Clay Pit

Primary clay production field. Produces clay every hour, and more of it at every level.

• Raise your Clay Pits to around level 8, then push one Clay Pit to level 10 to unlock the Brickyard.
• Then take the Brickyard to about level 4 before continuing the fields, for the same reason: it pays a percentage of what the pits already produce.
• A village does not have to be balanced. Four of each is ordinary, but a five-Clay Pit village exists and is worth settling for when the army you are planning eats clay faster than anything else - a hammer of Teutonic infantry will drink it. Judge that by what the army costs, not by which tribe you are.
• Nearby clay oases make such a spot better still: they multiply what the fields already make, so the two compound rather than add.
• Getting to level 10 across the four Clay Pits costs about 62,590 resources in all.

The level nobody builds. The game publishes a level 23 and nobody can reach it: one level costs about 20 million resources, far past what any warehouse will hold, so the figures exist and the build does not. 22 is the real ceiling, and only in a capital - everywhere else a field stops at 10, or 12 in a city.