Welcome to House of Kingdoms. In this Rise of Kingdoms guide, we are going to teach you how to upgrade commander skills effectively. If you upgrade your commanders in the wrong direction, you could make them useless.
Sometimes, it’s just so bad that you will want to create a brand new account simply because of a wrong move. So, if you are new to Rise of Kingdoms as a Free-to-Play player then you will need to read this guide.
First of all, do not use the 4-star trick on your legendary commanders. You will want to upgrade your legendary commanders’ skills slowly and correctly.
Why Legendary Commanders?
In this guide, we will be focusing on legendary commanders mainly because getting Legendary Sculptures is very hard if not, extremely rare. You definitely will not want to waste your hard-earned legendary sculptures on your legendary commanders just to make them useless.
It’s easy to get epic, elite and advanced sculptures to fix your mistakes. You can get plenty of them by doing daily quests, opening the chests and via events. But for most of the players in Rise of Kingdoms, the legendary sculptures is rare.
To sum this up:
- Don’t waste your legendary sculptures.
- It’s easy to get epic, advanced and elite sculptures.
- Only do 4-star trick on your gathering commanders.
How to Upgrade Commander Skills
You should have a general knowledge that all legendary commanders have 4 main skills. Upon maxing all of their skills out, the 5th skill is unlocked and activated.
If you are doing the 4-star tricks to unlock 3 to 4 skills at once. Every time you level up your commander, it will randomly pick one of non-maxed skill to upgrade. This isn’t the optimal way to upgrade your legendary commander.
Take this for example, Sun Tzu first skill is the most important. If you do the 4-star trick to unlock all skills at once then start upgrading the legendary commander. It’s likely you will have either 2nd or 3rd sill being upgraded to max.

Basic Skill Distribution Guideline
Here’s a basic skill distribution guideline to upgrade commander skills as effectively as possible to maximize their combat potential.
Skill Distribution: 5/1/1/1
Skill Distribution: 5/5/1/1
- Minamoto
- Julius Caesar
- Fredrick I
- Mehemd II
- Charles Martel
- Richard I
- Alexander
- Constantine
- Aethelflaed
- El Cid
Skill Distribution: 5/5/5/1
Skill Distribution: 5/5/5/5
Skill Distribution: 1/5/0/0
Note: Please be aware that these skill distribution always can change based on your needs or desire for specific commander to do a certain role or purpose. For example, Aethelflaed is used to level up your other commanders which will means she need to have a skill distribution of 5/1/5/1.
In certain situation, you will also want to have Cao Cao with a skill distribution of 5/1/5/1 and El Cid with a skill distribution of 5/1/1/5. Then again, it all depends on your needs and what suits to your current progress / gameplay the best.
Example of Legendary Commanders
Here’s some example of best legendary commanders with the right skill distribution:
Best Farmer:

Best Barbarian Hunter:

Best PvP:

Conclusion
In conclusion, the idea of upgrading your legendary commanders’ skills effectively is to max out the active skill first. Because in combat, your commanders will keep on activating their active skills.
Therefore, the stronger their active skills are, the more damaging and devastating they get along with a number of buffs / debuffs. But for gathering commanders, they will rarely activate their active skill. Thus, there’s no point in unlocking all of their skills.
I hope you find our guide on how to upgrade commander skills effectively helpful and informative. If you still have any questions or need some help, please feel free to ask us in the comment section below.
Lastly, did you know you can play Rise of Kingdoms on PC and Mac for free? Here’s a guide how to set it up on your PC or Mac. It’s a big improvement over playing the game on your smartphone and tablet. Plus, it makes it easy to manage multiple farming accounts to grow your empire quickly.
See my reasons why I recommend everyone to play Rise of Kingdoms on PC. Happy ruling, Governors! Be sure to stay tuned with us for more Rise of Kingdoms news that’s just right around the corner!