Each stage offers three levels of basic rewards, with the third level always being an amount of gold (hence the name Gold Event). The first two levels give the same rewards for everyone, but the amount of gold for the last level can differ. From what I can gather, it depends on your stronghold level. The points required for each reward level also seems dependent on this.

At the end of each stage, rewards are also offered for the 100 players kingdom-wide with the most points. These rewards are awarded in several tiers, for instance top 51-100, top 31-50, 16-30, etc. Each stage reward tier has its own amount of gold, as well as various items. Some of them might include for instance Master Axes to clear Advanced Rural Plots.

At the end of the entire gold event, rewards are also awarded to the top 100 players kingdom-wide who collected the most points over all stages combined. This is also done in rewards tiers, similar to the stage rewards.

All these rewards can really add up, so it can pay off to use that gathering boost (Gathering Stage), that extra bit of stamina (Monster Hunt Stage), those speed-ups (Power Build and Troop Training) or to risk killing those last few troops. Just keep an eye on your current stage and overall rank, and judge for yourself if it's worth it or not. :) You can find your current stage rank, and your overall rank through the Gold Event option in the Event Center.

Gathering Stage

The gathering stage lasts a single day, and is the first stage of the gold event. You get points for gathering resources on the kingdom map, and it doesn't matter if it is from food/farm, wood/sawmill, iron mine, silver mine tiles or the current Alliance Resource Building (for instance the Alliance Farm), as all of them award the same amount of points.

Stage Tactics

There are a couple of things to keep in mind to maximise your earned points during gathering stage, as well as a couple of tricks:

• Have your gathering gear equipped when you send your troops out to tiles, and make sure you don't switch gear before they've arrived at their tiles. After they've started gathering it's safe to switch gear again.
• Assign appropriate gathering dragon skills to your dragon. Increased troop load is very handy, especially for sending troops to the alliance resource building, and increased gathering speeds for all and each specific resource type are also recommended. Make sure you have those skills assigned to the gathering tab of your dragon skills as well. If you will only be focusing on one or two resource types (for instance food and wood) this event, consider resetting other skills so you'll have more points to put into the gathering speed skills for those types.
• It's wise to have your dragon troops gathering in the alliance resource building at all times, as your dragon gathering skills stack with the increased gathering speed and troop load from the alliance resource building.
• Points are awarded the moment the troops return from their tiles. So, make sure you call your troops back just before the gathering stage ends.
• Since points are awarded when troops return, it's also wise to have all your marches out gathering resources already before the gathering stage starts. Ideally you'll have them finish their tiles shortly after the stage starts.
• Fill up the alliance resource building with all-siege troops, preferably those with the largest troop load such as battering rams, long before the gathering stage starts. Make sure they won't return before the stage actually starts.
• Gathering Boost items will apply their increased gathering speed retro-actively. This means that if you use a 50% gathering boost, and your troops have already been gathering for 10 hours at 5.000 food per hour (and thus have gathered 50.000 food already), they will not only continue gathering at 150% of their gathering speed (i.e. 7.500 food per hour), they will also now suddenly have already gathered 75.000 (50.000 + 25.000) food.
  If this pushes them over their maximum troop load, they will return home.
  Since gathering boost items do not stack, my advice is to not have a gathering boost active when you send your siege troops to farm at the alliance gathering building for the remainder of the day before the gathering stage, and use the 24h Gathering Boost item a minute or so after the Gathering Stage has started. If you are lucky, this will finish up all your marches at the same time, and send them home, giving you a head-start on the gathering stage in points.
  
  I've recorded a video of this as an example:
  
