The Vikings were among the most feared and respected of the ancient peoples. From across the seas and the lands of ice and snow they came, taking from those who would not pay them tribute. Today, Vikings: War of Clans lets you enact your own Viking kingdom fantasy. Aspiring Jarls, take note: Plarium’s popular strategy game is available on both the App Store and Google Play.
If you’ve tried other empire management games like Evony: The King’s Return or Land of Empires, a lot of this game’s mechanics will be very familiar to you. For totally new players though, I’ve compiled a comprehensive Vikings: War of Clans beginner’s guide to hopefully help you get accustomed to the responsibilities of ruling your people! So without further ado, let’s get started!
Maximize Your Starter Shield
I’m going to sound like a broken record here, but since Vikings: War of Clans uses virtually the same core principles as games like Evony: The King’s Return or West Game, a lot of core mechanics remain the same – and the fact that Vikings: War of Clans is an open PVP world means that you need to be prepared to face off against enemy players. But just like other games, you’re given a starter shield that will protect your town from being attacked or scouted for 3 days.
Do note that this protection will automatically be voided if you initiate a hostile action against another player – which, as a new player, is highly discouraged. Instead, use this time to learn the basics of the game and establish a strong foundation for your future empire.
Establish A Stable Economy
Your warriors are brave – but they are mortal men with mortal needs. Without food to feed your army, wood for construction, stone for fortification, and iron for domination, you won’t get far in Vikings: War of Clans.
While you do get quite a bit of resources packages to begin with, with even more unlocked down the line, remember that your armies and buildings will both incur increasing costs. Apart from this, other warlords may also strike at you to take your resources for themselves. With that in mind, it’s important to know how to manage your economy.
Resource Generators
There are five basic resources in Vikings: War of Clans. These are food, wood, stone, iron, and silver. All of these are important resources, and you can’t eschew production of one in favor of all others.
Luckily, it’s fairly easy to get a regular income of these resources. By simply building resource generators within your walls, you’ll gain passive income that you can always fall back on. Farms will produce food, Lumber Mills will make lumber, Stone Quarries generate stone, and Mines produce iron. And yes – they do stack, so if you need more food, build more Farms, and so on.
Do note that these four resource generators can only be built in the green fields to the east of your city.
Silver is a different beast altogether. To get silver, you’ll need to build Manors. Manors can’t be built in the fields – you’ll have to set aside a lot in the city for a manor. This also means that you’ll have to plan carefully lest you run out of space in your city down the line. To make up for it, each Manor you have slightly decreases the training time for all units.
Resource Nodes
Another way of gaining base resources is by taking resource nodes on the world map.
These neutral buildings can be visited by any player by sending an army to that location. Once the army arrives, they’ll gather resources until they’re completely loaded, then return to their home city. Easy, right? Well…most of the time. See, these resources nodes are neutral territory, and if you run into another player’s armies while they’re gathering (or if they run into you), a fight will ensue – which is something you might want to avoid.
When you send units to a resource node, each unit you send will bring back resources equal to its capacity stat. As a general rule, the best units to send on these expeditions are melee and siege units as they have the best capacity stats out of all unit types.
The Vault
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The Vault is a core economic structure that serves not only as the heart of your city’s logistics, but also as a way to safeguard resources from invaders. Each time you upgrade the Vault, it’ll gain more space to protect your resources – meaning that even if you get hit repeatedly (poor you), you’ll always have at least that much resources to start over with. While the Vault provides protection to most resources, it can only start safeguarding silver from level 21 onwards.
Speed Ups Are Key
Like most games of the same genre, Vikings: War of Clans involves a lot of waiting – whether that time is spent putting up new buildings or upgrading existing ones, researching new military and economic advances, or training more fighting men. Thus, it’s safe to say that time itself is a valuable resource. And just like most resources in Vikings: War of Clans, you can literally buy more time.
