← Base Development · Also: Resource Efficiency. The Tech Center is your second-most-important building, so research order really is growth speed.
If I restarted my account from scratch today, plenty of things would change — but not the research order. The temptation to grab attack research first is real, and resisting it to lay down Development and Economy first turned out to be one of the best calls I made. The principle is simple: multiplicative growth before combat stats. Build, research, and training speed plus resource output make everything else faster, so combat stats only start compounding once they sit on that base.
Research priority
This is the path I actually walked, and the one I still hand to every new player in our alliance.
- Development — first. Speeds up build/research/training completion. The highest-return tree early on; everything after it finishes faster.
- Economy. Boosts passive resource output. Everything you do is resource-hungry, so Economy goes on top of Development.
- Garage. The order matters: max Garage 1 → build Garage 4 → circle back to Garage 2·3. It grows your strongest teams at a cost you can actually afford.
- Alliance Duel tree. Compounds weekly — take it first among the combat trees.
- Special Forces. Focus badges on the four T10 gate nodes (Advanced Protection / HP Boost III / Attack Boost III / Defense Boost III). The sooner T10 opens, the more every other upgrade pays off. Oil Wells also unlock in this tree — open them early to get ahead of the HQ31 Oil bottleneck (see Base Development).
I get why the combat stat research (atk/def/hp) looks appealing — my eyes went there first too. But skipping Development and Economy to grab stats slows your entire account down. Multipliers first, stats later. A few seasons in, that hasn’t changed once.
Second Tech Center
Once the second Tech Center opens, I run Queue 1 as a badge-free rotation: Development, Economy, Garage 1, on repeat. Those finish fast, cost no badges, and compound build/training speed into every other system. The badge-hungry combat trees (Alliance Duel, Special Forces) all go on Queue 2. Since splitting it this way, I haven’t had a queue sit empty over badge shortages once.
Daily routine
Keep the research queue full at all times — an empty queue is pure loss. My rotation is a long research before bed, short ones whenever I log in.
And time your research completions to the research-theme days of Arms Race and Alliance Duel to collect points on top. This one I learned the hard way: I once burned a pile of research speedups without checking the Duel’s daily theme and threw away the entire score. Since that day, I check the theme before touching a single speedup. Learn it from this paragraph instead of the way I did.
Research pays off later than everything else, which is why it gets skipped
Research competes for the same resources as buildings and troops, and it loses that comparison almost every time, because its payoff is a percentage applied to things you have not built yet. Nothing visibly happens when a research completes.
That makes it the classic under-invested track. The accounts that end a season clearly ahead are usually not the ones that made better individual choices — they are the ones that kept a research running continuously while everyone else let the queue sit empty between decisions.
A rule that survives patches
Prioritise research whose effect multiplies something you already have a lot of. Troop attack research on a large standing army compounds immediately; the same research on a small army is a promise. This is also why research order advice from another player often does not transfer — it was tuned to their army composition, not yours.
Two prerequisites are worth checking before committing a long research run, because both are absolute and neither is purchasable: HQ 35, which gates T11 troops and awakening, and awakening shards, which only appear from awakening trials and the global expeditions in weeks 2, 4 and 6 of a season. Research that feeds capability behind a closed gate is not wrong, but it is deferred — and if the gate is weeks away, something else likely deserves the queue first.
Whether your server is currently in one of those expedition weeks is derivable from its age: enter the number in the server calendar.
Unofficial fan-site content · no partnership or sponsorship with the developer · figures may change with patches.
By: lastwarhub.com
