Hustle Castle – Milking PvP for Resources

The PvP (player vs. player) battles in Hustle Castle are one of the best ways to acquire building resources: gold, wood, and iron. However, the difficulty of PvP battles are designed to scale based on how frequently you win. The more you win, the harder they get. This serves to somewhat limit the resources you can get from PvP battles.

It is possible to get lots of resources every day from PvP battles, though. This article will explain a step-by-step methodology that I use to get the most from PvP battles.

NOTE: The process outlined here might not seem to be working right away. It could take a few days before you start to see the benefit. Be patient. It really does work. Just this morning, I got over 5M gold in about 30 minutes.

Recommendations

To get the most out of this methodology, I recommend the following:

  • Premium – Yes, I know, this costs money, and many people don’t want to spend money on a game. I don’t get a kickback from the developers. Honest! A Premium account isn’t required, but it gives you five key elements that help significantly with this procedure:
    • Extra food – Your Food Court will produce 20% more food each hour when you are on Premium. The more food, the more you can do.
    • Extra spells – Spells help you to win PvP battles. When you run out of spells, you will avoid more difficult enemies, and might miss out on some very lucrative opportunities.
    • Extra winnings – Premium gives you an extra 10% of resources from each PvP battle you win. So, for example, if you win 100k gold, then you would actually get 110k with a Premium account.
    • Protected stores – Premium protects 30% of your resources from theft by other players. If you follow the process laid out here, you will find that you are losing very few resources to your enemies when you have a Premium account.
    • Barracks healing – When you have Premium, your fighters will heal while they’re still in the Barracks. You don’t need to deal with moving them into and out of the hospital.
  • Goblin Helper – This is even more crucial than Premium, and it’s free, as long as you budget your diamonds properly. The goblin helper is key to accumulating enough food to do the required number of PvP battles. He will collect food from your Food Court while you are not actively playing the game.

The process

I do my PvP activities in the morning, while I’m getting ready for work. The map gets filled with opponents several times per day, and one of those times happens overnight, while I am sleeping. Another refill happens at right around 7 AM (EST) and so sometimes I can get in an extra few battles from new opponents that appear at that time.

In order to maximize my morning PvP benefit, I take steps to prepare in the evening, right before I go to sleep. I want to have plenty of food, plenty of spells, and low ranking points each morning.

Ranking points: You want these to be low so that you get easy opponents.

Evening preparations

Gem Bay

As one of the last things that you do before going to bed, take a journey in the Gem Bay, and bring a full complement of 12 spells with you. It’s a good idea to save one of your free trips for this purpose. You should make sure that you have as many spells as possible prepared before you go into Gem Bay. Ideally, you would pull all 12 Gem Bay spells from your inventory, and not from your equipped combat spells.

Pull spells for Gem Bay from Prepared spells, not Combat spells.

The reason for this is that you can craft a replacement spell for each spell that you pull from your inventory to bring into Gem Bay, but you can’t craft a replacement for the spells pulled from your Combat spells.

Once you enter Gem Bay, immediately exit again, using the red X in the top-right corner. Don’t worry. This won’t end your Gem Bay journey. You can come back again later to continue battling.

Click the red X to exit. Don’t click the End journey button.

When you have exited Gem Bay, go to your Magic Workshop and refill your spell crafting queue.  Now here’s where the magic happens. Go back to Gem Bay and finish out your journey. Once you are done, any unused spells will go back into your inventory, even though it’s already full!

Using this method, you can overfill your spell inventory. It’s not uncommon for me to have 20 – 23 spells in my inventory in the morning, even though I’m only supposed to be able to stock 18.

Magic Workshop

It’s not enough to just fill up your spell queue. You want to make sure that all those spells will be available to you in the morning. Make sure you fill your Magic Workshop with skilled workers (equipped with Speed-up chronometers and Watchmaker suits) so that the spell crafting will go more quickly.

Resources

Spend any resources you don’t want to lose. Use gold to enhance gems. Use mana to craft items. Wood and iron aren’t so important. You can’t spend them as easily, but you’ll find that they’re usually full anyway if you follow this methodology.

Food sources

Don’t open your gifts from friends in the evening. Leave them for the morning. Also, don’t open your daily chest; leave that for the morning as well. You might want the extra food.

Barracks

Last thing… empty your Barracks if it isn’t already empty.

I mean completely empty. Don’t leave a single person in there. I know this sounds counter-intuitive. I know you will be attacked during the night. Trust me. That’s a good thing. We’re trying to decrease your ranking points. I’ll explain more later.

Morning routine

Groom your opponents

When you first start up Hustle Castle in the morning, don’t do anything until you first check out your opponents. Don’t watch any ads, don’t read your clan chat. Go immediately to the map.

