Skip to Content

Epic Age Beginner’s Guide: Tips, Tricks & Strategies to Outsmart Your Enemies

Have you ever wanted to see the Vikings pick a fight with the Samurai? Or have the Mongolians tag-team the Ancient Greeks with the Romans? Do you enjoy some quality brain-crunching and slow, burning tension when you attack another player who also happens to be as strong and active as you are? Or maybe you just love that feeling of finally capturing that one darned, juicy high-level tile next to your city that’s been taunting you since the start of the game season? If so, you may want to give Epic Age a shot.

epic age guide

Welcome to our Epic Age Beginner’s Guide, an incredibly historically inaccurate yet mind-enlarging hex grid-based strategy game by IGG.COM. If you’ve played Lord of the Rings: Rise to War, this should be relatively familiar to you, but at once a bit simpler: You gather your heroes into squadrons and assign troops to them, though this time instead of making a complex troop composition for that squadron that can counter everything, you assign them a single unit in bulk which can easily be swapped out while they’re in your city, and have up to 5 such squadrons each with its own single assigned unit type you can maneuver around the map.

Most of the complexity will be mixing the heroes in their squadron, and the fights will rely on the game’s rock-paper-scissors armies just as much as the heroes’ stat builds and skill combinations. You take tiles around you, with more lucrative tiles being much more dangerous to capture even when neutral, and you often have to choose between holding onto a low-level tile and using it to set up defensive structures, or abandoning them to make space for tiles that give you more profit. 

a battle in epic age

Every season, the map gets reset and you start from square 1, at least in terms of terrain control. PVP between two equally powerful and active players is a teeth-gritting affair, with both players trying to waste the enemy armies’ stamina and morale by forcing them into unfavorable movements and positions until one player finds the opportunity to land a killing blow with their troops and artillery.

In this game, your decisions will matter long enough to let you flourish during the season, or wind up being captured by a hostile guild a bit earlier than you might expect. With all that out of the way, we’re here to make things just a bit easier for newbies who may find themselves a bit in over their heads as they start the game. So without further ado, let’s get started with our Epic Age beginner’s guide, as we share with you a bunch of tips, tricks and strategies to outsmart your enemies!

GOVERNMENT OFFICE

epic age government office
Your desk, from which you oversee your fledgling empire.

The Government Office tab is usually the first or second thing you look at upon logging in, depending on whether you value Silver Coins or the Draft more. It has several functions which make life easier for you.

Trade

epic age trade
Sometimes, you need more of one thing than the other. Resource trading helps with that.

At a certain City level, you can (and should!) unlock the Trade Function in the tech tree. The Trade function, accessible through the Government Building tab, allows you to trade resources for other resources, though at a loss. This allows you to offload excess resources for something you have too much of, useful especially when you’re about to draft Troops and you’re not able to max it out even though you have a lot of everything else. The loss when trading starts out fairly harsh since you initially get 40% of the resources you spend, but this can be reduced with further upgrades to the trading node in the tech tree.

Market

epic age market
The city marketplace is a hub for heroes to find their gear.

The Market is your main source of equipment for your Heroes, among other things you may find useful such as Gold ingots and Silver Coins. It is divided into multiple sections: Supplies, Military, and Honor, which have a hint of what they’re selling, and the currency they take. The Military store takes Battle Merit which can be taken by capturing territories level 5 and above and usually sells equipment for your Heroes.

The Honor store and Supply store are similar to each other in that they tend to sell more random things, ranging from Gold and EXP books to equipment. While the Honor Store takes Honor points from matchmaking PVP (not to be confused with attacking other players’ cities), the Supply store takes random currencies every refresh for every item, and some items are even sold for basic resources like Wood, Iron, Stone, and Food. Always check at least the Supply Store every day, in case they sell something for resources.

Levy

epic age levy
The only certainties in life are death and taxes. As a king, you often have to deliver both.

Levy is a fancy word for taxation. It is your primary source of Silver apart from completing quests and event goals. Silver is an important resource for getting and upgrading Heroes: It is used for Training, which is an expensive, relatively inefficient, but rather fast way of leveling up Heroes.

