How to utilize the Power of the Museum

Should the Museum be a key component of my overall strategy?

The quick answer is "yes". The museum offers many advantages and can materially support your objectives. If your personal objectives are league advancement and rushing through ages you want to adopt a different museum artifacts strategy, then the one that is optimal for supporting your Alliance objective of being successful in wars.

As we are focusing on the Alliance objective, you will find strategy suggestions in support of the objective here. If you want to learn more about strategies supporting individual objectives, please ask in the regular chat and we will be happy to help.

Museum Main Hall Strategy The best path to support the Alliance strategy is to keep your league level low. Experience shows that a medal range between levels 200 and 800 is optimal as it allows you to raid easier for resources (food, gold, oil) and your base will be less attacked compared to medal levels above eight hundred. In addition, it is much easier to collect National Trade Goods, which are important for coalition troops joining wars.

For those reasons, you do not need main hall museum benefits that help you to defend your base against attackers. The best museum artifacts for your objectives have benefits that increase resources that you harvest from your production (farms, oil wells, hunting), increase the number of resources you gain from raiding, and resource refunds that you obtain from resources that were stolen from your base. Jewelry, Pottery, and Legendary Museum Cards are supporting those goals.

On the right is an example of an Atomic Age Main Hall from one of our team members. While the museum artifacts are not fully unlocked and leveled up, you can see that they already provide substantial advantages. For example, oil looted receives a bonus of approximately 54% (43% directly and 12% from All Resources Looted). You can click on the image to enlarge it.

Museum War Hall Strategy As we discussed in the war participation section (Alliance AOE 2 War Participation (part 1), wars are more geared towards offensive capabilities. The stronger offense wins the wars when the opponent match is equal or only slightly off as indicated by the Glory Point ratio awarded.   When you craft museum artifacts from fragments, you will find that many of the artifacts' benefits will enhance your defensive capabilities.  It is harder to find good offensive cards, but they do exist, and you will find ones that provide a distinct advantage for your attacks.  In addition, the University skills provide war opponents with insight into your Library, University, and Museum skills and leverage.  However, the Museum spy function is only available to opponents that have your same rank on the opponent's team and the Museum spy skill can only be acquired when the University is upgraded to Global Age level and the skill has been acquired. Therefore, most opponents cannot change their troop composition as they will not have visibility into your museum capabilities.

On the right is an example of a Space Age War Hall from one of our team members. The museum cards are fully unlocked, but not fully leveled up. All slots are filled. You can see substantial benefits that come from the museum. When getting to Space Age and higher, a well-developed war hall is critical for being competitive. The example shows a war that is competitive and more developed than about 90% of the opponents' war halls for opponent teams will face at the 17,000 Glory Points level and below.

When will you know if a crafted Museum Artifact is worth keeping and worth displaying?

It can be very time consuming to craft Museum Artifacts from fragments and then to assess whether you want to keep or sell the newly crafted artifact. Dominations provides an aid that will help you to expedite the process and to make it less time consuming. Museum Artifacts have a title and 5 benefits. Those titles and benefits come in three colors: White, Green and Blue.

White Museum Artifact titles and benefits are weak. White Main Hall Artifact benefits start with up to 3%. White War Hall benefits start with 1%.

Green Museum Artifact titles and benefits have medium value. Green Main Hall benefits start with up to 6%. Green War Hall benefits start with up to 3%.

Blue Museum Artifact titles and benefits are strong. Blue Main Hall benefits start with up to 11%. Blue War Hall benefits start with up to 6%.

Legendary Museum Artifacts are a powerful addition to your museum strength. Legendary Artifacts come in various starting values. Legendary Museum Artifacts obtained through events or chests are typically less "powerful" than the Legendary Artifacts you can purchase for real money from time to time.

In the Atomic Age Museum example above, all Main Hall and War Hall Artifacts have blue titles. Legendary Artifacts included in above values were obtained through events. No Legendary purchases are involved. Above examples also represent the strategic approach to maximizing resource benefits in the Main Hall and to maximizing offensive benefits in the War Hall.

Tactics that can help you to develop the Museum quicker and easier

Storage Space for Artifacts

One of the time-consuming activities when evaluating newly crafted museum artifacts is comparing a good artifact to the ones you already have on display or in storage. The Museum has a function where you can buy additional storage space for crowns. It is something you may want to consider. It will help you to go through the crafting process quicker and it also provides you with the opportunity to keep desirable museum artifacts that you do not have slots for at this point but will have when you upgrade your museum building.

Obtaining Supplies for Unlocking Museum Artifact Benefits

To unlock museum artifact benefits, you need museum supplies. The main source for museum supplies is to collect them from expeditions. You may want to have a few citizens available to send expeditions over night or when you are not actively developing your base. Sometimes you can obtain supplies from expeditions that have a duration of 6 and 12 hours, but it is more common for 1- or 2-day expeditions to offer supplies.

Another way to obtain supplies is by selling museum artifacts, especially if you have legendary artifacts that are duplicates or you do not use since other legendary artifacts are more helpful for your strategy, you can sell those to increase your supplies.

Optimizing and Customizing Museum Benefits

A strategy some players use to maximize the value of museum benefits is to swap artifacts before or after war. You may want to swap main hall museum artifacts to support your objectives of non-war day resource gathering. You could apply the same swap thought process to wars, once you have analyzed your opponent's team before war starts. During planning day, you can obtain intelligence about your opponents through understanding their base design and possible through seeing the troop composition they have visible (barracks, factory, air strip). Certain war hall artifacts will support your attack strategy better than others. While this is a more sophisticated and time-consuming approach, it can make a difference and can give you and your team the ability to create the distinguishing difference that wins wars.

 Please note: 

If your war opponent's war hall is "materially" weaker than yours, then your artifacts strengths is reduced to 85%.

Example of how your museum could evolve over time

Here is an example of how your museum could evolve over time. The example tracks the museum strength over a period of about 1 1/2 years. Please note that a meaningful museum does not exist before Industrial Age. Even then, the museum benefits are limited since you want to focus on offense and factory and air troops development. A number of those artifacts kick in after you have converted your troop composition to nearly exclusively factory troops, and specifically commandos, heavy tanks, and bazookas. Your air troops artifact support should focus on fighters at least until you have fully developed bombers in Cold War Age, when you might substitute fighters for bombers or for transport planes.

Please click on the chart below to expand the example size.