In a systematic fashion (I start in the top-right and go counter-clockwise) check every single one of your opponents for suitability.

Move around the map in a systematic fashion.

You need to look at two things:

  • Resources – Have in mind a minimum amount of resources you are willing to accept. For me, this is 100k gold. If the enemy has less than the minimum resource requirement, then they are unsuitable.
  • Squad power – Have in mind a maximum squad power that you are willing to face. For me, this is 1.7M. If the enemy has more than the maximum acceptable squad power, then they are unsuitable.

For every single unsuitable opponent, click on the orange Change opponent button. This is very important: change out all unsuitable opponents first, before you start any battles! Your replacement opponents will be based on your ranking points, and those will increase as you defeat opponents.

TIP: You can quickly get an idea of an opponent’s squad power by clicking the small profile button to the right of their name. This is historical information, though. It doesn’t reflect the current squad power in their Barracks. To see that, you need to click the green Scout button. Scouting takes longer, so I tend to only use it if the squad power is close to my threshold.

Look at resources and squad power. Change opponent for any unsuitable matches.
Attack opponents

Once you have groomed your opponents, go through the map systematically, attacking every suitable castle. I make 3 passes through the map. Each time, I lower the bar for what opponents I am willing to attack. Here is my own personal criteria for each pass:

  • 1st pass – Only attack castles with 400k or more gold
  • 2nd pass – Attack castles with 200k or more gold
  • 3rd pass – Attack castles with 90k or more gold

You can set up your own criteria, and determine how many passes you want to do. You should always start with the most attractive targets first, to make sure that you can get to them before you run out of resources (or time.)

Healing between attacks

Depending on the strength of your next opponent, you may need to take some time to allow your fighters to heal. This is why I told you to start the process before doing anything else in the game. Here are some suggestions for things to do while waiting for your squad to heal:

  • Watch ads (ad chest, movie theater, fighter training room, etc.)
  • Read clan chat
  • Send gifts to friends
  • Receive gifts from friends (when you have room in your Food Court for the food)
  • Open your daily chest (when you have room in your Food Court for the food)
  • Open other chests
  • Send fighters to Gem Bay
  • Start a tournament
Finish attacking

Keep attacking opponents until one of the following happens:

  • Run out of food
  • Run out of spells
  • Run out of suitable opponents
  • Run out of time
Spend resources

Once you are done attacking, I recommend you spend your resources ASAP. Build something or enhance some gems. Otherwise, you could lose the resources if someone raids your castle.

Of course you can’t do this if you are trying to save up for something big. But if you are close to having enough resources, then you might want to open some chests, request resources from your clan, or even spend some diamonds just to ensure that you can get all that stuff out of your castle before exiting the game.

Get revenge

Now that you’re done, your ranking points have most likely shot up from all the battles you have won. Let’s push them back down again so you’re ready for tomorrow! To do this, we’re going to fight a bunch of revenge matches.

First, empty out your Barracks except for one fighter. You want to lose these battles! I usually leave a single mage. They die quickly. You need to have at least one person in the Barracks or you won’t be able to attack.

To get revenge, click the crossed swords icon near the top-left of your castle screen. Go to the Castle Defense tab, and scroll down until you see an opponent who has a red Revenge button available. Click this button, then click the green Attack! button on the next screen.

Click the crossed swords, then Castle Defense, then scroll down and click a Revenge button.

NOTE: You might occasionally run across someone with an empty Barracks. Don’t attack! You will win this battle, and the goal here is to lose!

Run away!

Keep doing revenge battles until either your ranking points get below your desired threshold, or until you run out of revenge opponents.

My own personal goal is to stay between 2300 and 2400 ranking points. If you go too low, then your opponents don’t have enough resources. If you go too high, then they are more difficult to beat.

Empty your Barracks

Don’t forget to get that last person out of your Barracks. Otherwise, some joker will attack you with a cook, or something like that, and lose to you, pushing your ranking points back up again.

Conclusion

Now you are finished with your day’s PvP activities. Depending on your motivation level, and amount of food you are willing to expend, you could try to do a couple of PvP cycles in the day, or maybe 1.5 cycles, with the second one only attacking very attractive opponents.

It’s up to you. You have the formula now. Feel free to tailor the process to your own needs.

Remember that it might take a few days for this process to bear fruit. Be patient. Once you get used to the thresholds that are good for you, and once you’ve been ranked low for a while, then you will start to see the benefits.

Details on ranking points

I have pushed off the detailed discussion of ranking points because it’s not important for the process, and would just clutter the instructions. Here is the information for people who want to know the reasons behind the procedure.

