The Elven Springwardens, Humans of The League of Order, and the Orcish nation of Wilderburg once were hateful foes. While none of them were truly what could be considered evil, politics and old histories caused them to feud and fight and wage war against each other endlessly. At least until the skies fell on their heads one day, physically and figuratively.
As the stars crashed into the earth one night, out came true evil from the craters: Darklings, beings of blackened mana and unmitigated foulness, waging war against everything that breathes, committing unspeakable crimes against the world and even the very concept of free will thanks to their corrupting rituals and influence.
As such, the Elves, Humans, and Orcs must finally put aside their petty squabbles if they are to survive this onslaught. And off in the distance and the legends of old, lie a possible solution: Dragons and lots of fire!
Welcome to our Call of Dragons Beginner’s Guide! Call of Dragons is a kingdom-building PVP-PVE strategy game similar to games like Whiteout Survival, War and Peace: Civil War, and King of Avalon: Frost and Flame.
While most of those games have some form of separate PVE battle system with real-time battles compared to their pure-calculation PVP march combat, Call of Dragons differs with real-time march combat for both PVE and PVP rather than calculation-on-contact battles, where unit positioning can help otherwise disadvantaged armies fight on a more even footing against reasonably stronger foes.
While concept and storywise it isn’t much different from other fantasy kingdom builders of its type, it is a highly polished game worth checking out for any player of PVP kingdom builders.
GENERAL TIPS
As a newbie, your goal is to get a decently sized army for defense and to make it to City Level 10 before your newbie shield goes down for the first time. City level 10 unlocks Policies, which allow you to research Gem Prospecting, which lets you mine Gem mines that pop out on the map, along with the Military Expansion and Medic Recruitment policies, which will helpfully accelerate your army’s growth.
Unsure What To Do? Quest And Go!
Call of Dragons has a rather helpful Quest system that is easy to get into: Just tap the scroll on the top left of your screen, pick a quest, and tap Go. Or tap the tiny arrow next to the scroll and just tap the quest. That will send you to where the quest can be done, whether it be various menus or places on the map. If you spot any particularly easy ones like changing your avatar or talking to your heroes, get them done for quick loot.
Keep Training Facilities Running
You will always need more troops to beat ever stronger Darkling mobs or to defend yourself against hostile players. As such, keep your various training structures running so they’re constantly pumping troops out as you play. Don’t bother waiting for new stronger troops to get unlocked before you start making an army, keep those queues running. After all, once you get access to higher-tier units, you can upgrade your soldiers to said higher-tier units!
Keep Builders Busy
All construction takes time, so idle build slots are a crime. Before logging off, or heck even while you’re online, make sure your construction slots are never empty and are constantly working. Getting building upgrades running as you log off means you can save on speedups since the building will be upgraded in your sleep, and you’ll get your upgrade as soon as you wake up the next day. Provided it isn’t a several-day-long upgrade of course.
Use Speedups Liberally
As a newbie, you’ve got a limited time before other players can attack you. You have until the end of that newbie shield period to get strong enough that people think twice before doing so. As such, you should use Speedups liberally: Not only do you get them by picking fights with Darklings, but you can also buy them through the various shops you will eventually unlock, and by doing a ton of quests. You don’t have a reason to save them since you can get them pretty easily, so don’t bother saving them unless it’s something obvious and stupid like wasting a 1-hour speedup on a 10-minute construction project.
Use General Speedups Last
That being said, make sure you use task-specific Speedups first where you can, even if you get a ton of General Speedups early on. Most tasks, such as Research, Training, and Building have their own dedicated Speedups, which cannot be used for other tasks. Use those first so your General Speedups can be used during emergencies or for high-priority upgrades for which you lack the task-specific Speedups to do. General Speedups are best used on tasks such as Research and Building upgrades as they tend to take the most time to finish.
Free Healing Beats Resource Healing
So your soldiers got into a fight with something tough. Win or lose, some of them will get hurt and be put out of commission for some time. Thankfully, unlike other city builders, the unit healing structures in your City don’t have a maximum limit to how many injured units they can hold!
Instead, upgrading your healing structures speeds up the rate at which your units heal by letting the buildings heal in bigger batches. There are two types of healing then: Free healing, which takes time, and Resource healing, which eats your supplies for instant healing.
Free Healing is the choice if you’re a free player since Resource healing starts getting onerously expensive later on once you unlock higher tier soldiers for your army and your forces become stronger and stronger, along with the enemies they fight. This is an important distinction to make since getting your first healing Policy repeals its counterpart until the season ends, so if you’re a free player, upgrade your Free Healing policies first.
