Your first sixty days in Rise of Kingdoms are decided by three choices: push City Hall ahead of every other building, pour sculptures into one commander instead of five, and join an alliance that actually plays. Everything else is noise you can fix later.

This Rise of Kingdoms guide walks the systems in the order they start mattering, from civilization pick through your first Kingdom vs Kingdom season. If you have played another live-service 4X, the pacing will feel familiar, and the same discipline that runs our Whiteout Survival day-one guide applies here with different vocabulary.

Updated September 2026. Checked against Rise of Kingdoms version 1.1.11.28, which shipped the Anniversary Festival events and the current Season of Conquest pass schedules.

What Actually Matters in the First Sixty Days

Treat the first two months as one job: reach City Hall 25 with one finished commander pairing and a real alliance around you. Nothing else you do in that window compounds. Troop tiers, talent respecs, and second civilizations all sit downstream of those three, and players who chase them early arrive at their first season underbuilt.

The daily loop underneath all of that is small. Clear barbarians with your primary commander, keep gathering marches out on the map, fill alliance help requests, and spend action points before they cap. Twenty focused minutes covers it. The players who burn out in month one are the ones who treat every event on the calendar as mandatory.

Rise of Kingdoms runs everything on one continuous map instead of instanced battle screens, so your position, your neighbors, and your march timers are all live at once. That is the genuine appeal, and it is also why a badly placed city stays badly placed for weeks. The current build lists which events are running in your kingdom, which is worth a look before you commit resources to anything time-limited.

Pick a Civilization for the Next Month, Not Forever

Start China. The building speed bonus is small on paper and enormous in practice over sixty days of nonstop construction, and the starting commander slots into early fights without argument. You can change civilization later, so the pick is a tempo decision rather than an identity.

Where the tier lists mislead you is treating all fifteen civilizations as long-term commitments. Germany and France are the usual second homes, Arabia suits rally leaders, and none of that is a first-week problem. Lilith documents the current bonuses on the official Rise of Kingdoms site, and they do get tuned. If you came here from a turn-based 4X, the adjustment is that civilization matters far less than it does in Civilization-style games, because your commanders carry the actual power curve.

City Hall 25 Is the Only Building Target That Counts

Keep City Hall at the highest level in your city at all times, and upgrade other buildings only when they gate the next City Hall step. City Hall level controls new buildings, march queues, troop tiers, and research access, which means every level of it opens several other things at once.

The mistake that costs new players the most is even development, spreading resources across every building because the upgrade arrows all look equally urgent. They are not. A farm two levels behind costs you a rounding error, and a City Hall two levels behind costs you march slots you cannot buy back. Get the second builder early and push VIP toward 6 while you do it, because two build queues roughly halve the calendar.

The counterweight is that City Hall upgrades get brutally expensive in the twenties, and there is a real point around City Hall 21 where pausing to build resource capacity is correct rather than lazy. Research in the Academy runs on its own queue and never competes with construction, so keep something expensive learning at all times. If you want the pure builder version of this loop without the war clock attached, our roundup of mobile city builders covers games that let you take that pause forever. Budget a full month for City Hall 21 through 25 on its own, because that stretch is where most free accounts stall out, and the rest of our strategy guides take these systems one at a time.

Commanders: Depth Before Breadth, Every Time

Finish one competitive march before you start a second. A single legendary pairing with a filled talent tree beats four half-built commanders in every fight that matters, and universal sculptures spent to fix a scattered roster are the most expensive currency in the game.

Two mechanics decide most of this. Only the primary commander’s talent tree applies to a march, so the secondary is there for skills alone and does not need the same investment. And stopping a legendary at 5-5-5-1 instead of chasing max skills saves hundreds of sculptures per commander, which is often a whole second pairing. Universal sculptures follow the same rule, so hold them until you know which march you are actually fielding. Early on, put your primary into Peacekeeping to farm barbarians efficiently and respec later when field fighting starts.

