Welcome, your grace! As a new monarch, your objective is to establish your kingdom while defending it against the endless incursions of monsters and other monarchs seeking to subvert your reign. To aid you in your quest, you have an army of loyal archers, goblins, and elves, as well as a wide selection of powerful heroes.
Kingdom Guard is an unorthodox title that’s part TD, part base builder, and all very light. This title from Tap4Fun is available on both iOS and Android platforms, and is a very accessible game. In particular, Kingdom Guard can be said to be a light version of other empire builders such as Evony: The King’s Return or West Game.
While Kingdom Guard doesn’t quite provide the depth of the latter two games, it’s also very easy to play, making it a good stepping stone and a fun game to play in its own right.
To help you ease into the game, we’ve compiled a detailed Kingdom Guard beginner’s guide, that includes tips, tricks and strategies to save the world!
Rush Through the Tower Defense
Much of the game is gated behind what stage you’ve managed to complete in the tower defense. Because of this, it’s important to rush through the tower defense section as quickly as you can. Luckily, the tower defense system can be played with minimal input from the player.
Training and Merging Units
Merging units is most of Kingdom Guard’s tower defense gameplay, and it’s up to you to keep merging units even as more enemies come pouring in. The formula for merging is quite simple: two similar units of the same tier can be fused into a unit that’s 1 tier higher. Two level 1 archers become 1 level 2 archer, and so on. The higher a unit’s tier, the better its performance.
To get more units, you can train them for a small sum of gold by tapping the train button at the bottom of the screen. While this does get more expenive, you won’t be using the tower defense gold for anything else.
Merge Slots and Discarding Units
As you play through the tower defense game, you’ll unlock more merge slots. These will not only let you train more units, but it also expands the amount of space you have for merging units.
However, it’s still possible to run out of slots. Instead of just standing there and doing nothing, you can drag a unit to the blue magic circle in the lower right of your merge panel to discard it.
Auto Merge
Merging can quickly become tedious, especially if you’ve got nothing but level 1 units constantly popping up. To mitigate this, you can use Kingdom Guard’s auto merge function. By watching an ad, you’ll enable auto merge for a certain number of times.
Auto merge does exactly what it sounds like – it automatically merges units in your reserves. However, do note that auto merge does not merge units already on towers. For that, you’ll to go a step further and buy an elite monthly card. With real money.
Unit Towers
Each unit requires that it be placed on a tower to start firing. What’s not immediately apparent is that these are not permanent commitments, meaning you can take a unit off a tower if you’d like. You can also merge units on towers to streamline the merging process.
Heroes on the Field
As you progress through the tower defense stages, you’ll eventually gain the ability to place heroes on the field. Unlike regular units, heroes can be placed on the path, and will automatically engage enemies that come near them.
The Dragon Egg
The ultimate goal of the tower defense section is to hatch the dragon egg. This is done by completing all the chapters and their related quests. Note that quest requirements are not retroactive – if the current chapter tasks you to promote a unit or level up a hero, actions you’ve taken before receiving that quest do not count. With that in mind, it’s best to only perform actions when the egg specifically requests for them.
Completing these tasks also nets you a sum of resources, such as gold, stone, gems, and other stuff. And when the egg finally hatches, you’ll gain access to the Dragonden.
Town Development
Your town serves as your economic and military hub. Each building in your town has its own purpose, and we’ll briskly walk you through each of the early game facilities.
Castle
The castle serves as the central building of Kingdom Guard. Castle upgrades are very important as they affect many things: the initial level of new units, the maximum level units can have, the maximum level of heroes, and the maximum level of monsters you can fight.
Upgrading your castle requires both stone and gold.
Chronicle
The chronicle marks server-wide achievements that everyone can benefit from. It doesn’t matter if you’re in an alliance or not – as soon as your server attains the goals set forth by the chronicle, everyone on the server can claim them. These tasks are stuff that you would normally do in the course of playing the game, so it’s really just a matter of patience.
Tavern
The tavern is where you can recruit more heroes to join your cause. You get 1 free advanced recruitment per day, and 5 free normal recruitments gated behind ads. Since you need hero cards to not only recruit new heroes, but also to level up existing heroes, it’s in your best interest to visit the tavern often.
Barracks
Once your level is high enough, you’ll be able to upgrade your four unit types directly at the barracks. This vastly improves their performance, so sinking resources into your units is always a good decision, and we’ll talk more about this in depth later.
