I'd say levels 22–30 are the high end of upgrades. And those levels are ALWAYS obtained through this method of investing money and using Hades.
If you already have a big account before v14 , levels 22-30 are reachable in several years also for f2p players, just farm and convert resources via the premium trader.
The high end of upgrades should be 30-40 according to the units, when you start to have limitation due to warehouse levels (you cannot start up that requires more crystal than you can stock in a city)
I would somewhat agree, although v14 came out on 5/25, which means F2P players didn’t have enough time to upgrade to levels 22-25 (on speed boats and balloons, at least-and I’m not even talking about levels 25-30...).
And the units that cap at 40 are probably the cheaper ones, like hops and swords. Navy is much more expensive.
Speed boats and balloons at level 30 are the highest I’ve seen. I’ve also seen ram ships at level 30 (on both attack and defense) and steam rams at around level 22.
It's a little more than one year after v14 came out. Considering the speed of ikariam you should think in a 5 or 10 year perspective. In that time frame every f2p who actively farms and converts resources will arrive at around level 30 if he is interested in ups, while p2w players who paid for general banks to dismantle will arrive in the the 30-40 interval, even if it will require some very expensive warehouse ups.