PvP matchmaking

In general, the game tries to pick you PvP opponents who have roughly the same number of ranking points that you have. If you are playing the game straight (not gaming the system like I’m describing here) then this means that you will always have challenging PvP opponents to fight against.

Whenever you win a match, you gain ranking points, and you will get more difficult enemies in the future. When you are defeated, you lose ranking points, and will be provided with easier enemies in the future.

Of course, if the entire game population followed the steps in this procedure, then it would stop working. Everyone would have artificially low ranking points, and you would be matched with difficult opponents even though your ranking points are low. On the plus side, the majority of Hustle Castle players will never see this article, and so this process will almost certainly continue to work well for the foreseeable future.

Grooming opponents

You should always change opponents when your ranking points are at an ideal value. This makes it much more likely that your new opponent will have a suitable squad power. If you wait until you have fought a few battles before you change opponents, then you will gain ranking points from winning those battles, and your new opponents will be more difficult.

Getting revenge

The only thing that you accomplish by getting revenge is to adjust your ranking points. You won’t get back the resources that were stolen from you. The only reason the revenge feature was added to the game was to give you an opportunity to regain your lost ranking points. Kinda pointless, huh? (pun intended)

But now we’re putting that stupid feature to good use. Clicking the Revenge button costs you nothing. No food cost. If (when) you lose, you don’t lose any resources. It just adjusts your ranking points, free of cost.

The number of ranking points you lose (or gain) is based on the difference between your ranking points and your opponent’s ranking points. If your opponent has very high ranking points compared to yours, then it is expected that you will lose, and so you won’t lose very many ranking points. From the game’s point of view, you lost to a much stronger enemy, and you’re probably already ranked appropriately. So it doesn’t adjust your ranking much.

On the other hand, if lose to an opponent who has very low ranking points compared to yours, then this indicates to the game that you are ranked much too high. You lost to an opponent that should have been weaker than you. In this situation, the game will apply a much larger ranking adjustment.

This is why I recommend that you do your revenge battles right after finishing all your PvP battles. Your ranking points will be somewhat high, and so you will lose more ranking points per revenge battle than you would if your ranking points were low.

Empty Barracks

Keep your Barracks empty as much as possible. If you have fighters in your Barracks, then people will start to lose to you. Other people are trying to drop ranking points too. Don’t let them use you to do it because that will push up your own ranking points.

You will lose resources. That’s okay. You can mitigate this by spending your resources when you get them, and by buying a Premium account. But don’t be afraid to lose resources. If you follow this practice, you will gain resources much more quickly than you lose them.

If you are saving up resources for something, you might want to keep your barracks full for a while until your can get the needed resources. Don’t do this for too long, though. It will break the cycle, and it might take a few days for the process to recover.

4 thoughts on “Hustle Castle – Milking PvP for Resources”

  1. Don’t tell people to leave their barracks empty. You of all people must know how frustrating it is to try and get revenge and there is 0 defense. Always leave your least desired dweller for defense to help other players.

  2. 1. If you mess up, and have a high ranking, (let’s say because you forgot to empty your barracks (or almost empty it) the night before), and you are having trouble finding suitable opponents, you can spend apples to purposely lose (with one fighter) to the weakest opponent, which as you said, loses you the most ranking points.

    But you can’t do this indefinitely, and just get down as low as you like. First of all, the number of points you will lose will decrease, since your ranking is decreasing with each loss. Second, you can only lose to a PvP opponent twice and still have them stick around on the map for you to beat them with your full force the third time. After three losses (or one win, of course) the game takes that PvP opponent away.

    2. For me personally, I try to use a max of one spell per PvP battle. Sometimes something unexpected happens and you need to save the day with another one, but the Mana cost (and the time to craft) is pretty high for spells. I try to choose my suitability accordingly, keeping in mind that castle defenses add to the difficulty in beating an opponent with close to my fighting strength.

    I tend to use most of my Gem Bay spells in Gem Bay, especially now that Gem bay is so much more lucrative, and especially since gems can be your most reliable source of upgrading.

    3. Mana is probably my most difficult resource. I’m constantly requesting it from my Clan-mates. I try to keep all the crafting stations going 24/7, if not for gear I can actually use than to convert shards up to more useful shards. It takes a long time, but it pays off. As you point out, Gold can be plentiful from PvP but Mana can be too. It can definitely pay to fight an easy opponent (no spells needed) with little gold but a nice 40k of Mana.

    1. The only issue with paying to lose battles (not that I don’t do this myself) is that with each battle you lose, there is a shift in the number of trophies. If you lose a battle, The number of trophies you can lose decreases and inversly, the number you will earn for a win increases. This can negate any benefit from losing if you are trying to go after resources. This seems to reset with the map reset, so it is best under the method described above to do this at night to get your count down rather than doong this while attempting to farm resources.

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