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Message:: [QUOTE="ProfessorDaddy, post: 7846, member: 78892435"]Hello, Hello, and welcome to my laboratory! Housed within, you will find the various chapters I’ve written, now brought together into a single Multiguide! Oh boy, lucky you! As the game continues to update and change, I will do my best to update the guide to reflect those changes. I’ve done my best to provide information I’ve found relevant in my journey regarding most major aspects of the game. Your thoughts and feedback are always appreciated as I continue to edit and expand my work. I’d like to extend an incredibly heartfelt thank you to everyone who has supported me and helped me along the way as you watched this guide grow on Discord. I couldn’t have done it without you guys! ❤️ 📜Introduction📜 Before we begin, let’s establish the importance of why this guide exists: Currently, PvP in Heckfire leads near-exclusively to detriment for all involved parties. It lacks a reward structure of any kind, as well as being devoid of nearly any potential for strategical play. In addition, the PvP that currently exists is actually almost entirely PvOP. (Player vs offline player!) Isn’t that fun!? The only entity who benefits from the current PvP structure is ATA. Time spent retraining lost troops, or trying to boost PvP stats, means ignoring other sections of the game that help you get more out of the time you spend playing. Meanwhile, ATA gets to try to sell you a vast majority of tempting options to speed up your progress. I call this the “temptation phase”, and obviously the less time you spend here, the better. You can call Heckfire a PvP game if you want, but the fact remains that this game is centrally based around PvE, with elements of PvP sprinkled in to set you back as you go through the real bulk of the game: upgrading your buildings/research. The gameplay doesn’t really change that much as you progress. You do essentially the same things over and over, but continually upgrade. And upgrading is fueled by PvE not PvP. The PvP elements of the game don’t involve strategy, they involve statistics. Numbers and percentages, with all the advantage coming from *ahem*, your upgrades. Therefore, the quickest, smartest way to play the game is to upgrade the PvE side first. Maximizing the part of the game that fuels your upgrades. With that being said, this guide aims to maximize a (mostly) free-to-play player’s time spent playing the game as they progress. More specifically, this guide was designed to help you hone in that long-term strategy of how you’re realistically going to achieve your goal of completing every upgrade, update, and thing to do except for pick on all of the rest of us below you! Please note that this guide is not intended to teach you how to begin playing Heckfire, nor is it filled with pages of meticulous game statistics (just a few of specific interest)! This is not a how-to guide. You can already find those sorts of guides on the forums. This, is a strategy guide. So buckle up, because this game requires a sheer mind-boggling amount of hours to complete, but this guide highlights key decisions along the way that can help you reach the finish line quicker, maximize your in-game time efficiency, and help ensure a substantial edge on the competition as you grind your way towards that finish line. I truly hope that whether you’re at townhall 1 or 25, you can find at least a tid-bit or two among my collection that you find useful, interesting, or even mildly amusing. Remember friends, we’re all in this together out there. 🍻 -Professor Daddy 🔬 🏠SECTION 1 - Buildings🏠 This is where it all begins. Your buildings essentially set the pace for the entire game. You want your townhall to be the one corresponding to the top of the bracket you compete in. If you rush townhalls, you’ll find yourself struggling to compete in the events for your bracket. If you pause at the top to max all possible buildings, you’ll find it gets easier and easier to finish at the top of each event. The three townhall levels you will pause at before going all the way are 18, 22, and 24. Pause at each of those townhall levels, and ensure that you have maxed allbuildings before jumping to the next number you pause at. If you follow the rest of the advice given in this guide, you’ll find you have more than enough tokens to ease each transition. Although the game does little to inform you of this, after reaching TH25 you will have 10 buildings left to build, but no more land to build upon. There are 64 land spaces, and 74 unlockable buildings. Therefore, it is important that you only build one Farm and one Quarry. The resource production buildings are drastically lacking in usefulness. You’ll want those left over buildings you can’t build to be those two, otherwise another end-game area will suffer. Use your final two unlocked lands to build second copies of your Farm and Quarry, as they’ll be your only options left. There are 8 total buildings to choose from when building on a new land space. We have already established the importance of 2 of those, so that leaves us with 6 realistic options to choose from. As a free-to-play, casual player, this