It is also used for the Elite gacha, a gacha that has hilariously poor drop rates for higher tier heroes with individual 10-rolls but is so dirt cheap that you get a ton of fodder for SP conversion, which in turn is used to upgrade hero skills. You have 4 levy slots, one of which is free and three of which cost 20 Gold to use each. It might be a good idea to use the Gold levies once in a while if you’re prioritizing upgrading your current heroes rather than your tech tree.

Territory

epic age territory
A simplified map of your nation is useful for giving construction orders.

The Territory tab is the easiest way to keep track of the lands you control. From here you can see a list of all the terrain tiles you own, and whatever structures may be erected on top of them. You can also keep an eye on your terrain and structure ownership limit here. This tab also offers a quick way to offload unwanted low-level terrain tiles or to jump to said tiles if you have a hard time finding them on the map and need to gather there or set up a structure on top of said tile.

Dispatch

epic age dispatch
An adventure away from war.

The Dispatch function allows you to send your Heroes out to look for treasure and equipment. It is unlocked by the Cartography node in the Tech tree, after upgrading your City Hall to level 7. The higher the level of your Cartography upgrade, the more and better the Dispatch missions and their rewards get. Send your strongest heroes out if possible: While political appointees cannot be sent to Dispatches, combat heroes can still fight even while they’re on Dispatch missions, and stronger heroes typically increase the chance of getting a better reward.

GENERAL TIPS AND STRATEGIES

epic age capital city
The capital city, the heart of any empire.

Epic Age is a strategy game. As such, there are quite a few things you need to think about when making any moves. You have to plan out your actions, whether it be during a war with another player or simple daily busy work that keeps your city and kingdom running. Here are some tips for general play.

Use up your Decrees

epic age decrees
Defense and economic policy require paper for paperwork, which is a bit of a luxury back in the age of sword and shield.

Every hour, you recover a single Decree, which is a resource much like Stamina in other mobile games but is not to be confused with the entirely separate Stamina your army squadrons have. A Decree is used for various tasks such as Formations, advanced construction, and most of all, Gathering.

Gathering costs 3 decrees and is usually a good idea if you want a big influx of resources ASAP, perhaps for Drafting troops or getting that one Tech tree upgrades you’ve been eyeing the whole day. If you’re all out of Decrees, then check if you can do anything with your soldiers’ Stamina and if your reserve troops are at a healthy number. If those are also empty, then it’s time to take a break for an hour or two.

Keep an eye on Stamina

epic age stamina
A soldier can only fight so long until they can swing their sword no more.

If you ever get into a proper, honest-to-goodness war with another active player for some reason, Stamina suddenly becomes a very important thing to watch for. Every single round your soldiers take while they attack the enemy, they expend some Stamina, whether they win or lose. No matter how strong that army is, they will stop attacking and attempt to take a break on an adjacent tile if they run out of stamina.

This means you have to keep a very close eye on your siege units’ stamina, to make sure they go all the way in knocking down the enemy city’s walls, or else they may just go home right at the last bit of HP the enemy city has. If all you want is to capture neutral terrain, on the other hand, it’s just an indicator of whether or not you should call it a day, much like Decrees. This also goes for your troops defending the artillery team: If they’re out of stamina, they’re not gonna hold out for long if they get into a fight with any intercepting units!

Lives Are Currency, Keep Drafting

epic age drafting
Glory, land, and progress are paid for in blood. Spend it well!

Think of your soldiers’ lives as the price you pay for taking territory. Always remember that while an army guarding a tile might be strong enough to overpower one of your squadrons, you can attack it with the combined might of multiple squadrons as long as the timer for that enemy’s recovery hasn’t run out. You will usually suffer losses this way.

This means you should keep your Reserve number in mind whenever deciding to attack a powerful tile: If you can replace your losses after you win, then it could be worth it. If not, it might help to wait until the draft is done and your army reserves are full again. It’s not like your heroes can get anything done without soldiers behind them.

Speed Ups? Same Cost for 8 Seconds or 8 Years

epic age speed up
Whatever magical time-bending properties these gold bars have, we must use them efficiently.

