Game Tutorial
When starting a new game, a tutorial will pop up to assist you with a walkthrough.
This will help new players to understand the dynamics of the game, and explain the basics.
Bind Your Account
Before spending any money on the game, do not forget to bind your account.
You can Bind the account by selecting the "Player Profile Window" (Click the avatar on
the left top).
Click on the bottom left button to access the Settings page
Click Account to bind your account to Google or Facebook. For "iOS", you
can bind to Game Center and/or Facebook.
Select your Alliance
An important step is to find a suitable Alliance. Via the Alliance
menu you can apply to join an alliance or join one of the alliances that
are currently open for new recruits. As with other games with alliances
it is important to find a likeminded group of people. Don't be afraid
to switch to another alliance if you feel your first is not a good fit,
or if either leaders or other members are not active enough. Make sure
you have an active group of people. Not only the number of members are
important, but also how many actually log in, which you can see in the
Alliance menu (select Members and you see for each member when they last
logged in). If you are intending to play for a long time, the social
aspect is important for many people as well.
Alliance Teleport
When you join an alliance for the first time you get a free alliance
teleport (I had 3 when I started playing, got one as a free gift, not
sure where the other came from). You can use this to teleport close to
your alliance, but be careful about using it. The game can suggest you
to move to a location, which automatically happens if you accept, but
this might not be the location your alliance wants to settle down, just
where your leader happens to be at that time. Ask about it in the
alliance chat first. You can also acquire an advanced teleport from the
Alliance Store to teleport later, but this is costly, and Alliance
Credits are not easy to come by, so make sure you only use the Alliance
Teleport if you are quite certain you will stay.
University
One of the buildings in your base, inside the city walls, is your
University. You can build the University once you upgrade your
Stronghold to lvl 4. Once you have it, you should basically try to make
sure you always have some research project active and you should make
your research speed as fast as possible. The Development Research
Category contains import projects to increase your construction,
research and troop training speed, the Economy Research Category
contains important projects to increase your resource production and
gathering, the Combat Research Category contains, besides the many
projects to improve the strength of your troops also the very important
projects to increase the number of March Slots (these influence how many
different marches you can use simultaneously, very important if you
want to do multiple rallies, attacking enemies, gathering resources,
fighting monsters etc). The Defense Research Category offers projects
that help you defend your Stronghold in various ways. It is not that
this is not important, but if there is one category that you can pay
less attention to in the beginning, it is this one.
Training Troops
There are 5 buildings relevant for training troops. Barracks,
Stables, Range and Siege Workshop are the building where you can give
your assignments to train troop. The level of the buildings influence
which troops you can train, the higher tier, the better the troops. Each
is associated with a troop type, Infantry, Cavalry, Bowmen and Siege.
The Military Tents influence how many troops you can train and your
troop training speed. For each Military Tent you have for each level the
Troop Training Speed increases with 0.5%, so it is important to build
many and upgrade all of them.
Upgrading Buildings
The game suggests some order of building and upgrading buildings, you
don't need to pay attention to that. There are some things to consider.
One building to upgrade as fast as possible is the Embassy (unlocked at
Stronghold level 6), it increases the number of Alliance Helps you can
receive and the time each Help deducts from your timers. It does not
make as much difference as when a percentage of timers is deducted, but
especially early on in the game, when timers are not that long, it can
make a difference if you can receive many Helps (and you have an active
alliance that provides those Helps fast). Early on I also tend to focus
on upgrading buildings that are requirements for the next Stronghold
upgrade first to make sure I can start the next Stronghold upgrade when I
go offline for a while. All the buildings have their own importance,
the University unlocks new research project levels, the Barracks, Range,
Stables and Siege Workshop new troops, the Farm and Sawmill increase
your resource production rate and capacity (also build many of them and
upgrade them, do not forget to unlock the extra areas for building
outside the city walls). After you start an upgrade do not forget to
click the item above the building to request for Alliance Helps.
Walls
The Walls can contain traps that are build in the Trap Factory
building. Upgrading the Trap Factory unlocks more Traps. Traps can play
an important role in defending your city.
Market Place
At the Market Place building, located to the right of the Vault, you
can make trades. There are various different offers to get some
resources or goodies by paying with resources or gold, and there are a
couple of free refreshes each day as well. You might want to judge for
yourself whether trades are worth it, but some are no brainers, like the
wood vs food trades. Unless you are in high need of one and not the
other, you can always make some resource profit by making the trades
where you get more (e.g. paying 750 food to get 3000 wood).
