Commander Guide

Commanders are the heart of Rise of Kingdoms. There are many many possible builds players can choose when developing their commanders. There are also many opinions as to which build is "best". This guide explains how to go about planning your build, and lists some common builds.

Planning your Commander build

The first thing to consider is how long you expect to play for, or how much money you are planning on spending on the game. Legendary Commanders are the best, but also the most difficult to upgrade. Next, are Epic, Elite, and finally Advanced. Most F2P (Free to Play) players focus on Epic and Elite commanders. P2P (Pay to Play) players may go after one or multiple Legendary commanders.

Selecting roles

Additionally, you will want to consider what role you will take in your Alliance:

• PvE (vs Barbarians)
• PvE Rally lead (vs Barbarian forts, Sanctums, Passes, Altars, Shrines)
• PvP Rally lead (vs other player bases and alliance structures)
• PvP defense (vs incoming attacks from other players)

F2P players typically won't be leading large rallies later in the game, but they will do a lot of PvE (Player vs Enemy) vs Barbarians and some of the Barbarian Forts.

Normally you'll want to focus on at least one of above for your primary commander, and then have decent additional commanders.

Specializing troops

For attacking type commanders, there are two types - those that have skills and talents specialized to one troop type, and those that enhance all troop types equally.

The advantage of specializing is that if you can get a full march of one troop type, the buffs are effectively much higher, and you will be able to win more battles and march faster. There are several builds that focus on Cavalry, which can get you the fastest march speeds in the game, along with good attack buffs. The downside to specializing is that unless you plan on spending money to accelerate troop training, it takes a long time to get a full march of specifically one troop type. Hence typically P2P players specialize.

F2P players often choose to generalize, as they can train all troop types simultaneously, the best way for them to get a large army is to train them all. So your main attack commander would buff all units the same. You still might upgrade a cavalry-only hero for quick marches to get runes, help build alliance buildings or other non-combat missions where quick marches help.

Lastly, there is a small rock-paper-scissors type buff with the 3 unit types. Cavalry has a 5% bonus against Archers, Archers have a 5% bonus against Infantry, and Infantry has a 5% bonus against Cavalry. All 3 have a 5% bonus vs Siege. It is a small effect but can turn the battle if all things else are equal.

Luck

To some extent, your build may rely on luck getting statues. Eventually, you will get them all, but you likely won't want to wait weeks or months to use XP tomes on your favourite commander.

Importance

Finally, for many players, the exact troop selection isn't THAT important. Every skill and talent provides marginal improvements (0.5% attack, 3% march speed, etc). True that together these can add up to making armies 30~50% stronger, which is critical for end game PVP, but for casual players, this isn't a huge difference. So don't forget to just have fun!

