The (Unofficial) Beginner's Guide to Total War Battles: Kingdom

This guide is a collection of information, tips, and commentary on your first 10 hours of playing Total War Battles: Kingdom.

Welcome

Hello!

While the tutorial for Kingdom is nice, there's a lot it doesn't cover. I made a lot of mistakes in my first 'year' of gameplay, so I thought I'd share my experience and save everyone the trouble.

Initial Concerns

There are a few things that it is helpful to address before diving too deep into the game:

1.1) This is not a Total War game! It is a Total War Battles game. If you're looking for a grand campaign and thousand man battles, go check out Total War: Attila. Kingdom is actually a kingdom management game in the vein of Stronghold Kingdoms, Clash of Clans, or Evony. Keep your expectations reasonable and you will enjoy yourself.

1.2) As far as I know, there is nothing that you can buy with gold that you can't eventually make yourself (save for cosmetic portrait items). The game may seem pay-to-win at first when you see that you need to pay gold for the coolest looking troops, but rest assured they can later be crafted.

1.3) You'll leave the tutorial with a bit of a front-loaded expectation as to the pace of the game. You make a lot of progress in the tutorial but keep in mind that the typical pace of the game is somewhat slower. It's not tortuous; you'll just have to reset your expectations when you finish the tutorial.

Early-game Optimization

If you're like me, you obsess over maximizing those early gains for a smooth late-game. Here are a few tips to help you make the most out of your early setup:

2.1) This may be obvious, but don't spend your gold on cosmetics if you plan to play without buying gold.

2.2) Don't use "gather all" at your resource gathering points. Being able to gather all the resources in the general area seems tempting at first, but there are some key numbers to consider. First of all, using a single gather order gets done in just 20 minutes instead of 8 hours. This makes it an excellent choice for those with more time on their hands to micromanage the kingdom. Also, the single gather order yields twice the amount of resources. I tend to have the "gather all" order active and then cancel it and use the "single gather" order when possible.

2.3) Following the previous advice, try not to use the "fell all" order for your lumber camps. This will strip the area of wood and you will want to demolish your camp and rebuild elsewhere. This is fine to some extent if you want to do some early terraforming, but try to settle down and do some sustainable forestry later. This will allow you to eventually upgrade your lumber camps.

2.4) Farms spread wheat in a two-hex radius from the farm building itself. Use this to plan your irrigation accordingly.

2.5) Quarries do not really need that many stone nodes to be active. You can only mine one at a time, so don't worry about trying to excavate a massive stone mine.

2.6) You can build a maximum of 18 buildings around your first castle. I wasn't aware of this cap at first and made a few regrettable choices. You can eventually upgrade your castle to build more, but it takes a long time to meet the upgrade requirements.

2.7) Try to replace your levy troops as soon as possible. That way your mainline troops can start leveling up sooner. The levies aren't useless (higher starting troop-count and faster heal time) but it's nice to get your mainline troops upgraded.

Useful Information

Here is a collection of useful information that is not immediately obvious in-game:

3.1) Craftsmen are not helpful to use at markets unless you plan to use purchased gold to buy materials. Their only function at a market is to improve the gold exchange rate.

3.2) Building an economy building (Blacksmith, Market, etc) next to a building from the Military tab (Baracks, Archery Range, Church) will provide a free permanent craftsman! They appear as a green garrisoned soldier in the worker management area. You can give multiple garrison craftsmen from a single building, but can have no more than one free craftsman per economy building.

3.3) Click the plus button above the building details in the bottom left for additional helpful information.

3.4) You cannot have a height difference of more than one for terraforming. That is, you cannot have a low and a high terrain directly next to each other; you must go from low to medium to high.

3.5) You cannot have more than one active effect (personal skill or orders) on a unit at once. Don't waste orders by trying to double up! On the plus side, I think this may be able to override debuffs placed by the enemy.

3.6) You also cannot apply orders while charging. Trying to do so will just start the charge early.

3.7) You can raise land with landfill or the raise land option and then re-excavate it with your quarry. This provides an easy food to landfill conversion and also lets you re-roll for more stone or the occasional gold deposit.

3.8) Collecting the free resources (deadwood, boulders, deer) does not use up your lumber camps, quarries, or farms. Gather away!

3.9) Raising or lowering land will remove tree stumps. Using the clear option instead of felling the trees will also not leave any stumps behind. (Keep in mind that tree stumps will increase the probability of trees reseeding, however). Raising land will also leave behind tall grass, which is useful for grazing pastures.

