How do I make my bot run faster?

It's a question we hear all the time.  "Why is my bot slow?" or "It takes forever for the bot to complete actions!" - This can be frustrating, often more for us developers than the users.  Why? Because it can be easily fixed!  90% of the time the issue is NOT with the bot speed, but with how you have the actions set.  You want to have clear goals when thinking about how your bots will run.

In this post I will explain how to optimize your actions for SPEED.

What are Actions?

Actions are the functions that you want the bot to perform.  It's common sense that the more of these you add, the longer it will take the bot to complete the cycle. If speed is your main concern, you need to use these correctly in order for focus on time. 

Choose a Botting style that meets your goals

You need to decide what it is you are trying to do.  Is gaining the most amount of resources possible your desire? Is building up your farm accounts through upgrades more important? Is alliance management most important?  Pick what is important to YOU.

Focus on Your Botting style

Now that you know what's most important. Remove actions that don't meet those goals.  For instance, if you want to earn max resources, you shouldn't have the bot waste time on building upgrades.

But I want ALL of it!

Of course you do, the bot has a ton of features and we want to be able to take advantage of all of them - but you need to do it PROPERLY.

Lets learn how to do that...

Heres How: Use Separate Action Classes based on goals

Use the "Profiles" and change settings to create and use different action classes based on different goals. You find it if you right click the Add a New Account-button in the Accounts Menu.

Create different action classes to easily switch between what you find important.  For instance, an optimized bot will run Gather Resources 90% of the day because the troops return and need to be sent out every few hours.  If your bot is busy doing other functions like Daily Activities - it's wasting its time. How long does it take for your resource mines to reach max capacity? 12 hours or so? How much do you earn from them anyway? so as long as you run Auto Collect Resources once or twice a day - That's all you need.

You do NOT need Buildings to search for upgrades every time the account runs.  That's pointlessly slowing your bot down.  This game logic applies for many of the actions - They don't need to run all the time! Instead try this...

1. Save a Action List for Gather Resources
2. Save a Action List for Daily Activities and anything else you want.

Now, load Gather Resources and run that 90% a day.  When you get home from work, or school, or before you eat - Load Daily Activities and let it run though ONCE.  Once it completes, load Gather Resources again and let it go. You will now see that all your marches are always out gathering resources as it should - Did the bot change? No... Your Botting Style changed by using some game logic.

These are very simple principles that can be applied on a large scale.  Each botter has a different goal and should put a little thought into how he can gain the most from his bot.

Got it? Good. There's More!

This bot is meant to run 24/7 for a 30 day period. It takes a few hours for the troops to return from gathering in the game and therefor, speed is really never THAT much of a concern. While stability is the most important factor, it also shouldn't take an hour to run through each account.. 20 minutes or less is normal and safe for each account. It looks authentic and ensures you aren't logged into the same account all the time - That looks fishy.

Below are some ways to further speed up your bot if its running too slow.

Switch Gathering Styles

The most time consuming process is when the bot has to move around the map to find resources to gather. By using VIP and the Gather Search Action instead, you can speed up your bot by nearly 75%.  Switch from Gather Resources to Gather Search (or VIP when the game allows it).

Move to a Better Area

If you don't want to use Gather Search and VIP, its important that your mini farm accounts are in an area with A LOT of plots to farm. If you are in the middle of an alliance, or in an area with limited plots - The bot has to search longer and further to find a plot. When the bot has many different plots to choose from, and ones aren't already taken by others - It spends less time searching.

Putting a little thought into how the bot is working and why can go a long way toward speeding up your bot. 

Hope that helps! Remember, pick a goal and crush it! The bot only does what you tell it.