Chat With Heroes Once A Day
Once a day, your Heroes may have a speech bubble on top of their heads as you check on your town. Talk to them and never ever pick the option that says you’re too busy to chat: They will have loot for you and it often includes Tokens for the hero you just talked to, important for upgrading skills.
You also get a gacha key for the first time chatting with a Hero. Most importantly, you can unlock quests involving that hero, and you can also raise their Trust level a small amount without using Honeydew.
Scout The Mist
Sending scouts out to explore the Mist is important, as it unlocks new places to go, which means more quests and more loot. It is also a great way to get free stuff fairly easily, as Scouts will point out supplies, NPC villages, and camps which also often have mini-quests that involve answering questions for loot or trading materials for them. You also need this to unlock Anecdotes by choosing smart choices in NPC Towns. Anecdotes help you learn about the world while giving you some Gems for unlocking them.
Save Resource Chests and Resource Packs For Emergencies
As is the case with most city-builders of this type, other players may decide to be massive jerks and take your resources by force. Fighting them off is an option, and the Warehouse protects some of your loot, but eventually, someone will kick your walls down and run off with your resources no matter how strong your armies are.
This is why you don’t use the resource packs in your Backpack unless it is absolutely necessary to do so: The enemy can only take resources that are ready to use and unprotected by your Storehouse and cannot take the Resource packs in your backpack as long as they’re in pack form. Think of them as a second Storehouse reserve.
STUFF TO DO
Grinding is a fact of life in any city-building conquest game, and Call of Dragons is no different. Here are the things you’ll do most often as you play the game.
Dragon Trail
The Dragon Trail is a bunch of combat puzzles that exist to teach you how to position your troops well, though early on they’re too easy to really teach you anything. You are put on a small map and have to set up a march with your available troops and maneuver them in such a way that the enemy Marches get destroyed in battle by your army.
Early on, the amount of rewards plus heavy use of starter speedups means you will usually outnumber the enemy grievously, so roll through the early fights so you can take advantage of its idle reward, which includes a currency for its own shop and Prestige so you can Enact Policies from the Notice Board once you reach City Level 10.
Joining Rallies
Usually, there is some sort of Event running in Call of Dragons, and they usually involve getting together with your guild to beat the evil out of some particularly nasty Darklings. You’ll sometimes notice the Guild button light up and see a red notification circle in the War Tab.
Usually, that’s your cue to send troops to help a buddy kill something! Rallies allow guild members to call other guild members for support during things such as PVP, Event battles, assaults on Behemoths, and many other battle-related things. When doing so, make note of the unit type the Rally owner is asking for, as you’ll see a symbol telling you if they want Infantry, Cavalry, Ranged, or Magic units. Once you get your Rally structure, you will be able to call your own Rallies.
The Season Story
The main thing you’re gunning for is to finish the Season Story. This is the main story of the game, or at least its current season, after which everyone gets reset. Not only is the Season Story a good source of rewards, but it’s also one of the best ways to know just how strong your armies actually are since it will regularly send you against enemies around your own strength.
It will also send you against certain situations which may require a bit of brain power, such as defending NPC units against say, 3 marches when your maximum is 2 at a time or surprise ambushes where a bunch of enemies appear as your march inspects a crashed caravan or something. Be very careful and deploy both your marches even if the game asks for just one!
Gathering
If you aren’t picking fights, you should keep your marches busy on Gathering trips. Your city’s resource-gathering structures are much weaker than what you would find in most other games, and while you do get a ton of Resource packs as you finish quests, those are meant to be spent during emergencies.
Gathering, on the other hand, takes less time than in most other kingdom builders since you have access to both heroes made for gathering, and a unit specific to each faction whose main purpose is hauling gather loads, not to mention you can easily recall the march home in case of emergencies, unlike a lot of other games where recalls often cost some form of item to pull off.
COMBAT TIPS
Unlike most kingdom-builder games, the map combat in Call of Dragons happens in real-time, looking deceptively like battles in other kingdom-builders until you notice skills have an area of effect and ranged units typically shoot enemies from a long distance while infantry stops the enemy from getting to the ranger march, once you start deploying multiple marches against the same target.
Think of it like a fairly clunky but brain-enlarging RTS with a heavy emphasis on timing attacks between multiple marches, managing aggro, and pre-positioning your troops on the map. Or you could grind and bludgeon the enemy to death with superior numbers, that works too!
