be patient when you are trying to get a really good result. When you terraform, everything outside of the city is instantly destroyed, but your inner city buildings remain unharmed.

You can choose what you want to terraform the land into but you are only guaranteed 4 out of 8 land will be the type of resource you want. The other 4 are more likely to be the one you chose, but they can be anything. You can also use sky points to increase the likeliness of getting 8 of 1 type.

Plain= Farm
Desert= Refinery
Woodland= Forestry Center
Lake= Sand Field
Mountain= Mining Center


You can also get resources that are "special" and they will show up with sparkles over them. They recieve 30% extra resource so they're very useful, but rare. You can increase the chances by spending 100 sky points or you can increase the chances by upgrading Food Skill, Geology, Metallurgy, Woodcutting and Gemology.

Food Skill: When terraforming, the chances of creating flooding plains is increased by 2% with each level.
Geology: When terraforming, the chances of creating deep lakes is increased by 2% with each level.
Metallurgy: When terraforming, the chances of creating mine mount is increased by 2% with each level.
Woodcutting: When terraforming, the chances of creating dense forest is increased by 2% with each level.
Gemology: When terraforming, the chances of creating crystal desert is increased by 2% with each level.

All of the skills require the corresponding resource yield skills to be level 7 before you can get them.

2.2 New Castles
Dominance is an especially useful skill, because it allows you to get more castles, which allow you gain way more resources because each castle gets its own resources. With your new castles you can choose to terraform, and it's better to make them have only 1 or 2 types of resource but, so that you only need to upgrade 2 inner city buildings for the outer-city resources and you can save time and money to upgrade other buildings. However, for the first or second building you may want to wait a little bit before transforming for ideal castles so that you have an decent income to fall back on in case you repeatedly fail (and you will).

2.3 Heroes
Once you have a level 2 castle, you can build a tavern and recruit a hero, which can help increase your resource income based on their light attribute in the town they are assigned archon in. They also can upgrade the speed of which your manufacturing with their shadow attribute. You can upgrade your heroes stats in shrines, but usually not until the shrines are level 5+. You'll want to build a bright shrine, to upgrade light, and a shadowy shrine, to upgrade shadow. It takes EXP which heroes get from being archon and fighting battles, but you usually don't need to worry about battles so it's like heroes get EXP based on how long they are archon. You can have an archon in each town, but you need to level Ambition to level 9 in the end to get 10 heroes (10 towns). The higher level of shrines you have, the more mana you will get in the type the shrine is (1 mana per shrine level) and the higher attributes the heroes who come into your tavern will regularly have based on the shrines level.



2.4 Cloudport
Next, you'll need a cloudport. At first, a cloudport takes 8 hours to build, so I recommend you do it overnight. A cloudport will double the amount of resources you can transport from town to town through the market, per level. You can also repair flagships with it and repair flagships with it, but this guide is about commerce, so you don't need to be too concerned with that. Each town has to build it's own cloudport and upgrading it from level 1 to 2 takes nearly a day so be prepared to wait a while.

2.5 Dock Emplacement Defense

Although a shipyard may not be strictly commercial, it is vital in protecting your towns from constant plundering so I recommend building one so you can focus on building emplacements on your DOCK instead of spending time on a huge army. You'll need to add to some skills in the military institute to get the ability to build the emplacements but it only takes a few, and it's MUCH easier than spending a lot of skill points on an army so it will help greatly in defending your commercial empire. The emplacements don't take much resources to build, but they do take a lot of time, so you won't need to put too much effort into building them too often.


2.6 Resource Income
I can't stress enough how important it is to have an even amount of income in all types of resources, with perhaps the exception of food, because you won't be using an army as often as most. If you have the same amount of outer city resource buildings in total (all towns), than you won't need to buy very much, or buy no resources from other people which will save time and it will keep your max profit at the max. However, you'll also need a very good system of transport resources, so upgrading the cloudport and market are very important for keeping a well organized and efficient commercial empire.

