Rune walls/Even runes
Defensive structures: Rune walls vs. Even runes

 The goal of this guide is to teach the concept behind of Rune walls, providing enough information for the reader to decide whether it's best for their plex's defense to use them or not to do so.

 Rune walls are a rather old concept in RWK. When runes were first implemented in the game, they were used mostly in banks, landmarks, and as a bit of additional defense on the outter borders of kingdoms, which in itself was an implementation of rune walls. However these became far more popular later on, when their effectiveness was upgraded, and their cap removed (previously, the location would not gain any additional defense past 100 runes). Many kings built their empires by creating a few outter rows of what would be a medium-big plex (as scepters came out, there was usually 3 high runed rows, sometimes followed by a weaker fourth), and then depositing the insides having very weak defenses. My s1 crew built a relatively small plex back then this way; we had our 3 outter rows 30-50 runed. The strongest row would be the outtermost, with the other 2 either equally strong or progressively weaker, because even if the attacker has second scepter (or higher), if all his armies die while hitting the first location, the 2 behind will not take any damage. Inside, we had kingdoms with army, fortifications, and treasury (no runes), and the gold made from the kds went to building up the runes of the whole plex, from outside to inside (this is to make it more difficult to break in, rather than letting the attackers break in fast and destroy most of the income with ease). When tectons came out however, most of these plexes were jeopardized as you could basically pay 1t to destroy a kingdom in your path, making a wall much less effective. This strategy can still be used, and it was used when s2 opened by Alaric and myself, as well as some others, but these days it might be too risky, specially if you want to build a large plex. If you attempt this, I suggest you seed your inner kds at least with 500m armies and 250m forts at least, and run them a lot very quickly, with at least 1 rune.

 After all that reading, you should now know what a rune wall is about, as well as one of the uses it can have. However, they are also helpful in the defense of stronger plexes. A common strategy is to use an amount of runes on all your kds (for example, 20) with a wall to delay enemies trying to cause income damage (on the same example, this wall could be 4 rows of 40 runes). A wall is not likely to stop an enemy but it can delay them, and sometimes it will force them to tect the wall itself instead of a rune bank (should you have one), saving you gold. When defending a plex, it is also easier if you have a rune wall and the enemy isn't inside the plex yet, because he is forced to hit the highly runed locations with a defender online, and a blind monkey can defend 50 runers. Additionally, if you get nuked while offline, it is very unlikely that the attackers will try to destroy the whole wall and just go for the insides leaving it nearly intact, meaning if you can retake your kds and repair the wall, they have to break it again. This leads to another point, if the attackers wish to continue damaging your plex later, they will have to build a spike (a mini plex of very high rune kds) inside it, in an attempt to stop the defender from taking them back.

 Now, even runing. Why do I compare even runing with walls if they're actually used in a combination? The reason is, sometimes, it's best to just have the same rune count on all your kds rather than a wall if you want a higher proportion of "strong" locations, unless you plan to be online a lot to defend your huge plex with say 10 rows of 40s and 2s inside. For example, if your plex is a 30x30 with 5 rows of 40 runers on all sides (500) and 1s inside (400 locations), then someone could give you a bad day by getting past the 40s and taking the inner 20x20 of 1s, which could potentially be done with just 1 tecton. Instead, you could use the gold to 20 rune all of the kds and use the excess for a smaller wall of 40s, then if you wish, 40 rune from outside to inside. Ideally, you'd have relatively strong insides with a good wall, even if it's not many rows, as a means to difficult the attacking process.

 A couple final notes, some of us decided to use the word "depth" to describe how many rows the wall goes in (for example, a 4 deep wall of 40s would be 4 sucessive rows of 40 rune kds). Additionally, some of us had the idea to build several walls in a plex rather than just an outter few defensive rows - we'd add another wall in middle of the plex, in a sense separating two areas, forcing the attackers to break both walls to get into both of the "weak" areas. This is specially helpful when the attackers don't bother to look at the whole plex for weak points, as they may not even realize there is another wall at all until it is too late and they have to change their strategy.

 That should be all the information you need regarding the subject. I've noticed this is a rather long read, and I will write a shorter guide with just the most important points if I have enough requests. If you have any questions, feel free to post here or PM me on the forums (in game PMs can sometimes be lost due to interest/nuke/etc spam, and I will ignore any emails).