Academy
The academy allows you to purchase passive skills that improve virtually all aspects of your kingdom. Fortunately, research in Kingdom Guard is instant, although you will have to pay with both gold and skill shards. It’s important to note that your castle’s level also ties in with what skills you’re allowed to purchase.
Dragonden
The dragonden is unique in that it’s unlocked via the egg hatching quest rather than just completing tower defense stages.
Once it’s hatched, your dragon provides invaluable assistance to your armies on the field. Due to its cloning powers (the game’s words, not mine), the dragon can accompany several units at once. However, you’ll need to unlock assistants via the academy to bring the dragon with you.
The dragonden also serves as your dragon’s upgrade interface. By feeding it dragon runes and gold, you can improve the strength of your fire-breathing friend, and even raise its tier. As if that wasn’t enough, the dragonden also passively generates more runes to help you get stronger faster!
Vault
The vault passively generates gold for you even while you’re away from the game. While the vault already has a decent gold generation speed, you can boost this even further by assigning heroes to the vault, at the cost of unlocking each slot for a large sum of Gems.
Do note that there’s a limit as to how much gold the vault can hold before it needs to be manually emptied.
Resource Gathering
While Kingdom Guard is a very streamlined game with only a few major resources, such as gold, stone, and gems, you will still need a lot of them.
Gold
Gold is a universal currency, and in Kingdom Guard, it’s used to pay for many things: unit upgrades, castle construction, training units, and so on. Since gold is used so much, there’s also lots of ways to gather it – completing egg quests and daily quests, server chronicle achievements, playing the TD, or gathering in gold mines are just some of the ways to gather the shiny stuff.
The gold mines deserve special mention here as they’re one of the best ways to gather a large amount of gold at once. However, they are considered neutral territory, so anything goes in the wilds. If you decide that the risk is greater than the payoff, you can tap any mine that you’re currently occupying and order your units to return early.
Stone
Stone is a resource with only one use – to upgrade your castle. While stone literally only has a single use, don’t ignore it as upgrading your castle is pivotal to increasing your combat strength.
Gems
Gems are Kingdom Guard’s premium currency, and are used in a lot of things. There are lots of ways to gather Gems – usually through both daily and one-time quests such as hatching the Dragon Egg.
Quests
Quests in Kingdom Guard come in both the one-time, chapter variety and the daily variety. While quests have been mentioned several times throughout this guide, one thing that you need to be aware of is that daily quests themselves don’t give rewards. Each daily quests contributes to the activity bar, and you need to tap the chests above the daily quest list to redeem your prizes.
Watching Ads
Ads for rewards are par for the course. Kingdom Guard offers multiple prizes, located in the free rewards section on the second button in the upper right. The title is misleading; nothing is ever truly free, and you’ll have to sit through multiple ads to get your goodies.
The more stages you’ve cleared, the more things you can claim here, so it may be in your best interest to blitz through the game’s stages to make the most out of your daily freebies.
Capitalize on Global Speedups
Occasionally, global speedups become available. These are very important to leverage as they increase your passive income and just make everything go faster – and all for the small price of watching an ad. If you see those big fast forward icons, seize the opportunity!
Attack Random Mobs
Random mobs will spawn on the world map. Each of these mobs has a level – the higher the level, the more difficult it is, but the better items they’ll drop.
Each type of monster drops a specific unit exp book – green ogres drop archer books, red orcs drop wizard books, blue trolls drop ice mage books, and gremlins drop goblin books. Apart from unit exp books, these mobs also yield gold and stone.
Before you can attack a mob, you will need to upgrade your castle to increase the maximum level of monsters you can fight. To unlock combat for higher levels of monsters, you need to defeat a mob of the highest level you can fight.
For example, to fight level 10 mobs, you’ll need to have defeated a level 9 mob, and so on. To help you locate targets, you can use the search function on the lower right of the screen to show you mobs of your specified type and maximum level.
Attacking these monsters requires you to dispatch heroes. Note that heroes can only bring units of the same type as them into battle. Monsters also have their own element, meaning that the 30% attack boost from leveraging weaknesses applies here.
Dispatching armies requires you to pay with action points. You can have up to 200 action points tucked away, and these regenerate over time.
Pick Fights with Your Neighbors
Yes, you can attack other players too for their resources. You have the option to scout a player beforehand to get a readout on them, but you can order an attack even without scouting. Be warned – there will be consequences for attacking other players, especially those who are members of a strong alliance.