Mixed Unit Attack
When attacking with multiple marches, don’t send in two marches with the same unit type. Have each march be a different type of unit so they can support each other. Even heavily outnumbered ranged units can contribute to a fight without taking casualties if you’ve got another March loaded with infantry to take the brunt of the hits. This is especially important since battles happen in real-time, so you want to make sure your squishier units don’t grab any unwanted attention from NPC enemies like Darkling armies.
Pre-Deploying and Surrounding The Enemy
Since battles happen in real-time, positioning your units before engaging enemies can help if a fight looks tough. You can use this to time your attacks, manage Darkling aggro, have your squishier units escape enemy Skills, and generally get the advantage in what would otherwise be a fairly even battle.
This is especially important if you’re commanding 2 melee armies (Usually in Dragon’s Trail Side Paths where you are given pre-determined units instead of your own armies), as you get a damage bonus if you surround an enemy. When two melee armies or more smack into the same target from two different directions, the word “Surrounded!” appears over the target’s head to tell you that your troops are beating the tar out of them effectively.
Your Units Can Chain Fights
As battles happen on the map in real-time, you can actually command your troops to engage multiple enemies at once! If you’ve got a quest that involves fighting a lot of Darkling armies, you can form up your Marches, send them out, and keep selecting enemies to fight as they die, using the icons of your March commanders on the right side of the screen to send them to the fight, without waiting for your troops to come back to town.
Heck, you can even call in troops in the middle of gathering jobs to drop everything and rush to battle! Chaining battles together is a good way to finish quests that only care about how many armies you kill as opposed to how strong the enemies are, as you can use it to rapidly steamroll multiple weaker Darkling armies should they happen to be close by.
Delay Your Ranged Units
When deploying units against strong Darkling armies, a simple way to make sure your firepower doesn’t dwindle is to delay your Ranged or Magic units from attacking until your frontliners engage the enemy, especially if your target is another ranged unit.
Enemy ranged units will aggro against whoever strikes them first, which can be bad if they gun for your own rangers before your tougher melee infantry can make contact with the enemy and draw their attention.
THINGS TO SAVE GEMS FOR
Gems are a precious resource and are Call of Dragons’ premium currency. You get them from quests, by paying real money, or if ever the developers mess something up and send them to you as an apology. As such, they are rather rare but not rare enough that you can’t make good use of them with a bit of forethought.
Permanent Construction Slot
Being able to upgrade two buildings at the same time is a massive boon, especially if you have to upgrade your Great Hall as that can hog a slot for hours if you’re not willing to cram it full of speedups. Which you should do anyway especially this early into the game.
You can get roughly 2000+ gems on your first day as a new player, and it costs 5000 for the permanent Construction Slot unlock, so save up for it early! After that, you can gun for the next thing on our list…
Honorary Membership Level 8
Or in other words, VIP. Unlike a lot of VIP systems in similar games, Call of Dragons’ Honorary Membership system only needs gems to level up as opposed to needing gems to maintain a timed subscription.
Players generally recommend rushing to Membership level 8 with your gems as it gets you two very important things: Hard-to-find Legendary Tokens as a daily reward, and access to a second permanent Research queue so you can get upgrades twice as fast.
HERO MANAGEMENT
Making your Heroes stronger also makes the army following them stronger: Each Hero acts as a commander, imparting buffs onto their army and often coming with auto skills and passives that activate during combat or gathering. Here are some notes on making them stronger.
Star Levels
Promotions are the most noticeable upgrade you’ll feel for your Heroes for one simple reason: More stars means more main skills. They start off with their Rage Skill and unlock up to 3 main passive Skills as their star level goes up.
Unlike most gacha games, you don’t use Shards (or as the game calls them, Tokens) to upgrade the Star Level. Instead, you use Medals which give a Hero Star Points. The shards, you use after unlocking the skill to level said skill up! You can only raise a Hero’s star level after reaching a certain basic Level threshold.
Skill Levels
Unlike most gacha games where Shards raise a character’s star level, here Tokens can be used to raise individual skills for a Commander. A Commander’s skills usually determine what role they’re best at, whether that be combat, gathering, offense, defense, or flanking maneuvers.
A character who has skills mostly for raising the army’s stats is usually sent to combat, and one who has boosts to resource gathering might be sent to gather whichever specific resource they get a boost for.
The Talent Tree and Normal Levels
As your Commanders fight and gain experience, they will level up and get [attribute points] for their Talent Tree. The Talent Tree determines the overall stat build of a Commander and should match their actual Skill Set or the role you plan for them.