Improving your kd running
The aim of this rather short guide is to teach you a couple of tricks that came in handy to my past teams.

7 row running:
For this you need two characters, one with second scepter or higher. What you do is build in multiples of 7 rows or columns, and hand the middle (4th) column/row to the 2nd scepter char. You seed all the kds and remove all trebs from this line, and then every hour you walk that line and use your 0 or 1 trebs to attack both sides. Since the kingdoms are attacked they are forced to update and thus get walked (this does NOT work if you try attacking your own kds from the same character). This leads to a very fast running, it allows me to finish runs 3 times faster.

4 row running:
Essentially the same as 7 row, with the difference you only build 4 rows/columns, the 2nd scepter char holds one of the edges, and attacks in only one direction.

A few notes on 4/7 row running:
Something you should keep in mind is the fact the locations will not grow at the same speed if the two characters have a different level in kingmanship. Ideally you'd have 125 on both chars. If both of them have scepters and one of them has 99 kms while the other has 125, then you want the edge/middle line to be under the char with 99, since this means most of the locations would grow faster. However other factors should be taken into account, for example you may prefer to use the char with 125 kms to hold more interest kds instead, in which case you can do the opposite, and that is something YOU should decide. Also, remember that the character that isn't doing any attacks doesn't need any scepters, just kingmanship.
Another thing you must realize, is that the edge/middle row will have 0 trebs once you've maxed all the others. You can do one of 3 things; either leave it as it is, or transport trebs from the other 3/6 lines, or just buy trebs. I suggest the second option.

Double character running:
Unless your connection is really fast then you might want to run with 2 characters at once (this is not recommended for small plexes because you turn around too much). Basically you open both chars and alternate windows hitting submit every time starting on opposite sides of the plex, turning around when necessary.

Additionally, when running with just one character, keep in mind once you click submit it usually stays highlighted, meaning after the first click you can hold down / press the enter key to continue running, which is less tiring.

Decisions, decisions
The so delayed and painfully long fifth guide is here now. Unlike the first four though, this one is more general and deals more with actual situations rather than planning and theory.
First off, Buldermar made a few questions;

Buldermar wrote:
How many runes should the kd have before 2b food gets more important than more runes? (the bonus on the food contra the bonus on more runes when defending)

It is not known how food bonus works on a very precise level, however I can assure you from past experiences that this 20% difference is quite considerable. I would personally try to have my food maxed on any kingdoms with around 10 runes. Higher than that is pretty obvious... for example, on 20s, if you take off twenty percent you'd be at 16 runes, whereas you could instead alch two and have 2 bil food and 18 runes, which is a lot more effective. Again, we do not know the exact calculation for it but this is probably it, or quite close. The answer is: If you have 20 or more runes, max food. Under that, I would still personally max food at 10 runes.

Buldermar wrote:
Maybe a setup; What assets seems to work good? (nuking risks, costs, ammount of runs needed etc.)

