Welcome to our How to Understand Core Commander Mechanisms: Guide for Beginners. In Rise of Kingdoms, where everything mainly revolves around commanders.
You will not get that far without understanding the core commander mechanisms for beginners. So often, players make these simple, early mistakes and don’t follow these recommended game tips to maximize their advantages.
By arming yourself with these game mechanisms, you will have a competitive advantage over your opponents. In this guide, I will explain the very core game concept of commanders that you need to understand to become an effective governor in Rise of Kingdoms.
Here’s an overview of what you need to know when working on your commanders:
- Commander Skills
- Upgrading Commander Skills
- Commander Skill Lock
- Unlocking Stars
- Leveling Up
- Talent Trees / Talent Builds
- Commander Roles
- Commander Pairings
Without further ado, let’s get to the basics of commander mechanisms and learn what you can do to maximize your knowledge to gain an advantage over inexperienced governors as a free-to-play player!
Commander Skills
Commander skills are what identifies each commander and determines the strength and use in the battle. One of the main differences between the rarity of commanders is the quality of skills and the cost of upgrades.
In Rise of Kingdoms, there’s no stat difference between commanders — a nice feature, unlike other games. You can improve your commander’s stats by investing their talent points in the talent tree builder.
Pointers to know about Commander Skills:
- You get talent points for leveling up the commander’s level.
- Each level up increases the commander’s troop capacity.
- Starring up unlocks the next skill for the commander.
- On the 3rd star, you open the ability to send a secondary commander.
- On 5th & 6th stars, the commander gets extra talent points.
- Skills scale based on the total attack value of your march.
- All commanders have the same amount of talent points per level.
- There are no special or hidden bonuses for legendary commanders.
Upgrading Commander Skills
The cost to upgrade your commanders’ skills depends on their rarity. Advanced commanders are the easiest and cheapest ones to level up and upgrade with a minimal amount of sculptures.
While legendary commanders often are the longest and expensive to level up and upgrade with an excessive amount of sculptures.
To draw a comparison for you here’s how many commander sculptures you need to max out your commander’s skills:
- 230 Sculptures for Advanced
- 340 Sculptures for Elite
- 440 Sculptures for Epic
- 690 Sculptures for Legendary
Epic and Legendary commanders also enjoy the perk of having five skills, whereas Advanced and Elite commanders only have four skills. The 5th skill that Epic & Legendary commanders have is called Enhanced Skill and doesn’t require any sculptures to unlock.
It will automatically apply to the commander once you max out all of their skills. The number of required sculptures for each skill level increases with the number of existing skill-ups. The commander’s level and stars do not affect how many statues you need to use at all.
If you are using the 4 Stars trick (which works well for Advanced and sometimes Elite Commanders), there’s an element of chance to upgrade these commanders’ skills. You will want to minimize the randomness of upgrading as much as possible by reducing the number of minimum skills.
The governors can do it by maxing out the commander’s first skill. Then unlock the following two skills and hope that skill up will land on the third skill.
For instance, Lohar‘s third skill is a high priority, and you will have to depend on luck. In no circumstance will you want to star him up at all until you max out his third skill.
Commander Skill Lock
One of the newest features that Lilith Games recently introduced in the game is called Commander Skill Lock. This feature works by choosing a skill that you would like to focus on first.
For instance, if you have a rare commander such as Constance or Sarka that was upgraded to four stars and unlocked a few new skills simultaneously. Instead of relying on the game to randomly assign a skill point.
You can take advantage of the Commander Skill Lock feature to lock onto a skill and max out your preferred commander’s skill first. Afterward, you can focus on other skills to further enhance your commander’s combat performance.
The commander skill lock is a handy feature, especially if you are leveling up legendary commanders and want to focus on powerful skills first without putting the whole leveling up phase on hold.
Unlocking Stars
It is one of my favorite little tricks using stars to jump from 1 Star to 4 Stars. This trick works well for Advanced & Elite commanders. Though, you can easily do 1 Star to 3 Stars for Epic commanders. This trick becomes rare and difficult with Legendary commanders since the requirement to level up is costlier.
To do the star jump trick, you will need to use Starlight Sculptures that increase the star experience. Do this bit by bit until you reach 90% – 95% of your commander’s star experience.
Then apply stars with big experience points and throw in some extra luck so that it will be critical and double the amount. This star trick doesn’t work later because the experience required to level up the commander becomes more expensive.
It is better to do this trick early in the beginning when you max out your commander to level 10 to save more of your starlight sculptures!
Leveling Up
Each star increases the level cap of your commanders by 10. For the first star, the level cap is 10. When you grow your commander to 2 stars, then its level cap becomes 20, and so on.
The max stars you can have on any commander is six, which means the maximum level cap is 60.