Helping Alliance Members with Research and Construction
You and your alliance members can help each other with research and
building upgrades. Before you have build your Embassy you need to go to
the Alliance menu to Help, once you have the Embassy there will be a
shortcut icon above the Embassy to Help All. The number of Helps you can
receive is determined by the Embassy level. Initially you can receive
two Helps and it is increased by 1 by every level of your Embassy. The
initial time that is deducted with each help is 30 seconds and this is
increased by 3 seconds from level 2 of the Embassy onwards. This is a
fixed amount, so they are not a huge help like in some other games where
the alliance Helps take off a relative amount of the remaining timer.
Using Gold and Speed Ups
During the game there are various ways to get gold and speed ups, but
they are not that easy to come by. Once your timers start to be more
than just a few minutes you might get tempted to use these to speed up
research, construction and troop training. My general advice is don't
just use these for anything, only use them if you can get something back
by winning prizes in the active Events. Saving up some gold and speed
ups is important so that it will be easier to win the prizes of those
Events.
Power
Although the power of a player has no direct meaning for your
strength in combat, it is often used by players as a quick measurement
of strength anyway. Typically alliances will set certain power
requirements for their players which increase over time. As such it is
important you get your power up as well. There are seven basic
categories of power: Lord, Dragon, Troop, Building, Research, Trap and
Equipment. You can see your power breakdown by clicking on your avatar
at the left top of the screen, followed by clicking on the More Info
button to the right of your player name. It is an extra reason to always
have active research projects, building upgrades and troop training.
Your Lord and Dragon power increases by leveling up your Lord and
Dragon, and to do that you require experience points (XP). You get these
for a lot of different activities.
Lord Talent Points
After each level up of your lord you can assign lord talent points.
There are three different categories in the lord talent point section.
My suggestion is to focus on the Economy section first. There are
possibilities to increase the building and research speed in this
section, as well as increasing resource production and gathering speed.
Both are important for the speed with which you can grow your account.
It is possible to reset the skills later by paying the required 1000
gold or using a Talent Points Reset from the Alliance Store, so you can
focus more on the Combat tree before you start to battle.
Monsters
There are plenty of Monsters around on the map of different levels.
You can initially only kill the level 1, but once you have killed a
level 1 you are allowed to attack a level 2, once you killed a level 2
you are allowed to attack a level 3 and so on. You need to have a
stronger army to kill higher level monsters. When you click on a
monster, you will see a recommended Troop Power and when you select
troops to attack, you also see the Troop Power, so you know whether you
have a chance to win or not. Killing monsters gives you some Lord and
Dragon XP and goodies as well. Hitting monsters costs stamina. Stamina
will recharge automatically. Whenever you log in, hit monsters until you
are out of stamina.
Events
You can win prizes by completing various stages of Events. You can
find the active events in the Event Center building. There are various
events and this is likely to change all the time, so always good to
check out when you log in, but so far the most interesting are a daily
rotating (total of 8 stages) event with activaties such as training
troops, killing monsters and gathering resources. When you are very
small it might be difficult to win the gold, but once you get a
reasonable size you can focus each day on winning the tier 3 gold prize
of the daily event stage. I will write separate guides with tips on how
to complete each of the daily event stages.
Alliance Tech and Donations
The leaders (Rank 4 and 5) of an Alliance can do research that
benefit the alliance in Alliance Tech and Donations. Any member can (and
should) help by donating the requirements. This can be done by
selecting Donations in the Alliance menu, by going to one of the
projects for which the requirements are not filled yet, and clicking one
of the buttons to Donate at the bottom. The left one is always active,
the middle and right one sometimes. Even when they cost gold, you should
push them. You get alliance credits (can be used to purchase items in
the Alliance Store) in return and donate a lot more. Each Donation
increases 10 minutes on the cooldown timer. Once you exceed four hours
you cannot donate anymore until the timer is reset to 0, so I suggest to
always stay below 4 hours so that you can donate again when you check
back after 1 or 3 hours.
Daily Reward
In the Tavern building there is a Daily Reward menu. Here you should
look every day. You get rewards for tasks you likely do anyway and in
the Daily Reward section you can claim the prizes by clicking on the
chests. I will write a separate guide with an explanation for each
activity and tips on how to complete them.
Merlin Gift
Sometimes a free gift with timer appears at the Daily Shipment
location, near the Tavern. Look there frequently and grab it before the
timer expires.
Gather Resources
Gathering resources is an important way to get extra resources. Make sure before you log off to send out your troops to gather.
