Ever wanted to build your own city, expand, and conquer the kingdom? In Rise of Kingdoms (former known as Rise of Civilizations) is one of the best strategy mobile app game to play right now. Rise of Kingdoms isn’t your typical strategy game, in fact most of the gameplay depends on diplomacy, sheer power, performing tactical moves and working with your alliances to defeat the enemies. In the center of your kingdom is where the Lost Temple is located at. If it is captured by your alliance, your alliance members and you will become king of the kingdom.

I have been playing Rise of Kingdoms for around a year as a Free-to-Play player. Before that, I was looking for a new strategy game like Civilizations on my iPad. Rise of Kingdoms manages to capture the feel of Civilizations by combining historical facts, claiming and staking your territory, killing hordes of barbarians, acquiring holy sites to increase the troops’ combat effectiveness, and as well as forming alliance with other players in various regions. Initially, I thought the game was going to be simple and straightforward. But after playing it for a while, Rise of Kingdoms is much deeper than you think. What I mentioned is basically scratching the surface.

At the beginning of the game, you will be introduced by a female character who goes through the tutorial and teaches you how to play the Rise of Kingdoms. Each civilization has its own traits such as increases your archer attack, allows your commanders to gather resources quickly, and even speeds up the building time. They also have a unique unit that becomes available once you research Tier 4 troops in Academy. Arabia is my first civilization because of the damage traits that they provide, and I loved the idea of being able to strike fast with high mobility.

You also will get an epic commander right away at the beginning of the game based on civilization you pick. For instance, I got Baibars who specializes in cavalry and his active skill can hit up to five targets at a time. I also appreciate that there are so many things you can do in Rise of Kingdoms as a free-to-play player, yet the game developers do shamelessly offer several ways to take a little bit of your money in exchange for a ton of rewards. However, with dedication and time, you will eventually grow and collect commander sculptures to summon powerful legendary commanders to lead your armies in the battles.   

Upon your first game session on a new server, your kingdom will be filled with fog and you must scout to lift the fog. There are so many hidden secrets in the fog such as villages and caves. The friendly tribe villages are one of the best ways to get some free units as well as basic economic technology. Inside the caves is where the treasures hide in. Sending your scouts to the caves will retrieve the treasures and bring back to your city for rewards. The mountainous borders are protected by passes that your alliance must capture in order to move to the next zone. Killing barbarians brings in bountiful rewards and eliminating the sentinels who guard the holy sites drops runes that give you a strong temporary buff.

You can get started by joining one of the top alliances in your kingdom who often has advanced technologies that increase the speed of your building timer, researching timer and even you get to gather faster within the alliance territory. You will be surprised by how willing these top alliances want to take players in and how friendly they are towards new players. Ask any questions you have about the game, and they will answer your questions.

Alliances in Rise of Kingdoms follows a peculiar mindset: experienced players teach new players. This unique mindset works so effectively because it allows new players to grow and becomes an experienced player through playing the game within the alliance. This is an opportunity for the new players to learn about commanders and strategy in-depth. The community in Rise of Kingdoms is very friendly, helpful, and always ready to lend a helping hand.

Growing and expanding your sphere of influence as a free-to-play in Rise of Kingdoms is easy to do so. Doing the Expedition Campaign and Sunset Canyon is one of the many free-to-play avenues that give you tomes, which is books that grant your commander experience points to level them up. The events also sometimes come with amazing prizes that reward the top 3 players in your kingdom with legendary commander sculptures, powerful tomes, and even ton of resource tokens.

Gameplay-wise, Rise of Kingdoms plays the game very differently compared to other popular strategy mobile app games. In Rise of Kingdoms, the defenders have the advantage of not having their troops die during the battle when they are protecting their city. This means if you plan to attack an enemy, you will end up wounding your troops and some of them will get killed on the battlefield. This is done on purpose for a very good reason, the game developers want to encourage players to work together to assemble and rally a large army to take down opponents.

You can rally your army and other alliance members will join you. The more players who joins your rally army, the bigger, powerful, and deadlier it gets. Rallies army also suffers fewer causalities compared to dispatching your own army and is one of the most effective ways to get rid of enemy players. On the Lost Kingdom map, my alliance and I have zeroed at least several hundred via rallying armies to claim territory for ourselves. Unluckily, I have been zeroed a couple of times where my city ended up teleporting to a different region on the map, which I got the time to recover injured troops and gather resources to rebuild my force.

Rise of Kingdoms is very huge and every day there is always a new server opening, seriously. The game graphics are pretty good with the max resolution on my iPad and I haven’t seen any issues lately. There are a lot of things to do as a free-to-play player and the game progression is very deep. This strategy mobile app game isn’t something that you can finish in a few days. But over the course of months and years as you build your forces and work with your alliance to conquer the kingdom for yourselves.

Rise of Kingdoms is made by Lilith Games, a mobile app gaming company founded in 2015 and is based in Shanghai, China. Ever since this game launched on both Google Play Store and App Store in 2018, more than hundreds of millions have downloaded it and have given it overwhelming positive rating. If you are looking to sharpen your gameplay and to engage in the ever-evolving battlefield as players races to reign the entire kingdom, I highly recommend Rise of Kingdoms.

If you aren’t sure where to start with or need some informative tips on how to level up your commanders quickly and deciding which one to focus on to make your game progress as smooth as possible. House of Kingdoms is one of the biggest Rise of Kingdoms website that covers everything from commanders to civilizations to events and more. Even you will find some tricks that you never thought are possible but is doable!