Welcome to my guide: How to Attack and Defend in Rise of Kingdoms for Beginners. In Rise of Kingdoms, the player base is split into two different gameplay:
- PvP: Player vs. Player
- PvE: Player vs Environment
You get to know and master the basics of how to attack and defend in Rise of Kingdoms is essential to the success of your civilization. Mainly, you are going to want to minimize your losses while maximizing the rewards from your battles.
In my guide: How to Attack and Defend in Rise of Kingdoms for Beginners, I will explain the game mechanisms available right at your disposal.
How to Activate Commander’s Active Skill
Commanders have their unique active skill, which requires 1,000 rage (850 for Genghis Khan and 1,350 for Edward of Woodstock) to cast their active skill.
It is done automatically by the commanders themselves during the battles, so there’s no need to perform this task manually. To further improve your commander’s ability to cast their active skill more often, the governors can do it by enhancing their rage generation via the talent tree.
When it comes to the battle in Rise of Kingdoms, there’s a few things you should be aware of how the combat system works for the commanders using their active skill:
- To cast the active skill, the commanders need to have at least 1,000 rage.
- You can see how much rage your commanders have via the rage bar next to the avatar.
- If you have a secondary commander with your primary commander, they will cast their active skills afterward. The primary commander always launches their active skill first.
To maximize your commander’s active skill, you will want to max it out first. Almost all commanders’ active skills in Rise of Kingdoms are powerful and valuable, except gathering commanders.
Commanders’ active skill will make up for the most damage depending on what it does, with the splash effect doing the most out of all. Here’s some of the best offensive commanders in the game:
You can visit our best cavalry commanders, archer commanders, and infantry commanders to learn more.
How to Attack in Rise of Kingdoms
In Rise of Kingdoms, there are four different types of attacks that you need to consider to maximize your combat effectiveness.
- Normal Attack: These are the regular attacks usually done by attacking barbarians or an enemy player on the map. Normal attack costs 50 Action Points.
- Rally Attack: This type of attack typically consists of multiple armies forming into a single, colossal force that gives rallying attack and defense bonus against enemy cities, barbarian forts, alliance fortresses, and alliance flags. Assembling a rally army costs 150 Action Points.
- Attacking Alliance Structure: Attack enemy alliance structures; your alliance territory needs to be adjacent to the enemy territory.
- Reinforcement: Another type of attacking method is to reinforce the marching rally to fill up the capacity—an incredible combat mechanism to know if you want to help on the fly.
Before you launch a rally attack, there’s a couple of things you need to remember that:
- The size of the rally army depends on the level of castle created by the player.
- Launching a regular attack on an enemy player will always result in a massive loss of troops. Rally attack is the best way to minimize the casualties and an effective way to zero your enemies.
If you are playing as a free-to-play player, there’s a chance you don’t have a solid rally commander yet. If you do want to have a rally commander, we recommend Julius Caesar, Hannibal Barca, or even Ragnar Lodbrok for beginners.
You can check out our best rally commanders to see how they are ranked so you can plan when you get to summon the perfect legendary rally commander. With all of your saved-up commander sculptures and starlight sculptures, you can level up your commanders fast.
How to Defend in Rise of Kingdoms
It is one of the most overlooked combat mechanisms in Rise of Kingdoms. But did you know that you actually can select commanders that you want to defend your city?
Here’s how to do that:
- Tap on your wall.
- Select 2 commanders you want to garrison to defend your city.
Ideally, you want to use commanders that have Garrison / Defender attributes to protect your city. For starters, here are some of the best garrison commanders to use:
But that’s not all! There are several garrison commanders that you can choose in Rise of Kingdoms. Over time, the game has been adding powerful defenders that excel at defending your city. Be on the outlook for commanders with a robust defensive skill set.
How to Use Talent Build for Attack and Defend
Now that we have the basics covered for using your commanders to attack and defend on the map. In the next part of our How to Attack and Defend in Rise of Kingdoms Guide for Beginners, we will explain how to maximize your commander’s talent build for attacking and defending.
The talent builds play an integral role in boosting your commander’s overall combat strength when attacking other players’ units on the map or the city directly. For defending, it is all about reducing the amount of damage taken while countering the enemy forces.
There are two different type of talent builds that you should keep in your mind when investing your commander’s talent points:
- Offensive Talent Build
- Defensive Talent Build
Whenever you visit our commanders’ section, you will see default; popular talent builds that the majority of the players use for their commanders. There’s plenty of talent builds to choose from based on what fits your situation the best.
Offensive Talent Build
Commanders with Conqueror Ability usually fit these offensive talent builds and have the highest attack stat out of all in Rise of Kingdoms. Depending on the troop type of that commander, it can lead either all troops or a specific type of troop.
For instance, Charlemagne has Conqueror Ability and Leadership Ability, making him a famous commander to lead three or more troop types to maximize his overall combat strength.
While Xiang Yu has Conqueror Ability and Cavalry Ability, he is a strong cavalry commander. You also do not want to ignore support abilities such as Defense Ability, Skill Ability, or Mobility Ability as they all play a vital role.
Though they aren’t commonly emphasized in these offensive talent builds, it is always good to have at least a few talent points into support abilities.
Defensive Talent Build
Typically garrison commanders don’t have many talents builds because their skill set limits them. Defensive talent like this is what you usually see by default whenever players plan to use their garrison commanders to defend the city or a critical building on the map.
By default, a garrison commander will come with Garrison Ability as their main talent area. It is always the first talent ability to invest in because of a high return on investment through stat bonuses for defending the city.
Once the Garrison Ability is maxed out, you can focus on either troop ability or supportability. Ideally, you will want to invest some points into the troop’s ability to get some additional rage generation. Then you can invest the rest of the talent points into supportability, as long as it is not Mobility Ability.
In these defensive talent builds, you will rarely see them for offensive combat purposes. Yi Seong-Gye is an exception because of his active skill doing a lot of damage which is incredibly strong for PvP battles.
Conclusion for How to Attack and Defend Guide
Attacking and defending both play a significant role in Rise of Kingdoms. Even though it might sound simple, many factors go into the combat system, such as commanders, troops, skill set, and even talent builds.
As you grow in power over time, you must know how to attack and defend in Rise of Kingdoms. By utilizing these game tips to give you a combat edge over other Governors, you will be able to win a majority of the battles.
Did you find our guide on how to attack and defend in Rise of Kingdoms valuable and informative? If you have any questions about this guide, please let us know by commenting in the comment section below.
Happy ruling, Govenors!
does our troops have any role in defending city? should we keep our troops out of city when someone is attacking our city?
Yes, your troops do have a role in defending your city against the attacker. You should always use the best defensive commanders and stack with high tier troops that benefits from the defending commanders’ skills. You will lose excess resources if someone attacks you and you don’t have garrisoned commanders to repel the attackers.
Unlike attackers, your defending troops don’t die on the battlefield. This is a big advantage for the defenders. So you should always have troops paired with your best garrison commanders to keep your city safe. It also helps deter other players from seeing you as an easy target.