AFK Food Trick
When you log on after being offline for a while, typically more than a few hours. (8 hours or more is a good amount of time, basically the time you spend sleeping.) The very first thing you will likely see when you start the app, and login is a game advertisement for something, perhaps a sale on a hero, or cubes or gear. If you see this, simply click out of it, but do nothing more than that.
- You then want to locate a Farm in the bottom left hand corner where you are allowed to place your sanctuary tiles (farms, steel mills, lumber mills, bootcamp, etc).
- Once you have located that farm tile, click on it.
- If you have more food than can be stored in your warehouse, all the food that your troops have consumed during the time you were away should be returned to you.
This is a bug and may be fixed at some point, but take advantage of it while it lasts.
Essentially, the game takes food each hour in a specific amount and that is used as upkeep for your troops. The more troops you have the larger the upkeep is.
If you click on The Parade Grounds building in your sanctuary, you will see at the top there is a list of your total troops, and how much those troops consume in food each hour. You can see in this example that my troops consume over a million food an hour. That means each hour of everyday my troops are always eating.
The thing is the game does not penalize you if you run out of food to feed your troops. In fact, the game doesn’t even force you to use food that is protected in your warehouse—food that is under the cap. And that is why this trick works.
If your warehouse has a food cap of 1,000,000, and you have 2,000,000 food in total that remains outside of your bag, then 1,000,000 of that food is protected, but 1,000,000 of that food is not. In that case any food over that cap the game will use to feed troops based on the amount set in the Parade Grounds, which is based on the tier and amount of troops you have in total.
So when you logon after being away long enough, you will notice that your food should have been consumed to the point where it reaches the cap set in the warehouse.
Now if the first thing you do when you login is to activate that farm, then all of the food that your troops have been consuming—while you were away—over that warehouse cap should be returned to you.
It’s a glitch, and you will know if it works because when you normally click on a farm, you will see that it activates the stored produced food in the farm, highlights it in green, and then sends it up to the top to add to your total. If the glitch was successful, you will simply see that the food is added back to your total.
Because you are technically glitching the game, its possible this won’t work every single time you do it, but once I knew why and how it actually worked, I have been able to use it effectively almost every time I login if I remember that I must do nothing but click that farm first. (Clicking anything other than getting that first ad out of the way, will usually result in this trick not working.)
