As many of those who have played numerous war games in the past, you might have noticed that these games follow a certain pattern. While some of them offer unique mechanics to enrich their gameplay, they still revolve around the same basic concept: Develop your town, build your armies, conquer your enemies. While the road to creating a powerful empire in your server is full of hazards and obstacles, it’s more a battle of attrition than something you can accomplish in one day, regardless of how hard you try.

In the case of Reign of Empires, this game has a few mechanics to set it apart from its competitors, such as the Greatmen system. Nevertheless, the fact still remains that, as a civil war game, you’ll be building, upgrading, training, and doing the same types of activities that you might have grown to expect of these games. However, since every game has its own pacing and rhythm, we created a simple guide to help beginners get started with building their empires.

If you’re just trying this game for the first time, then be sure to read these beginner tips to get started on the right foot.

What Should I Build First?

The quintessential question that any budding leader should ask themselves. In a game where you have quite a few options for structures to build, which ones are the most important when starting off?

The most important part about building at the start is that you create a decent production for resources in your town, which you can achieve by investing in production buildings. These are the structures that go outside your city walls, and that generate resources every minute. While the vast majority of your resources in the future will come from other sources, your production buildings are pivotal in Reign of Empires as they give a constant influx of resources, even when you’re offline.

Luckily, Reign of Empires makes it really easy to decide on which buildings to focus on first. For starters, there’s only a handful you can construct. Your options are Lumber Yards, Farms, Hospitals and, shortly after beginning, the Army Camps will also become available. Furthermore, there’s a limit to the number of each type of building that you can construct, which is 7.

You need to carefully consider your options since in Reign of Empires, unlike other similar games, you can’t demolish your buildings without paying a hefty fee in premium currency. We can’t stress how important it is to get it right the first time since undoing mistakes is all but impossible if you’re starting out. Luckily, even if you do mess it up, you can expand the number of rural buildings that you can construct once your Castle reaches level 10.

In this regard, go ahead and construct all 7 Farms and 6 Lumber Yards. This will leave you two slots, which you should fill with 1 Hospital and 1 Army Camp. These last two buildings won’t make much of a difference since you’ll only build one of each. Nevertheless, they’re necessary for completing certain story missions, which the game doesn’t warn you about. In this sense, if did like us the first time and forgot to build a specific structure, then you’d have to wait until your Castle is level 10 until you can complete certain missions. It’s a minor hassle, but now that you know how to avoid it, you definitely should.

When it comes to inner buildings—the ones that go within your city walls—there’s really not much to think about since they’re already laid out for you. Once your Castle is high enough level to unlock them, all you have to do is click on the empty lot and start constructing. The game will handle the rest for you.

Maximizing Resource Production

As we just mentioned above, your production buildings will be a passive source of materials and resources throughout your entire time in Reign of Empires. However, these are far from being to best way to go about this matter. Instead, while your buildings work tirelessly to generate resources, you should supplement their efforts by sending out your troops to gather from the world map.

Scattered across the realm, there are certain spots on the map that you can visit to gather resources. When you order your troops to march to any of these locations, they will start loading up on goods, and then take them back to your town, after which they will get added to your reserves. If you’re diligent, you can actually generate tons of resources this way, which is a great way to make use of your downtime in Reign of Empires. In other words, whenever you’re not doing anything, you should just send your troops out to gather.

Alternatively, you could configure a macro so that it automatically sends out troops after a certain time has passed. This is a great way to optimize this process as you can simply run the macro, and step away from the PC as BlueStacks will handle the rest.

Researching and Optimizing Processes

Once you reach Castle level 6, you’ll unlock the Academy, which is where you will do tons of investigation to improve your effectiveness at many different tasks. These technologies are divided into four main categories: Battle, Economy, Technology, and Castle Defense. Regarding what they do, the names are pretty self-explanatory. Each category has a number of technologies that you can research to improve your efficiency in any of these categories. For instance, the economy tree has techs that increase your resource production in town, while the Technology tree has upgrades that improve the efficiency of your structures and builders.

Similar to building and gathering with your soldiers, researching technologies is something that you should always be doing, since these upgrades become significant only once you’ve invested significant resources into researching the higher ranks. As with most things in these civil war games, diligence is key for progressing in Reign of Empires.