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Idle Empires (iOS) Guide: 13 Tips, Cheats & Tricks to Become the Ultimate Dictator

Grumpy Rhino has released a new game for all you fans of idle clickers, as Idle Empires is now available for download on iOS and Android devices. The game puts you in the role of a gold-hungry, power-obsessed tyrant called King Norman, and since you’re controlling an evil individual, you won’t need to worry about being charged for war crimes. Your goal is to convert your peaceful title kingdom into one that’s torn in strife — it’s a “fear-riddled, war-hungry, gold-churning” dictatorship you’re going for here, as you blame everyone else for society’s ills, and attack your neighbors/allies for the sake of protection.

Idle clickers tend to be a “played one, played them all” kind of affair, but of course, there are tons of things you need to be aware of before playing these games. Once again, we’ve got that in mind as we now bring to you our Idle Empires strategy guide. It’s no laughing matter when the funny, creative, and other important stuff fails to amuse you for one reason or another. So keep on reading if you need some assistance making the most out of your clicks!

1. Tap For As Long As You Could

Just because the game is called Idle Empires doesn’t give you the carte blanche to let the AI do all of your dirty work. There’s more than just idling around in this game, and if you really want to earn serious profits, you’ll ned to tap as quickly as possible, especially once you’ve unlocked a new building. This especially applies in the early goings of the games, as unlocking more buildings will make it easier for you once it’s your time to reset, or prestige your game.

2. How To Level Up And Upgrade Properly

In this game, you’ve got several types of buildings, as well as several characters, and in order to get the best results, you’ll need to upgrade each of them to the maximum level. When talking about buildings, you would only be able to level them up a few times, but the good thing here is that every upgrade results in a generous increase in profit. This should make it easier for you to upgrade these buildings in the right way, though there is still a method to be followed here.

The first thing you want to do here is to upgrade the character a few times. And when you notice that the cost of leveling that worker up is more expensive than the cost of leveling up the building, you can then upgrade the building. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? It is, and you would only need to repeat the process until you max the building out. Upgrade the worker a few additional times, then move on.

Once you unlock a new money-making building in the game, it wouldn’t do you much good to upgrade the previous worker. That won’t earn you much profit, after all. But bear in mind that you have to max out all your workers to get the other bonuses.

3. Save Massive Upgrades For Missions

Although it might sound like a good idea in principle to upgrade workers as far as you can go, this isn’t really recommended. The only exception to this rule would be if you’re trying to complete a mission, and speaking of things like that, you can take a look at available missions by going to the Mission tab on top of the screen and seeing what you need to do. Do not go gung-ho on these upgrades, unless you know that your upgrades will result in someone getting boosted.

4. How To Make Your Villagers More Productive

The game allows you many ways in which you can make your villagers’ output go up. The easiest way to do this is to upgrade your villagers and to upgrade the revolutionized buildings, but you can also increase everyone’s output and gain villager bonuses once the census is unlocked. Having a few red gems, which serves as a premium currency, allows you to permanently increase a building’s output two-fold. Lastly, you can increase gold output for all villagers by 5 percent by building on an empty space — this is just one of several options, but noteworthy in the sense that it makes your empire a productive one.

5. Don’t Overlook The Revolt Meter

Idle Empires has a Revolt Meter, and you will notice that it ticks up each time your people are unhappy. Your upgrades, unfortunately, have a lot to do with this, but the good thing is that it’s easy to work around the potential unhappiness of your people and keep up with those upgrades. So how does the Revolt Meter work in the first place?

Once your Revolt Meter reaches maximum level, that means your people would then revolt, forcing you to flee. That’s something you want to avoid, and in order to do this, you may need to spend some actual money (i.e. the currency you get from the Priest, Wise Man, and other characters) to reduce the unhappiness levels within your empire. You’ll need to buy certain Unrest modifiers from the Aliens, then amp up the maximum value of the unrest meter. You will need to complete the Pledges and Achievements, or possibly get new members added to your Entourage and upgrade their skins in order to permanently upgrade and increase the threshold of your Unrest Meter.

6. More Tips For Controlling Your Empire’s Unrest

As we mentioned above, there are Unrest Modifiers you can buy from the aliens, and these are actually the most useful ways to manage the unrest in your empire. To further explain how the Modifiers work, they could reduce unrest by a specific figure per second. In fact, you’re going to have to buy these Unrest Modifiers as quickly and as simply as possible — make sure to upgrade them once you’ve got the right number of alien heads. That’s going to allow you to move forward faster and unlock new items.

