Buildings & research that actually save speedups

BigBoB rule from KitKiller: not every building is equal. Two structures must stay capped to your Town Hall level at all times — and a short list of Academy techs is mandatory for every F2P player, because they permanently buy back days of speedups.

1) Always max with Town Hall

Keep these buildings at the highest level your Town Hall allows:

Building	Why
Alliance Center	More helps from allies + bigger reinforcement capacity
Academy	Unlocks / speeds the research tree that multiplies every future tech

If your TH went up and these two are lagging — pause shiny side projects and catch them up first.

Not “max every building, then raise TH”. That trap kills tempo — see What to upgrade? Town Hall. Only Academy + Alliance Center stay glued to the Hall ceiling.

2) Alliance Center — helps & reinforcements

Each level raises:

1. Max reinforcement troops — more friends can sit in your city.
2. How many times you can be helped — each help shaves time off builds / research. Late game this scales toward roughly ~30 help presses.
3. Power — nice, but the real win is tempo.

Rule: Alliance Center = maxed for current TH. Always.

3) Academy — your permanent research engine

A higher Academy unlocks deeper economic techs and keeps the research pipeline open. Without it you stall the exact researches below that save speedups forever.

Rule: Academy = maxed for current TH. Always.

4) Mandatory researches (F2P BigBoB)

These are not optional. Push them whenever the Academy allows. They permanently boost building and research speed — that is literal days of speedups saved over the life of the account.

Building speed

Masonry («Каменные работы») — first big permanent build-speed line (example: maxed +15% building speed).

Engineering («Инженерное дело») — next build-speed line (more % on top of Masonry).

Research speed

Writing («Письменность») — first permanent research-speed line.

Mathematics («Математика») — next research-speed line (more % on top of Writing).

Priority tech	What it saves
Masonry	Building speedups forever
Engineering	Even more building speed
Writing	Research speedups forever
Mathematics	Even more research speed

Skip vanity military techs before these if you are F2P and still hungry for time.

5) BigBoB checklist

1. After every TH upgrade → check Alliance Center and Academy are maxed.
2. Keep help count climbing with Alliance Center.
3. In Academy: finish / push Masonry → Engineering and Writing → Mathematics.
4. Treat these four as mandatory homework, not “when I feel like it”.
5. Unsure what to queue next — ask R4 / KitKiller in chat.

Power from random techs looks nice in the ranking. Build % and research % buy you the whole kingdom calendar back.