Time boosts exist here, just like in other empire-building games. Here’s the thing though – the timers in Vikings: War of Clans are a cut above what similar games have, to say the least. The fact that I got 400 3-hour boosts (that’s 1200, hours, or 50 days, just shy of two months) for a maintenance says a lot, and long-time players insist that new players join every event to scrape out every last time boost they can get.
With that in mind, I would suggest being very judicious with your use of speed-ups, only using them if they’re 100% necessary. While yes, you can get them from events, you won’t get too many, and really, the only reliable way to get speed boosts of any real consequence is to spend gold (aka premium currency) to buy more. I’d also highly suggest joining a clan so that you can get speed boosts from your clanmates.
Fortunately, there are exceptions. Any research, construction or building upgrade time that’s at 5 minutes or less can be completed instantly, for free. This means that you can (and should) upgrade your resource generating buildings as soon as you build them!
Pick Fights with Random Monsters
Another great way to earn resources (in the form of usable bundles) is by fighting random monsters on the world map.
These monsters have no purpose other than to sit around and be killed by players, so go ahead and storm as many as you want. The higher a monster’s level, the better and more numerous items it drops – but it’ll also be harder to take down. Do note that you will have to research the appropriate invader level at your Oracle to fight monsters of that level.
When attacking a monster, you’ll be given the option of either making a normal attack or an enhanced attack. The difference between the two is that the enhanced attack simulates as many combat rounds as needed to kill the monster, or as much as can be spent. If you run out of energy, you can always use an energy item – and yes, this will allow your current energy to exceed its current cap. You can view your hero’s energy in their portrait – it’s the green circle. If your hero is out of energy, no more attacks for you!
You also get a sustained attack bonus for hitting the same monster over and over again in a short amount of time (around 1 hour), which gives your units an attack boost to help take the beast down. From what I’ve gathered, this boost can go up to 15%, which is a pretty sizeable amount.
At the beginning, your attacks will usually just scratch the monsters you fight. Don’t worry – you’ll still get a prize for hurting a monster – but try to finish it off as killing it gives more rewards.
To help you find targets to hit, you can use the navigator function on the world map (the eagle icon on the upper screen) to find specific landmarks – not just monsters, but also resource nodes and so much more – by inputting what you want to find, as well as the level range. By upgrading your town’s watchtower, you can increase the search radius of this function to make it easier to hit monsters. Knowledge is power!
Pick Fights with Your Neighbors
…but only as a last resort.
Raiding another player will pit your attacking army against their defenders – which in itself is sided against you as your opponent will have the advantage of their walls against you. Smarter players may wish to scout an enemy they plan to attack to see what they may run against, but be wary – wary opponents will do the same to you.
Naturally, picking a fight can cause some bad blood, so be careful of who you attack. While there’s no official rule against attacking other players, the server you find yourself in may have a special agreement between players where aggression is only allowed at certain times. If in doubt, always ask the veteran players of your server. In addition, you may wish to abstain from offensive actions until you’re part of an established guild – this way, you’ll have powerful allies to back you up. Do try not to pick fights without just cause though, yeah?
As an added layer of protection for new players, attacking players with palaces of level 6 or lower will not yield any resources even if you win. Sure, they’ll lose units, but that’ll pretty much establish you as a bully who only attacks new players. There’s no tactical or strategic reason to do this, and the game will double check if you’re sure you want to do this.
Develop Your Army
At the end of the day, might makes right in Vikings: War of Clans. Without an army to defend yourself and conquer other lords, you won’t be able to do much.
Unit Types
Vikings: War of Clans has 6 different unit types. These are melee, cavalry, ranged, killer, siege, and scouts.
Naturally, each unit has its own strengths and weaknesses.
Melee is good versus cavalry and killers, but is bad against ranged and siege.
Cavalry is good versus ranged and siege, but is bad against melee and killers.
Ranged units can pick off melee and killers from a distance, but suffer against cavalry and siege.
Killers are good against cavalry and siege, but are at a disadvantage against melee and ranged.
Siege units make quick work of both melee and ranged units, but fall to swift cavalry and lightly-armored killers.
