Home to numerous successful mobile games across various genres like Food Fantasy, Magic Rush: Heroes, and Age of Warring Empire to name a few, Elex recently released another real-time strategy game to add to its roster of distinctive free-to-play games called Lord of War. The game promises hours of fun and addictive gameplay as you explore a legendary land full of monsters, treasures, and other players. With its stunning 3D graphics and its unique yet familiar and easy to learn game mechanics, gamers new to the real-time strategy game genre as well as veteran gamers can discover something to love in Lord of War.
Lord of War puts you in the role of a legendary lord and ruler of a castle. As you explore the magical land and expand your territory, you gain power and resources to further advance the growth of your kingdom. With each hero that joins you in your adventure and each set of troops you train to strengthen your army you gain a step closer towards readiness to face other lords scattered across the land and battle it out for ultimate glory.
With a quick and easy to learn tutorial and relaxed initial pace of gameplay, Lord of War aptly prepares you for the struggles to come as you take each of the first few steps through learning all of the basics. To simplify the basic cycle, you always need resources to progress, and as you develop your castle and troops you become stronger and more capable of acquiring more territories to increase your resources.
As getting stronger leads to more complex and difficult challenges later on in the game, the more important it will become for you to rely on good survival methods and battle strategies. Whether you are totally new to real-time strategy games struggling to understand the game’s mechanics, or deep enough into the game looking for more efficient and faster ways of growing your kingdom, our Lord of War beginner’s guide can help you win more battles and dominate the kingdom. With that said, let’s move on to our Lord of War tips, tricks and strategies!
1. Keep On Building, Upgrading And Training
Like any online multiplayer strategy game, Lord of War makes it a must for every player to always be productive, as far as resource generation, structure upgrading, and army training is concerned. As such, you should not keep any production line idle so long as your current resources are sufficient to meet upgrade and training requirements. The further you progress, the longer it takes to finish each production. Keep in mind though that countdowns lasting 5 minutes or less can be sped up for free.
As fast as you need to go when production is concerned, be sure to check each structure for the short description of what they are for. This is very important when it comes to deciding which one to upgrade first when more than one structure is available for upgrade. Another important thing to consider here is the amount of time you’ll be spending online on the game as you may want to finish doing a couple of fast upgrades while online and queue in a slower one before logging out.
2. Choose Each Step Outside Your Castle Carefully
Every move you make outside your castle that consumes energy can mean one of two things: expanding your territory within its maximum capacity; or choosing a hex within your territory to gain something. There are loads of things you can find around the map and while expanding your territory quickly is a priority as you gain resources over time based on its size, choosing how to expand it considering the maximum limit offers a variety of options you have to consider depending on your current needs. Initially, you can tap on each hex to have an idea of what it has to offer. As you can only move to a hex adjacent to one within your territory, careful planning is needed.
For starters, additional heroes can be discovered near your castle on the start of your game. Later on you may see resources, mobs, structures, equipment, treasure chests, and runes scattered across the area. It’s good to try each of the unique structures and objects you see to have a better idea of what they can provide. You may grab resources if you are falling short on a specific one and the need is urgent. As runes are somewhat rare and you’ll need a lot of it later on, you may also choose to grab those.
As the maximum size of your territory is dependent on the level of your castle, there will soon come a point when you won’t be able to get to much needed items found on hexes outside your territorial area. If this is the case, do not hesitate to renounce some previously acquired territories to gain new ones.
3. Join An Alliance As Soon As You Can
In support of the saying that “no man is an island”, most, if not all, online multiplayer games have guild systems built into the game as a basic necessity for every player. This means that while you can play the game on your own without actually teaming up with anyone; it’s highly unlikely that you will make it far through the game surviving through assaults from opposing alliances. Therefore, joining an alliance is practically a must for everyone who wants to progress further in the game and joining an alliance sooner can lead a big head start for anyone as far as growth and development are concerned.
Be sure to also help out alliance members in speeding up upgrades for their buildings as you will receive the same kind of aid whenever you have pending upgrades on your castle. There may be occasions when you receive guild notifications on rallies against strong monsters or encounter one yourself. As these cannot be defeated alone, be sure to take part in such rallies as resource rewards from this battle are more than what you’d normally acquire from other sources.
4. Strengthen Up To 4 Heroes At A Time
As you explore the areas around your castle on the first few chapters, you will encounter and acquire new heroes that will become generals of your armies. Each hero is unique in that they have different sets of skills and stats to begin with and fall within the 3 basic troop types in the game: infantry, archer, or cavalry. While in most games, the best way to go is focus on one hero at a time, Lord of War makes it seem more logical to develop and enhance multiple heroes almost equally.
As each hero provides different buffs to their type of unit given that no single type of unit may fill in the entirety of you army, it’s highly likely that you have a mixture of units in your army. As such, leveling up and enhancing each of your hero gives buffs to your entire army at some point.
Additionally, you can scour the map and still not have enough of a specific rune to focus on just one hero, so you might as well go for other types of runes for your other heroes. You will also have a lot of opportunities to acquire equipment for all your heroes early in the game and giving each hero a full set of good equipment is an easy task as well. Lastly, each army can have up to 4 heroes, and the boost in power each hero adds is hard to ignore.
Don’t forget to forge and level up your equipment once you feel that it is good enough to keep. Perhaps blue-colored ones and up are fairly okay since you will be using them for a while and you can pass them on to other heroes anyway if you find better ones. Additionally, use enhancement materials more selectively as these items are far more difficult to obtain. You should also disassemble equipment you no longer need to acquire enhancement materials you need.
