Research Tree Priorities for Mid-Game Players
Research is one of the most impactful long-term investments in War and Order — and one of the most paralyzing. The research tree is enormous. Every node looks useful. And unlike building upgrades, research decisions compound over months and years of play. Getting them wrong does not break you, but getting them right significantly accelerates everything else.
This guide focuses on the mid-game — roughly the castle range where you have unlocked most of the research categories but before you are deep into end-game optimization. The principles here will help you sequence your research investments for maximum return.
The Core Principle: Economic Research First
If you take nothing else from this guide, take this: economic research pays for itself immediately and keeps paying forever.
Military research makes your troops stronger. Economic research makes your troops cheaper, faster, and more numerous. At the mid-game stage, you generally have more to gain from training and upgrading faster than from marginal combat stat improvements.
The most valuable mid-game research in the economic tree includes:
Construction speed — Every percentage point of reduced building time accelerates your castle level progression. Since higher castle levels unlock better research, better troops, and better buildings, construction speed is a multiplier on everything.
Research speed — Research that makes future research faster is the closest thing in War and Order to compound interest. Invest here early.
Resource production and gathering — As your construction and training demands grow, your resource income needs to keep pace. Research that improves farm, sawmill, quarry, and mine output — or that improves resource gathering from world map tiles — keeps your queues running.
Training speed — Faster troop training means larger armies in less time. Your barracks should rarely be idle in the mid-game, and training speed research directly multiplies the output of every training session.
{{VERIFY: Confirm the specific research tree names and node names within them for construction speed, research speed, resource production, and training speed in the mid-game.}}
When to Transition to Military Research
Once your economic foundation is solid — you have consistent resource income, your building queues are running efficiently, and you can sustain continuous troop training — it is time to layer in military research.
The transition point is not a specific castle level. It is when you notice that your bottleneck has shifted from resources and speed to troop power. Signs you are ready to invest more in military research:
- You can sustain constant construction and training without resource shortages
- You are being regularly attacked and losing battles you should win
- Your alliance is pushing into more competitive activities that require stronger combat stats
Even then, do not abandon economic research entirely. Many top players continue investing in both categories simultaneously, just shifting the balance.
Military Research: Focus on One Troop Type
The military research tree in War and Order is large, and it covers improvements for all troop types. Spreading your military research across all troop types will result in being mediocre everywhere. Focusing on one troop type will make you genuinely dangerous with that troop type far sooner.
Pick the troop type that matches your hero skills and playstyle:
- If your best combat hero has cavalry skills, focus cavalry research
- If you prefer archers and your hero has archer bonuses, focus archers
The choice matters less than committing to a choice. Once you have made one troop type strong, you can branch out. Trying to be strong in all troop types simultaneously in the mid-game results in being strong in none.
Research That Is Often Over-Invested Early
Trap research — Traps are useful for castle defense, but investing heavily in trap research early in the game is a low-return use of research time. Most mid-game players are not at the castle level or in the position where trap quantities make a decisive difference.
Alliance technology — Some research requires alliance points or is part of the alliance tech tree rather than your personal tree. Understand the difference so you are not confused about costs.
End-game military nodes — The deepest military research nodes require enormous investment and are designed for late-game players who have already maxed out the earlier tiers. In the mid-game, focus on the earlier military nodes that provide the biggest bang for their cost.
{{VERIFY: Confirm the names of any research categories that are commonly over-invested by mid-game players, and whether trap research specifically is considered low-priority by the player community.}}
Research Efficiency Tips
Always have research running. Research queues should never sit empty. Even if you are working through a long research node, there is almost always something smaller you can queue next.
Use research speed-ups strategically. Research speed-ups (the research-specific speed-up items) are most valuable on long research nodes. Using them on 5-minute research completions is inefficient — save them for nodes that take hours or days.
Prioritize research that unlocks further research. Some research nodes are prerequisites for other, more valuable nodes. Progressing through these enables your future research options even if the node itself is not immediately impactful.
Watch your alliance's technology contributions. Some alliance technology bonuses improve research speed for all members passively. If your alliance is actively developing alliance technology, your personal research benefits automatically.
The Long Game
Research in War and Order is genuinely a long game. No one maxes out the research tree in weeks or months — it takes sustained, consistent investment over a long play period.
The players who pull ahead on research are not necessarily the ones who spend the most gems on research speed-ups. They are the ones who keep their research running continuously, prioritize high-value nodes, and avoid wasting research capacity on low-return investments.
Start with economics, transition to military as needed, pick one military specialty, and keep the queues running. That simple framework outperforms most alternative approaches in the mid-game.