Rise of Kingdoms. We’ve all heard its name once or twice through its merciless advertising tactics that span across about every platform you can imagine, however, unlike most games who take the route of seemingly endless advertising, it’s a surprisingly good game!
Now, if you’re looking to get started, the game might look rather complicated and confusing, and it’s easy to make a few rookie, disastrous mistakes that could cause you great grief in the long run. However with a few tips and tricks the start of your adventure can be made a little less stressful.
Choosing the right civilization for you: This is the VERY first option you’re presented with, and it’s definitely overwhelming. There’s so many to choose from! There’s a few things to keep in mind when choosing, such as what troop type you want to mainly use, what buffs you think will be useful, what commander you want, etc.
To put it simply, just go with whatever and adapt your first go around! If you want to pick France for example, for its farming buffs and starting commander: Joan of Arc, then there’s nothing stopping you. If you want to choose China solely because of Sun Tsu, then go right on ahead. You can adapt and make changes to your playstyle and civilization later, and new commanders are always available to be unlocked at the Tavern.
Getting Started: The game will run a tutorial, as most do, but even after the game can still look confusing, So what’s the best way to go about it? Well, if you look on the upper lefthand corner of your screen, you’ll see a large number encased in a grey box. That’s your power. Power is the game’s way to track how strong you are compared to other players based on Technology, Commanders, Troops, and buildings you have. Your goal is to do what you can to increase that number. Power increase correlates differently with just about everything. For example, the more you upgrade a building, the more power you’ll gain with each upgrade. Tier 1 troops will give you less of an increase then Tier 2, and Tier 2 will give you less power then Tier 3 and 4.
Strategy: The strategy I recommend to increase your power early game and keep everything organized is to upgrade everything to the same level as your city hall (CH), with the exception of your watchtower and castle, before you increase your CH’s level again. That way, you’re maximizing your building power for each level of your CH. Alongside this, research technology constantly. I recommend agricultural tree first, seeing as it will be a bit of time before you will be involved in any wars, however don’t stall in getting your Tier 2 troops researched as soon as you can.
Commanders: All commanders in the game have four individual skill trees, and a set of active abilities that can be unlocked using their individual statues. For almost every commander (with the exception of gathering commanders) you’ll want to wait until the first active skill is at max level (5), before you upgrade them a star level and enable them to go past level 10. The reason for this is that once you upgrade them, their next ability is unlocked, so when you upgrade an active skill, it has a 50%/ 50% chance to go into either one, that percentage lessening the more you upgrade without the previous skill being maxed out first. The three skill trees each commander has all serve a different purpose. Garrison is for city defense, Infantry, Archery, and Calvary are for their individual troop types, the skill tree allows a commander to excel in dealing damage via their active ability/skill. Integration is for a commander who you want to excel at leading multiple troop types, and Peacekeeping is for attacking barbarians and barbarian fortresses. You can mix and match skills from each tree, and there’s many combos to ensure you can get a commander that has abilities that will work for your purposes.
Hunting Barbarians: Hunting Barbarians is something that I highly recommend. The level of barbarians corresponds with the level of your city hall. As you level, you will be able to kill the higher levels of them for a better fight and even more important, better rewards. From Barbarians, you can get Tomes of Knowledge: which correspond to XP points you can use to level commanders, your commanders gain XP from hunting itself, and you have a chance to earn Arrows of Resistance, the special item used to upgrade your watchtower. It’s recommended that you use a commander with the levels in the Peacekeeping skill tree to hunt for extra boots, depending on what abilities you’ve unlocked in said tree.
Alliances: Eventually, you’ll be presented with the option to go out into your kingdom and join an alliance. Alliances are individual networks of people in the kingdom who work together as a whole, usually with a singular goal in mind: become the reigning alliance of the kingdom. Usually in a fresh kingdom, there will be one or two established alliances who have rather high power players right from the start. These are called “Jumper Groups” or just “Jumpers,” so likely they won’t have just started their accounts, and instead started them 10 days prior in a different kingdom and used their beginners teleports to hop strategically from one kingdom to another, utilizing events and KvK (Kingdom vs Kingdom) rewards to try and get the greatest output of speedups, commander statues, gems, and resources before they hit their final destination: your home kingdom. However, there will also be smaller new alliances accepting new, smaller powered members to join. If you’re lucky enough, you’ll be able to find a good community of people with experienced members to help you and answer any questions you might have. Being in an alliance is similar to being in a team or family, and together you fight to conquer the kingdom together through war, peace, wins and losses. Once you’re in an alliance, you have almost unlimited access to a hive mind of compiled information that will help you along your journey.