Never speed up a Tech Tree upgrade timer that you can wait for: The Tech tree speed up cost is a constant 20 Gold for instant completion, which means you should use them on timers that are long and utterly tedious, such as upgrading the level of your City Hall.

The longer it takes to upgrade something, the more efficient that 20 gold becomes. Even then, if it’s an upgrade you’re doing at the very end of the day, you might not want to spend that 20 gold anyway: Sure that upgrade will take 8 whole hours, but you’ll be sleeping soon and you’re not about to do anything else, just leave the timer running while you sleep and the upgrade will be ready when you wake up.

Check In Every Few Hours

epic age city check
As king, you must always be there for your people.

The game kicks off relatively fast, as, during the initial Novice period, you don’t just have a shield protecting you, but also drastically faster timers for a lot of the things you do, such as capping territory. You have until then to make as much progress as possible because afterward, the game will slow down.

Once that happens, it’s best to check in every couple of hours or so: That’s how long it takes for your Reserves to fill up so your soldiers can take more land, Tech Tree upgrades can take anything from a few measly minutes to several whole hours, and you get enough Decrees to Gather every 3 hours. No use playing the game if the Draft isn’t gonna be done until the next two hours and all your soldiers were spent taking that shiny high-level resource tile you were gunning for last night!

Tile Hopping

epic age no supply chain
No use wasting resources to hold onto barren dirt.

You don’t need territory to chain with each other after you’ve captured them. You can capture next to any tile you own, marked Green or your guild owns, marked Blue, or even next to any tile owned by a player you conquered, marked Yellow, even if it doesn’t directly connect to your city. This means that while you may need to capture some Empty terrain to move your lands forward, you can abandon the Empty terrain later on by giving them a tap and then pressing the X icon.

You don’t need a clean connection to your City, you just need whatever tile you take to be next to a tile you already own. You’ll need to do this usually once you’ve filled up your allowed terrain ownership limit, and need to get terrain that gives out better resources. The other use for empty tiles is a safe place to put down defensive structures, which we will discuss later.

Level 3 And 4 Construction Zones

epic age resource structure
Just big enough to be worth taking, just small enough to be improved.

Level 3 and 4 tiles are weird: While there may be stronger, more profitable tiles available, you can only build resource-gathering structures on level 3 and 4 tiles specifically. Level 3 tiles support Basic resource structures, and level 4 tiles support Advanced resource structures. Advanced Resource Structures in particular can allow a level 4 tile to make 1200 resources per hour same as level 6 tiles, which are guarded by a total of 30000 troops compared to a level 4 tile’s pathetic 5400 strong garrisons.

This means it’s usually a good idea to have just enough level 3 and 4 tiles to support your structure limit for Basic and Advanced resource structures. You can check your structure limit by looking for the Resource Building node in the Tech tree, or the Territory tab in the Government Office screen, which you can enter via the building-shaped button to the bottom right of your screen.

Advanced Structures

epic age mint
It’s easier to set up advanced infrastructure if there is already infrastructure in the area. Unfortunately, that means more guards.

On Level 6 tiles and above, you can set up Advanced Structures, not to be mistaken for Advanced Resource Structures, which grant benefits to your army or income depending on what structure it is. You have:

The Mint generates the ever-useful Silver Coins needed for the Elite Recruitment Gacha, Training, SP Conversion for leveling skills, and other various things.

The Workshop increases your resource production so you can get Tech upgrades and conscript troops more readily.

 The Arsenal increases your maximum Reserve troop count. This allows you to get reinforcements for your armies more readily should they run into a difficult battle that depletes their numbers.

The Decree Office, which increases your maximum Decree limit. This means you can tell your troops to Gather resources more often and set up defensive positions by going into Formation, among other tasks.

And finally, Outposts, which increase your Heroes’ stamina limit, allowing them to fight more often and for longer before being forced to retreat from sheer exhaustion. This is especially important for PVP battles and sieges, since army power doesn’t matter if they run out of Stamina, and fights may end up being decided by the Stamina Bar instead of straight-up casualty counts.

