SEGA and Creative Assembly’s Total War Battles: Kingdom is now out for Android after its debut on iOS, and it’s the latest in the popular Total War series, which has since extended to the mobile space. The game allows you to build your own kingdom and expand it, putting up farms, quarries, and other establishments. You can customize the land structures as well, meaning mountains, rivers, and other natural structures that could make your kingdom look more impressive. And because the social element has, for a while, been very important in the world of mobile, SEGA also adds that you can battle other real-life players in real-time. And even if this game is part of one of the better-known franchises for PC and console gamers, SEGA is releasing this game absolutely free of charge.
As this is quite an in-depth mobile experience, we believe you may need some help creating your kingdom, and eventually battling other players. Before you do all that, we recommend reading this Total War Battles: Kingdom strategy guide, which covers a wide range of general topics in the game.
1. Don’t Overlook Neighbor Buildings
When building your kingdom, you should take into account the bonuses you can get from buildings that neighbor each other. You won’t be told about these bonuses at first, but once you complete a new building, you’ll want to look up its information and check the nearby buildings that would allow you to get the maximum bonus possible. Keep these bonuses in mind when building new structures, but before everything else, you’ll need to work with your starting castle and work your way onto the next buildings.
2. Make Your Castles Focus On Specializations
At the end of the day, you should be working toward having a balanced, versatile kingdom. But in the early goings, you may want to consider specialization when building your castles. For example, you can have one of your castles produce silver, and build blacksmiths, churches, and mansions nearby to get the best bonuses possible. Do the same and create a castle for producing troops, building structures around it that give you some solid bonuses. And while doing all those things and creating castles for other specializations, maintain your focus on acquiring resources.
3. Keep Road Construction In Mind
In this game, you will also have to work on building roads, and connecting them to your new castles and watch towers. Work on these roads early, as they will get quite costly over time. Try to cover as much ground as possible when building your roads, and plan this facet quite carefully. Remember that all new areas unlocked could host a new castle, so make sure you’ve got a solid action plan, not only for your roads, but also for the new castle.
4. How To Make The Most Out Of Your Kingdom’s People
Don’t let all your people remain peasants forever. Eventually, they’ll have to be of use to you, so with that in mind, make sure you’re building enough mansions and training your peasants to become craftsmen. Craftsmen give you bigger and better bonuses because, if you come to think of it, they serve an important purpose, unlike basic peasants who really won’t be of much help to your progress if they remain that way.
5. Which Buildings Do Not Fall Under The Kingdom Building Category?
Granted, a lot of the buildings in this game can be considered kingdom buildings, which have a cap limit, or a maximum number of buildings in total. But there are buildings that do not count under that total – these include the likes of your farms, mines, and woodcutters. Since we told you earlier about focusing on resources, build as many of these structures as the space in your kingdom permits. That’s a great way to ensure you always have more than enough resources on you.
6. Don’t Waste Your Gold
Gold is Total War Battles: Kingdoms’ premium currency, and you can spend it on a variety of things. But one group of things you shouldn’t spend your gold on is cosmetic items. They may make your crest look flashy, and give you something to show off while you’re fighting the enemy, but they’re just cosmetic – they don’t come with any special bonuses or whatnot that could give you an extra edge.
7. Base Your Attacks On Your Active Quests
Now that you know some of the things you should be doing when building the kingdom, let’s now talk about the attacking part of Total War Battles: Kingdom. This is where the social element kicks in, and that’s what makes this game quite similar to Clash of Clans and other titles, in more than a few ways. Now attacking is also a very intricate part of the Total War Battles: Kingdom experience, so you’ll need to remember a few helpful hints when planning whom to attack, and how to attack them.
Our first tip in the attack category would be to plan your attacks based on your currently active quests. This would allow you to win more loot per attack, and optimize your attack strategy in a fundamental way.
8. Scout Your Opponent
This is probably one of the more common attacking tips out there, regardless of game, but we’re going to mention it anyway, because it is very important. Make sure you know the types of enemies you’ll be up against before sending troops off to battle. Don’t send your cavalry off to fight a host of spearmen, because it just isn’t practical – the spearmen will make quick work out of your cavalry. Before sending those troops off, you should always make it a point to check whether they’ve got an advantage over the enemy troops.
