Gold is mainly used to speed up upgrade times and to buy Boosts and Skill cards from the shop.
When a player completes achievements on Gold difficulty, they are rewarded with a small bonus between 10 and 1.000 gold, of which most achievements are on the lower end of the spectrum. They take huge effort and time to complete and can only be claimed once. This makes them rather unreliable as a continuous source of income.
Whenever players in the clan buy packages with real world currencies, a small gold bonus is added to the Clan Account (if they choose to add it to the Clan Account). If the total gold after the weekly distribution exceeds 100 Gold, every player in the clan receives part of it based on their clan activity.
The main gold income comes from chests, which are:
Advertisement Chests
Clan Supply Chests
Contract Chests
Free Chests
Token Chests
War Chests
Tapjoy allows players to earn additional Gold by completing tasks outside of the game like download a app and do certain things in it. The rewards tend to vary a lot, beginning at 1 Gold and going up to tens of thousands of gold in some cases. Tapjoy also occasionally offers +50% on all rewards, so it is recommended to wait for this to happen. Overall it offers players to gain additional gold without paying money for it. It needs to be noted though, that most tasks take a lot of effort, so it is recommended to carefully choose what to do.
All timers in the game can be sped up with gold for a cost of 1 Gold for 3 minutes for upgrades with a shorter duration. In general, the efficiency of Gold to time sped up increases with the remaining upgrade time. It is also recommended to not directly speed up upgrades and buy 1/3/7/12-Day speed ups from the shop as they tend to have a much better Gold to time reduction efficiency.
It is possible to buy Red and Gold Boosts by using Gold and also indirectly possible to buy Blue Boosts by converting the Gold to Credits.
The ingame shop tends to have 2 daily offers which can be bought through Gold. They usually are Boosts at a cheaper price than usual, but sometimes also Skill Cards and Upgrade Time Booster. Especially Skill Cards should be bought under all circumstances as they are required to upgrade Skills.