This is a very tough question. First off, as far as building goes, I personally liked to expand 500-1000 kds at a time back when I was a mere mortal like the rest of you, and I used 250 million assets, getting the army for free by transporting from a nearby plex whenever applicable (and when transporting didn't take so long that it made me lose too many runs... this is something you have to evaluate on an on-case basis). Why use 250m? When you make too little gold and have too much time, it can be a good idea to take this approach. If you transport, and buy 250m food/forts then you will be spending 3.25b per kingdom on seeding assuming you don't rune them. You would throw in 2 runes in the mix though. I would personally try to transport in or buy 500m armies, and once armies reach 2b, just treasure the kds at 2 runes if political relationships and protection are good (ie: no enemies). After that you can transport from those kingdoms and run up the forts in the process (if you started with a 2:1 army:fort ratio then the forts will be 1b once armies max. Note that if you do it this way, it is a good idea to seed food as high as army, in this example 500m). Why not save up for a little longer and seed 500m? You will have waited the same amount of time in most cases, lost gold that you could have used to rune with (EXTREMELY important when you're just building up). In short, if you're lazy, someone who's working harder can pass you in the same amount of time with the same resources. Remember if you build 2 runers to save any spare gold you can inbetween expansions to rune up with, at least to 4s at first. Afterwards, the upgrade to 6 runes is also very helpful, then you can go for 10 runes eventually. Or you can just chance 10 runes per kd slowly and have 12s unless you alch the extra 2 runes. Essentially, you want to have 2-4 runers for your first 2k or so kingdoms, then begin working on runing up while slowing down expansion for some time. This might not be necessary though if you have good bezzling jobs. When your own plex only makes about 500b a day, it is not that tough to find a bez job that matches that income which doubles your runing up speed or allows you to expand and rune up simultaneously (125 kms, 0% corruption bezzling yourself you can add 10 runes per kd in approx a month if focusing only on this). IMPORTANT! If you build more than say 2.5k kds and they are all badly built, you will need some really good politics if you want to stay in one piece. Nuke mules, and sometimes kings around your size, often envy progress and might attempt to extort you, which if they succeed at, can get the other kings against you for funding them - something your little 2 hour nuke job plex would most certainly not enjoy.
If you don't really have the time to be running your kds a lot, then it might be worth it to seed higher - this is simple math though as long as you know the variables and you should not need my help with it. A good guideline to follow is not to build more than you can manage to keep up with; while it's cool to have 10,000 kds ready to be runed whenever you get the gold to do so, it is far more efficient to add say 2,000 at a time and actually get gold from them, allowing you for an exponential growth. If you can manage to build just enough that you will have the gold to have a desired X amount of runes in them by the time they max, then you're being l337. In any case, Rome wasn't built in a day and neither were you, so have patience. Also, if you can find a good runner, try to keep him but do not pay ridiculous prices; if the sum of all the assets you gain from the runs is lower than the amount you're paying your runner to do the whole job, then it is a waste of time, and time is literally gold. The sooner your kds make gold, the sooner you grow. Keep in mind if your runs are coming along so slow that it takes you a month to do 2 runs, then you should probably try a different approach.
As far as "safety" goes, 2-4 runes are good enough for your first 1-2k kds as mentioned before, as well as for expansions when you're in complete peace and already have some other decent/half decent kds. 6s are very annoying to nuke with low stealth, just so you know. I cannot stress enough the fact that if you build too many weak kingdoms and too few or none at all well defended, you will have a rough time. No one cares if the older players built up that way; this is a competitive game and the scenario is constantly changing, getting harder as time passes by (in some aspects; it can be argued that you can build a good plex a lot easier now than when the server started). Unlike unrealistic games, in RWK whoever has the power and knows how to use it has domination. Back to the defense subject, 10 runes make for a reasonable count right now. Anyone can nuke 100-150 per hour (Which adds up to up to 300 if they manage to besiege afterwards and had their attack well planned) but chances are they will lose as much or more gold than you do if they aren't careful, which they usually aren't. It takes some skill to actually defend 10s effectively... sometimes, they are very hardly defendable. As you can do them, 20s are a good option. When a war is upcoming or when you happen to have some spare gold, or just don't feel like expanding, 20 runing is always good. Of course you can also spend some of that hard earned gold you've made so far, it is entirely up to you to continue expanding and making 10s/20s or just spending your gold to fulfill your crafting/trading/cybering dreams. Once you learn how, 20s are relatively easy to defend unless your enemy has a lot of stealth bonuses on you. The next step would be 30s, they are more annoying than 20s but not to the point they will stop the enemy on their own. 40s are good for a delay wall, 50s make for strong defense. âst that very few people can nuke effectively, 100s are extremely annoying for instance... but if you're reading this guide you probably don't have over one quad gold sitting in your northwest hell corner... or do you?

Buldermar wrote:
Perhaps a way to spend 20b on each kds including assets and runes and such..

You could just throw in 500m per asset, transport armies, and 10 rune/2b trs. 500m assets take 112 runs to max at 125 kms which isn't catastrophic but as stated before, you might prefer 250m instead until you have a decent income going. Then you can spend a month of those kds' income to 20 rune them.


Buldermar wrote:
At what assets/runes count should trs be added if you decide to run your kds? (considering the cost of nuking kds)

Too relative to have a "right" answer. Questions you should ask yourself involve: How much longer will they be weak due to low runes/assets? Is my plex well hidden? Do I have any enemies? Do I have any allies? Obviously, never treasure 0s, additionally 500m asset 2s are VERY high risk and cheap to nuke, but it all depends on how close to the edge you want to play. Who knows, you could pass inadverted for two weeks to a month if you're very lucky and your plex doesn't draw attention.

