Age of Origins Upgrade Buildings Phase: Bank Completions, Not Speedups

Part of the Events series:

• Strongest Commander Guide: The parent event.
• Recruit Troops Phase: Always the phase after this one.

Quick Answer

• Scoring keys on completed upgrades, and it appears to be a lookup table by building and level — higher-level completions pay dramatically more.
• Scale reference: Academy upgrades have been cited from around 1,260 points at low levels up to 21,960+ at high ones. One late completion beats a dozen cheap ones.
• Speedups have no direct point value. They only matter as a tool to force a completion inside the window — never spend them on something that won't finish.
• The play: arrive with big upgrades parked at 95%, then release them into the phase.
• Whatever lands here, remember Recruit Troops always follows — so start your training queue during this phase.

Completions, Not Effort

Same principle as every phase, sharpest here: the game scores what finishes. Progress on an unfinished Main Hall is worth nothing; the same upgrade completing inside the window pays its full value.

And the values are not flat. The evidence points to a per-completion lookup keyed to the building and its level rather than a formula based on power gained — with Academy research cited anywhere from roughly 1,260 points at modest levels to over 21,960 at high ones. That's a seventeen-fold spread inside a single building type. The strategic conclusion is unambiguous: one deep, expensive completion is worth more than a flurry of cheap ones, and your most valuable phase asset is the big upgrade you've been deliberately not finishing.

The 95% Parking Habit

This is the discipline that turns the phase from a scramble into a payday, and it's referenced throughout the building and research guides:

1. Between cycles, push your big projects to near-completion — and stop. A Main Hall or deep Academy project sitting at 95% is a scoring asset, not a stalled build.
2. When the phase opens, release them. Collect the completion inside the window.
3. Then start the next big thing so it's ready to park for the following cycle.

Accounts running this loop score the same growth twice — once as progress, once as points — forever. Accounts that finish upgrades whenever they happen to complete are donating half their event value to nobody.

The Speedup Rule That Saves Your Stockpile

Since scoring counts completions, speedups have no direct point value. They're a tool, not a currency, and the rule follows exactly:

Never spend speedups on a project that won't finish inside the phase. Pouring an hour of building speedups into a three-day upgrade converts a valuable stockpile into nothing at all. Spend only to close the gap on something that will land — and if the gap is too wide, hold the speedups for next cycle. This is the single most common way players waste months of banked speedups.

(The community's rough allocation heuristic for a full cycle runs something like 30% build / 20% research / 15% recruit / 10% gather / 25% kill event — useful as a sanity check on whether you're over-committing to one phase, though treat the exact split as one player's framework rather than gospel.)

Both Halves Count

The phase covers buildings and technology together, so your Academy is as much a scoring engine as your construction queue. Park a deep research project alongside your building — Doc Gray appointed before you started it, naturally — and release both into the window.

Two supporting habits: post everything for alliance help (help clicks shorten the gap you'd otherwise close with speedups), and line up your next parked project immediately so the loop never breaks.

And Then Comes Recruit

The one fixed ordering rule in Strongest Commander is that Recruit Troops always follows Upgrade Buildings and Technology. So this phase is also your alarm clock: the moment it opens, start the deep training queue that will complete inside the recruit phase. Players who wait until the recruit phase opens to start training have already lost the day, and the event schedule guide explains why the sequence is deducible well before it happens.