3.10) Water does not move instantly; it takes a while to see the effects of dams and terrain changes. Don't be fooled by the tutorial, which speeds up this process in the interest of time when you repair that dam.

3.11) You can only have one unit of Shield Knights recruited. Don't build a bunch of Knight's Manors expecting to be able to make them into the core of your army! It's also reported that you can only have one unit of Medium Cavalry and Knights Cavalry.

3.12) Walls serve no real function except as a money sink for upgrading the castle. Feel free to build for form rather than function. They will block off water provided there is an alternate route for the water to flow, though.

3.13) Roads do not need to connect directly to your castle; they can connect to any town building for it to count.

3.14) Roads must be built on medium terrain and medium terrain only. Be aware that this provides an easy route for overflowing water to 'travel' to multiple cities. This has never actually happened to me, though.

3.15) Cattle farms must be built next to a road and require a market to purchase a herd. Sheep farms have neither requirement and are better off built in grassy highlands.

3.16) In the winter, you can track the beast using your farms and lumber camps. If you get an X on a hex, that means it is nowhere near that hex. If you get a number, that means that the beast is that many hexes away. Once you track the hex that the beast lives in, you can kill it for some crafting material.

Commentary

The following is a list of tips that are just my opinion; your mileage may vary.

4.1) I haven't had a lot of luck with spearmen; I'd recommend training swordsmen instead. If you run into a cavalry-heavy army, you can probably get away with just using your levies. The spearmen will come into their own as they gain upgrades, but for very early game they can be skipped.

4.2) When choosing King's Path quests, I prefer the "Control X Regions" objective. They seem to come faster than the corresponding "Achieve Lord Rank X" objective.

4.3) I have never chosen to pay tribute to annex a region rather than conquering it by force. They ask for a lot of money!

4.4) When upgrading troops, save up 200 XP and then choose a special skill upgrade. These are by far the most useful upgrade.

4.5) I prefer just building Houses to Slums or Mansions. They give a nice mix of peasants and craftsmen and you don't have to mess around with those height requirements. Feel free to build a few and see for yourself, though.

4.6) There's no need to build roads to the watchtowers until they are built and ready to be taken over. I built a road to an unfinished watchtower only for the whole area to turn into a lake, wasting the stone.

4.7) It will take a long time before you are able to upgrade your troops or castle to the next rank. Don't expect to achieve either of those too soon.

4.8) I really like the "Kill Them All" order and the "Precision Shot" order. The replenishing order seemed nice but is underwhelming in my opinion. The last stand order has made me lose a battle before, but I think the AI was using a beefier 3-star version than the 1-star version you'd start with. The 'distract with bees' order seems neat.

Closing Thoughts

Well, I hope you learned at least a thing or two from this wall of text. Let me know if you've got any suggestions or experience going against something I've said.

Thanks for reading!

[Captain Admiral James T. Kirk]

Excellent guide thank you❤

[xytaara]

There should be an option to start a new game, in case of terraforming errors and an option to fast forward or pause the time. Bring in night and day cycle too (Frostpunk). If the player choses to delete a saved game, case all the Gold you have spent in that game, should return to the player's stockpile, SEGA should not have problems as long as the Gold remains within the Game, right? It's not like it's going back to the gamer's bank account.

[user3jason]

Excellent guide, had to restart with three different gmails to play the game due to terraforming errors and bad judgement on building chains. On topic of building chains, does anyone know what a good ratio of residences to resource buildings are? (Slums/houses/mansions to blacksmiths/markets/taverns) I was constantly destroying residences in my first settlement to meet quest demands and now that my workers are retiring it’s a rat race to replacing them with insufficient citizens...

[Rijhardson]

It was still a valuable help in getting some of the basics down for a totally new player to this sort of game

[zero-max]

。

[chickenpig22]

Hey guys, what's up. If it wasn't already immediately obvious, I don't play Kingdoms or maintain this guide anymore. If anyone's interested in updating & maintaining this in the future, shoot me a message, or leave a comment, and I could look into making you a contributor.

[Spu00Key]

Anyone will ing list the parts that are out dated? Also, this Comments thread is very helpful to read along with the guide. Thank you!

[jaimers215]

One thing I discovered is that walls are crucial to prevent flooding out of buildings. So build walls!

[Axius]

When was this made? This seems outdated.

[C4M3L]

Log out, and make a new account @Totalwar.vlaanderen @themrblueis