This guide is meant for chiefs with Headquarters level 19+. While all chiefs can benefit from the strategy in this guide, some of the techniques won’t be useful for chiefs with Headquarters below 19. This guide is especially useful when rushing a Headquarters build.
So you’re well on your way to the coveted level 30 Headquarters and tier 10 troops. You’ve gotten the hang of gathering resources, saving speedups, and upgrading your buildings. You’re on your way to unlocking tier 8 troops at level 22, then tier 9 troops at level 26, and finally tier 10 troops at level 30. You look up the requirements to upgrade your Headquarters from level 21 to 22 and see it will take 6 days and 18 hours! And when you’re ready to go from 25 to 26, the construction time is over 21 days! It could take months to get to level 30. Don’t worry, you can cut that time down by strategically using your buffs, talents, biocaps, and speedups. Use some of the following advanced techniques to reduce your construction time and get to level 30 Headquarters sooner.
Rapid Development is Your Best Friend
Rapid Development is a Chief talent that you can learn in the Economy section of your Chief’s talent tree.
It costs 1 talent point to unlock and you’ll need to have at least 58 talent points to unlock it and all the prerequisites to the Rapid Development talent. Increasing your Chief level to 26 will give you enough talent points to unlock all prerequisites and the Rapid Development talent.
Rapid Development is a talent that “reduces the time of new construction or research tasks by 20%. Applies to tasks started within a period of 5 minutes 24 hour cooldown.” When you activate Rapid Development, every research and construction task you start in the next 5 minutes will automatically be reduced by 20%. So a construction that normally would take 2 days to complete would only take about 1 day 14 hours to complete if you start the construction in the next 5 minutes after activating Rapid Development. Any construction or research that is already in progress when you trigger Rapid Development will not be affected.
To take full advantage of Rapid Development, time your use of it when both building slots are empty (if you have both slots). Be sure you have enough resources to start the upgrades that you want to build. You don’t want to trigger the Rapid Development, then realize you have to go to your backpack and open enough resources to start your construction–you only have 5 minutes to get the construction started.
Since you can use Rapid Development once every 24 hours, try to time your 
constructions accordingly. If you find that you have an empty build slot but still have 6 hours until you can use Rapid Development again, think about upgrading a building that will take around 6 hours to finish (after accounting for timer helps). That way, once Rapid Development is ready, your build slot will be free again, and you can upgrade a building with a much longer build time.
Rapid Development is a must for all players of all levels once it is unlocked. But to make the most of Rapid Development, combine it with the techniques below for an even faster build time.
Use a Construction Speed Boost
There are multiple Construction Speed Boost Settlement Buffs you can purchase (with biocaps) and activate. These provide a 10% – 15% speed boost for 2-12 hours depending on the buff you activate. These buffs work similarly to Rapid Development–every building upgrade you start while the buff is activated will automatically decrease the time requirement by 10% – 15%.
For this strategy, we recommend using the 4 hour 15% Construction Speed Boost. This gives you the maximum boost available through Settlement Buffs (15%) while only costing 5,700 biocaps. If you’re low on biocaps you can use the 2 hour buff for 2,000 biocaps instead, but we find that 15% for 5,700 biocaps is the best option in most cases.
You shouldn’t buy this buff every time you start a construction since it’s not always worth it. In fact, if you do so, you’ll waste your biocaps on the buff when you could spend fewer biocaps on simply speeding up your construction directly.
As a rule of thumb, use the Construction Speed Boost Settlement buff whenever you start an upgrade with 2 days or more in construction time. We recommend this rule of thumb because it costs the same amount of biocaps to finish a 2 day construction that has 15% left as it does to purchase the Construction Speed Boost buff. If you’re someone that tends to use biocaps to speed up the final few hours of construction, using this buff upfront for 2+ day upgrades will save you biocaps in the long run.
If you have 2 build slots, using this buff before starting both upgrades will give you even better benefits since you’ll be cutting down 2 upgrades by 15% each. Using this technique every few days can help to speed up your growth and building upgrades.
Even if you’d rather save your biocaps by not following the 2-day rule for the buff, do yourself a favor and at least use it when upgrading your Headquarters. HQ upgrades require the longest times in the game, and you’ll be wishing you had used the buff when you’re staring at a 34 day upgrade time.
Pairing Rapid Development with the Settlement Buff
When you’re ready for a major upgrade (Headquarters, Hero Precinct, etc.), you can take advantage of both Rapid Development and the Construction Boost Settlement buff at the same time to gain both the 15% and 10% construction time reduction. This will give you a total boost of 23.5% (the game first applies the 15% boost followed by the 10% boost). Regardless of the specifics, this gives you a major boost that can shave days off of your constructions.
Since the Settlement Buff lasts for 4 hours and Rapid Development only lasts for 5 minutes, if you want to squeeze out a few more upgrades at 15% time reduction, start your 15% Settlement Buff a few hours before you plan to trigger Rapid Development. This will give you a few hours to speed out some of the faster upgrades and with alliance Timer Helps (and perhaps a few speedups), you may be able to knock out a few fast upgrades. Bonus points if you time this during a “Use Speedup” event, so your speedups earn you event points.
State Buffs and Capital Honors
If your state has reached the point where it has a governor, then State Buffs and Capital Honors can be used to decrease your construction time even further. The Fast Work buff will increase construction speed for everyone in the state by 10% for 24 hours. Ask your governor when they plan to deploy it so you can plan your Rapid Development and Settlement Buff with it. Often, the governor will post this information to the State Board so the state can plan.
If you are fortunate enough to granted the Chief Strategist Capital Honor, this will further increase your construction speed by 10% for every building started while you have the honor. Usually you’ll need to know the Governor well to get the honor, since they can only assign it to 1 person every 24 hours while they are governor. If you are able to combine the Capital Honor with the other construction buffs, you’ll cut down your build time drastically.
