From Lilith Games, home to several popular games across different genres like Art of Conquest, Soul Hunters, and Dank Tanks to name a few, comes a deep and complex strategy game unlike any you have seen or played before. With amazing graphics, enormous content, and broad tactical options, Rise of Civilizations is a game that both fans of the genre and first-time strategy game players should definitely enjoy.
Rise of Civilizations puts you in-charge of your city belonging to one of eight historical civilizations. As you ceaselessly strengthen your commanders, train more troops, and develop your city; you must ally yourself with others as you initiate joint assaults, fend of enemy attacks, and work towards advancing your progress further. Additionally, eliminating hordes of barbarians, exploring new areas, and gathering resources to sustain your city’s needs and to ensure unhindered growth becomes a natural part of your regular duties as well.
The game provides an easy to grasp tutorial as well as an ever-present guide on what you can do next towards strengthening your city. With each first try on any feature comes a brief yet clear enough description that will help you understand each and every new concept. With the sheer amount of game content and the more-than-usual complexity of its several upgrade systems, though, Rise of Civilizations can be a bit overwhelming to absorb at first glance, most especially to players who are not that familiar with the genre. Whether you’re an experienced gamer who has played similar games before or it’s your first dive into the genre, our Rise of Civilizations beginner’s guide can help you survive through the game’s seemingly harsh environment and come out on top of most battles you engage or participate in.
1. Choose Your Civilization Carefully
A lot of players usually want to start with the new game they installed at the soonest possible time and they may even readily choose to skip with all the intros and tutorials so they can immediately proceed to actually playing the game. In Rise of Civilizations, it is very important to not rush into anything as patience will be your key to success in this game like in any other strategy game.
As you scroll through the eight civilizations you get to choose from, take time to read through each of the traits or advantages available for each choice. As no one can say that one choice is better than any other, and given the premise of what you need to do in the game, determine which of the choices suit your play style and preferences the best.
This is very important as there is no easy way of going back to this point when you begin the game. With the initial hours you will potentially put in on your first try, you most likely won’t even want to try and start over again anyway.
2. Set Your Multitasking Skills To Maximum
The initial minutes of gameplay in Rise of Civilizations seems to set you in preparation for a fast-paced city growth and development process flow. As you build and upgrade one structure after another, you also continuously train more soldiers, do some research, gather resources, send scouts to explore fog-covered areas of the land, and summon more commanders (if free chests or keys are available). With all these almost constantly on your plate you might feel that it is the most you can do simultaneously.
As you progress further in the game, you will come to discover that there’s a whole lot more to do than just what we mentioned above. What is important at this point is getting yourself used to doing all these as efficiently and as fast as possible to keep up with, if not exceed, the development of other cities around you. While you may be protected by a Peace Barrier on the first two days of your immersion into the game, some more experienced players around you may identify your city’s current power level as a sign of weaknesss and already mark you as a potential target later on.
So on top of the guide on the left of your screen which constantly and progressively sets targets for you to accomplish, ensure that you are constantly doing the best you can, making sure that as far as army growth and city development is concerned there is hardly any idle time spent.
3. Join An Alliance At The Soonest Possible Time
Like in most games with guild systems, Rise of Civilizations has an alliance system that you need to take part in to ensure an advanced growth and development of your city as well as better chances of survival against attacks from stronger enemies. In fact, it’s hard to imagine being able to consistently survive assaults on your city and keep up with the continuously evolving kingdom if you are not a member of any alliance. So while joining an alliance at the soonest possible time is more of a preference, joining one per se is a must.
Primarily though, you still have to choose carefully which alliance you should join. There are many alliances to choose from and new ones are created every once in a while too. You may not be able to choose the highest ranking ones immediately but at least choose one that potentially has active members. It’s definitely a hard trait to determine on the spot, but for starters, look for alliance that have a lot of members and at the same time has a high enough overall level of power.
Being in an alliance expands your list of tasks to accomplish even further. As it opens up more activities for you to contribute to, you may want help your fellow alliance members with speeding up the upgrades and researches in their cities as the same reciprocally applies to you as well. As the alliance grows and develops, new features will be opened up to you and all its members so be sure to constantly be ready for even more multi-tasking requirements as you aim to strengthen your army and develop your city further.
4. Speed Up Progress Efficiently
As a good working plan with fast development still in mind, establish how long you plan to play the game every time you sign in and set even vague targets. With that you’ll have an idea of how and when you would want to use your speed boosters.
As initially, structures almost instantaneously finish building and upgrading, the higher the levels go the more time it takes to complete. With upgrades, researches, and trainings going on, it’s hardly possible that all these will constantly be completed simultaneously. You can use speed boosters at this point to bring completion times closer to each other as there will be times you won’t be able to keep a close watch on your city and any idle structure means less efficiency. While the nearest to completion task is still a long way to go, that would be the time to do other tasks that would make it impossible for you to closely monitor your city.
As you may be inclined to save boosters and other resources in the late game, it’s important to understand that what you need to do is to get a good head start, so to speak, as the faster you grow in power on your first few days, the more rewards and opportunities will be made available sooner.
Another useful item in speeding up progress is the Builder Recruitment which adds extra hands so you can build two structures simultaneously. If you want to progress very fast at the start of the game, then it’s best to use this in conjunction with your speed ups.
