Here is a brief introduction to this great game. Hopefully, it is sufficient to convince you to download the game to try it out for yourself.
Pick your Civilization:
At the start of the game, you are to pick a civilization from a choice of 11. Each civilization has its own unique city architecture, provides you with a unique epic-grade starting commander, boosts in different aspects of the game, and a unique Special Unit (which is a unique troop type you can train much later in the game). Your ideal choice of civilization depends on your preferred style of battle, and how advanced you at in the game. Should you change your mind later and wish to swap to another civilization, you can do so with a “Civilization Change” item that you can purchase at the alliance shop, or you can also change your civilization through the “Governor Profile” interface at the top-left hand corner of the screen (Governor Profile -> Civilization) at a cost of 10,000 gems. Check out this post for my analysis on which civilization to pick for beginners.
Build your City:
Once you have selected your civilization, next step is to start building your city. There are various structures that you can build and upgrade in your city, and each provides different benefits for you. However, most players will agree that you should focus on building up the level of your City Hall (abbreviated by players as “CH”) first, and to do so, you will want to prioritize upgrading structures that are pre-requisites to upgrade the level of your CH. The maximum level of the CH is currently 25; higher CH level grants you higher troop capacity, troop dispatch queue (at CH level 22, you can dispatch 5 troop slots), higher power and unlocks options to build new structures or upgrade existing structures to higher levels. Upgrading CH level consumes a large amount of resources (food, wood, stone) so make sure you have been gathering and save them well.
World Map and Alliances:
Begin your adventure in a vast world (known as a Kingdom, and there are many Kingdoms), occupied by other players and NPC characters. At the start, your Kingdom will mostly be covered in thick fog, and you will need to dispatch scouts from your City’s scout camps to explore and uncover these new territory.
Join an alliance as soon as you can, work with your alliance members to grow your city and troop force, and expand your alliance territory into the rest of the kingdom. Be wary of trespassing into hostile territory, as other alliances may not be as welcoming.
Resources:
The following are the types of resource (abbreviated by players as “rss”) in the game:
Resources are required to upgrade your City and train your troops. Gems are a valuable currency to make in-game purchases, and you will want to keep these for the special events that allow you to acquire legendary commanders by spending gems. Alliance and Individual credits are currencies that allow you to make purchases in the Alliance Shop, and you can obtain Individual Credits by making donations in Alliance Technology.
Most of these resources can be obtained in the game by dispatching your commanders to gather from resource nodes on the map. Upon spending a certain amount of time at these nodes, your commanders will return to your city with the resources gathered. You can also gain the resources through defeating barbarians and barbarian forts, as well as completing event quests.
Action Points (“AP”):
Another “resource” worth mentioning is the AP, a free in-game currency required to launch attacks on barbarians and barbarian forts.
Basically, barbarians are NPC troops on the map that you can defeat to grant your commanders experience points as well as resource and speed boosts. AP recovers slowly over time and is capped at 1,000, so log in regularly and fully utilize them!
Train up your Commanders:
Acquire dozens of historical figures as your Commander.
There are 4 rarity grades for Commanders as represented by the background color of the Commander icon as shown here (green for Advanced, blue for Elite, purple for Epic, orange for Legendary), with Legendary Commanders being the rarest and strongest.
Focus on increasing the level of your main Commanders and unlock skills unique to each Commander. Each Commander has 4 unique skills, 1 active skill and 3 passive skills, and each skill has a skill level of 1 to 5 (5 being the maximum). For Epic and Legendary Commanders, you can unlock an Expertized skill (which is an upgraded version of one of the Commander’s four skills or a totally new special skill) once you have unlocked and attained the maximum level (being level 5) of all four skills. Commander Sculptures are required to level up the skill levels. As a rule of thumb, always make sure you have attained the maximum skill level of the first skill of a Commander before you level up the Commander level beyond level 10. This is because the game system will randomly select an unlocked skill of your Commander to be upgraded upon use of your Commander Sculptures. The more skills you have unlocked for your Commander, the lower the probability that the skill upgrade will apply to your first skill. With really bad luck, you may need a lot more Commander Sculptures (and time) to attain the maximum skill level of the most potent skill of your Commander.
Train your Troops:
There are 4 troop types you can train in your city:
| Troop type | Structure to train troops | Remarks |
|---|---|---|
 Siege | Siege Workshop | Siege can carry heavier load and hence is useful for gathering. Siege is also used to attack other cities. |
 Infantry | Barracks | Infantry units are tanky, work well against Cavalry units, but are weak against archer units. |
 Archer | Archery Range | Archer units deal higher damage, work well against infantry units, but are weak against cavalry units. |
 Cavalry | Stable | Cavalry units have the highest mobility speed across the map, work well against archer units, but are weak against infantry units. |
You should always put your troop-training structures to work to increase your troop size and power. Upgrading your troop-training structures increases its training capacity (maximum number of troops that you set to be trained each time), training speed and your overall power.
You should also focus on training troop types that are boosted by your primary Commander’s talents and skills. For example:
Talents – Sun Tzu’s talents include the Infantry Talent, which has the talent ability “Iron Spear” that increases damage dealt by infantry units led by Sun Tzu against cavalry units.
Skills – Sun Tzu’s third skill “Master Strategist” enables infantry units led by him to gain 4-10% increased health.
Click here to return to the main menu for Rise of Kingdoms.