To attack or scout a player, neither they nor you can have a shield up. You automatically start with a shield which lasts around 3 days, but can be manually cancelled by taking an offensive action against another player.
Titans
Titans are powerful mobs that require alliances to take down. When attacking a titan, you’ll be asked to rally your alliance instead of taking it on solo. These giants have a massive amount of combat power, so you’ll need all the help you can get. If you do manage to take it down though, there’s tons of gold and resources awaiting, and the initiator of the fight has a better chance of getting rarer rewards.
As you might have noticed, you need an alliance to start or join a titan fight.
Strengthen Your Army
By improving the strength of your fighting force, you’ll be set to challenge tougher stages and take on fiercer foes on the world map. However, there are many ways to upgrade your units.
Unit Investment
At the barracks, you can upgrade your units by spending unit exp books and gold. Each item spent gives a slight performance boost, but by completely filling out the upgrade bar, you’ll raise the tier of a unit.
Promoting units to higher tiers gives you a large power spike, as not only do higher tier units perform much better than their early iterations, but they also gain access to powerful skills that they use automatically on the field!
While you will need a lot of unit exp books, don’t despair – the higher tier ones can be made by sacrificing a certain number of books of the tier below it. For example, 5 tier 1 books yield 1 tier 2 exp book.
Strengths and Weaknesses
Each type of unit is both strong and weak against something. When a unit attacks another unit that it’s strong against, its effective attack power is boosted by 30%. This is a hefty bonus that can turn the tides in your favor, or turn what appears to be an easy skirmish into a slugfest.
Heroes Lead The Way
Heroes represent powerful individuals in your kingdom, and they serve as both powerful warriors and commanders. Heroes can be acquired via the tavern or through event rewards.
Note that leveling up heroes requires sacrificing other hero cards. In the same vein, you don’t actually get heroes, you get cards that you can then exchange for a hero. Be sure that you’re both exchanging the cards for the heroes you want and using only your throwaway heroes for leveling everyone else up.
By sacrificing cards of the same hero, you can increase their star rank. This not only gives them a substantial power increase but also unlocks new abilities that can affect regular combat or the tower defense game.
Form an Alliance
Alliances are very important in Kingdom Guard – not only will you have a steady pool of allies to call upon if the time comes, but you’ll also be able to benefit from a lot of features.
Alliance Wars and Alliance Gifts
The alliance war menu helps you keep tabs on who’s been attacking your alliance members, as well as if there are any active rallies against titans.
If your alliance manages to defeat a titan, or if someone in your alliance buys certain items from the cash shop, every member of the alliance will be entitled to receive an alliance gift. These usually contain essential resources, but make sure that you’re not all take and no give – join rallies whenever you can, at least!
Alliance Territory
By building an alliance fortress, you’ll be able to claim territory for your alliance as well as unlock access to new structures. This is a massive undertaking, so be sure to chip in whatever you can to help your alliance put up its flag and stake its claim on the world. Other buildings include obelisks for increasing your alliance’s domain, and dragon nests that give gold to all members every week.
Only the alliance leader and high-ranking officers can place these buildings.
Alliance Tech
Your alliance’s technology tree gives passive bonuses both to the alliance itself and its members. Every member of an alliance can contribute to the current research project by donating either gold or gems (no prizes for guessing which yields more progress). In addition, your alliance leader and high-ranking officers can mark a technology they’d like everyone to focus on.
While these projects do take huge amounts of resources to complete, their benefits are far and wide, so donate to your alliance’s research whenever you can.
Alliance Store
All services rendered to your guild will yield some silver, which is used to buy items at the alliance store. Items at the store are restocked regularly, and occasionally you’ll find really great bargains such as advanced recruitment cards, city shields, dragon runes, or high tier unit exp books.
Note that there’s both a daily and a weekly store, both of which are accessible from the top of the alliance store screen.
Keep At It
Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither will your kingdom. While the road to greatness is long, hopefully we’ve given you enough information to help you build a solid foundation that can withstand the growing pains of a fledgling kingdom.
With that, our Kingdom Guard beginner’s guide is at an end. If you have anything to add, or have some tips of your own that you’d like to share with us, let us know in the comment section below!
Fred Huff
Saturday 4th of June 2022
how fair is the dimensional treasure when a player thats 1B plus cam attack a player thats 1Hundred thous