Are you new to Rise of Kingdoms or planning to play it? Well, you definitely need to read this guide before you start your journey in Rise of Kingdoms(ROK). This guide is made by some of the most experienced players in the game who have been playing the game for several years. It includes every tip and trick in the game and will save you from making some terrible mistakes. So, let’s get started.
Things you need to do as New players in Rise of Kingdoms
Your main goal as a new player in Rise of Kingdoms is to get your city hall to Level 25 as soon as possible.
The main gameplay in Rise of Kingdoms is the KvK event. It’s about 50 days long event where different kingdoms fight each other in exciting battles for glory and lots of rewards, of course.
Your success in KvK heavily depends on how strong your kingdom is. So, you need to make sure that you are playing in the best possible kingdom available.
If you are a new player, make sure to join the newest server available at the time. Why? If you join the older server, there will be lots of powerful players, and you will fall behind in the game progress. So, you will be fighting far more powerful players than you in PvP events.
What if the newest server/kingdom you joined doesn’t turn out to be very good? Don’t worry, because Rise of Kingdoms has a migration system, which allows you to go to other kingdoms. You can find a full guide on the Rise of Kingdoms migration System here.
Picking up the Civilization
Among some of the most common choices you need to make in The Rise of Kingdoms as a beginner is to pick the Civilization. There are 14 different Civilizations available in the game, each with its unique bonus and one free epic commander.
The best Civilization to play Rise of Kingdoms with is China. It provides you with 5% building speed, which will help you to get to level 25 city hall quicker.
Another benefit of China civilization is the 5% Action point recovery boost. Action points are used for the PvE game mode to defeat barbarians and Forts, which will give you important resources and Speed-ups to upgrade your city.
The third and biggest benefit of China civilization is getting Sun Tzu as a free starting commander. He is the most powerful Epic commander in the game.
What if you selected the wrong Civilization? Don’t worry, because you can change your Civilization completely free one time. Even after using that, you can buy civilization change tokens from the alliance shop using F2P methods.
While China is best for beginners, you might need to change to another Civilization as you progress in the game. You can check out the full Civilization guide for more details.
Alliance
You know how the kingdom is important for KvK, Alliance is important for your day-to-day progress. So, it’s really important that you join the Active and powerful alliance to grow your account faster in Rise of Kingdoms.
How alliances can help you in Rise of Kingdoms
- Help system cuts down building, research, and troop healing time.
- Alliance has technology that gives you several different buffs like resource gathering boosts, extra troop stats, reduced building times, and so on. It will be a big help for your game progress.
- You can only attack barbarian forts by doing a rally with alliance members. These forts give something called the Book of Covenants, which are essential items for upgrading your city hall to level 25.
- Alliance also has a gift system. Whenever your alliance member takes down a barbarian fort, it gives a gift pack filled with rewards to all the members.
- You also get a gift pack with even better rewards when your alliance member purchases an in-game bundle. So, if you are part of an alliance where members frequently purchase bundle packs, it will provide a huge boost for your game progress.
- As an alliance, you can build territory with your alliance members. Inside this territory, you get a huge resource-gathering speed boost.
- Access to the alliance shop, where you can purchase some really useful items using alliance credits.
VIP levels
As a new player, you need to reach VIP level 6 as soon as possible. VIP 6 can unlock a second building queue, which means you can upgrade two buildings at a time. It will make your building speed almost 2x since you will be upgrading two buildings at once.
You can get VIP points by daily logging into the game. Additionally, you also get them as part of alliance gift rewards, and you can also purchase them from the alliance store.
How to get your city hall to level 25 quickly
You need to take your city hall to level 25 as soon as possible. It’s the maximum level you can achieve in the game. Once your city hall is at the maximum level, you can also take all the other buildings to the maximum level and run your city at maximum capacity.
There are two main things you will need to achieve this task. The first is resources and the second is speed-ups.
Resources
You can get resources in the Rise of Kingdoms with two methods. The first one is from the resource buildings, and the second is gathering resources on the world map.
There are other methods like plundering other players’ cities, but it’s not highly recommended because it can get you in big trouble with other players of the kingdoms.
There are also farm accounts, if you have time to manage them. You simply create several different accounts in your same kingdom and then transfer resources from that account to your main account.
Speed ups
There are several different ways to get speed-ups in the game. We have already covered it in our guide – 20 different ways to quickly get speed up in Rise of Kingdoms. You can check it out for more information.
Runes and Titles
In the beginning, building and research time will be short; as you progress, it will become really long, sometimes more than months.
Runes and titles will help you cut down building and research time by a lot.
You can find runes on the world map. If you zoom out of the map, you will see some holy sites where runes are located.
You can send your march to collect them. They provide various bonuses like building speed, research speed, troop training speed, healing speed, and gathering speed.
Be sure to collect them before the start of building and research. These runes also have tiers; the best ones are located at the center of the kingdom map, near the great ziggurat.