5. Continuously Strengthen Your Main Commander
You will have more than one commander early in the game but it’s important to focus on your primary one initially as you may not even have enough resources to keep him fully optimized all the time. For one, there are Barbarian Hunt Quests you’ll constantly be doing but you may need to use experience potions that you collected to boost his leveling up. Choose to distribute his talent points in whatever way you feel will work with your desired play style. Perhaps the more difficult upgrade is ranking his star level up as resources for this are a little more difficult to come by. All in all, when it comes to strengthening your commander, it’s best to use resources now than save them for later.
Keep your commander as busy as possible. If for some reason you cannot defeat a certain barbarian level, feel free to target the next lower-leveled ones instead. If you run out of action points, you can also use items to replenish them instantly.
6. Progress Your Expedition As Much As You Can
The Expedition is a game mode where you try to complete a series of challenges that rewards you daily for every stage you complete with a 3-star rating. As you’ll be getting more rewards daily the further you progress at the expedition, you should constantly try to complete challenges here whenever you can.
7. Keep On Exploring
There will always be fog-covered areas for your scouts to uncover and clearing as much of these fogs as you can will give you a better view of the entire kingdom with all its previously uncovered cities and resource spots. On top of that, your scouts may also discover tribal towns and caves that give reward you with items as well as other landmarks which will be advantageous for you and you alliance later on.
For efficiency’s sake, you can always send a scout to continue exploring while they are still on their way back to camp. That way they can explore more of the map faster. Perhaps the only time to stray from continuous exploration is when a cave has been discovered and you have to send a scout to investigate it.
8. Open Free Chests And Use Keys At The Tavern
The tavern is where you get additional commanders as well as items you need to upgrade your existing commanders. As it’s established that it is important to keep your commander in top shape, everything we can get to help us achieve that should be given due importance. For one, you will get 4 free silver chests daily and one free gold chest every 3 days. That would be the only times that indicators appear on the Tavern.
From time to time, and occasionally without you noticing, you will acquire silver and gold keys that you need to open more chests. As there is no point in holding on to them, it is best to use them immediately so you can utilize the chest items you receive to do more upgrades.
9. Don’t Forget To Claim All Your Rewards
With the level of multi-tasking you do coupled with the amount learning and discovering you make in the game, it’s very easy to forget about the rewards you can get for meeting certain accomplishments and milestones in the game. As Rise of Civilizations is a game that is generous in the sense that activities typically contribute to more than just one line of achievement, you’ll constantly be earning a lot of rewards minute after minute of playing. Though there are indicators to notify you of unclaimed rewards, you may still miss a few before logging out of the game so always keep an eye out for those red dots.
10. Check Your Items Whenever You Can
There may be times that an indicator will appear on the Items icon on your screen to say that you acquired new items. However, over time, these may accrue leaving you without much idea on what items you already have. As progressing further faster is very important, most especially during the initial hours of your game, you should spend time to look at the items you have collected. At times, some of these items may be very useful for you at that moment.
11. Take Advantage Of The Courier Station
The Courier Station in your city is where you’ll occasionally find the Mysterious Merchant that offers a wide variety of items, often discounted, for gems or some resources. Initially you will have an overabundance of each resource in that you probably wouldn’t be interested in getting more. Later in the game though, you’ll come to find that you are having shortages on some of these resources. The Mysterious Merchant offers a lot of good deals so whether you need to trade in one resource for the other or perhaps in immediate need of something, it’s better to check what she has in store for you first before visiting the regular shop.
12. Prepare Well Before Initiating An Attack
It’s most likely that you still have your Peace Shield on and feel that you are ready to initiate an attack on enemy cities. For one, you should know that your Peace Bubble will immediately vanish once you perform any activity towards any city, thus leaving you vulnerable to attacks from other players. While you may also be a good idea to try and keep that shield up as long as possible, if you feel that you are strong enough to engage in battle then perhaps that is reason enough to do so.
But before you actually drop your attack immunity, you should consider teleporting to where most of your alliance members are. If the alliance already has a Center Fortress then it is best to move within that territory. On top of the added security being with your comrades, there will be additional perks for alliance members situated within their territory.
Even with your allies near you in the alliance’s territory you still need to scan all sides of the visible map for potential threats as you choose a more specific location to relocate your city to. Spend time looking around the map manually and try to highlight cities of players that are not members of your alliance. Though these may change too over time given that everyone can teleport their respective cities, at least you’ll be aware of immediate threats. Especially be watchful of groups of cities belonging to the same alliance as they may be stronger than your group and pose as a huge threat to you and your allies.
Once you decide on where to specifically plant your city and also decide to bid your shields goodbye, it’s time to look around the map for potential targets, the closer to where you are the better. As a general rule, you should scout to acquire more details on a city before initiating an actual attack.
As you begin your assault on a city with a lower power level, be ready as well as it may happen that an attack will be made against you sooner or later. For one, take note of your Storehouse’s capacity in terms of protecting your resources relative to how much of each resource you have. It’s better to spend excess resources than have them plundered in a worst case scenario. Additionally, in the event that you won’t be around in the game for a long time, you should put up another Peace Shield to ensure your absolute immunity from potential attackers.
And that is all we have now for our Rise of Civilizations beginner’s guide. We certainly hope that you enjoyed reading it as well as learned much from it. In case you know additional tips and strategies for Rise of Civilizations that we forgot to mention, feel free to leave us a message in the comments section below!
MsGuided
Saturday 9th of February 2019
How do I use the beginner Teleport. I wasted one by not knowing what to do