While the new King of Fighters: Survival City can look like a familiar game at a glance, considering that it’s basically a conquest strategy game and gacha RPG set in the KoF universe, it also brings a few unique mechanics to the mix, which we had yet to see in this genre. Specifically, instead of a traditional building and character upgrade system where you can purchase improvements simply with in-game currency, we have a merging system in place where we can combine two of the same type and level of item in order to obtain a piece of the next tier.

Table of Contents

1. Play King of Fighters: Survival City on BlueStacks to Enjoy the Best Experience
2. King of Fighters: Survival City Building and Upgrade System
3. Survival City Tier Progression System
4. How to Find Items for the Tier Progression System

Understandably, this merge system can create a lot of confusion, especially if you’ve never played any other merge puzzle games like Merge Dragons, for instance. And to many people, this system might even seem a bit out of place in this game. However, we believe it’s quite unique here and brings a lot of innovation to the way you can upgrade your buildings and heroes in Survival City.

With that being said, in this article, we’re going to give you a basic beginner’s guide for the King of Fighters: Survival City upgrade system. Specifically, we’re going to explore how to use the Tier Promotion system to enhance your characters, as well as give you a basic rundown on how to upgrade your buildings in the main city screen.

Play King of Fighters: Survival City on BlueStacks to Enjoy the Best Experience

First and foremost as a conquest game and strategy RPG, your progression can be quite slow in Survival City most times, and will require a lot of monitoring and diligence to keep your productivity high. However, if you’re playing on your phone, this means that you would have to keep the app open at all times, or at the very least launch it quite often in order to ensure that you’re always building or upgrading something, and overall minimizing the amount of downtime in between upgrades.

By playing King of Fighters: Survival City on PC with BlueStacks, you can reduce the hassle of optimizing your progression by keeping the app running in the background at all times, while being able to use it for anything you want at the same time. Moreover, since BlueStacks is quite powerful, it can also run your favorite games with the best performance and graphics, without any of the drawbacks of doing so on your phone, such as your device overheating, or experiencing rapid battery drainage, to name a couple.

Installing Survival City on PC with BlueStacks is very simple, taking just a couple of minutes and a few clicks. And when you’re done, you’ll be enjoying the best gameplay experience with this mobile title on your computer—we strongly suggest playing on our app player if you’re serious about progressing and powering up your account in this game.

King of Fighters: Survival City Building and Upgrade System

At a glance, Survival City is very much similar to other conquest titles, in that you’ll need to build up your town, train troops, and grow your power in order to defend yourself from other players and progress through the main story missions. However, while the initial building system is the same as in other games (pay for the building with resources and place them wherever you want), the way you actually upgrade them is very different this time around.

Instead of paying additional resources to upgrade existing buildings, some structures actually function with a merge system, wherein you can combine two similar structures of the same level in order to create one of a higher level. For instance, if you construct two level 1 Shelters, you can upgrade them by dragging and dropping onto the other, which will merge them into a level 2 Shelter. This will not only change its production numbers, but it will also free up space in your city to build another similar building, which will dramatically increase your production.

Keep in mind that, for some buildings, like Restaurants, combining and upgrading them is always a net gain in productivity. However, for the Shelter building, merging them will actually slightly reduce their productivity, so it can initially sound like a bad idea to do so. Nevertheless, while you’re losing a bit of production when merging Shelters, you’re freeing up space for another Shelter, which constitutes a net increase in productivity. Moreover, in the case of the Shelter, merging and upgrading these buildings is the main way to unlock troops of higher tiers, so you’ll always want to do it regardless of the loss.

In a nutshell, if you can merge your buildings, we strongly recommend doing so. However, in the case of the Shelter, you might want to hold out until you have enough resources to build an extra copy of this building to make up for the slight loss in production from merging them. This is excluding if you’re going to merge to upgrade your Shelters to level 5, 10, 15, 19, or 24, which is when you unlock tier 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 troops, respectively.

Survival City Tier Progression System

Just like you can merge buildings to upgrade them, one of the main ways to upgrade your characters in King of Fighters: Survival City is via merging. This merging is done through the Tier Promotion system in the Fighters menu, which you unlock fairly early into the main story.