Additional notes
Use common sense.
Use common sense.
Buy some more common sense, can never have enough of that.
It is helpful to have several spread out relatively small plexes at first. People tend to underestimate you and think you have a lot less than you actually do, and this plays in your advantage in several ways, specially during war (though it can also do the opposite if they feel confident enough to hit you and thus start a war, but this is not as common, specially if you're not seen as a threat). You can later focus on one plex by building more near to it, or building other plexes and connecting them.
Do not get involved in arguments that might offend the big guys or you could set them off. Sometimes even a regular discussion can be enough depending on their temper. If you're being called a retard then you might actually be doing something stupid and should take this as a wake up call and see if you're doing something wrong; maybe you're not, but maybe you are. Ubers can also have bad days like anyone so if you see one of them specially pissed off try not to make them take it out on you.
More common sense!
If someone just got into a war with whoever you might think is "l337 kr3w" do not talk smack to them as wars can have funny outcomes. An example would be peace after 3 days of fight which then puts you in a very horrible position. Also, unlike real life, you can't permanently kill someone on RWK, if they have no kds they will be a nuke mule so you should always be reasonably careful. You do not want to be a push over with everyone either, this gives you the image of being easy and will get you nuked in hopes of extortion.

That closes this guide for now. Updates may or may not happen; God may or may not exist; You may or may nor obey my orders; This may or may not be a subliminal message of sorts; See ya next guide.

Update: I felt this would be a good place for a little "bonus track", although it is kind of related to the guide. I suggest that, for your start, you get a 250b to 500b bezzling job (the more the better though) and get your kingmanship up to at least 99 (allegiances work, cheaply bought with part of one pay). If you don't have scepters then you might want to consider to just bezzle like a madman until you have enough to buy the ingredients or find someone who has them to hold for you. Bezzlng a char that doesn't have scepters takes forever and could potentially be a wate of time. Once you hit an income that you consider very good, and your kds are where you want them to be, you can drop your bez jobs and become self sufficient. Maybe even hire your own bezzlers! But remember, without hard work or a lot of paypal, you're not going to get anywhere.
 

The Workers
Advantages and disadvantages of hiring bezzlers

 While some people don't even think of doing their own bez work, hiring a bezzler brings several complications that have heavy impact on your kingdoms in several ways. The obvious advantage of having bezzlers is that you don't need to be online every 24, 48, 96, or however many hours you set your bez intervals to, and that you don't need to spend time doing all that irritating bez work. However, even if you pay for example 25%, the cost is very likely to actually increase because a good bezzler is extremely hard to find, and the average guy will miss bezzles or quit without warning. The more kingdoms you have, the harder it is to find people to bez them, and having your bezzlers quit/be paid by the enemy to quit in middle of a war has the potential to turn the tide of it as you can't war with no income unless you're l337 like me and have hundreds of trils muled, and it's an unexpected change that can affect your plans. The other problem is that you may very well be funding your enemy for a war, directly or indirectly; either your bezzler might work with them (an enemy or your competition, which can be as bad or even worse) or simply fund them by selling gold. Most bezzlers want money and they won't think twice before selling gold to anyone, and what is worse, they are usually stupid enough to sell below the gold rate and consequently drop the rate (this is in fact how the gold rate drops, with the other way being sell outs of large amounts). If you bez yourself, on the other hand, you know where all of your gold is going, and you might be able to find one time bezzlers every now and then when you can't get it done. Additionally, it can save you a lot of gold - when there are plenty of bez jobs around, rates tend to get ugly and in the long run if nothing changes, RWK history proves that it can go up to even 35-40%. With all the work it takes to build, hold, and defend kds, frankly paying 1/3 to 1/2 the income to someone that takes no risk seems pointloess. The bottom line is, if you can bez yourself, in my opinion it's in your best interests to do it. You will have more gold to spend, don't risk paying your enemy indirectly to nuke you, and ultimately you're contributing to keeping the gold rate at a good level, unless you're selling your gold regularly.