The honest criticism is that the roster is a gacha wearing a history costume, and the commanders you get are not the ones the tier lists assume. Sun Tzu is a fine early primary because he is reliably available, not because he is the strongest. Build what you actually pulled. Players coming from PC will recognize the shape of this from real-time 4X games, minus the sculpture economy.

Your Alliance Is a Progression System, Not a Chat Room

Join an active alliance in week one and move your city inside its territory. Gathering inside alliance land runs about 25 percent faster, alliance help cuts build timers directly, and territory is where reinforcements can actually reach you. A solo player at City Hall 20 is weaker than an allied player at City Hall 18.

Judge an alliance by how fast help requests get filled, not by how many members it has. A 100-member alliance where twelve people log in daily is worse than a 60-member one that answers rallies. Ask what time zone the leadership plays in before you commit, because a group that fights while you sleep gives you none of the benefits. This is the same social layer that makes MMORTS games work, and the same reason they collapse when the active core leaves.

Alliance technology deserves your credits from day one, since it buffs everyone permanently and costs you nothing but the help clicks you should be making anyway. If you want a smaller-scale version of alliance war planning to compare against, our DomiNations breakdown covers the same tensions with fewer moving parts.

Gems, VIP, and the Traps That Eat Your Progress

Do not spend gems as you earn them. Bank them and spend during a gem-spending event, which pays extra rewards for purchases you were going to make anyway, and treat the second builder as the one exception worth buying immediately.

After that, the free-to-play priority is short: VIP levels, then books of covenant, then gold keys. VIP 10 and 12 are the milestones people actually feel, because the daily sculpture income at the top end quietly outpaces anything you grind. Skip decorative purchases entirely.

The other trap is tier 5 troops. New players treat T5 as the finish line, but the resource and speedup cost is far higher than the power gain, and a T4 army behind a finished commander pairing wins fights against T5 behind a scattered one. If the monetization pressure is what puts you off, our list of games like Clash of Clans and the wider strategy game rankings point at gentler options.

Events and the Kingdom vs Kingdom Clock

Your kingdom is on a season timer whether you are ready or not, and your first Lost Kingdom transfer is where sixty days of preparation gets graded. Before it opens, get your city inside established alliance territory, bank speedups instead of burning them, and make sure your primary pairing is finished rather than promising.

Day to day, the event calendar is the real progression schedule. Recurring events pay for actions you were already taking, so checking the calendar before you spend is worth more than any single optimization in this article. Ark of Osiris is the weekly one to build a schedule around, because it is alliance-wide and rewards turning up more than it rewards raw power. The current build runs an Anniversary Festival alongside the Warriors Unbound and Siege of Orléans season stories, with pass openings moved to weekends.

The fair warning is that seasons never stop. There is no version of this game where you finish and put it down, which suits some players and quietly exhausts others. Lilith Games has run this cadence since 2018 and shows no sign of slowing. If the multi-month commitment appeals, our roundup of online war strategy games covers the rest of that field.

Using This Rise of Kingdoms Guide Across Sixty Days

Weeks one and two: pick China, join an active alliance, move inside its territory, and farm barbarians with a Peacekeeping primary. Weeks three through six: City Hall above everything, second builder bought, one legendary pairing pushed toward 5-5-5-1. Weeks seven and eight: bank speedups, top up alliance technology, and stop starting new commanders entirely.

Most of what gets written as a Rise of Kingdoms beginners guide opens with a civilization tier list, which is the least consequential decision on this page. The honest version of a Rise of Kingdoms new player guide is that pace beats optimization for two months, and the players who arrive at their first season with one strong march and a real alliance beat the ones who arrived with a spreadsheet.

Treat this as a Rise of Kingdoms game guide you reread at each City Hall milestone rather than a checklist you clear once. Keep an eye on the 4X guides as your kingdom matures, and the rest of the library is at Strategygame.org.

Frequently Asked Questions