Perhaps you may want to build a Commander to March fast so they can quickly fight Darklings one after another on the map, respond to invading armies early, or simply gather resources quickly. Maybe you want to build them tough so you can use them as melee frontliners while your other Commander who goes with an army of ranged units is built to hit hard, so you can get a one-two punch against difficult Darkling targets, bosses, or again, hostile player armies.
Artifact Matching
When equipping Artifacts for your Heroes, make sure you read up on both them and the equipment you’re putting in their hands. Most weapons come with buffs or skills that affect certain unit types, whether by buffing the holder or damaging certain types of enemies, especially since some weapons only do damage against Darkling and other NPC units.
Also, remember that while a lot of lower-tier weapon skills tend to be nothing more than glorified emotes, the weapons themselves still come with passive stat boosts so if you have a naked hero, give it to them anyway!
Artifact Levels
Equipment Levels are easy enough to understand: Higher level equipment means their passive stat boosts are stronger. You can upgrade an Artifact’s level by cramming it full of Arcane Dust. That being said, it will only go up to a certain maximum level until you star it up.
Artifact Ascension Star Level
Just like Heroes, Artifacts come with Star levels, which determine their maximum level. Ascension gives them a fatter stat boost than an individual level-up does, and instead of using Medals, you use dupes of any Artifact to star one up. Before you can ascend an Artifact, you have to reach a certain level threshold first.
Artifact Skill Levels
While you can use non-matching Artifact dupes to upgrade an Artifact’s star level, you instead use matching dupes to raise an Artifact’s Skill level. Leveling this up does exactly what you think it does: While the artifact level and star level affects its passive stat boosts, upgrading an Artifact’s skill level improves the effects of its active skill, whether it’s a buff, an attack, or some form of protective shield, or anything else. You must read an Artifact’s active skill before upgrading this: Some of the lower tier ones have purely cosmetic active Skills, so use those dupes for upgrading star levels for other Artifacts instead.
STRUCTURES
As a city builder, you’d do well to know the Structures in Call of Dragons so you can prioritize which ones to upgrade via Research and Policies. The writer suggests prioritizing military research and anything to do with construction speed as idle resource gains tend to be quite slow in this game, and you will only start getting serious benefits from such upgrades later on.
Resource Buildings
Sadly some of the weaker structures in the game, Resource gathering structures such as the Mint, Lumber Mill, and Foundry make resources, albeit in fairly small amounts even with upgrades. Since these structures take forever to make resources in worthwhile numbers, these are not your main source of Wood, Gold, Ore, and Mana.
Instead, you should go out and Gather resources using your gathering units and Heroes or do quests for the rewards. The only reason to upgrade these, at least as a newbie, is to unlock other upgrades for your town. They become more useful later in the game once you have enough upgrades to get them going at more reasonable speeds, but as a newbie, you’ll rely a lot more on Gathering and Quests for your resources.
Training Structures and Unit Types
No matter the faction, you will have access to 4 training structures, one for each unit type: Infantry, Cavalry, Marksmen, and Magic. Units marked as Infantry are typically used as tanks, going in to take aggro for everyone else and engaging the enemy first thanks to their high defensive stats and mildly higher speed compared to ranged attackers.
Behind them are usually Marksmen or Mages. Marksmen units are mostly for dealing damage from a distance, while Mages are more for supporting the frontliners taking the hits for them while still contributing some damage. Finally, you have Cavalry, fast movers who can maneuver easily and proc the Surrounded debuff for the enemy, which occurs when an enemy is attacked from multiple sides by multiple marches at once.
All factions have different names for their units and their training structures, but the archetypes for the units are more or less what you’d expect across the factions. There are also dedicated gathering units that share the Cavalry building, but this also means there is no such thing as tier 1 cavalry.
Great Hall
The Wilderhall, Hall of Order, and Sacred Hall are the Great Halls for Wilderburg, League of Order, and Springwardens respectively. This structure is the core of your town and also determines the size of your marches, with its Legion Capacity making up the bulk of troop space when compared to the smaller bonus Heroes give to army size.
Usually, this is the last building for you to upgrade in a chain before you can upgrade other buildings again since this is the biggest upgrade of them all. Since this is also the slowest building to upgrade, it’s best to either use your heavier Speedups for it or upgrade it right before logging off so it’s done when you wake up.
Medical Buildings
The Hospital, Shaman’s Hut, or Herbalist Hut are the medical structures for the League of Order, Wilderburg, and Springwardens respectively. They all do the same job: Heal injured units so they can rejoin the battle.
