Landing Craft are some of the most important and expensive support type of buildings to upgrade, especially once you hit the upper mid game (~HQ16+). Right now, I’m getting my last landing craft (of my seven) to 15. From here on out, it becomes a lengthy grind towards 19.
Part of this issue has been my unwillingness to upgrade my landing craft for a while. Since I play Grenadiers-Tanks-Medics, I only needed to have 3 level 12, 2 level 14 and 2 level 16 for where I was at in terms of my landing craft levels. However, with HQ20 slowly creeping up, I wanted to prepare enough craft so that upon hitting HQ20, I’ll have that opportunity to start the last really necessary upgrades until I decide to switch troop compositions.
Luckily, at this stage of the game, I’ve managed to upgrade the most important buildings that compete with landing craft at this level for resources which are my Armory and Vault. Gunboat is still 18 but it’s more of a nice-to-have considering that my GBE is at a good level. And Radar still lags behind at 16, but I do not wish to spend gold opening up my map while I have tons of expensive, critical troop upgrades.
So what about defenses? Generally, I prefer to avoid anything costing over 100k stone since stone is where I’m hurting the most at this level. As a result, I’ve been focused on less important defenses such as Machine Guns, Mortars and Flame Throwers. The rest of my defenses are either too expensive or at a level where I doubt that increasing one would make a huge difference.
The only exception for non-cheap defense and landing craft upgrades I’ve made are resource storage units. Fortunately, beyond Vault, I’ve maxed out my gold storage, which means that I ought to be handle every single Armory upgrade until the end. Stone storage isn’t a major issue as I’m always pressed for more. Iron is an odd resource because I tend to either have an overabundance or not enough. But unless I start hitting my limits again, I feel that upgrading my Iron storage is a waste. The only one that may get my attention is pushing another level 10 Wood storage just because it’s the second resource that’s easily obtainable.
At any rate, from here on out, beyond the small defense upgrades that I might throw in, it’s pretty much the long haul with landing craft. It seems that it could take anywhere between a two Doctor T days in a row through a whole week without going PVP to obtain the necessary resources or drawing upon diamonds. My best landing craft is at 18, which I thought was a huge accomplishment. But to get to the next level is grueling as most resource requirements are at a stunning 3 million+. My two lowest craft are at 15 (with one in progress) so I might just try to push for all 16 at the low end or drive my next 16 to 17 for consistency. I suppose a positive in this experience is that I could plan to do Scorchers just for fun. Unfortunately, the GBE requirements to deploy all 7 Scorchers might be high. Not to mention my Scorchers still are level 1, making them severely weak.
The other option is to try and focus on one boat at a time, starting with that 18 and pushing it to 19. Landing Craft level 19 really have no benefit beyond adding a single rifleman. So it’s just the stage to ready oneself before HQ 20. I’m not even sure at this stage if it’s worth going all out with a massive boost just to clear up bases. I suppose the answer to that lies in getting to that point and seeing where I am with resources. If I’m on the edge, I’d say definitely doing a mega boost could help. Otherwise, I might just have to be patient and see for a week how much I can obtain without losing too much from being attacked.