Uranium

Published: September 5, 2024
Updated: September 5, 2024

Maybe you have heard in alliance chat about uranium or “fighting in the mines” and wanted to learn more. Or, maybe you are a big spender and the first to open the Core Mining Station and are trying to optimize how you gather uranium. Either way, you've come to the right place!

What is Uranium

Uranium is simply another resource used for upgrading buildings past level 30 (c30). If you thought gathering resources was slow, it's nothing compared to the small drip of uranium. The catch? Uranium is unique to each city, i.e. it can't be sent as a gift or plundered by attacking the city. How do you collect it? There are a number of ways, they are:

  1. Uranium Gobbler
  2. Doomsday Challenge
  3. Core Mining Station - Surface Mining
  4. Core Mining Station - Deep Mining
  5. Monthly Uranium Card
  6. Pack through the store
  7. Various limited time events

Uranium Gobbler

Starting at c28, you can start collecting uranium tracker fragments through the daily quests, 2 fragments at 150 points and 3 fragments at 360 points. You can combine 10 fragments to create a tracker. Using the tracker will automatically find a Uranium Gobbler on the map which you can attack, consuming the tracker and 10 mobility. If the attack is successful, you gain 1,000 uranium. If done properly, you can get 10 fragments every 2 days, averaging 500 uranium daily.

Doomsday Challenge

Starting at level 30 you unlock the Doomsday Challenge, an extra challenge in the City Ruins scattered across the map. Each day, you are granted 1 attack which is similar to the Ruin Rally where your army challenges up to 10 waves of zombies, each wave getting more difficult. Early on, you will not be able to pass more than a couple of waves, but it's only a matter of time before you can clear all 10. Keep in mind, this event is similar to the Mother of Doom event where you can send all your troops at once, so make sure you don't use a saved fleet! At 10 waves you will gain 800 uranium.

Monthly Uranium Card

For $19.99 USD you can unlock the Monthly Uranium Card which is good for 30 days. Each day you can collect 1,000 uranium, along with some other perks.

What is the Core Mining Station

The Core Mining Station is unlocked when you reach c30, check out the Core Mining Station in the Building Tables for resources needed. There are two parts to the Core Mining Station, surface mining and deep mining. Surface mining generates 30 uranium per hour up to a cap of 300 uranium without the monthly uranium card, or a cap of 360 uranium with the uranium card. Effectively, this mean you can go either 10 or 12 hours (depending on whether you have the monthly card) without collecting before you start losing out on uranium. Deep mining is much more complicated.

Core Mining Station - Deep Mining

Deep mining, or better know as the uranium mines (or mines from now on), is a pretty complicated topic. Let's break it down.

What is it? - At it's core, it's a feature of the Core Mining Station where you can gather uranium and, more importantly for some, attack other players without losing, or wounding, troops. That's right, no lost troops and it doesn't cost anything to heal your warriors.

When you first go into the mines, it can look pretty confusing, but it's actually fairly straightforward. Breaking it down, there are four mines, each with four levels, similar to how you dig for power ore. As you go “deeper” into the mines, the quicker you can gather uranium, but you'll also encounter stronger and stronger players, the big spenders. Below are the rates (also available when you view the mine):

Mine 1

Mine 2

Mine 3

Mine 4

The obvious solution is to go straight to the deepest mine because you'll gather uranium the fastest, right? Yes and no. There is a way for weaker players to do this, it's not exactly something I recommend for most people, but I'll cover it below. Before we go into those strategies, there are a few more concepts we need to cover: plundering and occupying.

When you click on a mine that another player is in, you have two options, plunder or occupy. When you chose to plunder a mine, you attack that player, and if you win, get 15% of the uranium they had gathered at the time. If you lose, nothing bad happens, no wounded or lost troops. Occupying a mine is similar, if you attack and win you still get 15% of whatever they had gathered, but you also kick them out of that mine and take it over. Again, if you lose, nothing bad happens. A very common question at this point is usually, “If I am occupied, will I lose all my uranium?” No, only 15%.

