How to Increase Power in Age of Origins: The 8 Levers Ranked

Part of the Progression series:

• Beginner's Guide Hub: Where every lever below plugs into your routine.
• F2P & Spending Guide: Raising power without a wallet.

Quick Answer

• Power comes from eight levers: research, officers, equipment, troop tiers, buildings, Titans/warplanes, commander skills, and VIP — and they are not equal.
• The permanent levers (research, officers, gear) outrank the losable one (troops) for long-term accounts.
• Power is also a targeting beacon: inflated troop power on a weak foundation makes you a fat target, not a strong one.
• The four power categories (Building, Officer, Technology, Equipment) separately scale your tower defense damage — balance pays twice.
• Fastest honest gains for most accounts: unlocked-but-untrained higher troop tiers, idle research queues, and unappointed officers.

The Eight Levers, Ranked

Lever	Permanent?	Notes
Research	✅	Survives every defeat; compounds forever
Officers	✅	The largest multiplier, and the easiest to spread too thin
Equipment	✅	Multipliers on the multiplier
Buildings	✅	Gates everything else
Commander skills	✅	Free, and left unspent by most players for months
VIP	✅	Rate forever, climbable without spending
Titans / warplanes	✅	Expensive; sequence them after the core
Troop tiers	❌	Losable. Real power, but the only entry on this list an enemy can take

The trap: power is also a targeting beacon. Inflated troop power on a weak foundation makes you a fat target, not a strong one. And the four power categories — Building, Officer, Technology, Equipment — separately scale your tower defense damage, so balance pays twice.

What Power Actually Measures

Your power number is the sum of everything — and that's precisely its problem. It counts a million T3s the same direction as a maxed research tree, but those two accounts fight nothing alike. Understanding which power is real is the difference between growing strong and growing wide.

The taxonomy that matters:

• Losable power: troops. Dies in battle, converts into your enemy's kill-event points, costs a fortune to heal or replace.
• Permanent power: research, officer development, equipment, buildings. Survives every defeat, compounds forever.

Veterans read enemy profiles through exactly this lens: high power with a big troop share and shallow permanents is a piñata; moderate power with deep permanents is a porcupine. Decide which one you're building.

The Eight Levers, Ranked by Long-Term Value

1. Research. The quiet king — permanent, compounding, and it scales everything else, from combat stats to march sizes. If your Academy queue ever idles, you're donating relative power to your server every hour it sleeps.
2. Officers. Levels, skills, breakthroughs on a focused core — the tier-list trio plus development pair, finished before anyone else is started. Officer power also directly scales Rocket turrets in TD.
3. Equipment. Officer gear and Elite gear are permanent multipliers with their own economy of alloys and blueprints — slow, unglamorous, and never dies in a war.
4. Troop tiers (not troop counts). Upgrading tiers converts the same march capacity into more real strength; mass-training low tiers converts resources into future enemy points. Tier before volume, always — the troop guide math.
5. Buildings. Main Hall pacing unlocks everything above; past the early game it's the scheduler of power more than the source.
6. Titans and warplanes. Huge per-unit power for developed accounts — but multipliers on a foundation, not substitutes for one, as both the Titan and warplane guides insist.
7. Commander skills. Points from Commander levels, spent in the War or Development tree — and the route to SOS and Slaughter, the skills that make aggressive play affordable (commander skills guide).
8. VIP. Small percentages on everything, forever — the continuity habit more than a lever you pull.

"Increase Power Fast": The Honest Version

The quick wins are almost always unclaimed power sitting in systems you've already built:

• Train the tier you unlocked but never filled marches with.
• Start the long research you've been "saving." (Then time its completion to a Strongest Commander phase and get paid twice.)
• Appoint officers before every activity — free percentage points most players leak daily.
• Claim and use the officer XP, gear materials, and speedups rotting in your bag — inside event windows.

What not to do for fast power: panic-train low-tier troops before a kill event (you're catering the enemy's banquet) or buy resource packs (resources aren't power until converted, and they're lootable while they wait — the spending guide's oldest warning).

Power Discipline

The number on your profile is a scoreboard other people read. Let it grow as a side effect of deep permanents and disciplined tiers, and it tells the server "expensive target." Pump it with troop mass and hollow buildings, and it tells the server "buffet open." The strongest accounts on any server are rarely the top of the power rankings at month three — they're the ones still climbing at month eighteen because nothing they built could be taken away.