By going to the Fighters menu and clicking on the character that you wish to upgrade, followed by clicking on the “Tier Promotion” tab, you’ll find a large grid that is exclusive to the character in question, and which you can fill up with a variety of elements that you’ll obtain from completing missions, challenges, and other content. It’s through this grid where you’ll upgrade a lot of your character’s most important traits, including promoting them to higher tiers, as well as unlocking higher tiers of equipment. You will also score a few rewards and boosts by interacting with the elements on this grid.

In a nutshell, the Tier Progression grid can be filled with a variety of elements that represent some of your fighters’ most important stats, including their tier rank, as well as the tier of their equipped gear. By completing challenges, you will obtain rewards and tokens that you can place in the empty slots of the grid, which can then be merged to enhance their effects. This is also the only way to increase your fighter tier and equipment tier.

There are various types of pieces that you can find in this grid, all of which can be combined. These pieces include the following:

Normal Pieces

• Character Tier Pieces: Represented by icons of the character in question, with a number of stars representing their tier. A character’s tier corresponds to the highest of these pieces currently on the board.

• Equipment Tier Pieces: Similar to the character tier pieces, these equipment tokens on the grid represent the maximum levels of the corresponding character’s equipped gear. Each character has three unique pieces of equipment, and you can upgrade them by placing them on the grid and merging them with duplicate copies.

Special Pieces

• Tier Pieces: Represented by a green icon with a varying number of stars. You can click on these pieces to turn them into a character tier piece, which can be of equal tier of the number of stars of the piece. However, it’s not guaranteed that these pieces will result in a character tier piece of the number of stars indicated by the original piece. For example, a 3-star tier piece has a chance of resulting in a tier 1 to 3 character tier piece.

• Equipment Pieces: Represented by a yellow icon with a vest on it. Like the tier pieces above, you can click on these icons to turn them into a random piece of gear of the tier indicated by the number of stars on the original equipment piece. For example, a 3-star equipment piece will result in a random gear item ranging from tier 1 to 3.

While this system can be a bit complicated to follow at first, it’s actually quite straightforward once you get used to it. In a nutshell, whenever you have duplicate character tier or equipment tier pieces, make sure to merge them to upgrade your character’s tier and equipment. Remember that your character’s tier corresponds to the highest character tier piece currently on the board. Also, remember that character tiers go from 1 star all the way up to 10 stars, while equipment tiers go only from 1 star to 5 stars.

How to Find Items for the Tier Progression System

If you’ve unlocked a new character in King of Fighters: Survival City, one of the first things that you’ll probably notice is that their Tier Promotions grid is empty, and has lots of spaces to add new items. These items are obtained through several means, including completing challenges, progressing through the story, and completing daily missions, among others.

Most importantly in this regard, however, are the buttons to both sides of the Tier Promotion grid, which you can click to add new pieces to the empty spaces on the grid. On the left, there are four buttons, corresponding to the following:

• Free Special Piece: Recharges one use every 8 hours. When used, it will place a random Character Tier Piece or Equipment Tier Piece on a random slot on the grid. You can have a maximum of 5 Special Pieces saved up at any given moment, so make sure you use them when you’re capped out to avoid overcapping. Also, these pieces are shared between all your characters.

• Character Tier Pieces: Places a Character Tier Piece on a random slot on the grid.

• Equipment Tier Pieces: Places an Equipment Tier Piece on a random slot on the grid.

• Experience Pieces: Places an experience token on a random slot on the grid.

Just like we mentioned above, these pieces can be merged on the grid before using them in order to enhance their effects. In the case of the Experience Pieces, this will be particularly useful since they will give considerably more experience if you upgrade them before using them. In other words, if you’re not in a rush, it’s always better to wait before using them to get the most experience out of them.

Last but not least, there are two buttons on the right of the Tier Promotion grid, which corresponding to the following:

• Character Fragment Pool: The duplicates of the character that you receive from summoning or completing certain challenges will go into this button. Whenever you click it, a Character Tier Piece will be withdrawn from your reserves and will be placed in an empty slot on the grid. You can click on the magnifying glass icon under this button to check how many Character Tier Pieces of the corresponding fighter you have in reserve.

• Hammer: The hammer button lets you break open any of the blocked tier slots in the Tier Promotion grid, allowing you to fit more items within. Use these items on the characters that you wish to upgrade to the fullest extent, as this will give you more flexibility to progressively upgrade them.

Getting used to the upgrade system in King of Fighters: Survival City can take a while, particularly since it’s so different from what we’re used to in this genre. Luckily, with the tips and tricks in this guide, you should now know everything you need to know to get started on the right track.