Scouts are the odd unit out – they have no strengths, but no weaknesses either.
An easy way to sum this up is melee versus cavalry versus ranged, siege good against slow movers, and killers serving as specialist anti-siege units.
Training New Units
To train new units, you’ll need to construct a barracks.
Once there, simply tap on the troops tab, then indicate how many units you want and whether you want to pay with resources and time, or gold. After that, you just need to wait (or not wait, if you paid in gold), and presto – new units.
While you canconstruct multiple barracks, you cannot train different troop types at once. This means that building multiple barracks is only for increasing the amount of units that can be trained at once. Be assured – other lords will be doing the same, so don’t sleep on barracks upgrades or other improvements.
Note that active units have a food upkeep cost. While you won’t lose units by failing to pay their upkeep, your progress will be severely limited if you don’t have food to train more units or buy new structures. If your food income is negative, it’s time to build more farms and upgrade your existing ones!
Unlock New Unit Tiers
You can amass as many units as you want, but if your opponents have higher tier units, your army will simply be outclassed.
To stay one step ahead of your enemies, it’s important to beeline towards unlocking new unit types at your Oracle. Higher tier units have better stats than lower tier ones, so it’s much more economical to train some high level ones than a ton of low level ones. At the same time, don’t stop producing units. As a rule of thumb, always produce the highest tier that you currently have, and you can wait a bit if your tier unlock research is almost done.
Marches
Having a huge army is only half the battle – if you don’t upgrade your march size and number of marches, your fighters will be stuck behind your walls, just twiddling their thumbs. For reference, march size refers to the number of units that can be deployed in an army, and march number is the number of armies you can have in the field at once.
The simplest way to upgrade these is to upgrade your Shrine of Odin. Each level increases your march size by a good number, and every so often, you’ll gain an increase to the number of marches you can have.
The Shrine of Odin also provides easy configuration for marches. Not only can you view your current army here, but you can also set certain formations of units as a template for activities. This helps deal with the annoyance of confirming how many units to send on an attack, to gather, and so on.
Heroes and Shamans
All armies need organization, and in Vikings: War of Clans, you’ll need either a hero or a shaman to lead your armies during important activities.
Heroes are unlocked by default, and you can customize your hero by tapping on the icon in the upper left. You can even change their name and appearance once for free (as the game gives you these items).
Heroes also have access to a powerful passive skill tree. Each time a hero gains a level, they gain multiple skill points that can be spent in their respective trees. The three skill trees are main (economics), against invaders (for attacking monsters), and special (miscellaneous boosts that come later in the game). Don’t forget to spend these skill points – they can give sizeable boosts to your empire’s production and can be the key between victory and defeat!
Shamans, on the other hand, are a second hero and are required for certain actions, such as attacking ghosts that your hero can’t deal with. To unlock your shaman, you’ll need to build a Hall of Mysteries, which requires your palace to be at level 12.
Equipment
Heroes and Shamans can also be outfitted with equipment that you can craft at your forge. These items can give your generals the edge they need to win difficult battles and improve their economic efficiency.
To craft equipment, you’ll need the appropriate items, as well as resources (mostly silver). Raw materials used in crafting can often be sourced by beating up monsters outside your walls, as well as quests and events.
You can also fuse 4 materials of lower quality to get 1 material of the next rarity. This helps immensely in gathering rare items, especially if you need a lot of them and the RNG seems to hate you that day.
Healing The Wounded
Injury and even death are simply part and parcel of a fighter’s life, and in the course of Vikings: War of Clans, your soldiers will see a lot of these. Luckily, the infirmary exists to patch up your wounded and somehow resurrect your dead (at a steep cost, mind you).
When a unit is defeated in battle, there’s a very high chance that it will be wounded instead of killed. Wounded units are, for all intents and purposes, dead – they can’t participate in either offense or defense. However, they’re not out of the game yet. By going to your infirmary then tapping the healing tab at the top of the screen, you can spend resources and time to bring your wounded units back into fighting shape – which is way more economical than training a new batch of units.