Aside from the runes, you can also use the title for building and research speed boost. There are two types of Titles, Kingdom Titles and Alliance Titles. You can use both simultaneously for maximum benefit.
Gathering Commanders
As mentioned before, resources are extremely valuable in the game, and you will need them daily for upgrading buildings, researching, training troops, and healing them after the battle.
The main way you will obtain them is by gathering them on the world map. That’s where the gathering commanders come in.
There are several gathering commanders in the game, and they should be your top priority when upgrading commanders.
You need to take them to level 37 at a minimum to get the full benefit of their talent tree. Along with that, you also need to upgrade their gathering skills to maximum levels.
List of Gathering commanders with their best resource boost
- Cleopatra VII – 30% Stones
- Seondeok – 30% Gold
- Ishida Mitsunari – 30% Food
- Joan of Arc – 25% All resources
- Matilda of Flanders – 25% stones
- Queen Tamar of Georgia – 25% wood
- Constance – 20% wood
- Sarka – 18% All resources
- Gaius Marius – 20% Food
- Centurion – 10% All resources
Read this – under no circumstances spend your legendary commander sculptures on gathering commanders like Cleopatra and Seondeok, just max them out naturally with tavern gold keys. You can check out a guide on how to quickly get gold keys to make your task easier.
Peacekeepers commanders and Action points
After the gathering, commanders focus on upgrading the peacekeepers’ commanders. There are several peacekeeping commanders in the game, like Lohar, Aethelflaed, Boudica, and more.
Peacekeepers are particularly helpful with the PVE aspects of the game. You can use them to hunt down barbarians and Forts. The reason you should use them instead of the other commanders is that they cost fewer action points.
Now, what are the Action points? Well, Action Points or AP are items you need to attack barbarians and forts. When you use Peacekeepers commanders, it costs 10 less AP compared to other commanders. It may not sound like a lot, but in the long run, it makes a huge difference.
If you are a new player or even an expert, you should never let your action point bar go to full. Action point bars refill over time, so make sure to hunt barbarians regularly. They provide lots of valuable resources, speed-ups as well as rare items like gems.
Tip – Use multiple marches to quickly kill the barbarians and spend your AP quickly.
Research Technology
One of the most common things new players get confused about is which technology they should research first.
There are two main types of technology, military and economic. While military tech may look cool, you first need to focus on the economic technology.
Economy tech will help you develop your city quicker, and once that’s done, you can focus on military tech.
Even in the economy and in technology, you need to focus on some key technologies first. The first one is Masonry, which gives a 15% building speed, the second one is Writing, which gives 10% research speed, the third is Engineering, which gives a 35% building speed boost, and the last is Mathematics, which gives a 15% research speed boost.
Aside from these technologies, you also need to upgrade the academy building itself as soon as you upgrade your city hall. The academy level itself also provides a boost in research speed.
Expedition Levels
Expedition is a PVE game in the game, and a great way for new players to get some really cool rewards.
There are a total of 80 levels in the expedition, each with its unique condition. Try to clear these levels as quickly as you can to earn the medals of the Conqueror as a reward.
You can exchange medals in the shop for rewards. These rewards mainly include epic commander sculptures, which help you upgrade your epic commanders faster.
Aethelflaed is the only free-to-play legendary commander in the game, and you can get her totally free from the medal store. Despite being a free commander, she is quite powerful, especially for debuffing your enemies. You can check out Aethelflaed full guide to find out more about her.
Basics of Commander Upgrades
In Rise of Kingdoms, leveling up commanders and upgrading their skills are crucial for enhancing their abilities and effectiveness in battles. Here’s a detailed breakdown of it
Leveling Up Commanders
To level up your commanders, you need XP points. You can earn XP points by Defeating Barbarians and Barbarian Forts as well as by using Tomes of Knowledge, which can be obtained from various events, quests, and chests.
The maximum level a commander can reach is 60. As commanders level up, the amount of XP required for the next level also increases.
Each level-up grants talent points that can be used in the talent tree to improve various aspects of the commander’s abilities, such as improving troop stats, march speed, or special skills.
Upgrading Commander Skills
Each commander has a total of 5 skills, out of which one is an active skill and one is an expertise skill. The first skill is active, and it is unlocked from the beginning, while the others unlock at commander levels 10, 20, and 30, respectively.
Aside from leveling up, you also need to star up your commander to unlock the skills. To star up the commander, you will need items called starlight sculptures. You can easily obtain them from events, different stores, and as another in-game reward.
Each of these Skills can be upgraded up to level 5, and once you upgrade all four of them to max level, it unlocks the 5th expertise skill.
To upgrade the commander skill, you will need a commander sculpture of that specific commander. There are also universal commander sculptures that you can use on any commander.
You need to be quite careful when using universal commander sculptures, especially legendary sculptures. They are quite rare, so be sure to use them on the best possible commanders.
The active skill is the most important, and you need to max it out first. Once it’s done, you can move on to the rest of the skills.