You have a maximum limit of 8 Advanced Structures total, which you can reach by upgrading the Advanced Structures node in your Tech tree. Note also that level 6 tiles and above can have 2 or more armies on them, which makes them sharply more difficult to capture compared to lv5 and below tiles, which only have one army guarding them. Advanced Structures will also stop that level 6 tile from generating its original resource type, so put some thought on where you build them.

Match Heroes With Each Other

epic age recommended skills
Helpful community squadron builds can act as a goal, or at least point you in the right direction with what you have at the moment.

Each hero has a proficiency with unit types, which determines that unit’s effectiveness. Each squadron can carry 3 heroes max, and unlike most kingdom builders, you can only assign a single unit type to a squadron, with all the infantry inside turning into cavalry or whatever else you choose should you pick one.

To make the unit as effective as it can be, the Heroes within should more or less match the proficiency of the unit you want to assign to them. An example is taking all your best Cavalry heroes together to form a cavalry squadron. You can tap the Q and A button on the bottom left of the screen to check for recommended hero builds.

Join A Guild Nearby

epic age allies
Now if only there wasn’t a whole mountain range in the way.

Joining a guild confers quite a few benefits for you: It extends your reach massively by allowing you to take terrain tiles next to terrain tiles owned by guildmates. You get a portion of their resource gathering while contributing some of yours, which comes to a net profit for you. You will also be able to get rewards from guild-based events.

Before you do though, check out which guilds are very close to you, and we don’t just mean the ones within the same area as you indicated by the Guild screen. We mean the ones within marching distance of your city! The closer you are to a strong guildmate, the easier it is for them to rescue you should things go wrong and someone else sieges you, and for you to do the same for said guildie.

Joining a guild marked near only to realize they’re too far away to march to while being sat next to a particularly aggressive player as a newbie is not a thrilling feeling.

Silver surplus? Roll the Elite Recruitment!

epic age silver gacha

Soon enough, you’ll unlock the Elite Recruitment gacha from the Recruitment screen. This allows you to spend Silver from levies (You can levy Silver from your city daily by tapping on the button that looks like a building) on Heroes, usually low-tier ones but you can occasionally get Epics and Rares. This is the best money sink in the game since even if it will likely give you heroes you don’t want, it’s fairly cheap and the heroes you don’t want can be converted to SP, Skill Points.

SP can be used to level up skills, and duplicate or unwanted Heroes can be used to increase a skill’s maximum level. Roll this gacha constantly. And if you get dupes of heroes you already maxed out, you can use the Skill Inheritance function to get rid of them, and you will be able to apply their hero-specific skill to other heroes who have open skill slots. Note that this can be only done once per Hero, so any more dupes should be melted for SP or kept on hand for events that ask you for them.

WAR AND MORE WAR

epic age tension
Don’t mind us, just passing through!

In this game, war is pretty much inevitable, whether it be between players or neutral territories that somehow have giant garrisons in them. While the game automatically calculates who wins or loses when two armies collide with each other, you have ways to control the outcome beyond just making a superior hero build, hero combination, equipment, and army numbers.

Such as forcing your opponent to waste stamina and unit morale with clever moves and positioning of defensive structures, or deciding which armies attack which targets first so none of the above happens to you.

An Army marches On Its… Morale Bar?

epic age tent
No matter how strong the army is, they cannot fight with weary feet and empty bellies.

Marching long distances can reduce the Morale of your squadrons, with each tile they travel shaving off 1 point of Morale, and they have a limit of 100. Reduced Morale will make them vulnerable, since it will lower their attack power, and an army with 0 morale will only do a pitifully limp, soggy 30% of their usual damage power! The only way to recover Morale is for the soldiers to stop moving and rest their feet.

If you want to attack a target from a distance far from your city, remember to set up Tents near the enemy you happen to be attacking, or simply as checkpoints after every 30-50 or so tiles. Tents allow you to Draft and reinforce a single Squadron (Multiple squadrons once upgraded!) without having to walk back to your City.

This lets those troops spend less Morale marching back toward the enemy after a retreat, as they can simply take a break in the Tent, reinforce, then attack again having only walked a short distance. They also provide map vision with two tiles ranging all around themselves, which lets you check if armies are marching toward you. You may need Tents if you want to link up with one of your guild mates.

