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Kingshot Tips

Kingshot F2P Academy Research Order: What to Rank First

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AQuick answer
Free-to-play Academy time is scarce. Rank the early Assault Techniques and hospital/economy lines that unlock the next Town Center week before you dump research speedups into late combat branches you cannot staff with T5. Use the Academy planner with Include prerequisites on so unmatched Academy building gates show up before you spend.

TL;DR

F2P research time is the bottleneck. Finish early Assault Techniques and the Academy building gates first. Do not start a long combat branch until the planner shows the Academy level you actually have. Share the encoded rows, not a screenshot of someone else's tree.

Why F2P Academy order is a time problem, not a combat problem

Research speedups are the resource free accounts cannot buy back quickly. Spending them on a late infantry line before the Academy building itself is high enough leaves you staring at a locked node while the speedups are gone.

The Academy planner is the right tool for this: it expands prerequisite strings from our imported tables and lists Academy building gates. Those gates are not priced as research rows. Raise the building separately.

A sequence that matches how the planner works

  1. Load the F2P academy basics preset (Assault Techniques I, ranks 0–3) and adjust current/target to what you actually have.
  2. Leave Include prerequisites on. If the warnings panel lists an Academy level gate, that is the next construction job — open the building planner for Academy, not another research row.
  3. Only after those gates are clear, add the next tech you actually use this week (hospital, gathering, or the next Assault Techniques rank). Do not queue a full tree “because a ranking site said so.”
  4. If the spend is meant for an event, the event panel on the Academy planner maps research minutes to Research Speedup points from our editorial table. Confirm the live rate on the event screen.

This is finish-gates-first: unmatched building requirements before spend rows. It is not a greedy optimizer and it is not lore.

What to ignore

Copied “best research order” graphics go stale after a patch. Our tables are community-sourced and marked Last checked. If a slug in a preset is not in your catalog, skip it. We will not invent T6 troop costs or Hero Hall rooms to make a prettier path.

For a combined share (Academy plus Town Center), use the Progression hub r: and b: segments so alliance chat gets one URL.

If you are choosing between Academy and War Academy tools, read Academy vs War Academy before you paste a slug into the wrong planner. Alliance donations are a fourth catalog — see the Alliance Tech primer.

Frequently asked questions

Early Assault Techniques ranks are a common first push because they are short, listed in our tables, and sit on the way to later combat lines. Confirm the slug in the Academy planner — if a tech is not in the catalog, skip the preset.

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