Second reason is too keep population growth high, a happy population grows more quickly, and during times of war when you need to recruit troops quickly it’s very important to be able to get a high population growth rate. Another thing when it comes to wine and war is that it’s much much harder to beat down a player with lots of wine cities, it’s almost impossible. Even if he loses all his troops he’ll be able to recover real quick since he’ll still have max population in his cities, he’ll be producing and consuming wine even if you plunder his other resources after all. A non wine city will have a much harder time keeping it’s population if it’s being plundered often since it depends on getting its wine sent from other cities.

If you’re in a peaceful neighborhood, being a peaceful player that and just sticking to yourself I guess having a mix of all kind of resources is ok, but for an active plundering player that risks being attacked back during night, wine is definitely the superior resource. If you worry about raids during night just set wine production to the same as you consume, stop producing all other resources, and you’ll wake up in the morning with lots of  gold and no losses. I’ll write more on this in my wine and plunder article.

It’ll take some time for the academy to be finished though, so just send as many workers as possible to the saw mill while you wait for this. You find the saw mill by clicking the view island button and then clicking on the pile of wood on your island. Depending on if this is a new server or not the saw mill might be at level 1 or at a higher level. The saw mills level decides max number of workers each city can have there. When the academy is finished you might have to withdraw a few workers to get enough idle population to fill the academy to the max. Academy is your main focus, you want to get that well digging technology quickly.

Keep upgrading your academy to level 3 and keep putting more scientists in there, no matter if this is a new or and old server you should follow this route. Some people like to get the barracks and port before higher level academy, but I do not agree with that at all, you don’t even have enough money for a single ship and you don’t want to loose population training troops this early either. Anyways, next technologies you want to research is in the economy category, it’s conservation, pulley, wealth and wine culture. Keep upgrading town hall some more levels as well as the academy.

Where you go from here depends a lot on how old the server is, what your luxury resource is and what your island looks like overall. I’ll talk more about this in future guides.