Academy

The Academy is the cornerstone building for your Empire's research development in the early game, housing the three primary research trees: Growth, Economy, and Battle.

The Growth tree manages your development speed and can significantly increase the tempo of your account. Key projects include Tool Enhancement (increasing research speed), Tooling Up (boosting construction speed), and Command Tactics (unlocking extra march queues).

The Economy path regulates your resource generation and harvesting. Technology in this tree will improve both the speed of your in-town resource buildings, such as the Mill, Sawmill, Quarry, and Iron Mine as well as the gathering rate of these resources in the world map.

The Battle tree directly upgrades troop stats, specifically attack, defense, health, and lethality, alongside Regimental Expansion, which increases Squads’ Deployment Capacity.

You can view the full list of Academy research projects, their costs, and their bonuses in the Research calculator tool.

While the Academy’s function is universal to all players, your ideal research path depends heavily on your player archetype. Free-to-play (F2P) players should generally deprioritize the Battle tree (except for Regimental Expansion) because their stats do not affect rallies they join. Also consider holding back cheap Battle tech to score significant points easily during early Hall of Governors events. Instead, F2P players should develop Growth and Economy first to have compounding effects on the growth of their account.

For a full discussion of prioritization of research across various player archetypes, check out this guide for more information.