There is no doubt that everyone would want to live as a king, even if it is just in fantasy worlds. SayGames’ King or Fail: Castle Takeover puts you in the shoes of a king, but not the type who just sits on his throne and rules by giving orders to his subordinates. With a herculean responsibility resting on your shoulders, you will need to be as active as possible performing numerous tasks in relation to protecting, expanding, and developing your kingdom and tending to its people.
Being a king in King or Fail: Castle Takeover is a challenging yet exciting role to get into as you will cycle across a wide variety of tasks as you move forward in your unique adventure. Expanding your kingdom’s territory certainly means having to take over other castles and doing so requires leading an army. Naturally, you can also expect gathering resources and crafting items to be a part of the usual activities involved to sustain your growing kingdom’s needs. The full extent of your kingdom’s growth and expansion will surely be beyond what you would expect.
King or Fail: Castle Takeover is certainly a straightforward adventure and its core design ensures that even complete beginners will be able to grasp the basics within a short period. You can play through the entire adventure utilizing just one finger and actions like attacking, gathering items and materials, and even selling goods are all automated.
As a casual game, progress can be made even by adventurers with very limited time. However, the rate at which your kingdom will grow and develop is heavily impacted by the amount of time and effort you spend adventuring. Beyond that, there are simple tricks and strategies you should consider to ensure a fast and efficient progression. If you are keen on advancing in King or Fail: Castle Takeover at a rapid pace, then look no further as our beginner’s guide has all the basic tips and strategies you need to become the most powerful king in no time!
1. Follow The Quest Targets
King or Fail: Castle Takeover starts you off with just a small area to roam around in as you are introduced to the most basic tasks of gathering resources and building the most basic structures. Naturally, the small area that makes up the entirety of your kingdom will only continue to expand and develop to host various structures and features that further help you progress in your journey.
As expansions create additional goods and resources for your kingdom, it expectedly comes with more activities to engage in and more concerns to tend to. It will be a common scenario to experience being torn between or among several activities or upgrade options, especially with the latter being subject to limited funds on your end. King or Fail: Castle Takeover, however, provides a quest system that not only gives you extra rewards with each objective’s completion but also serves as your most important guide towards advancing in your journey.
Although King or Fail: Castle Takeover seems to have an unlimited stack of quests lined up for you, you will only see them one at a time flashed at the top of your screen. Throughout your adventure, the available quests will cycle across the basic activities and milestones you will typically be engaging in on your journey. These will generally involve upgrading troops, upgrading structures, gathering a certain amount of a specific material, selling specific resources in the shop, winning a castle takeover battle, and even reaching a new level.
For the most part, accomplishing a quest target before it appears at the top of the screen is okay and once it pops up, it will immediately appear as completed and you will automatically receive your rewards. The usual exemptions to this consideration are tasks that involve gathering items, crafting them, and selling them at the shop.
In this sense, it becomes important to try and adhere as strictly as you can to the quest at hand as doing so ensures that you will make progress as fast and as efficiently as possible. At some point, it may take you a little longer to accomplish the current quest, specifically when it requires spending more gold than what you currently can afford. In these instances, you can always spend time engaging in different activities as you please while also working towards earning more gold to move forward.
2. Purchase Upgrades As Soon As You Can
Despite providing a plethora of activities for you to engage in, the only way for you to earn EXP in King or Fail: Castle Takeover is to engage in battles. Battles take you through enemy castles on a seemingly endless map and you can expect opposing armies to grow in strength and number with each new battle stage. Following the quest objectives will ensure that your armies are up to par with the challenges ahead as upgrading troops are a common quest objective you will come across.
Upgrading troops, just like upgrading structures and everything else within your kingdom, have soft level caps, meaning that they can only be upgraded to a certain level based on your current adventurer level. It may take several battles to earn enough EXP to reach the next level but each new level reached comes with new features or structures unlocked as well as increases in level caps of available upgrades.
Although you can always choose to push forward with attacks one after another, so long as you have the strength and time to do so, the best approach to move forward is to still follow the quest targets and cycle across other activities before taking on the next battle. Castle takeovers are certainly easy early on, especially with the help of the cannon that can deal massive damage to a large group of enemies. As your kingdom grows and your level increases, however, you can expect succeeding battles to be more and more challenging.
The higher your level, the more structures and features become available for construction and upgrade and in some cases, even having access to more sources of gold will still make it a challenge to purchase every available upgrade. For the troops as well as the establishments, we recommend maxing out the upgrade levels before you attempt to reach the next higher level. However, there are other upgrade options available in King or Fail: Castle Takeover that does not have level caps and can be patronized based on your current needs.
You will unlock the tavern when you reach level 3 and the tavern hosts a trio of upgrades for the king. Expectedly, each upgrade costs gold and each higher level costs more. You can increase your character’s attack, health, and even axe power. Axe power may seem confusing at first, but this relates to your character’s strength in terms of gathering wood and fruits.
A higher level of axe power will eventually require fewer slashes to cut down a tree. The tree farms are among the areas you can upgrade as well so if you leave your axe power at base level and upgrade those resource spots, it will take you a lot more time to farm for wood and other resources that require using your axe.
