Beginner’s Guide
Written for someone in their first days on the server. Everything here is either a habit worth starting now or a mistake worth not making — the numbers behind it live in the Handbook, the event sections and the tools, and this section points at them rather than repeating them.
Your first week 6 points
- Start collecting from day one. Resources are easy early, which is exactly why people stop thinking about them — and then hit the level where one upgrade costs more than everything they own. Gather, farm and bank before you need to, not when you notice you are short.
- Join an alliance immediately. It is the largest free bonus available to you: alliance help cuts construction timers, the Alliance Shop sells the cheap 24-hour shield for alliance coin rather than diamonds, and rallies, alliance chests and the Alliance Duel are all closed to you until you are in one.
- Read before you build. The Sanctuary section in the Handbook says which buildings gate your next Sanctuary level, and Server Milestones says what unlocks on which server day. Both are worth ten minutes before your first big upgrade.
- Turn the game’s own notifications on. See Turning on notifications under How-to on this tab — the shield-expiry alert in particular is the cheapest protection available to you.
- Shield before you log off, not after, and bring your marches home first. See Shields under How-to; Saturday is the day it matters most.
- Learn the week. The Events tab is the whole recurring calendar — what runs when, and what each one wants from you. Knowing that Friday trains troops and Saturday is a fight changes what you save on Thursday.
Where your upgrades should go 6 points
- Do not pour levels into the blue heroes. Four heroes in the catalogue are SR — William, Durant, Robin and Kafa — and hero investment does not come back out. Levels, stars and skill badges spent on one are spent for good, and SSR and UR heroes replace them soon enough that anything past keeping them usable is thrown away.
- The same applies to buildings. Upgrade what you will still be using at Sanctuary 20, not what carries you to Sanctuary 10.
- Sanctuary prerequisites come first. Your Sanctuary level gates almost everything else, and it will not go up until the buildings it depends on have. The Handbook’s Sanctuary section lists them per level.
- The Builder’s building and the Alliance Hall are the two worth rushing. One lowers every construction time you will ever pay; the other is what alliance help runs through. They pay for themselves in a way a stat building does not.
- Research: go down the tree until it makes you go back up. Follow one branch as deep as it will let you, and climb back only for the prerequisite it demands — rather than levelling a whole row at a time.
- One strong squad before three mediocre ones. Get a Warrior squad to where it comfortably clears your PvE, and only then start building Ranger and Warlock squads beside it. The squad builder on the Hero Companion will tell you what a line-up is missing.
Alliance advice, not measured. The building order, the research heuristic and the one-squad-first rule are alliance members’ own practice rather than anything captured in-game. They are consistent with how the game costs upgrades and nobody has argued against them — but nobody has run the comparison either.
Collected from alliance members, 8 Sep 2026. Not individually attributed; the names belong on this line and are missing.
Hoard from day one 5 points
- Speedups are worth more later. A stack spent on early upgrades saves you minutes; the same stack spent at a high Sanctuary level saves you days. Sit on them.
- And spend them inside a scoring window. Survival Battle runs in 4-hour blocks and the Alliance Duel gives each day a theme — the same speedup is worth points during the matching block and nothing outside it. Bank, then dump is the habit; both Events sections say which day and which block.
- Materials to hoard rather than use as they arrive:UR shards, gearstones, antitoxin, gear blueprints and raven essence. These are the inputs to the upgrades that actually move your power, and every one of them is slower to earn than it looks.
- Buy them weekly once the shops open to you. The weekly rotations are the reliable source; events are not. Weekly shop priorities under Purchases on this tab has one player’s ordering of the four shops.
- Salvage the gear off heroes you have replaced. Gear crafted for a hero you no longer field is not spent — remove and salvage it, and the materials go back toward the hero you do field.
The daily loop 6 points
- Finish the daily list every day. It is small, repetitive, and the most reliable income on the account. The Today tab shows what is live now and what unlocks today.
- Join every rally until your rewards cap out. There is a daily ceiling on what joining pays; until you reach it, every rally you join is free.
- Alliance Duel and Survival Battle reward planning more than effort. Both are scored, both have wildly uneven point values, and both are won by doing the big-ticket items first — read the two Events sections once and you will spend the rest of the season ahead of people playing more than you do.
- Use the minister titles, early and often. A construction or research title applied before a long upgrade is a large free discount, and the queue is usually empty enough to get one. See Titles in the Handbook for what each grants, and the Title Queue Timer on Tools for when your slot comes up.
- Claim Falcon Quests deliberately. The Alliance Duel point fires on claiming a completed quest rather than on completing it, so a finished quest is worth holding until a day that scores it. The Falcon Quest Planner on Tools works out the timing.
- If an expedition or exploration challenge refuses you, come back to it. Try it a couple more times straight away, and if it still will not give, leave it several hours or until the next day rather than burning attempts on it.
Fighting other players 4 points
- Start farming other players as soon as your troops can take a city. It is the fastest resource income in the game, and most new players leave it alone far too long.
- Ask leadership before your first hit inside the kingdom. Kingdoms and alliances run non-aggression pacts — a NAP — and hitting someone covered by one is an alliance problem rather than a personal one. Who is off-limits changes; leadership knows, and this page does not.
- Spend your first five hits on the highest-level target you can beat. Plunder falls off steeply after the first hit on a city, so the order you attack in matters as much as who you attack.
- Bring your marches home before you shield. A shield covers your city and nothing standing outside it. See Shields under How-to.
The falloff numbers are unverified. The alliance figure is 100% of the plunder on the first hit, then 15%, then 5% — but nothing here has been checked against the game and no capture of a five-hit sequence exists. Treat the ordering advice as sound and the three percentages as a claim; consecutive hits on one city, screenshotted, would settle it.
If you spend money 4 points
- The extra build and research slots are the best value on the store. The Permanent Build Queue and the second research queue are permanent and compound from the day you buy them, which no pack of materials does. Both are listed with their prices under Purchases on this tab.
- Buy Marlena early and commit to her. She is the first Top-Up hero, a UR Warrior carry, and she scales hard with stars — so shards put into her are worth more than the same shards spread across three heroes. She joins the Tavern on day 66 regardless, so this buys her sooner and further, not access.
- Spend your diamonds each month rather than banking them. Diamonds spent count toward VIP and the VIP bonuses are permanent percentages; the alliance rule of thumb is to put 10,000 through each month as soon as you can afford it.
- Everything else is under Purchases. Pack contents, prices and one source’s value ordering, including the path to VIP Freya. Read it before a sale rather than during one.
The VIP thresholds are not captured. The 10,000-a-month figure is an alliance habit, not a boundary read off the VIP panel — there is no screenshot here of what each VIP level costs or grants. Until one exists, treat it as “spend regularly” rather than as a target that unlocks something specific.
Known gaps on this page. Three things a beginner asks that are not answered here: how pirate chests appear and whether they are tied to Falcon Quests; the exact plunder falloff; and the VIP level table. Each is one screenshot away from being written properly, which is a better use of anyone’s time than guessing at them.