should be the order that you prioritize your buildings, broken down into 3 tiers: Tier 1: Dragon Alters- When gaining XP via attacking monsters and collecting resources, you want to be getting the absolute maximum return for your time and brew. One of the ways you do this is by maxing your Dragon XP Bonus ASAP. The quicker you max out your bonus, the bigger the difference it will make in the long run. Treasuries- The levels of protection your treasuries provide when you have built all you can and maxed them for your townhall (plus the bonus from research) corresponds quite well to the amount of ore you need to be able to protect in order to afford to max out other buildings at that townhall level. Therefore, building and maxing these ASAP will save you from needless worrying over capacity, and allow you to easily stockpile tokens for when they really matter. Tier 2: Studies- There is an absolutely overwhelming amount of research to be completed. Obviously, the sooner you reduce the total time required to finish it all, the better off you’ll be. Wards- These are the only thing that will prevent you from quitting when you inevitably get zeroed. Having these built and maxed provides you with a cushion of troops that allows you to continue to grind your way towards glory, albeit a march or two slower for the time being. Tier 3: Barracks- Barracks provide a relatively small production boost to troop training, and since this game is a marathon, not a sprint, its best to leave these buildings low on your priority list. Embassies- You don’t really need to worry about allies until late-game. This is discussed further in a dedicated section. 🐉SECTION 2 - Dragons🐉 How much chow could you redeem right now? 2 million worth? 10 million? Maybe even 100 million. But what if you had over A BILLION XP ready to feed to your dragons in the most glorious feast of all time? Stop feeding you dragons, and you can. It really is that simple. As was noted in the prior section, your dragon xp bonus is of utmost importance. One of the reasons you should be focusing on your dragon alters, is because your dragons should only be growing via use, not feeding. If you save your chow from townhall 18 forward, you will build up a massive stockpile of all sorts of chow (including event chow). Meanwhile, you’ll be raising your dragon xp bonus which makes every bit of chow you’ve saved grow more and more valuable. You can reach a whopping 750% dragon xp bonus, 173.5% of which is locked from TH 24 to TH 25. So hang in there, and by the time your dragons get to feast, you’ll surpass the dragon levels of everyone else who has put in the same amount of time and work as you have, so long as you have more patience than they do. As an added bonus, 1st place in a major dragon xp gaining event (easily multiple) is guaranteed yours when your time does come to chow down! Not feeding your dragons means that maximizing your dragons’ xp gain elsewhere in the game is very important. This is another reason to send out gathers as frequently as possible to collect resources. Another great way to gain xp is via special event titans. Check out that brew to xp ratio! It’s phenomenal. Oh and hey, if you’re somehow not positively convinced that saving your chow is worth it, I’ve got one last thing for you. By not feeding those dragons, you’ll bypass the games chokehold it has in place for dragon growth anyway: relics. You’ll stack up plenty of relics before the time comes that you’ll need them. 🙋🏼‍♀️SECTION 3: Allies🙋🏻‍♂️ With an in-game ally system that is in no way designed to help you find good allies, you’ll find that constantly dealing with scrolling through the system is often more of a headache than it’s worth. Allies serve two main purposes: extra resources, and extra power. Considering the fact that monster resource rewards are relatively low, adding a multiplier onto this still won’t yield tons of resources. Most of your daily gain and eventual stash of resources (in an active clan) is tokens. That leaves us with the power boost. It’s nice, but totally unnecessary until end game. The biome research trees contain upgrades that grant an additional 100% bonus to stats gained from allies, but you won’t finish maxing this bonus until late-game. It’s better to invest your gold into getting to this point first. The developers have stated that they are “...looking into improving ally UX in general”. Until this time arrives, it remains my sincere recommendation that you save worrying about allies for late-game. One of my goals with this guide is to lay out how most efficiently to spend your time playing this game. When you get tired of having to do the same thing over and over again in a game, the game becomes less fun. Suddenly logging on just feels like a chore. Until the system sees improvement, I honestly can’t in good faith recommend that you bother with the hassle. But maybe you don’t really care how I feel about allies and want to start buying them right now... well, then I congratulate you on the amount of free time you must have. Here are your best options: Ally Pools: This is the most common method Heckfire players use to hunt for allies. It also requires a significant investment