• Since most equipment will only give improved gathering speeds for food and wood gathering, you might want to consider focusing just on food and/or wood. Don't let your troops' upkeep eat up all that extra food though
• Don't lose too much time travelling to and from resource tiles. Send your troops to full level 7 tiles if you can, but consider if marching those two times 2 or 3 extra minutes is worth the extra resources when you can get a full level 6 tile much closer to your stronghold.
• If you have multiple marches coming home around the same time, make sure you have a bunch of full tiles bookmarked already, so you don't have to waste time looking for tiles while your troops are idling at home.
• Avoid using siege troops on regular tiles if you can, as they travel so much slower; use just cavalry (if you can) instead.
• All types of troops gather at the same speed.
• The amount of troops only changes how much they can carry home, not how fast they gather, so don't send more troops than you have to, unless you want your stronghold to be empty of troops. The amount of troops the game suggests when you select a tile, should be enough to empty the tile (as long as you don't change your equipment or heroes before the troops arrive on their tiles).
• TRY NOT TO LEAVE DIRTY LEVEL 7 TILES. I know it's tempting to leave a level 7 tile prematurely when you see fresh level 7 tiles spawn, but please don't leave those dirty half-eaten tiles for others to find. If you want to switch to fresh tiles because you have to go offline for an extended period, ask an alliance member if they can take over for you.

Upgrade / Lord Power Stage

The second stage of the Gold Event is the Power Build Stage, which also lasts a single day. Points are awarded for increasing lord power through completed building upgrades and research.

Stage Tactics

There are a couple of things you can do to prepare for this stage:

• Save your StrongHold upgrades
  StrongHolds offer the most points, as they increase your lord power by a significant amount. It often is enough to give you the gold reward for the stage.
  So, if it's time to upgrade your StrongHold, and you've saved up all your resources for it, make sure it finishes at the start of, or during, the power build stage. Either by starting it way in advance so the entire build time lasts till the power build stage starts, or by saving up (construction) speed-up items so you can finish it within the stage duration.
  Be sure to calculate in the time that gets deducted from alliance timer helps. It would be a shame if it finishes too soon because of timer help.
• Remember your equipment and heroes
  Some equipment and heroes increase construction and/or research speed and costs. Equip or unequip, assign or unassign them so your upgrades/research finish at the right time.
• Plan upgrades to finish at start of this stage
  Time two upgrades and one University research which increase the largest amount of lord power to finish directly as soon as the day starts.
• Upgrade/Research the things that give the biggest power increase in the shortest time
  Certain buildings and research types give more power than others. A farm or mine might take a long time to complete, but doesn't give as much power increase as for instance your Hall of War. Troop buildings for instance are good examples, as well as your storehouse. Dragon Spirit research is also recommended.
• Save up your timer speed-up items.
  Save up some of your timer speed-ups to use in case you run out of time, or if you want to rise a couple more ranks.
• Save up your resources
  Be sure you have plenty of resource items in your satchel, and an alliance storehouse full of food, so you can actually afford all those upgrades. ;-)
• Destroying buildings decrease power
  You can no longer build something, destroy it, and build it again for more points, as points can be deducted.

Monster Kill Stage

The third stage of the Gold Event is the Monster Kill Stage. Points are awarded for killing monsters. The higher the level of the monster, the more points you get. Through the Gold Event option in the Event Center you can find out how much points you get for each level of monster.

Stage Tactics

Even though you can't start the stage with a whole bunch of points right from the start, there are still a couple of things you can do to prepare for the stage, and maximise your points:

• Have a full stamina bar at the start of the Monster Kill Stage!
  If the next day is monster kill stage of gold event, make sure you start the game day (midnight UTC) with a full stamina bar. I know it is tempting to do a barbarian camp rally, or hit some more monsters throughout the previous stage, but be sure to stop in time so there's enough time for your stamina to replenish before Monster Kill Stage starts.
• Kill the strongest monster you can kill
  Since you get more points for higher level monsters, there's not much use in killing lower than you can actually take on.
• Consider using a Attack Boost, Defense Boost and/or Colossal March Capacity Boost item/talent
  If this means you can take on monsters that are stronger than you can usually kill, it can be worth using, so you can earn more points per kill than you'd normally would get. However, the downside of this is that your Hunt dialog might end up showing monsters you can only kill when your boosts are active, which can make finding monsters a bit harder.
• Use the Monster Stamina Talent
  If you put 11 Lord Talent Points into the Balance talent tree, you get the Monster Stamina talent, which (when activated) reduces stamina consumption when attacking Monsters by 20% for a period of 10 minutes. This talent has a 24 hour cooldown. This skill will allow you to kill more monsters with the same amount of stamina, which means more points.
• Save up your march speed-up items.
  They will come in handy to reduce travel time if you use the Monster Stamina Talent skill, so you can kill more monsters in that 10 minute period in which your stamina cost is reduced.
• Save up your Stamina refill items.
  So you can kill more monsters when you run out of stamina. I recommend combining this with the Monster Stamina Talent if you manage to use up your stamina within the time period.
• The first level reward is 50 Stamina refill
  Use it to your advantage to kill some more monsters. ;-)
• Save your Emergency Recall Talent
  Use it when you use the Monster Stamina
• Bookmark monsters ahead of time
  You'll save time finding the right level of monsters. No need to waste valuable Monster Stamina Talent time finding those pesky monsters.
• Activate VIP
  If you don't have VIP permanently activated, it might be worth it to activate a 30 minutes VIP item for the increased monster march, or even a 1 day VIP item for increased stamina recovery. I usually save these up on my farm account that doesn't have permanently active VIP, and activate them only when needed.
• Make sure you are killing the strongest monster you can actually kill
  Try a full day in advance to see if you can perhaps actually kill a higher monster than you thought you could, for instance while using boosts. This way you aren't wasting stamina during the monster hunt on lower monsters than you can/should be killing.
  

