"How much to max my city?" deserves a computed answer, not a vibe. Here is how the cost engine behind this product prices a build-out — and why its numbers are trustworthy.
Bottom-up, not rule-of-thumb. The engine sums base times from validated per-building and per-unit data, then applies buffs explicitly: days = base_time / (1 + buff) × (1 − help%). As a concrete anchor: taking a City Hall 15 account to a whole-city Level 25 with dual 400k T5 armies prices out at roughly 2,600 speedup-days at verified baseline buffs, ~2,300 in a sprint scenario with titles and runes active during the surge. The two scenarios are published side by side because the gap between them is a decision you control.
The details that separate honest math from guides' math:
- Alliance helps are applied where they work — building and research (~26% off per task) — and not to training, where they don't apply. Skipping that distinction alone bends totals by months.
- Upgrade rewards are netted back. Milestone rewards along the way offset part of the bill; ignoring them overstates cost.
- Method is cross-validated. Independent top-down and bottom-up computations of the same build landed within ~1%, and the engine ships with a 15-test battery of arithmetic identities and monotonicity laws that must pass before any number is quoted.
Where a popular figure is wrong: widely circulated "~2,000 speedup-day" totals for this build undercount late-tier research — the re-extracted research tree prices higher, and the engine says so rather than matching the popular number.
The commander side uses the same discipline: level bills computed in EXP and tome-equivalents, netted against free income first (daily expedition EXP alone covers a measurable share) — you're only ever quoted the cost of the gap, never the gross.
What to take from this: any cost figure you get from this advisor names its buffs, its scenario, and what's netted out. If a number arrives without those three, it isn't a cost — it's a guess.