of your gold, and subsequently introduces you to risk of loss of said gold. There are certain ally prices which contain massive percentages of the available allies for purchase. You can always find a “good” ally in these pools if you have the time to search through. There are charts which show which prices to type in and search through. (I won’t be posting a chart here, you can find them all over Heckfire Discord’s and other guides.) Ally Ghosting: If you want to spend some time on allies before end-game, I recommend this method. It requires substantially less gold, time, risk, and most importantly: frustration. Sometimes when a player quits playing, they cease to appear on an ally list. The only allies I’ve ever had that never sold are players who quit. Look for unowned players who are not in a clan. Alternatively, you can buy all kinds of new players and see who ends up quitting! I’ve managed to keep double digit allies for months without a single one selling. All for less than 200 gold, and all with around 2% total bonus. Search for 100 gold allies, click on players who are in a clan, go to their clan, and buy all of the players in that clan that fit your criteria. Some of them will quit, and they’ll (almost) never sell. ⚔️SECTION 4: Troops⚔️ I recommend that you only build huntresses for Tier 3 Troops, followed by starting with Trophy Huntresses when you unlock Tier 4 Troops and training 3-4 full marches of those before moving on to PvP troops. I also recommend that you rarely speed up your troop training. Only do it when you know you’ll be asleep when it finishes, or if you’re within 2 hours and the troop training quest is on. This applies up until end-game, when you’ll have nothing to spend your gems on except this! I know it’s tempting to want to speed things up, troop training is a particularly slow game aspect in Heckfire, but here’s the thing: I can promise you that no matter how good you are about remembering to put up a shield before bed, or how good your clan is about reinforcing you or pinging you on discord when you’re being attacked, or any other thing, you will almost certainly be zeroed before you reach endgame. It’s a serious speedup/gem hole when this happens, growing larger as your troop count increases. The reason I say this is simple; There will be times in your life as you dedicate more than a year to reaching endgame, that you simply won’t be able to prepare for. Maybe you won’t be the person who gets zeroed because their phone died while they had no way to charge it, sure. But if not some other way, then likely because sometimes we just don’t think about our phones at all, much less the silly little game we play on them. And this is okay! Pretty healthy, I’d actually argue. There are plenty of times in life where we just get absorbed in being human, living in the now, doing something we enjoy so much that it actually gets us to forget about the machine we all spend so much of our lives on these days. If you can manage to never be zeroed on your way up, I commend you. I’ll bet on the rest of us experiencing a setback or two, one way or another. 🔬SECTION 5: Research🔬 Oh boy, this is the big one. This is where the real grind is. This is what increases all of your base stats, and this is what separates you from all of those names you see at the top of the leaderboards. This is also where you actually get to have fun speeding the game along, and blowing through all of those hard-earned resources! I recommend that you funnel the vast majority of your gems and speedups to this section of the game. If you’re following the rest of the advice given in other sections of this guide, you won’t be struggling nearly as hard as other players. Gold is primarily what is required for most research, but it’s much easier to handle if you’re following the advice in the Allies section. Before you get to TH25, you’ll also need a sizable chunk of both ore and food as well, but you’ll find you have the tokens to pop if you’re following the advice given in the Buildings and Troops section. I’m going to break down each Research Tree giving a few key points about each, as well as recommendations for what parts to focus on within each tree and when. But first, there are a number of research options that have upgrades scattered in multiple trees. Let’s address the importance of each of these first so that we can focus on just the unique options of each Research Tree when we break them down. March Capacity Easily one of the most important research options to invest in, regardless of what Tree you’re in. More troops per march helps you clear tiles for more building spaces, as well as helping ensure that you’re able to hit the top monster level for your bracket. City Defender March Cap This is for PvP. If you’re following the advice given, it’s unlikely you’ll even have any PvP troops until endgame. You can ignore this until you decide to step into the PvP realm. Rally Reinforcer March Cap The same concept as the City Defender March Cap applies here. Reinforcement March Speed Boost It applies here as well. Rally Leader Cap And here too. Beginning to see another reason why postponing your PvP adventures is helpful? Ally Bonus vs Players