We recommend considering the king upgrades as secondary priorities relative to all other upgrades. These upgrades will not likely form part of your quests although each upgrade option will certainly make your journey easier. If you want to take a break from pursuing quests or engaging in battles one after another, then you can always spend more time in your kingdom to speed up gold earnings and purchase the tavern upgrades one after another.
3. Establish A Path For Routine Work
Although it will take some time and a lot of battles before the castle takeover stages will necessitate some investments in attack and health back at the tavern, purchasing bits of upgrades early on can make the challenges easier, especially if the cannon is not available for free or if you are not particularly keen on playing an ad to use it.
Straying from quests, King or Fail: Castle Takeover has plenty of activities to offer that will prove to be beneficial for you in your long journey ahead. Gathering resources, crafting, selling goods, and collecting gold make up the steps necessary for a production cycle that aims to augment your gold earnings. More gold earnings, in turn, allow you to max out all pending upgrades relative to your troops and structures as well as chip in some boosts to strengthen your character’s offense and defense.
To begin with, you will have people in your kingdom that help you gather resources automatically and almost endlessly. By “almost endlessly”, we mean that they will only continue gathering for as long as there is sufficient storage space for the goods they farm, like the woodman’s cabin, warehouses for produces, and even the fisherman’s hut. Although all these storage structures can be gradually upgraded, you will always find the workers idle as the storages become full rather easily and quickly.
Other than quests, battles, and ad boosts, the way you can earn extra gold with manual activity involved is through your market. This will initially be a fruit stand just beside the first residential house that initially sells berries for gold. This will eventually grow to include apples and jam as products and separate stalls for fish and other products can be unlocked as well. As for the buyers, the more houses you build and upgrade, the more customers you will have purchasing goods continuously.
Just like the gatherers and the respective storage structures where they take their goods, the market stall sellers will also work continuously provided that there are goods to sell and that there is sufficient space for the gold they earn. Goods being sold at the market also have a limit, which means that you will have to replenish them from time to time.
You will also be able to employ couriers at some point in your adventure and these NPCs will ceaselessly take items from storage down to the market. However, the couriers have very limited carrying capacity so chances are that storage will still be full ad the market will still be empty without your intervention.
An efficient way of managing resources and earning gold in King or Fail: Castle Takeover requires more active involvement on your part to tend to the resource-gathering aspect of kingdom management as well as replenishing the market supplies and claiming the gold earned. This trio of tasks encompasses more activities as there are several materials to gather and there are items that can be processed as well, like the jam for instance.
In this sense, it is best to establish a route that lets you go around the kingdom to handle each of these tasks quickly and efficiently. As your kingdom continues to expand, adjustments to an established route should naturally be made.
Taking the market stall as our focal point, what we usually do is walk through the kingdom in a clockwise manner, collecting resources along the way. We will pass by the berry storage structure first. As this stands as your initial storage structure, you can expect this to have the highest probability of being full considering the upgrades on the berry farm and the number of workers as well. If after touring your kingdom once and it appears that you return to the market stalls ahead of time, feel free to engage in gathering berries manually as well.
The next stop is the jam factory and if you have some extra apples at your disposal, you can leave some here for processing. Jam takes a little time to be produced but the price increase they yield is well worth the effort. To its right comes the apple tree garden alongside its storage facility. The workers assigned to automatically harvest apples and take them to storage will unlock later than those working the berries so if you do not have helpers here yet, you should consider manually harvesting apples.
Further to the upper right side of the apple tree garden is where most trees are cut down for wood and wood stands as among the most basic resources you will need from the start of your adventure to the very end. There are lumberjacks to help you gather wood and the woodsman’s cabin will have a secondary unit ahead of all other storage facilities. Considering upgrade levels, you will likely not need to chop down trees manually and will even witness the log cabins being full for the most part of your adventure.
If you have unlocked the fish pond, you will soon after be able to enjoy idly earning fish once you have built the fisherman’s hut. Like all other resources, the pond takes a while to replenish its supply of fish and if you want to manually catch some fish, the trick is to check the ripples along the fishing area. When fish are available for catching, the ripples are bigger and more active. There are very limited fish to catch in one go but with some pond upgrades, you can have multiple fishing areas on the pond.
After visiting the pond and the fisherman’s hut, now would be the time to head to the market to unload some goods and replenish the stocks for sale. The gold depot where sales end up is conveniently situated between the stalls so be sure to collect all your gold profits and proceed to restart your cycle if you still want more gold.
4. Every Battle Can Be Won With Patience
For adventurers who enjoy the action more than the city-building aspect of King or Fail: Castle Takeover, the battle mode where you take over castles to expand your kingdom is certainly a challenging and entertaining treat. As we mentioned earlier, passing through the initial levels of the battle mode can be a breeze but you can expect stronger enemy forces with each new castle you challenge. Beyond army strength, battles can also stretch further where your march from the starting point to the end of the level will require breaking through multiple barriers and more soldiers.
