Building out your Stronghold

TLDR

Every building helps you progress in the game with the main goal of providing the resources you need to collect and max out heroes. The Stronghold is the central building, and upgrading it unlocks more buildable area, raises the level cap on your other buildings, and unlocks Advanced Buildings. Because so much is gated behind Stronghold level, your build-out is really a balancing act: keep the Stronghold climbing, but do not neglect the resource and hero-production buildings that help grow the strength of your hero roster.

Your buildings, grouped by job

Resource production

- Farm — produces Food.

- Mine — produces Iron.

- Watchtower — stores resources collected and upgrading it increases both its storage capacity and production rate.

Storage

- Food Storage and Iron Storage — raise your maximum Food and Iron capacity; their capacity adds to your base maximum.

- House — houses Recruits (the raw material for training heroes).

Hero & troop production

- Training Camp — trains Recruits into Heroes. It requires a minimum Stronghold level to build, and upgrading it unlocks more Training Options

- Barracks — levels up Troops, and lets you convert Epic Troops into Legendary Troops. Upgrading raises your Troops' max level.

- Hero Academy — advanced training that can produce Troops, Heroes, Trainer Heroes, and even past Heroes of the Month and Event Heroes; it also retrains Legendary heroes into other Legendaries, and is where you edit your Defense Team's Raid Formation.

Crafting & utility

- Forge — crafts Battle Items; upgrading unlocks new Crafting Recipes.

- Hunter's Lodge — crafts advanced Battle Items using Titan Parts; upgrading unlocks new recipes (your key building for serious titan and war items).

- Alchemy Lab — transmutes Battle Items, Crafting Materials, and Ascension Materials, and each transmutation produces Alkashards; upgrading unlocks new Transmutation Recipes.

Advanced Buildings (unlocked by Stronghold upgrades)

As your Stronghold level climbs, you can convert basic buildings into stronger versions:

- Advanced Farm and Advanced Mine — produce Food and Iron more efficiently than the basic versions.

- Advanced Food Storage and Advanced Iron Storage — store more than the regular storages.

- Advanced House — houses more Recruits and trains new Recruits automatically.

A practical note: converting a storage building temporarily reduces capacity and you lose any excess resources over the new limit, so empty it (or spend down) before converting.

Recommended build-out priority

1. Keep the Stronghold leveling whenever you can afford it. Almost every other improvement — Advanced Buildings, higher caps, new building slots — is gated behind it.

2. Do not let production and storage fall behind. If storage is full, you are wasting resource generation. Match storage upgrades to your production so you can spend your resources on big upgrades before you reach full capacity.

3. Maximize Training Camps. As an intermediate player, hero feeding is your main bottleneck. Several leveled Training Camps running efficient training options keep a steady supply of feeders and pulls. 

*** Advanced tip - there is no maximum amount of training queue you can have at any given time. So you can build up really long training queues and even use them as a form of temporary storage

4. Build toward several resource buildings of each type so you can convert to Advanced versions once the Stronghold unlocks them — the efficiency gains compounds over time.

5. Prioritize the Hunter's Lodge and Alchemy Lab once your economy is stable. These unlock the high-end titan and war battle items and ascension-material transmutation that define mid-to-late progression.

6. Use the Hero Academy deliberately — retraining and Hero of the Month / Event hero production are powerful but expensive, so lean on them once your core economy can sustain them.

A note on the Dragon base

There is a separate Dragonspire base with its own parallel buildings (Fishery, Quarry, Egg Storage, Hatchery, Dragon Forge, and so on) that work the same way — upgrade the Dragonspire to unlock and improve those buildings. This guide focuses on the main Stronghold base.