2.7 Part Manufacturing/Selling
You'll want to build workshops that build parts. At first, this is a very slow way of making profit, and can take a lot of skill points, but in the end because you can sell higher level parts to people for more profit and because skills help you use less resources to build parts, you can make your resources much more valuable by turning them into parts. Some of the skills you'll need for this are craft, energy transfer, and forging. You may also want to invest in weapon theory, airship theory and dynamics so that you can build the parts faster and sell more of them overall. Having 3 of the same type in castles that get 1 resource is ideal, but sometimes you'll want 3 types for places that make food or sandstones.









Craft: materials needed will be reduced by 5% each time the carpenters workshop is upgraded 1 level
Energy Transfer: materials needed will be reduced by 5% each time the energy workshop is upgraded 1 level
Forging: materials needed will be reduced by 5% each time the arsenal is upgraded 1 level

Weapon Theory: weapon production time will be reduced by 5% each time the arsenal is upgraded 1 level
Airship Theory: required hull production time will be reduced by 5% each time the carpenters workshop is upgraded 1 level
Dynamics: engine production time will be reduced by 5% each time the crystal workshop is upgraded 1 level



The key to getting a good balance of all resources so you become very independent, yet at the same time you work with others really well. A few other things that will help you are Miracles, Treasure Boxes and Taxes.



2.8 Mircales
Miracles are built by Alliance leaders when your Alliance has a total of 30 combined levels from all its members, and can be upgraded by anyone after they've been part of the alliance for 20 days. With each level of the light miracle, you gain +3% income on every type of resources in every town. They are leveled up by sending a certain amount of all types resources to them (located on alliance leaders territory), and can reach up to level 25 each. You can build 4 of them, the 2nd one after the first one reaches level 5. The third one after the other 2 reach level 10. The forth one after the other 3 reach level 15. The 3% adds to the last 3% making it as if it multiplies by 1.03x as much each time. For example, +3% is really 103% so 103% x 103 = 106.09%. It might not seem like much but as it adds it becomes 209% with just 25 levels. Try not to obsess over this number, but take an active part in contributing to it, like a good alliance member. The other miracles giveattack bonuses, defense bonuses, and production bonuses depending on their attribute, and their effectiveness is calculated the same way.

Nice....
Move all your Guide here Deneron...^^

3.1 Treasure Boxes
You can receive free treasure boxes once you get 5000 rep and become level 2 in the "Treasure Box" section of "The Item Mall". You get 3 of them a day and they can give anywhere from 250 of a resource to 10,000 of it, 250 to 10,000 gold, any type of ship from any level or blueprints. However, it's very unlikely that you'll get blueprints but you might just get lucky enough to get some if you keep trying.



3.2 Blueprints
Blueprints can be used to build parts in Arsenals, Carpenters Workshops or Energy Workshops depending on the parts, and they are used to make flagships in the cloudport (you need to have 3 different types of parts that make one flagship). You will be mainly concerned with selling the blueprints or making them into parts and selling them as parts. When you sell blueprints or advanced parts, there is a pre-set price of gold that can be anyone from 500g to 90,000g. You don't get to choose what you price the blueprint at in gold, but you do get to set how much you want to charge in sky points for the blueprints. Believe me when I say, you want to charge at least 1 sky point per blue print. Depending on the blue print or part, you have to charge different prices in sky points, but keep it reasonable and try to sell for lower than the competition. If you ever want to sell to the empire for the quick money, I don't recommend it but you should definitely sell it to an alliance member instead, most of them will be more than willing to buy it (probably).


3.3 Levy Taxes
Taxes are very useful for beginners, because they can get you thousands of gold per day and double that in sand stone tributes. It's pretty much self-explanatory, but you can tax all of your subjects 1 gold per for letting them work with you and you get more subjects with every thing you build or upgrade. To collect taxes, go to big map, then click on a town and click "Levy Taxes". Unfortunately, after you become level 3, you don't get sand stone tributes. As you become more powerful, and level up, the taxes tend to become more useless but it takes seconds to do and there's absolutely no downside to collecting taxes. The lucky jerks get off paying 1 gold per day, might as well take it!