Regardless of the biome, these all raise the cap on stats you can receive from allies. If you’re not bothering with allies, no need to bother with these until you do. As you can see, if you’re following along with the rest of the sections, the majority of these can be ignored unless necessary for unlocking further research. Moving on to each Research Tree as a whole, your personal play-style will affect how you prioritize each individual research and you’ll be hopping from Tree to Tree throughout the game regardless, so don’t stress the individual selections, just focus on your big picture goals. Army Strength This is the research tree where you unlock and upgrade troops. You’ll want to upgrade the troops as soon as you unlock them, as all of the bonuses are relatively short compared to many other research options, and provide you with significant boosts. You can ignore those PvP troop unlocks until you’re ready. You only need one troop type to upgrade the bonuses, so whenever you do decide to unlock your PvP troops, they’ll already be upgraded. You’ll also find the upgrade for concurrent marches here, that you’ll want to upgrade ASAP for obvious reasons. City Growth You’ll spend a lot of your early upgrading here, and some of your first ‘bigger’ upgrades are unlocked here once you reach the bottom of the Tree. Almost all of these upgrades speed up other aspects of the game. The sooner you do them, the faster the game will go. The upgrades to the hospital cap and garrison cap at the bottom of the Tree are the bigger upgrades mentioned earlier, and they are well worth investing in. Both can protect more troops and buy you time before your troops start to die! Monster Hunting This is where you unlock what you can kill on the PvE side, and how good you are at killing it. Everything in this Tree is beneficial to upgrade as soon as you can. It’s that simple. Resource Gathering Although I recommend you only ever gather gold resource nodes, you’ll want to upgrade everything in this Tree after you finish with your top priority items. Of particular note are the upgrades for your protected resources, as well as the higher reward gathering levels you can upgrade to unlock. Raid Tactics If you live in a hive location with your clan, you may want to invest in this at your leisure in order to participate in raids. If you don’t, you’ll probably want to ignore it. Ignoring this section for as long as you like won’t leave you missing too much, as you’ll just be stacking up raid brew to use at some point later on. Biome Skill Trees I’m going to combine the next three Research Trees together as they mirror one another. This is where you can upgrade that dragon xp bonus we talked about in an earlier section. Max that as soon as you can. You should know why! I recommend that you mirror all of what you upgrade for each biome, so that they grow equally. You don’t want to be a one-trick pony, do you? These upgrades are pretty steep, so you probably won’t want to dive deep into them until around TH24. I recommend prioritizing maxing the right side over the left, as the left is primarily helpful for PvP and allies. Shrine Specialties This is a PvP research category. I recommend you leave this for last. There is a hospital capacity bonus which you may want to modestly invest in at your discretion. Realm Mastery The Crown Jewels of Research right here ladies and gentlemen. By the time you unlock these, most of the upgrades you can get your hands on in here are more than worth investing in and speeding through. There’s quite a variety of upgrades, with some of the best upgrades from other Research Trees being brought together in a beautiful harmonious union. Remember, you can always upgrade some of the sections you’ve been ignoring for some easy might gain when you need it for special events. However, I do recommend you exercise caution and restraint when it comes to doing this. You never know when you may want to transfer to a realm with a lower might limit for one reason or another. It can be hard being a PvE player and transferring into the smallest realm you can is often a good idea. If you primarily focus on my research suggestions, it will be incredibly easy for you to slip into a realm as a slumbering PvE giant, then rapidly morph into a PvP monster within the Realm with a bit of careful planning. 💰SECTION 6: Pinching Pennies💎 While this guide is designed for free-to-play players, I acknowledge that many (like myself) will in fact splurge a bit here and there, and actually drop a few of our hard earned dollars on the game. We can’t buy our way to the top, so when we do spend our money, we want to be getting the biggest bang for our buck. That’s why I’ve included this section, which highlights how to get the most from every dollar you spend, as well as some tips for gem spending. Firstly, I wish that I could tell you that the legendary dragons aren’t worth investing in, but I simply can not do that. ATA charges a steep price for the 3rd dragon purchase, but the versatility of the legendary dragons ensures that you’ll use them in every aspect of the game from completing early dragon quests to crushing end-game PvP. The bonus speed they provide to other aspects