Forge of Empires Age-Up Guide: Readiness Checklist and Timing

In Forge of Empires, advance to the next era only when you can easily clear Guild Expedition Level 4, support Guild Battlegrounds attrition, and maintain stockpiles of Forge Points, goods, and upgrade kits. Rushing through the research tree inflates enemy difficulty across all combat modes and raises quest production costs before your city can handle them.

Camp in your current age until your foundational Great Buildings are developed and your inventory is prepared. Once ready, execute the transition right after Guild Expedition unlocks on Tuesday to gain an immediate military advantage.

Pre-Advance Checklist

Do not unlock the first technology of a new era until your city meets these resource and infrastructure benchmarks:

Core Great Buildings

Your Great Buildings dictate your city's baseline performance across ages:

• Offensive Trio: The Statue of Zeus, Cathedral of Aachen, and Castel del Monte supply the baseline attack and defense boosts required to handle daily combat and attrition scaling.
• The Arc: Raising The Arc toward Level 80 provides substantial guild treasury goods and makes banking Forge Point packages through 1.9 reward contribution threads dramatically faster.

Renovation and One-Up Kits

Event buildings produce the majority of your attack percentage, daily Forge Points, and guild goods. However, they remain locked to the era in which you placed them. Without Renovation Kits or One-Up Kits in inventory, aging up will leave your event structures producing outdated goods, which halts your contribution to current-era guild needs and stalls event questlines requiring current-age productions.

Optimal Timing Around Guild Modes

Because era advancement instantly updates game-wide battle calculations, align your jump with weekly guild schedules.

Guild Expeditions (Tuesday Morning)

The most advantageous window to age up is immediately after Guild Expedition opens on Tuesday morning:

1. Wait for Guild Expedition to open while still in your old era.
2. Confirm the expedition is active, which locks enemy unit lineups and negotiation costs to your old era for the entire week.
3. Advance to the next era and immediately research your new military technology.
4. Use newly trained, higher-era units against the locked, lower-era defending armies for an entire week of easy clears.

Guild Battlegrounds (Off-Season or Round Start)

For Guild Battlegrounds, advance either during the break between active seasons or immediately after a round closes. Advancing mid-season updates the era of opposing sector armies on your next attrition reset. If you do not already have new barracks built and operational, your combat efficiency in sector racing will drop significantly.

Recommended Camping Eras vs. Transition Eras

Some eras feature cleaner layouts, superior unit mechanics, or distinct quest advantages, making them ideal stopping points to camp and build resources:

• Iron Age: The standard early baseline for stabilizing city production, building foundational Great Buildings, and running recurring quest loops without complex supply lines.
• Progressive Era / Industrial Age: Landmark combat eras featuring long-range units and story quest structures that let properly boosted armies punch far above their weight.
• Contemporary Era: Delivers consistent combat advantages through powerful anti-air and strike units, creating high stability during high-attrition Guild Battlegrounds runs.
• The Future Era: The premier late-game camping era. Hover Tanks gain stealth on plains tiles, allowing them to fight efficiently against both Future Era armies and units from several ages ahead on the campaign map.

Eras with difficult terrain constraints or awkward troop counter-systems, such as Early Middle Ages or Postmodern Era, are best treated as transit stops. Move through them once you have gathered enough goods and Forge Points to reach the next stable camping point.

What to Do Immediately After Aging Up

Once you unlock your first new-era technology, follow this order of operations:

1. Spend Saved Forge Points on Military Branches: Unlock the technology branch containing your era's primary combat unit and any immediate city expansions.
2. Place Land Expansions: Lay down newly unlocked grid expansions to adjust your city layout without tearing down existing production or event buildings.
3. Apply Upgrade Kits to Combat and Goods Structures: Use your Renovation Kits on event buildings that generate attack bonuses and current-age goods. Leave pure Forge Point producers alone if kits are limited, as base Forge Point output does not increase with age.
4. Push the Campaign Map: Advance your sectors on the map to match your new age, unlocking higher-tier recurring quests and locating new goods deposits.