Even in the first battle, you will engage in, you will already be introduced to the cannon, which is a very powerful weapon that can wipe out large numbers of enemies. The cannon is free to use once every 10 minutes, but you can always choose to play a short video ad to instantly eliminate the cool-down period. What would usually happen in the initial levels is that you will hardly have any challenge ahead after using the cannon just once but as you move forward in the castle takeover campaigns, there will still be plenty of enemies even after downing a group with a cannon.
The ad option for using cannons is practically infinite, which means that you can basically clear every level utilizing it as many times as you want and then proceed to walk through the level to collect the loot and exit the stage. As cheesy as it feels, playing through an entire level utilizing multiple cannon shots does require a lot of patience especially since the video ads you will play here are 30 seconds long.
If you choose not to utilize the cannon, then you will next have to rely on the strength of your army, which is entirely dependent on their numbers and respective upgrade levels. Each new level reached by your troops increases their attack strength and health but this will be challenging to determine in actual combat given that there are no visible damage numbers or health bars on the battle arena. You will likely be surprised by how long your troops can survive in combat with each new level.
Even in the absence of troops under your command, you can still beat any level in King or Fail: Castle Takeover. It is neither shown in the tutorial nor indicated anywhere in the game, but your character, the king, holds tremendous superpowers that make him unbeatable in combat. The king’s first superpower is HP regeneration.
You will take damage from enemy hits and you will see your life bar decrease but if you stay idle and do not take hits for a short while, your health will start to recover. Considering that enemy troops will not move forward as far as the starting point of the level, you can always just make a short retreat if you are low on health and get back into battle once your HP has fully recovered.
The king’s even more powerful ability is resurrecting himself at full health infinitely. Even if the enemy troops overwhelm you and manage to reduce your health to zero, perishing in battle will simply have you respawn back at the starting point of the level. The level itself will not reset so you can simply proceed straight to where you left off and complete the level. Considering both these abilities, it is safe to say that anyone can beat every battle stage on their first try.
5. Take Advantage of Ad Boosts
For casual and hyper-casual mobile games, above most other genres, it should always be expected that ads of different forms will form part of the app’s package, especially considering the free-to-play ones that cannot rely on micro-transactions for profit. While the presence of ads, particularly video ads that pop up every once in a while, may serve as a nuisance for some players, it is important to understand that these ads are necessary to ensure that the game will remain available for everyone to play and enjoy for free.
While King or Fail: Castle Takeover does contain video ads that pop up during gameplay, these are ads that you can easily and conveniently skip after 5 seconds. There are plenty of other video ads to see, but those are voluntary and form part of the app’s ad boost campaign. Like any other casual mobile game, we recommend that you take advantage of the ad boosts as much as you can as each of them will certainly propel your progression a lot faster than effort and even the most active playing routine.
One of the most important ad boosts we always tend to patronize is the icon that pops up at the lower left corner of the screen. For the most part, these ad boosts coincide with your current needs relative to your quest. If you need a specific resource to collect, then chances are that an ad boost giving away the resource you need will pop up. If you are low on gold and have numerous pending upgrades, then you are likely to see an offer to play a 15 to 30-second video ad to receive a huge sum of gold.
Despite having soft level caps on troop upgrades, the growing number of troops at your disposal, and their respective upgrade levels, will require more gold than what you currently have and will often require you to engage in collecting resources and tending to your market stalls to amass more gold. In some cases, the upgrade cost for troops can become free, provided that you choose to play a short video ad in exchange for paying gold.
As these offers are not always present, we recommend taking advantage of them whenever you see them. Even a full 30-second ad is a lot shorter than the time it would take you to accumulate the required amount of gold for upgrade payments.
The tavern that houses the King Upgrades is not just a place to strengthen your hero. At the bottom of the window, you can instantly earn 50 gold for playing a short video ad. This ad offer is consistently available and you can take advantage of it as often as you want. Compared to every other ad boost that can give you gold, however, this is the lowest and even the lowest levels of free troop upgrades have more value. In any case, you can always resort to this if no other offers are available and you are in dire need of more gold.
We mentioned earlier that you can continue to use the cannons in battle and cut down its cool-down period to zero by playing a short ad. Once you have completed the level and can take the gold and wood you looted from the stage, you can double the amount thru another ad boost. In essence, this is like taking on the battle challenge a second time for the same amount of loot, but it will only take 30 seconds, considering the ad length, and will offer no additional EXP.
As much as this ad boosts bear a lot of benefits, keep in mind that King or Fail: Castle Takeover does not force any ads on its players. You do not need internet connectivity to play and fully enjoy the game. You can simply turn off your Wi-Fi or mobile data and enjoy your adventure without any interruptions from ads that pop up.
Keep in mind, however, that you will also not be able to enjoy any of the ad boosts we discussed above and if you suddenly decide to utilize an ad boost, it may take a while before you can do so after turning your device’s internet connection back on unless you restart the game.
King or Fail: Castle Takeover certainly still holds a lot of expansions and upgrades in store for you but the simple tips and strategies we shared with you are sure to apply to any scenario or challenge you will encounter moving forward. If it so happens that you came across some more tricks beyond what we have uncovered, do not hesitate to tell us about them in the comments!