Commander Specialities

Rarity	Name	Talent 1 (Red)	Talent 2 (Yellow)	Talent 3 (Blue)	Specialty	Unit Specialty	Typical Role
Legendary	Julius Caesar	Leadership	Conquering	Attack	Primary	All	PvP attack (strong)
Legendary	El Cid	Archer	Versatility	Skill	Primary	Archer	PvP (fast)
Legendary	Richard I	Infantry	Garrison	Defense	Primary	Infantry	PvP defense
Legendary	Cao Cao	Cavalry	Peacekeeping	Mobility	Primary	Cavalry	PvE (fast march)
Legendary	Frederick I	Leadership	Conquering	Attack	Primary	All	PvP attack (strong)
Legendary	Minamoto no Yoshitsune	Cavalry	Peacekeeping	Skill	Primary	Cavalry	PvE or PvP (fast march)
Legendary	Yi Seong-Gye	Archer	Garrison	Skill	Primary	Archer	PvP defense
Legendary	Cleopatra VII	Integration	Gathering	Support	Gathering	Siege (gathering)	Gathering
Legendary	Charles Martel	Infantry	Garrison	Defense	Primary	Infantry	PvP defense
Legendary	Hannibal Barca	Leadership	Conquering	Attack	Primary	All	PvP offense
Legendary	Æthelflæd	Leadership	Peacekeeping	Support		All
Legendary	Mehmed II	Leadership	Conquering	Skill		All	PvP offense
Legendary	Constantine I	Infantry	Garrison	Support		Infantry
Legendary	Saladin	Cavalry	Conquering	Support		Cavalry
Legendary	Seondeok	Integration	Gathering	Attack	Gathering	Siege (gathering)	Gathering
Legendary	Ishida Mitsunari	Integration	Gathering	Support	Gathering	All	Gathering
Legendary	Genghis Khan	Cavalry	Versatility	Skill		Cavalry
Legendary	Alexander the Great	Infantry	Versatility	Attack	Primary	Infantry
Legendary	Artemisia I	Archer	Garrison	Defense		Archer
Legendary	Attila	Cavalry	Conquering	Attack		Cavalry
Legendary	Charlemagne	Leadership	Conquering	Skill		All
Legendary	Edward of Woodstock	Archer	Versatility	Skill		Archer
Legendary	Guan Yu	Infantry	Conquering	Skill		Infantry
Legendary	Leonidas I	Infantry	Versatility	Defense		Infantry
Legendary	Takeda Shingen	Cavalry	Versatility	Mobility		Cavalry
Legendary	Tomyris	Archer	Conquering	Attack		Archer
Legendary	Wu Zetian	Leadership	Garrison	Support		All	Defense
Legendary	Theodora	Leadership	Garrison	Defense		All	Defense
Legendary	Yi Sun-sin	Leadership	Garrison	Defense		All	Defense
Epic	Baibars	Cavalry	Conquering	Skill		Cavalry
Epic	Belisarius	Cavalry	Peacekeeping	Mobility		Cavalry
Epic	Eulji Mundeok	Infantry	Garrison	Attack	Primary	Infantry	PvP defense
Epic	Lohar	Integration	Peacekeeping	Support	Primary	All	PvE (exp bonus)
Epic	Joan of Arc	Integration	Gathering	Support	Primary, secondary, or gathering	All	Gathering, PvP or PvE
Epic	Hermann	Archer	Garrison	Skill	Primary	Archer	PvP defense
Epic	Pelagius	Cavalry	Garrison	Skill	Primary	Cavalry	Defense/Fast attack
Epic	Sun Tzu	Infantry	Garrison	Skill	Primary	Infantry	Defense
Epic	Scipio Africanus	Leadership	Conquering	Attack	Primary	All	Attack cities
Epic	Kusunoki Masashige	Archer	Garrison	Skill	Primary	Archer	Defense
Epic	Osman I	Leadership	Conquering	Skill	Primary	All
Epic	Keira	Archer	Peacekeeping	Skill	Primary	Archer
Epic	Boudica	Integration	Peacekeeping	Skill	Primary	All	Barbs
Elite	Šárka	Integration	Gathering	Skill	Gathering	All	Gathering
Elite	Lancelot	Cavalry	Versatility	Mobility	Primary	Cavalry	Fast attack
Elite	Tomoe Gozen	Archer	Versatility	Attack	Secondary	Archer	PvP attack
Elite	Gaius Marius	Leadership	Gathering	Skill	Gathering	All	Gathering
Elite	Constance	Integration	Gathering	Skill	Gathering	All	Gathering
Advanced	Markswoman	Archer	Peacekeeping	Skill	Secondary	Archer	Useless (archer only vs barb??)
Advanced	Dragon Lancer	Cavalry	Versatility	Mobility	Secondary	Cavalry	Fast attack (secondary)
Advanced	City Keeper	Infantry	Versatility	Attack	Secondary	Infantry	PvP Defense
Advanced	Centurion	Integration	Gathering	Attack	Gathering	All	Gathering (but inferior)

F2P Suggested builds

PvE (Barbarians)

This will likely be your main commander. Many choose Lohar​​​​​, with Boudica​​​​​ as secondary for hunting barbarians for their increased experience gain from their passive skills.

Gathering

Get some of the gatherers (Centurion​​​​, Constance​​​​, Šárka​​​​, Gaius Marius​​​​, Joan of Arc​​​​​, Cleopatra VII​​​​, Seondeok​​​​, Ishida Mitsunari​​​​) and upgrade all their gather and march talents and skills. Prioritize lower rarity gathering commanders, as they are easier to maximize gathering talents earlier. Use other gathering commanders as secondary for an extra gather speed bonus.

