This article will contain all the answers to various questions regarding the Tier 4 Trinity Challenge.
Question: "Why would you build the prison all the way to 21 first and lose out on any shackles you pull from opening alliance gifts? Why not get it to lvl 20 then switch to building alter, get that to 20, then switch to HoW. Once all three are at 20 then you can shift back to getting the prison to 21. One of the worst feelings is opening gifts and getting stuff you no longer need… at least at first. After a little while you get numb to opening shackles haha."
Answer: Most alliances don’t get a ton of gifts with shackles. In my opinion it's not a huge deal if you end up with a couple more than necessary, but in the end it's a personal preference whether or not you want to go this way.
Also, the less alliance all-mails the better. If you send too many mails and keep changing things on people, they either won't listen or won't keep up with the latest mail.
Question: "This is a great topic which is relevant to a lot of players trying to reach the “holy grail”. Choosing a candidate is indeed very difficult, as there are likely to be quite a lot of applicants. An alternative may be for the alliance to help 2-3 candidates at a time, thereby spreading the risk (in case the candidate leaves the alliance after reaching Academy 21), and more members can benefit from the programme at any one time. From a resources (gold) perspective, gifting items to help a candidate is more costly (by 50%), since we can only gift books of war, shackles and daggers one at a time (15 gold pcs per item), whereas if we purchase it directly from the store, we can buy 1,000 items for 10,000 gold pcs. An alternative may be for alliance members to donate rss and speedups to the candidate to win gold from the events, who can then use it to buy the items in bulk.
Anyhow, thanks for all the great articles. Look forward to reading the next one."
Answer: You are completely right on this. When this challenge was first created it wasn't very hard for players to obtain the necessary amount of speedups required to complete the buildings. Rather, it was hard to obtain the gold necessary to purchase the items. Therefore, I think this challenge could be reversed as you suggest except for one thing: alliance members will likely be less willing to give up such a large amount of gold so quickly to buy the recipient speed ups. Almost every member gets 45 gold a day from gold gifts and can donate the 3 item minimum per day.
Another reader agrees with you though: "Since gifting Books, Shackles, and knives is so expensive, we try to gift things the person would otherwise spend gold on, like 3 day shields. Those are the same cost for both the gifter and the [recipient], but frees up another 2500 gold every 3 days the target can spend on special items in bulk. This is also true for 3 day speeds to a lesser extent if the target is speed limited as well."
Question: "Another very important point I think should be included is, once the candidate reaches T4 they remain in the Alliance (within reason, obviously people can leave for many reasons).
One thing I found when members of the alliance I was in reached T4 is that they left and joined larger alliances because T4 players generally like to play alongside other T4 players. First it was ‘visits’ where they would join larger alliances for KE’s. Then it would become more frequent and eventually evolve into fully pledged membership and a farewell mail message haha.(and to be honest, loyalty was not an issue, it was purely wanting to enjoy the game more with their new unlocked troops and you can’t blame them for that).
Kill Events and Rallies aren’t as fun when you’re the lone T4 player in an alliance. The first few recipients would need to have the patience to remain in the alliance until you have a horde of T4 killers.
p.s – Awesome site Navi, you get my ‘Master’ member money so keep up the good work"
Answer: This is a very real concern. It happened to some of our members as well. I think some options to preventing or delaying members leaving the alliances are:
Obviously, the recipients will likely be friends of yours, so be fair. Try to treat all alliance members the same so nobody feels cheated or under-appreciated.
If anyone has further questions, feel free to leave them in the comments and I'll give my best answers. Fortunately, there weren't too many questions to begin with which must mean the first two articles were very clear 
The Tier 4 Trinity Challenge - Introduction
The Tier 4 Trinity Challenge - How to Select A Candidate
Enjoy!
Navi