9. Never Surrender
If you notice that you haven’t got a prayer against your opponent, you might be tempted to wave the white flag and retreat. This isn’t exactly what they call “rage quitting,” but we don’t recommend it either! The upside of retreating is that it will take your troops less time to recover and heal up, but the downside is that you won’t walk away with experience. It’s better to lose a battle and win some XP, than to retreat late in the battle and leave the battle with no XP at all. And if you should retreat, do so while it’s still very early.
10. No Pain, No Gain
On occasion, you’ll be facing an opponent that the game classifies as Challenging. Do not let this daunt you! Sure, you’ll have a slightly harder time, but if you follow our tip about sending off the right kind of troops to battle, you should have a better chance of winning it. Then you’ve got the battles that are classified as Brutal. Your chances of winning these would be substantially lower than usual, but they’re also winnable if you use the right strategy and use the right troops. It’s recommended that you get a boost before heading off to a Brutal battle for better odds against your opponent.
11. Upgrade Your Troops Regularly
Even if your complement of troops includes some who seem ostensibly useless, you should upgrade all of your units. Who knows – those seemingly useless troops may actually serve you quite well if you upgrade them. It all depends on the skills you get – it’s possible to get a skill and upgrade that skill once the target unit earns more XP. But what skills should you use? Logically speaking, you want the skills that return troops to you for melee units, or the ones that improve attack power for ranged units. But you shouldn’t be afraid to experiment with skills, even if the skill you choose will be associated with that troop permanently.
It’s good practice to have your troops’ stat window open from time to time. This would let you see if there are troops, or groups of troops that can benefit from upgrades.
12. When Should You Swap Out Your Troops?
One of the more interesting mechanics in Total War Battles: Kingdom is the ability to swap your troops. We say it’s interesting because there’s a science, or a technique to it all. Swapping too early in the battle, just so you could get the bonus, would not be a good idea. That’s because opponents will generally go for the swap as well, and would still have the upper hand. The best time to swap would be before the enemy troops start charging; this would leave them with little to no chance to perform a swap as well. Also, you won’t be able to swap until the enemy troops stop charging.
13. The Art Of Charging
Well, we wouldn’t call it an art form in the truest sense, but you will have to learn how to hit the charge button at the perfect time. Executing a perfect charge would give you some much-needed bonuses in a battle. That’s why it’s very important to practice this procedure; make your charges as precise as possible and the odds of your winning the battle should improve noticeably.
14. Craft Equipment Once You’re Able To
Once you reach Level 21 in the game, you’ll gain the option to craft equipment for your troops. This equipment would normally be better than conventional items, so go ahead and craft once the game allows you to. Work your way through your troops starting from the first row, and eventually on to the final row.
15. Be Careful Of Friendly Fire
It’s important that you be careful when firing at the enemy, because there is such a thing as friendly fire in this game. That means you could accidentally be firing at your troops, effectively hurting you on the battlefield! This isn’t always the case, but in general, you want to be careful and avoid firing at your own units.
16. Research In Advance
As you keep playing the game, you’ll gain access to special abilities that you can use while in battle. These abilities could turn the tide and serve as big-time game-changers when you need them the most. Still, you wouldn’t want to be blindly using them just because they do all sorts of cool and awesome things. Research on those abilities before heading to battle, so you know which icon matches a certain ability, and what the abilities actually do while you’re out there.
17. Use The Church Bonuses To Heal Up
There’s always the option to switch troops while you’re in battle, and you may need to do a lot of this if their health reaches critically low levels. There is, however, such a thing as Church bonuses, which allow your troops to heal up completely. Follow this up by taunting the enemy so you could hit your desired targets.
And this completes our extended guide for Total War Battles: Kingdom. If you’ve enjoyed our tips and tricks or you know other hints we haven’t included in this guide, be sure to let us know by commenting below!