On the other hand, if you’re at war with another player, check how far away their troops are from the nearest enemy tent or guildie city, and check their morale using the yellow bar under their commander’s name: If you catch them at low morale on their way to you, sweep them up with your troops when they get close so you’re fighting them while they’re hungry and their legs hurt!

Undefensive Terrain, Defensive Structures

epic age tower
Towers to ward enemies off your lawn.

Do you know how high-level tiles have tough garrisons in them even when no player controls them? This also applies to tiles controlled by players, which can protect against the enemy even though you didn’t put any of your troops in them directly. This also means that lower-level terrain tiles can act as a weak spot in your defenses! This is what defensive structures like the Chevaux du Frise and Archer Towers are for:

These force the enemy to either risk going through your higher level tiles and waste stamina and troops, or attack those structures with Artillery, which also wastes the Artillery’s stamina. The more stamina you force the enemy to waste not attacking your City or troops, the fewer rounds of fighting the enemy can do if they reach you.

This also lets you intercept said units while they’re busy, especially Artillery, which is weak vs all troops yet are the most dangerous threat to your City. This can be one excuse to keep some strategically positioned low-level tiles, particularly ones that lead to a weak spot that needs plugging up. Of course, keep in mind that if the enemy DOES manage to clear out one of your high-level tiles, your income will suffer for it.

Spears Stab Horses, Horses Trample Infantry, Infantry Steamrolls Archers, Archers Pincushion Spears…

epic age food
An infantry garrison holding some land. Routing them with horsemen should usually do the job.

There are 5 types of units in the game, of which 4 of them are used for general combat. Spearmen, like in most games, beat Cavalry Units, Cavalry can roll over Infantry, Infantry can shield themselves from Archers, and Archers can drown Spearmen in arrows. In most other mobile games of this type, the safe option is usually to make a mixed army composition so it has no obvious weaknesses.

This is NOT the case with Epic Age, since here, a squadron can only carry a single type of unit with it, even if it can carry 3 different heroes as commanders. Thankfully, it is relatively easy to swap between unit types: Just tap one of your commanders on the top right of the screen and then press Assign Squad. This takes you to their Assign Squad screen, which lets you reinforce their armies from your reserves, and lets you swap their unit type out.

Just press Choose Troops and pick, as an example, Cavalry, and suddenly, those 3000 Archers under that unit’s command now know how to ride horses and use lances! That being said, we state this as being “relatively” easy because of how Heroes work since they each have proficiencies with different units. And if they suck with a certain unit, then it might not be a good idea to assign it to them unless you’re pretty desperate.

… And Artillery Wrecks Homes

epic age artillery
Artillery is the best, and usually only, way to paint someone’s city yellow.

Artillery is the fifth type of unit in the rock paper scissors of the game, and gets a special mention because it’s a weird one: It is weak against all other units but can be used to besiege Cities, ruin defensive Structures, and press-gang neutral or hostile players into your Guild so they can’t attack you. As such, if you see one marching to your city, you might want to recall everyone home so you can repel it.

Otherwise, you’ll be subjugated by the player’s guild. Having a unit that can double as Artillery might be a good idea if you want to “help” another player decide what guild to join. Note that you do the same 300+ siege damage to buildings no matter how many troops are in your Artillery army: This means even a hero and two guys manning a single arrow-riddled catapult is a threat if it reaches your City, so you’ll need Arrow Towers or an intercepting army to get rid of them anyway if they wind up closing into one of your structures.

This also means you can use your weakened Artillery to force the enemy to intercept them, then you can ambush their troops if you spot them with low morale on their way to try and stop your Arty. If you’re the one besieging the enemy, it may be a good idea to send in actual troops into the city first to clear it out, so the siege units can go in unimpeded and burn the place to the ground.

Commander’s Personal Favorites

epic age unit proficiency
Commanders will often specialize in one or two forms of troops.

Each Hero acting as squadron commanders have various proficiency levels, rated from S (120% combat effectiveness) to D (hilariously worthless), on how well they command certain unit types. Because of this, it’s best not just to match units with the Heroes in the group, but also certain heroes with each other: If you want a Cavalry unit to be as good as it can be, you pick 3 commanders with high proficiency in commanding Cavalry.

