Growth Guide for Players Through Keep Level 25 - Part 1

This is a guide written for players who want to get to Keep Lv25 (K25) as quickly and efficiently as possible. Also, there will be attention given to both monster hunting and participating in PVP events like BoX (Battle of Constantinople, Gaugamela, and Chalons).

Quick Starting Tips

1. Recommended Cultures for early game growth:

America – Increases gold production, research speed, gold levy, and training speed
China – Increases training speed, resource production, research speed, and troop load
Korea – Increase resource gathering and lumber production
Europe – Increase stone production & building speed (via subordinate city buff)

At the start, I strongly advise you to choose America for your culture. This is so that you can focus on completing as much research as possible early in the game. The quicker you finish research, the more time it has to compound on itself (much like interest).

2. Always check your monarch gear before starting any activity!

Your monarch gear must be active when you start an activity to gain the bonus. If you activate it after the task has begun, there is no benefit. BUT once you have started the task, you can switch to any other monarch gear with no effect on the timer.

Remember, if you must march to begin a task (for example, resource gathering), the gear must be active when you reach the tile. If you equip it after you have reached the tile (or remove it while marching), you will not receive any buff.

3. Improve your monarch gear

Monarch gear can help increase speed buffs for key activities like resource production & gathering, research, construction, etc. While you do get a benefit at low levels, as you upgrade your monarch gear, the buffs get exponentially better.

The earlier you make these upgrades, the longer you will see these benefits over the life of your account. A great first benchmark to aim for is Lv7 in monarch crowns (excluding traps) and crystals (excluding food).

A great recommendation is to set aside some gold to patrol at your keep wall. If any monarch gear comes up, you can purchase it for 30 gems (instead of the 200 gems it costs in the item shop).

Another method is to buy Level 3 monarch gear for 380 – 540 gems or Level 4 gear for 1080-2160 gems in the black market. This is EASILY the best method to get monarch gear. A Level 3 monarch gear piece would cost 1800 gems and a Level 4 would cost 5400 from the item shop. Using the Black Market, you can cut those costs by 1/4.

Resource Gathering & Production

In general, we recommend you read our previous guide for optimizing your gathering and production to allow you to grow as fast as possible. Start with Part 1 of Basics of Resources. If you’ve already read that, continue on below.

Early Game Research

Prioritize the Advancement Tree – especially research items that increase:

Research speed – To speed up all future research
Resource gathering speed – The fastest way to gain more resources
Resource production – The most passive way to gain resources
Construction speed – These are the upgrades that cost the most

Next, invest in the Alliance Tree – but focus only on these items early in the game

Alliance Help Time
Relic Exploration
Alliance Help Amount
Consider Alliance Lumbering, Masonry, and Mining as these will increase your speed gathering from the alliance resource tile

Thirdly invest in Subordinate City Tree – This is the only way to increase passive material and gold production

Subordinate City Levy
Material Speedup
Material Processing I & II

Although it is appealing to research heavily into the Military Tree, this should be delayed until you have reached K25 and have started building T10 troops. That is the point where your troops will begin making an impact and you will want to start improving their power.

Undead Invasion Events for Fast Research

Some may see this as only a “trick” but, especially when you’re early game, this is a great opportunity to complete research with little to no need for speedups. Undead Invasion is an event that the entire alliance does together and, when planned well, you will have everyone pressing alliance help constantly.

During this event, everyone is working to survive the waves and healing is a necessary part of it. When healing, players will ask for help from their alliance to reduce the time it takes to heal. As an alliance, you all should be pressing alliance help as often as possible. As a result, anyone asking for help on ANY task will receive the same flood of help. Use this time to start research with less than 2 hours to complete and watch the researches finish constantly.

Just make sure you save enough gold so that you can research throughout the event.

CONTINUED IN PART 2