Rise of Kingdoms offers a thrilling experience of conquest and city-building where the entire game progression depends on your ability to protect and defend what you have built and continue having steady city growth. But because this game is mostly a PvP title, knowing how to defend your city, troops, and resources is essential.
Through this guide, you will learn the best strategies and techniques on how to defend yourself and your city in Rise of Kingdoms, and how to avoid being zeroed by powerful enemy players.
11. Have strong walls
The first tip for defense in Rise of Kingdoms is to have a strong Wall. This structure, which is basically the gate of your city, is the backbone of its defense and should be upgraded whenever possible. The good news is that with every new age you advance to, your Wall gets better protection. A high-level Wall will be able to withstand more enemy attacks.
It will also provide your troops and commanders with extra protection while they are defending the city, and hopefully avoid having your city completely burned and randomly teleported on the map.
Another advantage of upgrading the Wall is that this structure will help you gain power fast in Rise of Kingdoms because it offers the highest building power per level, among all buildings in your city, besides City Hall.
10. Level up the Storehouse
The Storehouse is the only building in your city that can protect your resources from enemy attacks. But there’s a catch: you will only be able to protect the resources such as Food, Wood, Stone, and Gold that do not exceed to Storehouse’s capacity.
In other words, if the number of resources you see at the top of your screen, exceeds the Storehouse’s capacity, the excess can be looted by enemy players.
That’s why is important to keep an eye on the number of resources you get from gathering, missions, plundering other players, or using the resources tokens from your bag, and try to always keep these numbers equal or lower than the Storehouse’s capacity unless you plan a quick building upgrade.
9. Choose a powerful civilization
The civilization you choose in this game, not only impacts your overall progress, but also the defense capabilities of your city. Each civilization has its unique bonuses, which can either provide decent defense boosts or other bonuses that will help you train more troops, gather more resources faster, and so on.
That’s why picking the best ROK civilization for your play style is essential. The good news is that you can change your civilization as many times as you like, as long as you can afford the cost.
8. Upgrade and garrison the best heroes
Your city’s Wall can significantly reduce the impact of an enemy attack, but your Heroes are the ones who will stop the enemy from having a successful siege. That’s why is important to always upgrade and garrison the best commanders in your city, so you can have a powerful defense force for when an attack happens. For this you can use our RoK tier list for, to have a better idea of which commanders have a better defense.
In the early stages of the game, unfortunately, you won’t have many options, but as you progress and recruit stronger commanders, you should only garrison those that have the Garrison talent, or a strong defense and tanking ability. These commanders should be your main defenders and you should upgrade them as much as possible if you want to have a strong defense.
To garrison commanders to your city’s wall, simply tap the gate and press the gate icon. Next, tap the commanders you see at the top of the page, and select any other commanders you may have on the left side list, and they will be automatically assigned.
7. Join a strong Alliance
Another way to increase your city’s defense is by joining a strong Alliance. This way, your city will have extra protection from other players in the same alliance, who can help you defend your city if it gets attacked. Additionally, most alliances have helpful players that can offer you essential ROK tips and tricks on how to improve your defense or get better at this game in general.
The biggest advantage, however, is that in most kingdoms, the top 10 or 15 alliances have a NAP, which is a non-aggression pact or policy, meaning that they won’t attack each other. This provides huge protection for your city and your resources, so you can focus on other aspects of the game.
Unfortunately, if you are a new player or have a low-level city, it will be difficult to join those in the top ranking as most of them require either an application or a certain power level. But don’t lose hope and keep playing, as eventually, you will be able to find an alliance that fits your needs and can help you increase your defense.
6. Increase the Watch Tower’s level
Situated on top of your city’s wall, these structures can also help you have better protection in Rise of Kingdoms. These towers will automatically attack any enemy units that attack your city and they will do more damage as you increase their level.
As you have noticed, multiple Watchtowers are surrounding your city, but fortunately, tapping and upgrading any Watchtower will increase the level of all of them. To level up the Watch Tower, besides the required resources, you will also need special items called Arrow of Resistance, which can be obtained from events and defeating barbarians on the map.
5. Level up the Hospitals
While this might not seem like the most important building to upgrade to increase the defense overall, the Hospitals can make a big difference when your city is attacked.
That’s because when some of your troops are severely wounded while defending your city, an allied city, or even while gathering or fighting in an open-field fight, they will be sent automatically to your Hospital buildings.
If the maximum allowed capacity of hospitals is reached, any additional wounded troops will be lost. That’s why it is important to upgrade your Hospitals as soon as possible so they can accommodate more and better heal your troops, and also to avoid the costs of training new troops to recover the losses.
4. Purchase and use Enhanced Defense items
A quick way to increase your defense in Rise of Kingdoms is to purchase and use Enhanced Defense items. These items can be useful mostly when preparing to attack other players but they can also help defend your city.
For instance, you could use a 24-hour item, participate in PvP activities, and then instead of using a peace shield due to the high cost, you could just make use of your consumed Enhanced Defense item.
However, this might seem a good idea only if you are sure that your army is strong enough, your resources are below the Stronghouse’s capacity, and think that you might have a good chance of resisting any potential attacks while you are offline.
Enhanced Defense comes in 3 types with different durations. The first one has a 12-hour duration and offers you a 5% defense increase to your troops.
The second one has the same defense bonus but for a 24-hour duration and costs 400 gems, while the last one, the most expensive one, comes with a 10% defense bonus and lasts for 24 hours, and costs 1,500 gems.
All of them can be obtained from events or missions, or purchased from the City Management menu, which can be accessed by tapping the little arrow icon below your player name.
3. Upgrade and train troops constantly
This may seem like a no-brainer but most of us tend to forget or even ignore the trained troops once we unlock new tiers. But instead of training the newly unlocked tier troops, you should first upgrade all your previous tier troops to your latest tier, so you can have better defense, and better troop stats, and save you some resources as well. Likewise, having more troops, not only helps increase your power but helps you defend your city more efficiently.
To upgrade or promote your troops to your actual tier, tap on the military building of your troops, press the lower-tiered units, and hit the little yellow icon on the left side. Next, slide the bar to decide the number of troops that you want to upgrade, and hit the upgrade button.
2. Use a Peace Shield
The Peace Shield is the most secure way to defend your city, troops, and resources from any enemy attacks. They will offer you 100% protection, which means that enemies won’t be able to attack or scout you, but at the same time, they are not that affordable.
Once you consume a Peace Shield, will have a certain duration. But keep in mind that engaging in a battle while under the shield, or scouting other players, will make your shield disappear instantly.
The Peace Shield can be purchased from the City Management menu. It can also be obtained from different rewards in the game, like events, or missions, and it’s available in 5 different forms, such as:
- 8-hour Peace Shield: this is the most common and easiest to get in Rise of Kingdoms
- 12-hour Peace Shield, which costs 700 gems
- 24-hour Peace Shield for 1,000 gems
- 3-day Peace Shield for 2,500 gems
- 30-day Peace Shield for 45,000 gems
1. Research defense-related techs
The last point to consider for increasing the defense of your city is researching the techs related to unit defense. These can be found in the Research building under the Military tech tree, and some good examples include Buckler (infantry defense), Leather Armor (archer defense), Scale Armor (cavalry defense), and Enhanced Axle (siege unit defense).
Of course, the more techs you will research in this tree, the better defense upgrades you will unlock. However, if you are a new player to this game, don’t jump on spending all your resources just yet, and focus on having a better city economy first, so you can get more resources and better support all your future upgrades in the long run.