Why plunder and not occupy, you might be wondering? If you are already in a mine and don't want to leave it, but another player has 700 uranium piled up, you may be tempted to steal some of that for yourself. At that point, just plundering seems like the right course. However, what if you are the one with 700 uranium piled up? Now is definitely a good time to hunt for a new mine to occupy where you can kill two birds with one stone – take 15% of what someone else had acquired and start over with a new mine.

Etiquette

Now seems a good time to cover some basic etiquette in the mines.

  1. Don't attack the same player multiple times in a short time frame, either occupying or plundering. I know it might seem tempting, but it's more rude than anything. There are a lot of mines, you are bound to find someone with similar BP and gathered uranium if you keep looking.
  2. Try to observe the 10-12 hour rule, or easier yet, the 500 rule. What is that? If the amount of uranium is less than can be gathered in 10-12 hours, don't attack them – you won't be gaining all too much, and are probably just going to create bad blood. Don't want to do the math? Simply don't attack other players who have less than 500 uranium. Personally, I draw the line at 600, but I don't do much attacking in the mines anymore.

Strategies

Let's go over two of the most popular strategies I know about for gathering in the mines.

Strategy 1: What I recommend to most players is find the level mine that works best where you can gather without being plundered or occupied too often. When you first start out that may be Mine 1 Level 1, later it could be Mine 3 Level 4 (where I hang out). This way, you can collect uranium for free, no gold spending involved. How? Each Day you get two free ‘attacks', either attacking other players (occupying or plundering), or occupying vacant mines. After that, it starts to cost gold, up to a maximum of 500 before you simply can't attack any more. Twice a day, roughly 12 hours apart, collect your uranium and occupy a new mine – take over another players' mine if you want to maximize the uranium collected.

Stategy 2: This is a more hardcore strategy. You may have noticed that when you occupy a mine you get a protective shield. This shield lasts for 2 hours without the monthly card or 4 hours with the card, for this strategy, you need the monthly card. First, find the highest level unoccupied mine you can and take it. Next, set an alarm for four hours so you can collect your mine and re-occupy that mine, or a higher one. Rinse and repeat every four hours, every day. Not only is this method time intensive, it is also starts to drain your gold as every attack after the first two costs gold, up to a maximum of 500.

Battles

For some, this is what helps keep the game from being stale when your nation gets to a certain point where it's more farming than fighting. You've probably been wondering how to know who to attack, what formation to use, how you will know if you will win, etc. Basically, it's a lot of educated guesswork. Formations are complicated, and worthy of their own guide, but for now, it's enough to recommend at least 20% front row (shredders, infantry, or tanks), maximum zombies, and either max midrange if you are a midrange fighter (probably not if you are reading this), or max back row (cannons, EMPs, or snipers), whichever is the strongest for your build.

How do you decide who to attack? When you click on an occupied mine, the Battle Power (BP) is displayed and the total number of troops – not a lot to go on. Over time, you'll get a sense of who the really strong players are so you can avoid them, and who is more on your level, while still observing basic etiquette. When you are first starting out, just start attacking people who have similar BP to you and try your luck – but keep in mind, fleet formation has a lot to do with success at this stage.

Which formation should you choose? There's no one right answer to this. Some people use interesting formations in the mines and the only way to beat them is by using an unorthodox formation yourself, something you wouldn't use if the losses were real. One formation I would recommend avoid is the 1/1/99 formation, where all soldiers except back row are set to one unit each. The key to any successful battle is to make sure you have plenty of frontline soldiers, be it a single unit or a mix of each. A simple, usually effective formation to start trying out is the 20/max/80 formation – 20% front row, max zombies, 80% back row.

Uranium

In summary, if you want to continue to grow your city past c30, you will need uranium. There are many ways to collect it, for free using the methods described above, or in combination with purchasing uranium packs through the store. Since, at the time of writing, it is impossible to gift or steal this resource, I recommend trying to maximize the amount of free uranium you can gather before spending more money. Hope this helped!