Server speed: what changes at 2×, 3× and faster

Server speed does not scale everything. Training shrinks and merchants carry more, but troop movement is capped and unit stats and costs never change.

Updated 13 September 2026

"3× server" sounds like everything happens three times as fast. It does not, and the things that don't scale are what make speed servers play differently rather than just quickly.

What server speed divides

Training time is divided by server speed, at the very end of the calculation, after the building level, artefacts, helmets and alliance bonuses (see Training time and building levels):

time = base × 0.9^(level − 1) × artefact × helmet × alliance ÷ serverSpeed

A Clubswinger from a level 20 Barracks:

Server speed	Per unit	Units per hour
1×	1m 37s	37
2×	0m 49s	74
3×	0m 32s	111
5×	0m 19s	185
10×	0m 10s	370

Travel time is the exception, and it is the one most often got wrong. Troop movement does not follow the server speed. It is capped: 2×, 3× and 5× worlds all move troops at exactly twice the 1× rate, and only 10× goes higher, at four times. You can read it off a unit card in game: on a 3× world a Legionnaire shows 12 fields per hour against a base of 6, not 18.

A Legionnaire covering 100 fields:

Server speed	Fields/hour	Travel time
1×	6	16h 40m
2×	12	8h 20m
3×	12	8h 20m
5×	12	8h 20m
10×	24	4h 10m

So a 5× world trains five times as fast but its armies still move at 2× pace. Attacks land no sooner on a 5× than on a 2×, while the troops behind them are trained more than twice as quickly - which is why fast worlds feel offence-heavy.

What server speed multiplies

Merchant carrying capacity scales linearly with server speed: a merchant on a 3× server hauls three times what it would on a 1×.

What server speed does not touch

Unit statistics. A Clubswinger has 40 attack on every server. Offence, both defence values, crop consumption and carry capacity are all fixed.
The smithy formula. Upgrades give the same percentage on a 10× server as on a 1× - see Smithy upgrades: what they do to your units.
Resource costs. A Legionnaire costs 400 resources everywhere.

Why that matters

Because times shrink and costs don't, server speed changes the ratio between how fast you can build an army and how much it costs to feed one.

On a 1× server, a level 20 Barracks producing 37 Clubswingers an hour is usually limited by resource income. On a 10× server the same building wants 370 an hour - ten times the resources - while each unit still costs exactly 250. Production capacity stops being the constraint and the economy becomes it.

The same applies to crop. An army eats per unit per hour, and that rate does not scale, but units accumulate ten times faster, so a crop shortage arrives ten times sooner.

And because travel shrinks while stats do not, defence gets relatively harder: attacks arrive with less warning, but a defender is exactly as strong as before.

Try it

Both calculators take server speed as an input. Switching from 1× to 3× in the army calculator triples the troop count and the resource burn while leaving the per-unit cost alone - that gap is the whole lesson.