5. Make The Most Out Of The 72-Hour Magic Field
As soon as you build your castle at the start of the game, you will have an Magic Field surrounding your castle. Similar to many online multiplayer strategy games, this will prevent anyone from launching an assault against you and your territory for 72 hours. As the same barrier effect applies to all players as well, you won’t be able to launch an attack on any castle when you see the bubble still actively protecting one. With the first few days being the most important ones as far as pushing for growth and development of your castle and troops are concerned, be sure to take this rare opportunity to focus on raising your army’s battle power without having to worry about potential attacks from other players.
Continuous multitasking may be enough, but you may want to spend some your earned speed up items at this point so you can become stronger at a faster rate than most players. While it’s not necessary to be continuously online in Lord of War while awaiting for some production lines to finish its countdown, at least taking note of completion times and knowing when to log back in is advisable to more efficiently ensure that there is little idle time as far as upgrading buildings and training troops are concerned.
If you can afford to, you may also purchase and use the Advanced Workshop (the golden hammer icon) as it provides an additional building queue for 24 hours. Be sure, however, that before doing so, you have pending structures for upgrades that are independent of each other and can be run simultaneously.
Keep in mind that once you decide to launch an attack against any player your Magic Field goes down leaving you vulnerable to attacks. You can purchase new ones later and put the barrier on up again but it’s very, very expensive.
6. Move Into Higher Level Territory When Possible
It may take a while before your castle can reach level 7. Hopefully though, you still have a magic field up and running when you do. Before you can reach level 8, one of the requirements is to occupy about 5 level 2 territories. This cannot be achieved if at this point in time you are still on the same spot where you started the game. What you need to do then is to move a little bit closer towards the center of the map and though there are clear indicators in map view, it’s best to still scan the map to determine the best place to teleport your castle to.
If you have an active enough alliance, then chances are that some of them who are ahead of you considering castle level have already moved into an area on the next higher territorial level and if there’s enough of the alliance there, then that’s a good enough place to find a spot to relocate to. If that is not the case at all, feel free to communicate with your alliance and strategically find a good area where the active members can simultaneously warp to.
7. Be Well-Prepared Before Deciding To Attack
If you followed our Lord of War strategy guide enough to have upgraded your castle and trained your troops more efficiently than the rest of the crowd, then you should have a high enough battle power to be ready to do battle against other players. As you have waited about 3 full days to finally bid your magic field goodbye and finally quench your thirst for some castle-plundering, it’s easy to fall victim to over aggressiveness and incur battle losses for lack of due preparation and careful analysis.
You have to remember that once your shields go down and you launch an attack on a seemingly weaker castle, you will also be vulnerable to attacks from stronger players surrounding your castle. As such be sure to scan castles within close proximity to yours, especially enemy alliance castles that are bundled very close together. As there will always be stronger and weaker castles than you in the game, the same theory applies to alliances. So before you decide to launch the first attack, make sure that you, together with your alliance, can fend off attacks from surrounding castles as well.
Another important and almost basic thing to do in any strategic game like Lord of War, is to always scout first before an attack unless it’s a rally attack and friends from your alliance have begun attacking the opposing castle. Launching scouts always provide more information that will help you determine better if you can win against the enemy’s castle given its defensive power.
One more important scenario you have to be ready for is the possibility of being attacked by an opponent and actually failing to defend your castle. If this happens, a lot of your troops may wind up wounded and resources gone. In preparation for these worst case scenarios, be sure that your warehouse and advanced warehouse are on high enough levels so that more of your resources are protected from being pillaged. Keep your hospital upgraded as well so that it can hold more injured troops. Again, if you know for certain or feel the high probability of being taken over while you are offline and at the same time know that you will lose a lot of troops and resources, purchase and use a magic barrier.
8. Complete Quests And Events For Rewards
On top of the Online Supplies which give you rewards from time to time, there are various quests and events that grant awesome in-game rewards. Perhaps you can’t miss the Chapter Quests stated in the lower right of the screen as you will most likely be following these from the start of your game up until some point before straying off to do your own set of activities following what you feel you need the most. Likewise claiming rewards here as well is almost automatic. Be sure to click on the icon beside it to see if you may have achieved some quests that relative to Chapter Quests, and tap on the Petitions Tab as well to see which ones you have accomplished and can still accomplish. The petitions are actually pretty easy to accomplish and the rewards are very much worth the effort.
Additionally, the Events Icon on the upper right hand of the screen may be unconsciously neglected as well. Be sure to claim daily login rewards here once per day. You should also check on the King’s Path Event and try to get as much from it on the first seven days of your game. The end reward here for completing each task is very difficult to obtain anywhere else. Be sure to see your standing on the Strongest Lord Event as well as reaching a certain point of achievement here earns you great rewards.
9. Check Your Items From Time To Time
You should check on your inventory of items every once in a while to see if there are items you can readily use to speed up your progress in the game. As far as basic resources are concerned, you don’t need to use them unless you really need to. With regard to gold and silver, however, you should use them immediately as you can never have enough of each currency and there’s really no point in keeping these in your items. There may be equipment here as well that you won’t need on any of your heroes so you might as well disassemble them and gain enhance runes for the gears that are equipped on your heroes.
And this wraps up our list of Lord of War tips, tricks and strategies. We certainly hope that you enjoyed reading our strategy guide and that you learned a lot from it as well. If you know more Lord of War tips, cheats or strategies that we forgot to mention, be sure to drop us a line in the comments!