Unlike many other city-builder PVP strategy games with a troop injury mechanic, Call of Dragons’ medical system is much more forgiving: Even at level 1, these structures have room for infinite casualties! Instead, they heal in batches over time, and you must remember to collect the injured every so often so the next batch can have their turn. Higher-level medical structures heal troops faster and are important to maintaining high-level armies.
Research Center and Notice Board
The Seer’s Council, College of Order, and School of Sages are the research structures for Orcs, Humans, and Elves respectively. These allow you to research technologies for your city and military, such as new unit tiers and improved resource gathering.
You should keep your Research queue busy as much as possible, especially early in the game so you can get a head start and make yourself a difficult target for PVP-happy players. The Notice Board is highly similar, letting you enact Policies once your Great Hall reaches level 10. The main difference is that you can’t use Speedups to enact Policies, but you can use them for Research.
Alliance Center
The Alliance Center allows other Allies to send troops to reinforce you should you find your city endangered, and also increases your Help chances so other players can speed up your Building, Research, and Training Queues while you do the same for them. This is mostly a priority to upgrade if you’re in a reliable guild, but otherwise, you’ll only really upgrade this structure as one of the requirements for a better Main hall.
Storehouse
The Storehouse is a staple in any kingdom builder with an overworld map and PVP. The Storehouse protects a limited number of resources from players attacking your City. This way, you will always have some resources to recover from any looters that your army is unable to stop.
This is also the reason you don’t go around using your Resource packs unless you need them, since keeping your resource count low but your backpack full is a good way to make yourself an unattractive target while ensuring you’re never actually truly broke.
Rally Instrument
The Orcish Rally Drum, the Human Rally Beacon, and the Elven Rally Harp allow you to call rallies against hard targets such as Event enemies, enemy Alliance Towers, and Behemoths. Rallies are battles where multiple players from a single Alliance send armies against a single very dangerous target, so they can share in the loot while ensuring the enemy goes down.
You’ll usually have some time to join a Rally, so don’t rush into them: If you find one, look at it carefully, check what unit type the Rally organizer prefers, and see if you have enough of those troops to matter. If not, send in whatever you’ve got and try to time your joining in so you don’t spend 5 hours with one of your marches rendered useless because of an overly long Rally timer.
Scout Post
The Centaur Sentry Post, Scout Camp, and Ranger Retreat allow you to send out scouts to clear the Mist around the map. The scouts will also tell you of places of interest when they find them: Villages, encampments, treasure maps, lost supplies, and traders.
Most of these things will either give you free stuff, or put you in a situation where you can get free stuff, or at least trade at great advantage to yourself. They may also find Behemoths, which can be helpful for your Alliance.
Watch Tower and Wall
The Wall determines your City’s durability and contains your Garrison, and the Watch Tower allows your city to damage attackers independently of your army garrison. Together, these structures help your Garrison kick invaders out more effectively. You usually upgrade the Wall before the Great Hall as it requires quite a lot of other buildings to be upgraded to go up itself.
As for the Watch Tower, it isn’t mandatory to level up if all you want is to rush your Great Hall, but it will be quite useful to power up in case you find yourself on the front line of an Alliance war.
Goblin Market
The Goblin Market is your best friend, at least if you get lucky and it sells stuff for resources instead of gems. The Goblin Market sells various wares for resources and has a separate shop that can convert your Hero Tokens and other materials to a currency that can be used to buy different Hero tokens. This and the Bazaar shop are good sources for Speedups since they often sell them for cheap.
Bazaar
The Bazaar is how you access the game’s VIP system. Not only does it contain the VIP shop, which is full of heavily discounted stuff, but you can also level up your VIP membership here by shoving the Bazaar full of Gems. This is a good place to get Speedups, and once your VIP level reaches 8, you unlock a second research queue and can have a Legendary Hero Token of your choosing every day for free.
Arena
Contrary to most city-builder conquest games, the Arena is not where you go for single PVP skirmish battles. Instead, this is the gacha building! Here, you can spend Keys or Gems to roll for Artifacts, Heroes, and resources. Spending Keys is perfectly fine, but as a newbie, you should never spend a single Gem here: You’re saving your Gems for the Bazaar’s Honorary Membership and for your permanent second Build queue.
And this ends our Call of Dragons beginner’s guide. We hope this helps, and if you have any of your own tips to share, comment below! Now get out there and send those Darklings packing!