HQ Upgrade Priorities: HQ 1 to 35
Which buildings to keep up with your HQ, how to manage builders, and the milestones from HQ 10 to 35.
Your HQ level gates almost everything: troop tiers, hero levels, new buildings. The fastest accounts treat every other building as "HQ requirement or not now".
Priority order
- HQ
- Tech Center: needed at almost every HQ level and the most expensive requirement. Keep it level with HQ.
- Barracks and Drill Ground: troop training and squad size.
- Your one main Combat Center (Tank, Aircraft or Missile, matching your main squad).
- Hospital: enough room for your wounded (see Shields & Hospitals).
- Wall: only when HQ requires it.
- Alliance Hub.
Skip or keep low
- Material Workshop: most guides say don't upgrade it.
- Farms, mines and warehouses: keep them moderate early.
- Decorations and defensive buildings: only when required.
Builder management
- Plan two HQ levels ahead. Read the next level's requirements and build them while HQ is still upgrading.
- When HQ finishes, send the second builder straight to the next blocker.
- Start long builds before you log off.
- Use speed-ups only on real bottlenecks. Finish other builds on Tuesday, City Building day in Alliance Duel, so they score points too.
Milestones
| HQ | What changes |
|---|---|
| 1–10 | Barracks, Wall, Radar, Tech Center and Drill Grounds unlock |
| 10–25 | A fairly easy climb. Rush it |
| 20 / 24 / 27 / 30 | New troop tiers (T7 to T10). Worth speeding up |
| 25–30 | The first real grind: multi-day builds |
| 30 | T10 troops (also needs Tech Center 30, Barracks 30 and Special Forces research), and Age of Oil becomes available |
| 31–35 | Needs Oil. HQ 31+ is gated by Age of Oil research, and oil becomes the main bottleneck |
Late-game targets
After HQ 30, keep Tech Center, Barracks and your Squad Center level with HQ. Hospitals, Drill Grounds, Wall and Alliance Hub can sit in the high 20s. Resource buildings around 25 are fine.
See also: Research Priorities.
Sources
Compiled from community guides (last checked October 2026). Several are run by top-up shops, and numbers change with updates and differ by server, so double-check anything important in game.