Ah yes, the biggest nuance to the strategy of Battlegrounds: the buildings you can place on the sectors. Buildings are important because they can change the flow of the map, or the flow of your victory points (or both). The real kicker is the cost for them, though. You need to have the goods in the treasury to fund these buildings, and you’re going to need to fund them for almost two weeks at a time. It’s a real pitfall if you aren’t careful, but that’s why only those with permission from the guild founders or leaders will be able to do this.

Any GvG guild leader will tell you how easy it is to quickly deplete a guild treasury without noticing. Costs add up over time, and just like that credit card bill full of $10 purchases that suddenly is $1,000 and accruing interest at an alarming rate, it can sneak up on you until you realize that you’ve overspent the treasury just a little too late. Having a steady flow of goods into the treasury is going to be important now. The cost for GE is a pittance for what the cost of GBG will be; and heaven forbid you do all three (GE, GvG, and GBG). GvG guilds usually already have folks farming goods into the treasury, but in their case it’s commonly targeted to whatever era they’re working in. GBG is more like GE in that it matters what era your players are in.

Unlike GvG, GBG is going to make use of the higher eras in the treasury (AF, OF, VF, etc) that GvG simply doesn’t have maps for. Unlike GvG, there is currently no use for medals (but that may come, you never know). GE also uses those higher eras, but again at very minuscule rates. How much of each good it will use though is the tricky part.

This is straight from the Inno Games forum on what goods will be required for the buildings:

“Only the eras that are represented in a guild will determine the costs of province buildings. If a guild has two members, one in Iron Age and one in Colonial Age, then only goods from those two specific ages will ever be asked for. Nevertheless, the distribution takes into account the weighting of represented eras, which means that if a guild has mostly members of Space Age Mars, then it’s most likely to see Space Age Mars goods as costs.”

This means that the goods will be random, but weighted. So if you have a lot of lower-era players, you’re more likely to see it asking for lower-era goods… and potentially a lot of them. Similarly if you have more higher-era players then you’re more likely to see GBG asking for higher-era goods. One building could ask for goods from Iron Age, Future Era, and Virtual Future if you have members in each of those eras.

Speaking of, each building will cost three (typically) different types of goods, in varying amounts. The total number of goods required per building remains consistent though. So if a building costs 3,000 goods to build, it might be 1,345 of Goods #1, 1,036 of Goods #2, and 619 of Goods #3. Then the next time that same building could cost 255/2,145/600 respectively. Either way, it’s 3,000 total goods dispersed among three different kinds of goods. Sometimes, not often, the quantities will be dispersed between two types of goods instead of three, but the total needed still remains the same.

There will be two main ways to get goods into the treasury, and both are going to be valid for this:

  1. Player Donations. This would be players working to trade goods down, or just making a bunch of extra in their cities, and donating them to the treasury. The nice thing about this is the flexibility it offers. Players can donate goods of any age, at any time (except bronze age) to the treasury. So if you’re desperately in need of EMA goods, there’s no reason players of any era cannot work to bring in EMA goods to the treasury.
  2. Treasury GBs. The beauty of the GB is that it’s passive, so long as it’s collected the guild is going to get a set of goods into the treasury. What they have in stability of consistency though, they lack in flexibility. These GBs will always be a set amount of each good based on their level, and they will always donate goods of the era of the player who owns them. So an Arc built in a Colonial Age city will donate Colonial Age goods. When the player moves up to Industrial Era, so too the goods from the Arc will be from Industrial Era.

There will also be a new way to get goods into the treasury, on a small scale, and that’s the building being released with GBG you can earn fragments for: The Statue of Honor. It takes 200 fragments to get a level of the building, but you earn the fragments through successes in GBG at random, and the whole guild each earns fragments at the end based on where you place in the rankings. SoH will have five levels to it, and it gets better with each level. The amount of goods it produces though cannot compare to a GB or to individual donations, but on the flip side it can stay in a specific era AND you can have multiples. So it’s somewhere between individual donations and treasury GBs.

The biggest thing to remember when building these buildings is that once you select to build them you can never recover the goods spent. Deleting the building before its finished gets you no goods back. Deleting the building after it’s built gets you no goods back. Losing a sector to an enemy means they could get the building for free.

Buildings have a 50/50 chance of being kept or destroyed upon capturing a sector, including ones currently being built. This is important to note, because you could be in the process of building something that takes longer than the lock down time to do, and the enemy could steal the sector before it’s finished and get that building. Brutal. So you’ll want to be mindful on how wise it is to spend the goods to build certain things too, depending on where they are.

Not all sectors can have buildings, and some can have multiple. You will know by clicking on the building button to look. If the button is grayed out then no buildings can be built on the currently selected sector. If it’s golden though, then you can check to see what, if any, buildings are currently built or being built on sectors not owned by you; and on sectors you own you can choose to build new, and delete what currently exists. You’ll know how many spaces are available for buildings (one, two, or three) based on the number of pentagram-shaped shadows you see in the header part above the building selection menu (or buildings, if a guild has already built stuff).

Yes, you can build multiple of the same building on a sector, and yes the bonuses of them do stack. So if you get two Palaces on a sector, you will get 150% extra victory points, and it will have a 60% increase in cost to be taken away from you. It will also cost you double the goods though, so that’d be 24,000 goods out of the treasury to drop two of those bad boys in. The only thing that doesn’t double is the time needed to build it, it’d still be six hours (unless you build a second one an hour after you start the first, in which case it’ll be 7 total hours of build time for example).

So, what are the buildings, what do they do, and how much do they cost? Here’s a handy chart to help you out with that, complete with images. Again, the goods are totally random among three different ones as to what you’ll actually need to build each building, but the total cost will remain consistent.

BuildingWhat it DoesCostBuild Time
OutpostThis province requires +10% advances to be conquered.500 Goods5hrs
FortressThis province requires +30% advances to be conquered.3,000 Goods6hrs
DecoysIf an enemy fights or negotiates to conquer this province, there is a chance of 15% that this enemy will suffer double the amount of attrition.500 Goods4hrs
TrapsIf an enemy fights or negotiates to conquer this province, there is a chance of 45% that this enemy will suffer double the amount of attrition.3,000 Goods5hrs
WatchtowerIf members of the owning guild of this province advance into adjacent provinces, they have an 8% chance to not increase their attrition level.500 Goods1hr
Siege CampIf members of the owning guild of this province advance into adjacent provinces, they have a 24% chance to not increase their attrition level.3,000 Goods2hrs
BannerThis province generates 10% more victory points.250 Goods30min
StatueThis province generates 30% more victory points.1,500 Goods1hr
PalaceThis province requires +30% advances to be conquered. This province generates 75% more victory points.12,000 Goods6hrs

That’s basically it. It’s up to your guild to determine what buildings work best with your chosen strategy (which could change mid-way through a session in Battlegrounds depending on your opponents), and sometimes you just can’t afford them. As in… literally, the game might ask you for more of a good than is in the treasury. So good luck, try not to break the bank!