For the unfortunate few who actually die in battle (for perspective, I got invaded and only 2 men died out of 600), generous and deep-pocketed jarls can elect to pay gold to bring them back from the dead. Yes, gold, the premium currency. The cost of resurrection is 50% of that unit’s cost when trained with gold, per unit.
Considering that there are few ways to earn gold, and that high level units cost quite a bit, resurrection costs can get out of hand very quickly. Do note that you only have a week to make the decision as to whether or not to resurrect units; after this time, they’ll be permanently deleted.
Better Living Through Science
Technology is a vital part to getting ahead in Vikings: War of Clans, and unlike other games, your research building is available from the very start.
The Oracle is an imposing building made of black stone. This structure serves as a hub for your empire’s greatest thinkers to stick their heads together and come up with ways to make your empire more efficient.
Research at the Oracle is divided into several distinct research trees, such as espionage, unit training, unit stats, hero stats, invaders, economics, and more. With so much to choose from, it’s important to determine exactly what your empire needs at the moment – if nothing comes to mind, I’ll always suggest running economic research.
It’s important to note that you should also upgrade your Oracle whenever you can, as this not only unlocks more technology for research, but also provides a research speed bonus.
Join A Clan
Clans are very important in Vikings: War of Clans – heck, it’s even in the game title. Without a clan, you’ll be denying yourself access to a good chunk of the game’s content, not to mention you’ll be easy prey for clans yourself. Joining a clan is thus not only great for expanding your options, but as additional protection against other players.
The Clan Store
The clan store is one of the main reasons you should join a clan as soon as possible.
At the clan store, you’ll be able to trade loyalty points and prowess points for some neat stuff, like VIP Points, Peace Treaties, and various resources and buffs. These points are earned by helping your clan members in tasks and participating in clan activities, as well as by completing clan tasks (more on that in the next section).
Clan Help
With how unbearably long timers can get in Vikings: War of Clans, it’s always nice to get some free help, and that’s what the clan help system is for.
As long as you’re in a clan, you can tap the help button that appears after you start any project. This will allow your clan members to help you out (at no cost to themselves!), reducing the timer of that project by a small amount. There are some limitations though – you can only be helped so many times on a single project, and helping only adds a tiny amount of progress. However, it’s totally free, and helping your clan mates also gives you loyalty points.
To send help to all active requests, you can tap the green clasped hands icon that appears on the lower right of the screen.
Onslaughts
Clans also let you organize and participate in onslaughts, which are joint attacks against strong foes. Whenever a clan member starts an onslaught, you’ll be able to join in if you’ve already built a War Bloc in your town. You’ll then be asked which units you’d like to send to help in the attack.
Reinforcements and Resources
Last but not least, clan members can both send reinforcements to each other, as well as give resources to ailing allies. This can be used to help allies facing a siege, or if they need more resources to complete a project. Do note that you’ll need a Mead Hall to both send and receive help.
Nab Free Stuff
With all the building and the training and the researching you’re going to be doing, it’s in your best interest to nab all the free stuff you can find. Here’s the breakdown on where you can get resources for free.
Quests
Quests in Vikings: War of Clans come in four flavors – standard, daily, weekly, and monthly. The quests menu is accessible by tapping on the upper left icon, just below your hero.
Daily, weekly, and monthly quests are exactly what they sound like. Do note that the rewards for these don’t come from doing the quests per se – each quest completed gives points, which contribute towards a meter. Every time said meter reaches (or surpasses) a chest, you can tap on that chest for a reward. If you’re part of the Northern Brotherhood (aka a monthly subscription), you can get more rewards out of these chests.
Standard quests, on the other hand, serve more as progression milestones than anything else. Fulfilling these is a great way to get used to the game’s mechanics, and completing them will yield resources and other fun stuff.
Tasks
Tasks are another way to get free stuff. The tasks menu is located just below the quests menu.
Tasks are divided into 3 types – personal, clan, and premium. The personal tab is always open, while the clan tab requires you to have joined a clan (and gives loyalty and prowess points, too). The premium tab is only open while you have VIP status, so if you turn that on, make sure to do your premium tasks for some extra loot.