of the game from their unique stat boosts is invaluable as well. Keep in mind, you’ll progressively rake in more and more resources by playing as you advance, hitting higher level monsters and gathering higher level resource nodes. That being said, spending money on resources is not at all a priority. Just be patient. You’ll primarily use gems for speeding things up. You can speed up substantially more for the same amount of money by buying gems as opposed to buying speed-up packs. Likewise, It’s never a good idea to buy speedups with gems; the conversion rate is worse than if you just use the gems to finish your upgrade. To use your gems to speed things along, Heckfire charges you 2,500 gems per day for the first 2 days, and 2,000 gems per day for every subsequent day. Therefore, if the upgrade is less than 2/3 days, avoid paying the extra premium by using your speedup tokens. For those larger requirements, go ahead and use your gems. The best conversion rate ATA offers for dollars to gems is 3,000 gems per dollar. It is offered during events, $20 for 60k gems, but it only appears as a flash sale these days so grab it when you can! They also offer an event package with a tiered option ($5, $10, $20) which offers close to this conversion rate when you buy all 3 and average the return (this includes gems awarded from opening event chests with keys included in the package). The only way to acquire a 7-Day shield is to purchase it with gems (85k). You can buy the 3-Day shield for $5 in the shop (once a week) or for 35k gems. Since 35k gems is equal to about $11 worth of gems, Cedric’s Magic Package is worth it if you need the shield. Once you start hitting level 8 monsters, the brew to gem ratio you get for spending your brew attacking monsters becomes positive. You’ll average just slightly over 1 gem per 1 brew spent. This causes brew to become one of the most valuable resources you can acquire. It’s worth it’s weight in gems, and gives you dragon xp, relics, chow, and resources on top of that! Late-game, brew is easily one of the most worthwhile things to spend money on. 🧠SECTION 7: Playing Smart🧠 Some of the remaining advice may seem obvious to many players, but it remains important nonetheless. Get into an active clan, where everyone buys a pint each day. Whatever your max chest capacity is, you should be able to collect that many multiplied by 3-4 easily each day. Be nice to people; make friends with your neighbors, especially if you live alone. You’d be surprised how many people are willing to be kind in return. Furthermore, you may find that you’re a lot less likely to be targeted for zeroing (or get warned/helped by more people) than the player who treats others like trash. After Townhall 15, your dragon quest only gives a single shield, down from two. You’ll still sometimes get more than 1 in a day, since the resource swap chests can give them among other ways, but regardless you’ll still want to avoid putting a shield up outside of sleeping hours. Otherwise, you’ll run out quick. Finishing your daily dragon quest is one of the most useful things you can do to progress. Furthermore, consistently sending out your gatherers to collect resources (one in each biome) is also incredibly beneficial both to you and your clan (daily clan quest lb). Ensure that the 4th March of gatherers you send out is not in the same biome your castle sits on. This will send out your wall dragons, and leave you more a much more vulnerable target when your first 3 matches return. You’ll want to exclusively gather gold. In addition to the obvious importance this guide highlights for gold, the game makes it very clear that this is the most valuable resource. ATA charges more for gold when compared to food/ore regardless of the medium of payment. It nevermakes sense to gather any other resource type. Even if you decide to ignore raids, you’ll still acquire the items you need to upgrade your Idolith structure and Idols from occasional chests given as event rewards. The notification icon can be annoying, so if you want to upgrade an idol, the only one most players use is Mermolga’s Misfortune. Once you max it out, upgrade a titan idol or save them for future idol releases. Save your brew as much as you can, but don’t be afraid to splurge a bit here and there. It’s one of the only actual gameplay activities to do in Heckfire, so have a little fun every now and then. Titans are always worth spending extra brew on, since you need their unique relic drops. ~~~ “I’ve been asked time and time again why I don’t live with the rest of my clan in our hive. So many times, in fact, that I’m going to include my explanation here, in my guide. At first glance, it may seem counterintuitive to live alone as you grow, but with a little routine and kindness, it can easily be your safest bet. So here it is, The argument for living solo: Following all of this guide means that you will have exclusively PvE troops until some time after you reach TH25. In other words, most of it. This puts you at a higher risk than most players of being targeted for troop kills. I’ve found that living away from my (or any other) clan’s hive has led to a much easier life than had I lived within. Here’s why: <ol> <li>Most clans keep track of all other clan hive locations, so therefore, the location of almost any player is known by most of the realm. Few people pay attention to individuals. </li> <li>Often the only people who will take the time to scout you will be your nearest neighbors. If you’re never over capacity on any resources, some of them won’t even bother. This is even more true when you constantly have dragons out gathering while you aren’t playing! (Which you totally should!!!)