Other ways to deal with uprisings and unrest include blaming everything on your servant, which is somewhere you don’t really want to head to, especially since you’ve got the option to watch ad videos. Watch as many videos as you need to, and once the game has no more new ads to serve up, you can flee, and return to the very start. Fortunately for you, though, you’ll still have your alien credits, which you can use to buy any number of free stuff available to you. These free items can increase your gold per tap production or bolster or strengthen your men out in the battlefield, so go for those freebies whenever you could!

7. Watch The Ads

The game will occasionally ask you if you want to watch advertisement videos in order to earn more money. As you advance further in Idle Empires, you will earn more money for the ads that are offered to you, so make sure you answer in the affirmative if the game asks if you want to watch. And as a bonus tip, you would also be able to double your income at least once a day if you have been away from the game for quite some time. Our recommendation would be to watch an ad once you’ve just woken up, as that would allow you to maximize the profits that you stand to earn. There’s also the option to go to the in-game store to make purchases so you can remove the ads. That’s also going to cost you some money, but the good thing is that you can no longer sit for about 20 to 30 seconds until the ad video is over and done with — everything is instant, just like you should expect it to be.

8. How To Get More Gems

Two words — offer wall. As we established above, gems are the game’s premium currency, and you can get more of them without exerting much effort, though based on our experience, we’re not really fans of the mechanics Tapjoy uses when it comes to their offer wall. But for what it’s worth, Tapjoy is the official offer wall provider of Idle Empires, and the offers allow you to download a game, fill out a survey, etc. Make absolutely sure that you’ve read the mechanics of each offer, because missing just one step in the smallest of ways could result in failure.

Pro-tip: Some of the offers may allow you to complete them by entering an email address. In this case, you don’t really need to use your own email — a dummy account would do. Take note that this only happens with a few offers, and not all of them.

9. You Don’t Get Bonuses From The Alien Heads

Idle Empires is a game that has a prestiging system, like many an idle game needs to. And typically, you would be able to keep certain items after you go back to square one and “prestige” your game. That is not the case with the Alien Heads, as you would not get a bonus from these items. The only bonuses you can expect to get are the work clothes to replace the old ones, as well as the items you buy from the aliens. That means you should be spending as much as possible, instead of saving up your heads for a certain item — the former option helps far more than the latter in most cases.

10. Best Things To Spend Your Alien Heads On

In most situations, the items you should be spending your Alien Heads on, once buying upgrades becomes more expensive, are chests. Idle Empires has a wide range of relics which you can unlock by opening the chests, and if you choose wisely, you would be able to find an effect that gives you the most upside out there, or the best bonuses that could serve you well while idling away.

11. Basic Battle Tips – What Should You Do To Win More Battles?

Talking about the battles in Idle Empires, the main goal of each of these battles is beating the enemy army, or orcs and other monsters. But you don’t need to fight them right away — you may have some unrest to take care of first, and that would typically be the best course of action. But there’s an easy way to get around this if you’re still in the earliest stages of the game. At that point, you can use pizza delivery guys to reduce the unrest quite markedly, allowing you to keep on grinding until you see them show up. Don’t use this strategy, however, once you’re already past the easy side of things, as they won’t do much good at a certain point in the game, and going forward.

Another basic tip for battle would be to properly use the blank spaces, and make good use as well of your healer character; wait for as long as you could before bribing them. Once again, that could be a great way to quell an uprising, but it does get progressively harder over time.

12. Do Not Use More Troops Than Necessary

As you may have noticed, unrest is a bit of a currency in Idle Empires, and if you’re using way too many troops, meaning more than you may need, then you may have a problem. That’s going to cost you progressively more unrest, so keep your people in mind and conserve your troops for as long as you could.

13. Time To Prestige

The best time to prestige, or to reset your game and go back to square one, would be when upgrades cost too much, with progress being simultaneously too slow for your comfort. As mentioned, the Alien Heads can be used for permanent boosts, and could also be used to unlock relics that buff you up in a number of ways. But don’t go overboard by using your Alien Heads exclusively on one item; the key to properly using them is balance across the board.

There you have it, folks! Hopefully, you’ve enjoyed our exclusive strategy guide for Idle Empires. If you know more hints or just want to share your thoughts about the game, be sure to drop us a line in the comments below!