3.4 Gold Deal
There is also a function called "Gold Deal". This function allows you to offer a raising amount of gold each day for sky points in sets of 300. So you can offer 50,000g for 300 sky points of 40,000g for 600 sky points if you want (up to 9 sets of 300 or 2700 sky points at a time). Unfortunately, people rarely use this to sell sky points and you'll most likely be wasting your time trying to get someone to buy your gold and there is an ever increasing limit to how much gold you can sell it for that increases every 20 or so minutes so people will be constantly outbidding you.


3.5 Sky Points Purchase
There is an easier way, and in my opinion the easiest way to become rich and powerful in FreeSky. It is to buy sky points using real money. You can purchase them on IGG.com and it's a great way to get started and become a powerful Lord in FreeSky and is without a doubt a great way to become a commerce god. You can get sky points here http://pay.igg.com/?g_id=15 or get some for free here by completing a survey http://getpaid.igg.com/

3.6 Why not to specialize
It's important that you spread out all your resources, manufacturing and skills because if you don't than you will rely on the market, lose profits and lose efficiency. If you decide to make only refineries, crystal workshop and only upgrade crystal based skills than you will have to sell a ton of parts on the market a buy a ton of parts from the market so if the price for crystal goes down than you're out of luck. If you get a variety of skills and resources than you won't encounter those problems and you can just use the parts you make instead of constant buying and selling. Also, you won't need to get useless skills to build flagships. However, towns are ideal if they specialize because you can focus on 1 type of resource and workshop (just don't do it for everything).

3.7 No Calc
You might have notice that I didn't decide to include the calculation for how much resources you can get based on the level of your castle, resources buildings, etc. That is because it's simply too difficult and pointless to calculate all the data because all of the bonuses you receive after anyways, and because all you need to know is that:
MORE RESOURCE BUILDING LEVELS = MORE RESOURCE

3.8 All the Bonuses
Along the way you'll probably notice that your actual output becomes much higher than your basic production. This is obviously because of bonuses.

Some the bonuses are archon bonus, item bonus, science bonus and mircale bonus. Let me explain what all the bonuses are.

Item Bonus: This is a bonus you can get if you use sky points to buy them in the item mall, you can either buy it for individual cities, or for all of them under Global.

Archon Bonus: This is a bonus you get from having a hero assigned to your town as Archon. You get more and more resources depending on your archon's light attribute.

Science Bonus: This is the bonus you get based on your skills such as Planting, Digging, Smelting, Lumbering and Extraction as mention earlier in the guide. You get 5% with each level more than the level before. Lucky for you they stack so +5% becomes 10.25% then 15.7% and so on.

Miracle Bonus: As mentioned before, you get this for increasing the level of the miracle located on your alliance leaders territory. You get 3% for every level of every miracle your alliance has.



3.9 HELP ME
Asking people for help is always a great way to learn about anything in FreeSky, and it doesn't cost any gold or sky points!

3.10 Final, and #1 Tip
Give all of your resources to Deneron and he... I mean you will prosper faster than a turtle!

3.11 The Rest is Up to You
Don't be a mindless player, if you actually followed and read this huge guide than you should know enough to play this game better than a hacker, so good luck!

3.2 Credit
I'd like to thank hunter0 (for doing nothing), Adrasteah (for doing nothing), PerenXiao (for doing nothing) and me (for doing everything. I suppose they did help me learn some of this stuff but I gave them all credits!

Cool...!!!!
^^ i hope you join the chatroom ^^

I need to change it from html to bbcode

Oh well i'll activate the HTML

I'm done changing it

Yeah but, This is for "if there are someone who want to made another like your....~~"

Woo-hoo!
You deserve to win the competition Deneron!

Good Job...^^

Wow great strategy..
How can I insert game picture and edited it on forum??