Tasks are simple – just tap on the button to start a task…then wait. That’s it, nothing else needed. Note that you can’t run multiple tasks of the same tab at once, so make sure to pop back in and collect your loot.
Competitions
Vikings: War of Clans holds regular seasonal competitions which give out points and rewards based on your activities during these times.
To view what competitions are currently running, as well as what activities get you points and what the rewards are, tap the sword icon to the upper right side of the screen, when you’re in your city.
Competitions are very important as they’re one of the most reliable ways to earn gold outside of buying the stuff. However, you will have to join a clan to participate in a number of them. Even if you’re not a very social person, a clan will benefit from having new members, so look for one that’s accepting!
Loyalty Rewards
Loyalty rewards are just a fancy name for login bonuses. To access your login bonus, tap on the calendar icon below the tasks menu, or alternately, go to the menu and look for loyalty rewards there. Do note that these need to be consecutive logins – if you miss a day, you go back to the first square.
As can be expected of login rewards, they’re nothing fantastic – but every resource point helps.
The Chest of Loki
Loki’s mystical chest appears in the lower right of the screen. This curious container spontaneously generates resources every few minutes, which you’ll need to manually collect by tapping the chest. While these resources aren’t anything fantastic, they’re free.
Bank Freebies
The bank is mainly there to coax you into spending money, but it does have some free items. To get your free daily stuff, tap the bank button in the upper menu while in your city, then go to subscriptions.
The chest here can contain stuff like runic coins, as well as unit buffs.
Leverage Your VIP Status
Empire builders like Vikings: War of Clans almost always have a VIP system in place. This VIP system works sort of like a subscriber system – if you scratch the system’s back, you’ll gain perks and bonuses for a limited time. And in a PVP-heavy game like Vikings: War of Clans, you can be certain that everyone is going to leverage every advantage they can get.
VIP Benefits
So what exactly does having VIP give you?
For starters, having VIP status increases the reach of your free project completion timer. While it’s a measly 5 minutes at no VIP, it increases quite a bit with each new VIP level you have – at VIP level 4, for example, I can now complete any construction or upgrade timer at 11 minutes or less.
All resource generation will also receive a boost across the board. At higher levels, this can even reduce the upkeep costs of your units. Higher VIP levels can also not only increase the stats of your units, but also lower the stats of enemies you fight – including other players.
VIP levels also give you more tasks, as well as access to the premium tasks tab. This is often overlooked, so don’t forget it!
If you’re sold, you can access the VIP tab by tapping the crown on the upper panel, to the right of your hero and shaman slot.
VIP Levels and Duration
To gain better VIP bonuses, you can increase your VIP level via items.
These experience items can be bought with gold, but a better way to get them is to participate in various events and competitions. If you decide it’s time to increase your VIP level, simply go to the VIP panel and tap the Get Points button.
You can also purchase VIP time, which is separate from experience points. By buying and using VIP time, you can activate your VIP bonuses to kickstart your economy and get a huge advantage over your enemies!
Use Level Ups To Activate VIP Status
Finally, you don’t have to buy VIP as a new player. Increasing your VIP level will activate your VIP status for an amount of days, based on the level you reached. Use your VIP experience points judiciously and soon, you’ll be swimming in rewards!
Glory Awaits!
The world of Vikings: War of Clans is vast and varied, and only you can dictate how your story will play out. Will you be another forgotten, nameless clan, a mere footnote in someone else’s history? Or will you stand and fight bravely for your place in the world?
That about wraps up this beginner’s guide for Vikings: War of Clans, and I hope that this is enough information to help you find your footing and establish your place in the world. If there’s anything you’d like to add or share, make yourself heard in the comments!
a727
Wednesday 10th of May 2023
I'm the first comment! How do you pruchase VIP time, because I would like to spend my gold on that instead of rushing to try and upgrade my status 1X every day (because every level gives you time)