</li> <li>There will be tons of mobs around you that are all the level you need to hit. That means that you can very quickly rack up massive points on the any sort of monster quests, including major event ones! More importantly though, on days when life gets in the way and you hardly have any time to dedicate to the game that day, you can still invest less than 30 mins into the game that day and complete your Daily Dragon Quest. (It’s super imperative to do this for growth and shields!)</li> <li>If you’re kind to most people on the game, especially towards your neighbors, many won’t target you for 0ing even when they can. Don’t do anything stupid, be kind, and you’d be surprised how few people have any interest in doing you any harm. This can make a world of a difference when you forget to put up a shield one night before bed, trust me!</li> </ol> So yeah, it comes down to safety and swift gameplay. You probably won’t want to participate in your clan’s raids depending on your distance, but as I’ve mentioned before, there’s nothing wrong with just stockpiling your raid brew. When choosing a location, look for a spot where all 3 biomes are present (duh) and where in each area you see an abundance of the level of monsters you need. Ideally, find a safe pocket where there are other clan hive’s a little ways away. When they kill monsters, some will spawn far enough away from them that they won’t bother with them, but those will be very close to you. You definitely don’t want to be close enough to more than 2/3 other players who kill monsters in your area. You’ll need plenty of time with 0 players paying any attention to your area, so that you have time to solo titans when they spawn.” ~~~ ❓Now What❓ So you made it to TownHall 25, that’s awesome! You’re in the home stretch, so let’s make sure you finish strong. The game feels the need to send you some mail letting you do what to do next. Here’s what it should say: Stage 1: You unlocked a ton of cool new      , but everything officially costs a bazillion resources. That means you need to be both making and protectingmuch more than you were before. Focus on upgrading your treasuries and unlocking your new research capabilities in the Monster Hunting and Resource Gathering sections. The toughness, strength, and ability bonus upgrades for your troops in the Army Strength section are also a top priority. Stage 2: It’s finally time to finish maxing that dragon xp bonus! Turn your attention to your dragon alters, and focus on fully maxing out those Biome research sections! Your Dragon March Capacity needs to be maxed as well. Stage 3: You’ll want to max your hospitals and universities before moving on to your barracks and then finally your embassies. Max out your newly unlocked Realm Mastery section, as well as your remaining Army upgrades. Stage 4: It’s finally time to enter the PvP realm. You should have at least 3 million Trophy Huntresses. Switch to pugs and knights being trained if you haven’t already, and blow through all those PvP researches you ignored. You’ll soon have plenty of gold to start pouring into allies, and can speed-up troop trainings more efficiently than 95% of other players! You’ve already done pretty much all of the hard work, so just breeze through the rest at your leisure, and enjoy being at the top! 📜Conclusion📜 So here we finally are, ready to wrap things up. I’d like to thank you for taking the time to read through my work. It has been an arduous project, and I couldn’t have done it without the help of my many friends throughout the realms who provided feedback and support as the guide has grown. As you can see, the road to maxing out is an incredibly lengthy one, and getting there quicker than others doesn’t come without drawbacks. Yet while some players may wish to participate in PvP as they progress, they will inevitably find that very long road... even longer. The benefits of delaying entering the PvP realm are numerous, and it will save you loads of time and frustration. You have to take a step back and break down every aspect of the game to truly see how overarching the effects really are. Focusing on upgrading the various bonuses and unlocks via research while other players are rushing townhalls and focused on speeding up training troops that they’ll inevitably lose (and will be cheaper to speed up later) will ensure domination in the long-run. Some consideration of your long-term strategy can go a long way. I sincerely hope that this guide helps you get a little closer to where you want to be. Combine a few smart gameplay decisions with a little bit of patience, and you’ll be at the top of the leaderboards in no time. Best Wishes, ~Professor (Captain) Daddy 🔬[/QUOTE]