[Rise of Warlords] Early Game Growth

[Rise of Warlords] Early Game Growth
 

Early game growth is a large part early on for online strategy games and it directly affects your late-game growth. Just look at those in the top of the rankings. You get 3 new areas, he gets 5. You get 5, he gets 6. You get 6, he gets 8. In this article you can find a few tips and tricks for early game expansion to raise in the rankings.

1. Choosing Heroes

No matter the season, which heroes you should use for early-game growth and expansion isn't set in stone as you won't be able to know which heroes you can recruit. Instead, you'll have to use what you get. When doing so, you should heavily focus on your damage dealer. You also start out in Rise of Warlords with 10 leadership. With this limit in mind you'll have to adjust your early game strategy, with unit being of greatest importance and then leadership.

2. Choosing Skills

During early season, while you should focus on your heroes' main skills, their remaining points also play a big part. Many players focus a tad bit too much on chance% when allocating skill points, and always believe that a higher level is the best choice. In reality, you don't need to max out everything, instead 5 points in Long journey is enough. Some skills are quite potent even at level one.

3. Choosing Heroes II

If you're familiar with the forces in the wilderness you can take on any number of battles without chance of failure. During the early game, your main source of damage in the wilderness comes from normal attacks, and so why is the damage in the wilderness high? Honestly, that's mainly because of a difference in unit strength. The wilderness is a place where a small force meets a large one, and 3000 units might even attack 5400 units in a level 4 land. What's more, you must pay attention to the marching distance as marching reduces morale, and thusly damage.

So, do skills deal high damage in the wilderness then? Of course they do, but the main issue is a difference in unit force. When expanding in a new season most lands host 3-star heroes with fairly low stats and combat power. Neither their basic attacks or skills will deal high damage, so once again, the difference lies in unit strength. To expand quickly one must focus in reducing the damage the wilderness enemies deal. I'll write up a short guide here as aid:

①Main Strategy: Damage Reduction + Recovery

Skills: Glamorous Fox/Bide, Strong defense/Prosperity/Remedy

Core Team: Valkyrie (first purchase) + Xuan Zang or Hammurabi + Heimdall (total purchase)

Glamorous Fox grants protection and a chance to recover force. Bide gives damage reduction%. Strong defense, Prosperity, and Remedy all restore strength. The main goal here is to avoid losing units as they are of vital importance when expanding to new territory, and something one does well in avoiding to spend too rapidly.

②Main Strategy: Avoidance + Weaken

Skills: Holy Torch/Cyclops Leer, Pathlight/Foresight

Core Team: Abe no Seimei, Achilles + Hestia + Mu Zha

Holy Torch increases damage + disarms, Cyclops Leer disarms, Pathlight weakens, and Foresight removes buffs and reduces stats. By reducing the enemy's damage capabilities you also reduce your own losses. Avoidance + Weaken is a fairly quick early-game expansion strategy.

③Main Strategy: Debuffing

Skills: Wind Scar/Bloodbath, Ice trap/Curse of tragedy

Core Team: Medusa + Gullveig, Ibaraki-Dojo + Yuki-onna

Wind Scar and Bloodbath both apply bleeds, Ice trap applies curse and grants resistance, Curse of tragedy deals magic damage + poisons. This build gives you a great variety of debuffs, and you have a lot of skills to choose from without actually changing the strategy you're employing. I'll refrain from listing them all here, but you can change the skills out for ones that you have access to as you see fit, and the aforementioned ones are merely an example of a possible skill build.

4. Using Reserves

During season 1 100% of reserves and resources are returned to you, and you should take advantage of that to pull ahead of the competition. Don't simply toss all your reserves to fight a level 3 land, instead start with a garrison. At this time you'll have access to level 1 Recruiting camp, and start by setting up three squads and fill up with units. Then send these 3 teams to occupy land, and once your Recruiting camp is of a higher level you max out your units. Once done, you can keep one team in your main city, use one to complete tasks and explore, with a third team acting as support. Just keep the units coming. Note: You have a set amount of stamina in the early game, and stamina dictates how much experience your heroes can get. Just make sure they're not capped out and you lose on out experience and you'll be fine. Oh, and your first level 3/4 land should be focused on getting stone as you need a ton of it during the early game.

5. Skill Allocation

Your early game expansion set up should consist of one damage dealing hero, and preferably 2 support. To deal as much damage as possible it's best if you focus on leveling up your damage dealer, and keep at that hero until you've maxed its main skill and skill 1. While expanding, avoid awakening if you can, after all, to do so you need a level 20 hero with a main skill at level 10, and it will cost you 2 heroes to boot. It comes at a great cost and so it is better to check whether or not depending on your specific situation. Generally, while you're expanding having skills of level 5-7 is enough.

6. Summary

Early game expansion focuses on earning as much experience and claiming as high level territories as possible while expanding as few resources as humanly possible. What won't change is your stamina, the resources you get for free, and reserves. What may differ is tactic points and hero experience. Either way, there is no one-single strategy that works for everyone, but if you allocate your resources well you'll be off to a good start. Anyway, I hope that this guide was useful!