Battlefield Buffs

When you manage to get to a high HQ level in the game, you'd see difficulties in amassing the resources needed to upgrade or research stuff. Additionally the time you need to render them starts to reach in weeks time to even a month. For instance, upgrading from HQ 24 to HQ 25 will take around 33 days to render. Even if you particularly have enough speedups to get there, you can actually save a lot by being smart when to perform upgrades.

When you get to a high HQ level, it wouldn't really matter whether you rank high in the daily individuals. As long as you get the 3rd tier of the event, you'll be fine in the weekly rankings as well as for the rewards it basically generates (around 490 gold and some items). What you need to do is save up on your speedups, and wait for BF buffs to come around in order to make the most out of them.

To check which ones are currently active, click on the icon as indicated on the image below (this icon is where you usually see the remaining duration of your aegis buff). There are are times that an event will grant you 30-50% build or research acceleration. Other times this is coupled with resource utilization rate increase too (discount on the required resource to render an upgrade). You'll when these buffs are active, you'll generally see a great decrease in the days needed to actually finish an upgrade.

Additionally, you could compound these effects with the items that you get from the inferno event (usually building, research, and troop training acceleration). Before doing any upgrades, you should "Use" these buff items first.

An additional buff you can get is when you are in the good graces of the Top Commander. You might want to work your way up the corps, and hopefully be able to join the Top corps. This way, you'll get familiar with the Top commander. The unique thing that only the Top Commander of the battlefield can do is assign titles to different people in the battlefield. For instance, if you are generally inclined to upgrading your buildings in HQ, you might want to ask for the "Engineer" title. What this title grants is an increase of 10% in Building Speed. There are several more titles and are listed below.

It does not costs the Top Commander to grant these titles and he can do so interchange-ingly with different people. If you are an active corp member and can persuade him/her to perform a battlefield buff, the Top Commander can also perform battlefield buffs for 2500 gold (not that large of resource especially for a Top Commander). In our experience, even without the Battlefield Buff from the Top Commander, we were able to trim down the originally 33 days to only 15 days. That would be a savings of 18 days or roughly 39,600 gold (computed by purchasing 2pcs 7-day versatile speed up, 1pc 3-day versatile speed up, and 1pc 24 Hour versatile speed up).

So make sure to make the most out of the buffs you can have -- especially when you are at the point where upgrades already reach to weeks or even months in wait duration. A fraction of decrease can equate to days in speed-up savings (which you can then use for upgrading your resource collectors instead).

Luckily, Battlefield buffs are always announced a week before they actually become available through system delivered messages. This way, you'll know when to perform or schedule your upgrades. Grinding and hoarding speedups is one thing, being smart when to actually use them is another. There are instances where events are coupled to HQ development events where you also gain additional rewards, or probably use the required speedups for an inferno event to get the rewards from it too. So be extra smart when you use those hard earned speedups!