The amount of experience you need to get through killing barbarians and using the tome books to level up your commanders depends on their rarity.
For starters, here’s how much experience each commander has at level one:
- Advanced: 60 Experience
- Elite: 80 Experience
- Epic: 100 Experience
- Legendary: 120 Experience
You get the idea that the amount of experience increases as you level them up. For example, legendary commanders are 50% more expensive than advanced commanders and 16.67% more expensive than Epic commanders.
Make sure you prioritize carefully and plan out the talent builds in advance.
Talent Trees / Talent Builds
One of the essential core commander mechanisms you need to know is the talent trees in Rise of Kingdoms. All commanders have a talent tree, but they vary depending on what skills they have.
At House of Kingdoms, we have tons of commanders that cover each talent build in the detailed guide: Aethelflaed, Guan Yu, and Cao Cao, to name a few.
You can customize your talent builds for these commanders, but if you want the best of all to maximize damage done, reduce incoming damage, increase your commanders’ skill damage, and more. I recommend following our talent builds guide for commanders.
Here’s a list of probable talent paths you can pick for your commanders:
- Peacekeeping Commanders
- Gathering Commanders
- Rally Commanders
- Garrison Commanders
- Infantry Commanders
- Archer Commanders
- Cavalry Commanders
All commanders start with zero talent points at level one. Every time you level up your commanders, they gain one talent point. However, at 5th and 6th star, the commanders will get 5 and 10 extra talent points, respectively.
The max amount of talent points that all commanders can get is 74 talent points at level 60. You also can reset your commander’s talent tree, but the cost of doing so is rare and expensive. So, make sure you know which talent build you want to use for your commanders.
Commander Roles
When you star up your commander to 3 stars, they will have the ability to pair with a secondary commander before dispatching them onto the map.
It is one of the core commander mechanisms that we get to see in action. Commander’s levels, skills, and talent build all come together to what I call it: dynamic gameplay.
However, what are the factors that determine what is in effect and what’s not?
Primary Commander:
- The level of commander determines how many troops are allowed on the march.
- The level of skills is essential and plays a vital role in the commander’s combat capabilities.
- Stars are crucial to high-level cap and higher skills.
- The primary commander’s talent build goes into effect.
Secondary Commander:
- The level of commander also determines how many troops they can add to the march.
- The level of skills is also crucial in deciding how well they can support the primary commander.
- They will activate their active skill after the primary commander uses their active skill.
- Stars are also crucial to level cap and abilities.
- Secondary commander’s talent build is worthless.
Therefore, the factors you need to decide will be:
- Which commanders will you take with you in the late game?
- Which commanders will you have the time and resources to upgrade/invest?
- Are you willing to use low stars while skilling up your commanders’ skills?
The more rare/legendary the commander is, he should become your primary commander when you have enough resources and time to invest. However, before doing so, I suggest you wait a bit to see what rolls your way.
Then you can make the decision moving on from that point.
Commander Pairing
A commander pairing is when you dispatch a march consisting of a primary and secondary commander. It is called commander pairing, and both stand to benefit from each other skills and abilities.
But this is also important to know in Rise of Kingdoms because the level, talent builds, and skills that your commander does impact your game play.
Here’s an example:
You have a level 50 Alexander the Great on 5/1/3/1 with a level 30 Eulji Mundeok as your secondary at 5/5/5/5.
Then you do the second pairing with a Level 50 Eulji Mundeok at 5/5/5/5 and a Level 30 Alexander the Great at 5/1/3/1.
Both dispatches have the same infantry talent tree and the same army against the enemy. But, which one fights better? If you guessed the results are the same, you are correct. Although, the first one would have done a better job in the late game.
The second commander pairing would do a lot better early to the mid game because the first commander pairing gets to use the active skill right away.
While the level requirements to upgrade your epic commanders is 16.67% lower than legendary commanders, Eulji Mundeok is an ideal choice for early to late games.
You can visit our commander guides to learn more about each commander pairings, such as Trajan, Hannibal Barca, Bjorn Ironside, Ragnar Lodbrok, Jadwiga, and Moctezuma I example.
Conclusion of How to Understand Core Commander Mechanisms
As we conclude how to understand core commander mechanisms, you should know how to utilize these game mechanisms to your advantage and build a formidable army march.
Remember to take advantage of the star trick to level up commanders fast and grow in power. As a free-to-play player, you will want to focus on one commander at a time until you max them out before working on other commanders.
It will also be a critical KVK tip as you prepare in advance for the first and second KVK seasons. Do not make the KVK mistakes that these governors are making.
I hope this guide on understanding the core commander mechanisms helped you become an effective and better governor in Rise of Kingdoms!
If you have any questions, please feel free to drop a comment in the comments section below!
