Generals for gathering

Gathering is a valuable activity you can perform to develop your army and castle in Evony. One of the main ones. It is also part of Monarch competition, and King's Path quests. Which at those times increases its already high weight in overall development model. Let’s explore how:

speed can be increased
made more efficient through increased load and gathering bonuses
de-risked in event of a rogue players

Speeding Up Gathering

There are four items to keep in mind when it comes to gathering speed:

Having right general
Training generals right: skills, stars, and level
Having right general equipment
Having boosts selected accordingly

Generals

Evony allows up to 6 marches. Thus to maximize output of gathering a player needs around 10–12 well equipped and trained generals.

Queen Jindeok

This one is ultimate general, and eventually you want to have 6 of them. They give 40% bonus when gathering from world resources, and 20% bonus - from alliance ones (e.g. alliance mine).

This is one of the top premium generals, and it does not come that often in tavern, you can't get it from relics, or other places.

Hence you would want the following three. These generals come from various quests, tavern, and relics. They are great while you are developing and waiting for luck to get your first Queen Jindeok. Also they will be very useful in pair with her later on.

Constance I

The Constance is next great alternative to the Queen Jindeok. Their built-in skills are: 20% bonus for gathering, and 20% increase in troop load. Together with speed up skills, she is universal soldier for gathering.

Gaius Marius

Lumber. Stone. Ore. This general gives extra gathering speed for Ore gathering - 30%, and 15% for stone and lumber. You can't add more ore gathering speed skills to them, but you can for lumber and stone. Making it even better for stone and lumber as you get to red level of skills for them.

Shimazu Yoshihiro

Food. General gives 30% RSS bonus after gathering from world farms. Also increases gathering speed by 10% as well.

Training generals right

There are several categories of skills which you want to be added to these generals:

Gathering speed increase.

This general has 45% food gathering speed increase skill.

Gathering bonus. After gathering you receive bonus report on top of main swag. This way you can bring more RSS than mine has.
Troop load bonus.

This general allows ground troops to carry extra 45% of load.

Another aspect of general training are general level and stars. In terms of gathering it is important to have generals at level 20 or higher, and have three stars to allow for assistant general. This allows to combine non-overlapping skills, and increase overall speed and gathering bonus when it comes to a bottom line. Keep in mind that two generals of the same name, as of today, can't assist each other.

Depending on a general, you might want to go to level 22 to get ability to ascend them; as well as to level 25 to use their specialty. Both are very expensive processes requiring rare artifacts. Queen Jindeok is likely only general where you should go beyond level 20 upgrades. To expensive for initial ones.

Right general equipment

The best equipment for gathering comes from King's scrolls. Lower level scrolls, like general, or champion equipment even after all upgrades will be far less powerful.

For each of four resource spots there are three items of equipment to have, a layout.

Food gathering equipment: King's Spear, Fearless King's Helmet,
Courage King's Armor

Lumber gathering equipment: King's Axe, Fearless King's Armor,
Courageous King's Leg Armor

Ore gathering equipment: King's Bow, Courageous King's Helmet,
Fearless King's Boots

Stone gathering equipment: King's Sword, Fearless King's Leg Armor,
Courageous King's Boots

Griffin, Junior Cerberus, and Ifrit rallies is where you can scrolls for King's equipment. It is especially difficult to get last piece of equipement. One scroll in 100-200 rallies is normal.

If you don't have alliance member who can fight these monsters yet, fight Royal thieves and Manticores - they will be able to give you general equipment.

Champion's set is also a good alternative for earlier stages when you absolutely not able to craft King's equipment. By itself: set attributes give you 10% gathering speed, and gathering bonus when you have four specific items of the set.

Enhancement, and Cultivation of Generals

Generally enhancement and cultivation of generals improve various rations. These two options improve one more specifically to gathering - gathering speed as part of politics section. As general practice tells be ready to spend around 20 million gold on cultivation of general till +300 points, and then another 100k-200k diamonds to get to +500 points. Gold does not work past 300 points, and all attempts come negative.

Correction to common cultivation rule when it comes to training general specifically for gathering:

accept cultivation result if sum of all positive or zero, and politics is positive.

Boosts selected accordingly

Before each general gets into a resource spot make sure:

City Buff has gathering boost activated: click on your city, then "increase all resources gathering speed"

Monarchs equipment set accordingly: load boost bottom left (purple), and accordingly to a resource spot gathering increase (bottom right, green)
Monarch equipment set of extra load, and ore gathering

Keep in mind monarch equipment needs to be active in two cases to give desired result:

in the last moments when general is getting to the mine
if you are refreshing gathering buff

De-risking gathering

Selecting right troops

There is price to gathering you will pay. First one for troop training to handle load. At maximum you need to cover 8.4 million resource spot. Second price - if your server allows attacks on world resource spots, or there is a rogue player (there is always one out there) - cost of healing.

The larger level your troops have - more load they can carry. Also the larger level the more RSS it takes to train useful troop load unit. The least expensive are T1 (level I) ground troops: after all upgrades in Academy single troop can carry 21.3 units of load and has a cost of 160 RSS (food). It means you need 8 turns to get profit. It means in 1-2 days of gathering in level 15 resource spots you can cover cost of this unit.

For comparison T10 (level X) ground unit costs 4.2K RSS (2.5K food, 0.85K stone, 0.85K ore), and can carry 78.81 units of load. This means 54 full turns. Which is in 6.75 times longer than T1 troop to cover the cost. 1-2 weeks instead of 1-2 days.

T1 troops might be a limitation before your rally spot reaches 200K-400K, but after - that much of level 1 troops is enough to cover the largest RSS spots on world map.

For the main cavalry you will have for monster hunting - send it to alliance mine, or behind the bubble (truce agreement) in your main city as this makes your main army safe from rogue players.

Academy Research

You want to make sure that all gathering you can upgrade in first section of Academy ("Advancement") is upgraded

As well as "Medicine" and "Adv Pharmacy" on the second section of Academy ("Defense") to make sure healing costs 70% less

Evony Tactics