  Killing Dragons

  For me the best troop composition for killing monsters is about 18k infantry, and the rest of the march filled up with bowmen. Ideally you mix your two top tiers of troops, as troop tiers alternate between long-range and close-range troops, thus maximising your damage capabilities. Below is a recording of how my SH17 was killing a level 30 Dragon with just T6 units. This was after a recent battle system rebalance, which required me to use a mix of Infantry, Cavalry and Bowmen, instead of just Infantry and Bowmen, but I've since been able to go back to just Infantry + Bowmen again. Of course, your battle equipment, research, dragon skills, heroes and lord talent skills plays a big part as well.

Troop Training Stage

The Troop Training Stage also lasts just a single day, and is the fourth stage of the gold event. In this stage points are awarded for training Troops in your Barracks (Infantry), Range (Bowmen), Stables (Cavalry) and Siege Workshop (Siege). The points per unit depend on the troop tier you are training.

Stage Tactics

There are a couple of things you can do to maximise your points for this stage:

• First of all, like the Gathering Stage, it's important to note that points aren't awarded when training finishes, but rather when you collect the trained troops!
• Start the stage with a full load of troops.
  Plan a full load of all your troop types to be done at start of game day, and collect them as soon as the event starts. They can be ready hours in advance, as long as you don't collect them before the stage has actually started.
• Start the monster stage with a batch of 250 (T1) troops per type
  At least if a full batch of top tier troops takes the majority of the day to train. (For instance, a full batch of my T8 troops takes 18.5 hours to train.) This way you can get your daily activity reward points for the day before the troop training stage, while still having sufficient time to train a full batch of your highest tier troops for the most points.
• Collect your last load of troops right before the stage ends.
  When it's time to put on your last batch of troops, make sure you can either speed it up to finish in time, or train just enough so they finish in time. In other words, you don't have to build a full load of troops; you can drag the amount slider in a way so the timer will match how long you still have before the event ends (or before you have to log off because you have to go somewhere, so you can start a fresh, full load right before then). In any case, don't forget to actually collect them! I've made that mistake before. ;-)
• Remember you can use timer speedup items to get more troops done in the limited amount of time. Consider buying some more speedups with gold or alliance honour, if that will mean collecting the reward for completing the last tier of the gold event stage, or getting into a higher stage rank reward tier for better rewards.
• Higher tier troops give more points.
  So if you have just one or two troop buildings at the next tier, and want to speed-up several batches of troops to increase your rank, focus the speeding up on the highest tier troops.
• Focus on the troops you use/need the most.
  So if all your troop troop buildings are of the same tier, and want to speed-up several batches of troops to increase your rank, focus the speeding up on the kind of troops you will be using the most. Personally I usually prefer to focus on my bowmen since most of my gear and heroes etc is aimed at that.
• Consider buying a temporary training scepter relic
  A regular temporary Training Scepter will increase troop training speed by 20% for the duration of 1 day. It will go for 1000 gold, though sometimes one with a shorter duration goes up for sale in the Temporary Relic Store.