Recruiting

One order has to fit in your warehouse

Grepolis charges a recruit order in full the moment you place it. An order is not a plan, it is a purchase — and the whole bill has to sit in the warehouse at once.

Sixty light ships is seventy-eight thousand wood in one payment, against a warehouse that tops out near thirty thousand: unaffordable at any level, on any world. From outside that was worse than an error. The town recruited nothing, forever, and the only symptom was a goal that never moved.

Grepobot sizes each order to what the warehouse can actually hold, and to what the town can pay above its own reserve, then places the next one as the previous clears.

It counts what is already on order

What the goal is short of is the number you asked for minus the units standing at home and the units already queued in either barracks or harbour. Without that second half a bot re-reads the same shortfall every pass and buys the army three times over.

Splitting costs nothing

A unit queue is serial and there is no bulk discount, so seven orders of one rider occupy the barracks for exactly as long as one order of seven. Splitting spends queue slots, of which there are seven per queue — barracks and harbour counted separately — and buys back the ability to start at all.

Sized to the goal, not to the queue

The engine is not trying to keep the barracks busy. It is trying to finish the goal — an attack fleet, a defence army, the escort for a colony ship — so what it recruits and when is scored against that, alongside everything else competing for the same resources.