The exception perhaps is Joan of Arc​​​​​, who also has some very good fighting skills and many players use her as a secondary commander. You can fully upgrade all her skills and talents for gathering, and in the end, it won't make a difference if you use her as a secondary commander. If you want to use her as primary, don't put talent points into her gathering tree.

PvP Offense

If you are free-to-play, you likely won't be leading major attacks, only joining in, so you might just care about march speed, or applying debuffs to help other armies do more damage. Accordingly, prioritize cavalry to move quickly around the map, or commanders with the support tree.

For attacks in the open field, you'll either have to use a unit specialized commander or get one of the very rare legendary commanders, either way with preferably with multi-target active skills​​​​.

For attacking cities, Scipio Africanus​​​​ is an easy choice early on.

PvP Defense

You will need to have a primary and secondary commander assigned to your wall. All garrison/defense commanders are specialized, and you can choose anyone you like. You can choose between your highest ranked commander or any commander with the garrison talent.

Fast attack

You'll likely want to make a specialized fast march for quickly joining rallies or gathering runes. Some combinations:

• Lancelot​​​​ and Dragon Lancer​​​​ (Cavalry). While these aren't the best units in the end game, they are the easiest to upgrade, and have their passive skills directly increase march speed.
• Cao Cao​​​​ and Minamoto no Yoshitsune​​​​ are also great fast cavalry commanders, but they are much harder to upgrade.
• Hermann​​​​ and Tomoe Gozen​​​​ (Archers). These are harder to upgrade compared to Lancelot​​​​ and Dragon Lancer​​​​. El Cid​​​​ has the best Archer March Speed but he is hard to upgrade.
• Richard I​​​​ is the only commander with Infantry specific march speed bonus. Not really something to shoot for. He has also been disabled since kingdom 1032.

P2P

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Upgrading

Experience

Commanders gain experience by fighting Barbarians and with Experience Tomes. Higher rarity commanders require more experience to gain levels. Each star extends the maximum level of a commander by 10 levels.

Caution - Sometimes it is UNDESIRED to level up your commanders as fast as possible with experience. See the below section on Skills.

Talents

Each commander has a talent tree with 3 specialties. Each time your commander gains a level, a talent point is made available, and more talent points are made available when promoting to star levels 5 and 6.

Caution - It is hard/expensive to undo poor talent choice, as talent resets are expensive. If you are not sure how to purpose the commander, don't spend the talent points until you are.

Talent points of secondary commanders have no effect on the march or battle.

Skills

Skills are the most important upgrade for commanders, without them, the talents and stars don't make a difference. All commanders have one active skill, which triggers when the commander's rage meter maxes out at 1000. They then may have 3 or 4 additional passive skills.

All commanders start off with their one level 1 active skill.

To enable more skills, their star level must be upgraded. Once the skill becomes available, the skill may be upgraded with Sculptures. However, for almost all main lead commanders, you will want to upgrade their first skill first to level 5 before enabling other skills!

Higher rarity commanders require more sculptures to upgrade their skills. To upgrade all 4 skills to level 5, it takes:

• Legendary: 690 sculptures
• Epic: 440 sculptures
• Elite: 340 sculptures
• Advanced: 240 sculptures

When upgrading skills, one of the available skills will be randomly selected to upgrade until they are all level 5. For epic and legendary commanders, this enables their final expertise skill, enhancing a previous skill or activating their new expertise skill.

Stars

Once your commander has reached level 10, you can upgrade his star level. But wait until you have maxed out its primary skill to level 5 unless you are sure what you're doing.

Before you upgrade, decide if you want to attempt to jump to 3 stars (so the hero can get a secondary commander on marches), or not. In most cases you do.

To do the 3-star trick:

1. Apply 2 starlight sculptures, to get to 40 or 80% of the first star.
2. If it doesn't critical, apply one more to get to 60 or 80%.
3. If it doesn't critical, apply one more to get to 80%, but hopefully not 100%.
4. Then if you can get it to 80%, apply 6 stars all at once. This will take you to 150% stars, and you'll have a good chance that it will critical, you'll get double experience, and the 3rd star will open.
5. If you're unlucky and miss it, you'll just have to wait until the hero levels to level 20.

This trick doesn't work for the 4th or later stars as those required too much star experience.

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