Expertise is just as powerful as an active skill, but it is not true for all commanders, so you shouldn’t try to unlock it for all the commanders. We have several commander guides that will tell you whether you should unlock expertise skills for that commander or not.
Skill Lock
Rise of Kingdoms has a weird skill upgrade mechanism. Instead of allowing you to choose which skill you can upgrade, it randomly upgrades a skill upon using the required commander sculpture. That’s where skill lock can be useful; it’s located in the skill upgrade tab.
For example, if the commander’s third skill isn’t good but 2nd one is, then you can use skill lock on the first two skills, and that way it will only upgrade the first two skills. However, the weird part is that if the third skill is good and 2nd isn’t, then there is no solution for that, you will need luck and need to hope that it upgrades 3rd skill and not the second skill.
Commander Pairing
If you are a new player, you will only be able to send one commander with a March. The secondary commander unlocks once your primary commander reaches 3-stars.
The commander pairing is one of the most important strategies in Rise of Kingdoms. If you pair the right kinds of commanders together, then it can do wonders for you in the battles. If you are not sure which commanders are good together, then check our commander pairing guide.
Talent Trees
Just like the pairing, the Talent tree of the primary commander also makes lots of difference. Each commander has three different branches of talent in their talent tree.
You can use up to 60 talent points to craft a perfect talent tree for that commander. You can take a look at the commander guides on our site before building a talent tree. We include the best talent trees for each commander based on different scenarios and pairings.
Even if you make a mistake and build the wrong talent tree, don’t worry, because it can be reset by using a talent reset token.
Tip – don’t use gems to buy talent reset, you can get them from the alliance shop.
Tavern
Tavern is the primary way to get new commanders in the game as beginners. There are two types of keys, silver and gold.
Silver keys unlock epic commanders while gold keys unlock legendary commanders. These keys will help you a lot as a new player to upgrade your commanders, so be sure to use them often.
Important – While commanders from gold keys are quite powerful at the beginning of the game, they become weak in later stages of the game. So, you need to avoid spending universal Legendary commander sculptures on them and save them for better commanders for the later part of the game.
Other ways to unlock Legendary commanders
Aside from the tavern, there are two main ways to unlock legendary commanders and get their sculptures.
The first one is Wheel of Fortune, which costs gems. You can check out our detailed Wheel of Fortune guide to learn more about that event.
The second way is a bit competitive; you can participate in the Mightiest Governor Event, or MGE. As the name suggests, it’s 5 stage event where you need to train troops, kill enemy troops, gather resources, kill barbarians, and increase your power by building and researching.
We suggest that you avoid this event unless you are a big spender. Most kingdoms have this event fixed for their big spender whales who sacrifice troops in large quantities during the KvK.
Even if it’s not fixed by your kingdom’s management, it’s still very hard to compete in MGE as an F2P player. So, it’s best to avoid it.
The best way for you to unlock the MGE commander is by giving a great performance in the KvK and then asking your kingdom management to give you a fixed spot at the event.
Best Troop Type
Rise of Kingdoms has 4 main troop types: Archers, Cavalry, Infantry, and Siege units. They also have tiers from 1 to 5, with tier 5 being the most powerful
Archers are countered by Cavalry, Cavalry is countered by Infantry, Infantry is countered by Archers, and Siege is countered by all three.
Out of these three, Cavalry is probably the best troop type if you are an F2P player or a low spender. You will be doing open field fights, and for that Cavalry is the best due to high attack and march speed.
Tip – Most new players chase after tier 5 troops like they are the ultimate task of the game. They are indeed the most powerful troops in the game, but they also cost much more resources and speed-ups to train, and later on, heal them. With the right commander pairing and talent tree, you can even do great with just tier 4 troops. So, if you are an F2P player, then they are your best bet.
Gems
Gems are the most important currency in the game. It’s a premium item; however, you can accumulate them just by playing the game too.
One of the biggest mistakes new players make is that they spend the gems right away. You shouldn’t do that; instead, save them for the event called “More Than Gems.”
If you spend your gems during this event, then you get an extra reward. More importantly, you get Universal legendary commander sculptures as part of the reward.
Which things should you spend your gems on?
Your top priority is, of course, VIP level 6. However, there are also other things that you will need to take your city hall to level 25.
You need a master’s blueprint for each building when you upgrade it from level 24 to 25. As well as lots of books of covenant to upgrade the castle as a prerequisite for the city hall upgrade. So, you can spend your gems on them after VIP level 6.
Once you are at city level 25, you can continue to spend gems on the VIP level. Just make sure to do it during the More Than Gems event.
Bonus Tip: Consider playing Rise of Kingdoms on PC to get better performance and less lag during battles.
Final Words
That’s it for this Rise of Kingdoms beginner’s guide. We hope that every detail was covered in this guide, and it will help you in your new journey in the ROK. If you still have any questions about the game, you can ask us in the comments below, and we will try our best to answer them.