Kingdom runners

 Unlike bezzlers, runners tend to have one time jobs, and a very good runner (which is equally hard to find... it's almost impossible) can do more runs a day than the average person can. However running doesn't require you to be on every 48 hours and is very flexible, as you can for example get on 20 minutes and do 2 runs if you time it right, granted it's not a massive amount of kds. From my experience, runners rarely keep doing their job properly if they are doing 1000 kds per run more than 5 times a day.
 Why hire runners? Perhaps you are able to bez at the same hour every 2 days, but you can't be on at 8 different hours every day to do runs. In that case, you might want to hire runners and do your own bez. Unless you treasure seeded kingdoms, not hiring runners can also cost you more in the long run (no pun intended) as those kingdoms are not making gold for a longer while if you're slower than a runner would be. Before hiring a runner, make sure you analyze the possibility of 7 rowing the kingdoms yourself though.

Common pitfalls when employing KD workers

 Perhaps the most common pitfall of all, is the runner/bezzler that says he can walk 3000 kingdoms per hour 8 times a day. Now, while this sounds amazing, the average player can't even do 1500 8 times a day and last more than a day, if that. One common question I ask is how much they are willing to do, without getting worn out, because it's no use to hire a permanent bezzler if they will quit the third bez (in this case, often times they do not even tell you, or make up excuses for not doing it - keep an eye on your kingdoms at all times).
 Another common problem is unreliable workers. Very often you will run into bezzlers that do fine for a week (or not), and then they will start leaving bezzles incomplete with some bogus excuse or none at all, and they will often not even warn you of the situation unless you pressure them. The classic one is "my grandma/brother/sister/dog/alien pet is in the hospital/agonizing/broke his back", which sometimes is true, but half the time is not.
 Also to keep an eye out for are fake workers. It is common for someone who doesn't like you to go on an alternate character, take a job, and then not do it with the sole purpose of sabotage. Always be careful. 
 If you hire someone who is not starting immediatly (ie in a week for example) or who is going on vacation, I suggest you don't count on it happening unless you already know them. They tend to change their mind/not come back to the game at all.

Employer's tips and tricks

 An easy trick is to tell your newly hired worker to pay attention and warn you of kingdoms with low moral/tected kingdoms. If they are really good, they will even make you a list of kds that have no treasure (which is common in a large plex as you can miss them when depositing).
 Don't start with a high pay unless you really have to. If they do a good job, give them a bonus every now and then, either via an extra payment or a rise in payout. Also be careful not to pay more to someone who bezzles 2k kds than you do to someone doing 20k, they might get in touch with each other and your big bezzler could get angry. If you're unlucky he won't confront you about it... why do I say unlucky? Because that makes them more likely to betray you when they get the chance. Keep your workers happy and befriend them, because they can be a valuable asset given the right circumstances, and besides, this is a game and making friends can be a good part of it.
 Don't pay in advance unless you're familiar with the person and they have worked with you before.
 As mentioned before, keep an eye on your kingdoms to see when they get bezzled and not. Keeping good track of a runner isn't extremely easy as they could just randomly run areas of the plex, although a good trick is to deposit a little bit of gold and then run random kingdoms yourself and see how much time has elapsed since last run via the interest message. It's common once you get big enough to just let your bezzlers tell you what you owe them but at least keep track every once in a while to make sure you're not getting scammed. Also make sure to corroborate that the amount bezzled after they're done is close to what it should be (you can figure this out by multiplying kds by bez amount). It's common to miss a few kingdoms (though if you're missing out on 100b out of 1t, you should probably worry and take action. As you work on plexes you will realize 10% is a lot to lose).
 Don't listen to Glitchless. They're communist bastards and that's exactly what you don't wnat (j/k, although watch out for little tricks they might pull every now and then. For example when the last corruption update happened, the whole point of suggesting people to send kingdoms to NOBODY was probably so new players could come and settle fully built kingdoms. Ultimately there are some players/clans with mules for bogus kingdoms.

 One last comment; hiring a friend to do some work for you can be a good way to get them started in the game. After all, unless you buy gold, working for someone is one of the best alternatives to build up even if it takes a while.
 And that's it for this guide. Always make sure you think of the pros and cons before hiring someone, and remember that you can decide to pay more later, but if you try to pay less you'll have trouble. Like in real life, if you need employees, taking good care of them is vital for success. Comments are appreciated, and you can remind me of any detail I might have forgotten. If you're feeling curious, I do not hire people to do any of my kingdom work at this point in time.