And don’t worry about flexibility too much: Usually, Commanders have one or two units they’re good with, a couple more they’re okay with, and some they’re worthless with. In a pinch, you can assign them, troops, they are merely good with, say something they’re rated B for, should you find yourself unable to counter certain units.

Politicians for Politics, Generals For Battle

epic age government
A lot of the time, civilian affairs must be left to the civilians, while the military handles military affairs. Crossovers sometimes end in disaster for everyone involved.

If you check some heroes’ stats or army proficiencies, you may find that they have utterly poor stats for battle, lack good army proficiencies altogether, or worse, both. If so, check their Politics and Charm stats: If they’re high, then they aren’t combating Heroes.

Instead, you should give them government appointments through the Appoint screen, which you can access by tapping your City then tapping Enter City, then the Appoint button. Both these stats make for good government appointees, with their Political stat affecting boost effects from being appointed, and their Charm affecting bonus effects.

Scouting Matters

epic age overwhelming numbers
Countering is always a good idea. That being said, overwhelming numbers don’t hurt either!

The rock paper scissors in this game also affect combat with the AI instead of just other players: Each tile you can conquer, even unowned neutral tiles, has their Heroes and associated unit type guarding it. You can scout it out by tapping the tile then tapping Scout, then Information.

It will tell you the heroes commanding it, the skills they have, their unit type, and the size of their army. The higher level of the tile, the nastier the army guarding it, and even early on you might find yourself attacking single tiles using more than one squadron.

Scout, then send the unit that bests counters the enemy, then send in a clean-up crew in case the first attack doesn’t cut it, since it takes AI tiles a few minutes to recover losses. That being said, you can’t scout an enemy player’s tiles, so beware when attacking other players, since you will only be able to see the unit type of a player-controlled enemy squadron marching rather than the contents of an “undefended” red tile, which will only tell you the number defending it. 

Getting Conquered And Its Consequences

Again, artillery pointed at you can have some annoying consequences.

So despite all that, you still got conquered by an enemy nation. Perhaps you spawned next to a high-level player who you had no hope of overpowering within the 5 minutes their overfed armies were gonna march into your city, and you just happened to be in the way of a juicy resource tile.

This can make it a bit harder to expand: You can do everything a normal player can do if you’ve been subjugated, except conquer other players. This means your ability to expand and look for certain tiles is hampered since the easiest way to get some area coverage is to look for a nearby player and paint their tiles yellow by burying their City in artillery.

Afterward, you can use their yellow tiles as jumping points for exploration and expansion. There are only two ways out of being Captured: Get rescued by one of your guildmates, or pay a steep ransom to whoever captured your city. Always remember: Check if there are any really dangerous players near your city and if there are, join their guild so you won’t have to deal with the nonsense of being captured. Or teleport your capital away, either work.

GREATER HEROES, BIGGER ARMIES

epic age heroes
The big names are in front of the real backbone of a battle line.

A big part of the game is collecting heroes, strengthening them, then matching them together so they complement not just each others’ skills, but also their unit command proficiencies. There are many avenues toward strengthening a hero, all of which must be taken for them to be at their most effective during either combat or as administrators for your city.

From using dupes to both give them more skills and make the hero themselves stronger, to leveling them up through Training and grinding fights and Sweeps while getting certain Tech tree upgrades to increase the number of units they can command. Here they are.

Advancement

epic age advancement
A very literal depiction of a Hero searching for themselves.

If levels affect your Hero’s army size, Advancement affects their statline directly. To advance a Hero, you will need duplicates of said hero, which you can get from the various gachas in the Recruitment tab, usually the Elite Gacha since that one takes silver coins.

The higher the star level of a Hero, the more you can advance them, with higher star level heroes often having a higher maximum total statline compared to lower tiers, though being much harder to advance thanks to their rarity.

Each star level increase adds 10 stat points you can distribute, which usually get spent on stats they are already good at so you can make the most of their strengths. Note that you should only spend on the Political and Charm stats for heroes you Appoint as government officials, and on the other stats if they’re being used for combat.

Levels and Training

epic age training
Training is generally useful early in the game, but later you might prefer to rely on fighting because of its high cost and diminishing returns.

The most direct way to strengthen your army is to level up your Heroes by fighting and using the Training function. Levels don’t affect your Hero’s stat line: Instead, it simply tells you how many troops a Hero can have under their command, with each level adding extra space for 100 troops under them. Early in the game, this is the most important thing to get for your heroes as the early game army size differences can be very overwhelming. T

hat being said, later on, spending on skill upgrades becomes more useful as the incredibly high cost of leveling mixed with the static power increase of each level means you’re not powering up efficiently if you dump all your Silver Coins into Training, and shoveling Silver into the gacha lets you do so much more thanks to Hero dupes having more than a single use. Besides, you can grind levels by using the Sweep function! Just go to the terrain you already control and use Sweep to pick a fight with the locals. For some reason, they are totally fine with this.

One particularly odd way to level a Hero up is to Appoint them to a government position. This ensures that they are constantly gathering EXP just by sitting on their chair and providing a bonus to resource generation, even when you’re offline. It can be highly effective over time, as you’ll sometimes notice your government officials become rather high-level compared to long-time military officers, who only really get EXP from fighting, and can only go through Training when not assigned to a Squadron.

That being said, if you do this, you’ll be sacrificing some resources since combat stat Heroes tend to offer smaller resource bonuses than Political or Charm stat Heroes, and lack Skills for government office.

Military Technologies

epic age military technologies
People say war never changes. Perhaps the goal and result might not change, but the methods always do.

In the tech tree, many nodes can strengthen a hero’s army. Look inside and it should be obvious enough to tell which ones are for a military application and the ones for a good economy, such as the various Training STAT nodes which improve hero stats directly. Especially since they’re arranged under Admin, Military, and Defense. But of particular note to look at especially early on are the Logistics, Coordinated Strike, and Military Theory nodes.

All of them increase the overall size of your army in one way or another beyond leveling your Heroes. Logistics increases the number of squadrons you have to a maximum of 5, Coordinated Strike comes second after Logistics unlocking the third hero slot of its respective squadron number, and Military Theory increases the number of troops each Hero can carry. Get at least Coordinated Logistics and Coordinated Strike maxed as your first big goal while upgrading the nodes that the Main and Sub quests require of you.

Skills

epic age skill
Commanders often have a favored stratagem they become famous for.

Skills make the Hero what they are, and each Hero has a starting skill unique to them, and room for two other skills which can be unlocked and filled later on. To upgrade skills, you can spend Skill Points which you can get by spending Silver Coins to convert low-tier heroes (Greys and Greens) to get said Skill Points.

Once you have a skill at max level, you can further increase its maximum level by spending duplicate heroes of a tier below the skill, which usually means Blues and Purples. Having a mix of skills that complement each other, the skills of the other heroes in the squadron, and the task given to them becomes very important later into the game when the army size differences between you and enemy heroes become smaller and smaller, especially once you have a pair of full 5 squadrons of 3-hero level 50 armies smacking each other around.

Skill Inheritance

epic age skill inheritance
A retiring commander may impart their wisdom to those they leave behind.

Skill Inheritance is another one of the ways you can make use of duplicate cards. If say your hero reaches maximum star levels and you get duplicates of them, you have two choices: Convert the dupes to SP, or use Skill Inheritance so you can assign their unique starting skill to another hero.

This destroys the hero card, which is why it’s usually a good idea only to do this once you’ve maxed out the hero with that skill, or if it’s a good skill on a hero with poor stats. Only Blue and above heroes can be used for Skill Inheritance since Greens and Greys only have common basic Skills as starters. Note that Skill Inheritance only lets you assign that skill once: To assign the same unique skill to more heroes, you’ll need more dupes of that Hero.

And this ends our Epic Age Beginner’s Guide. If you have your own tips or tricks to share, please put them in the comment section below!

Ivan

Friday 23rd of December 2022

"Dec 1, 2022 — The closer you are to a strong guildmate, the easier it is for them to rescue you should things go wrong and someone else sieges you..."

Can you explain in more detail how the 'rescue' option works? I cannot seem to get the rescue option to function.