Rise of Cultures Tips and Tricks to Expand Your Town at Lightning Speed
Rise of Cultures is an awesome take on the traditional strategy conquest genre, this time featuring a stronger focus on PvE aspects rather than the traditional season-based PvP design of other popular games like Rise of Kingdoms, among others. These differences are precisely what makes RoC stand out among the rest, and also what makes it quite different to approach. In this sense, if you’re new to Rise of Cultures, then this guide is for you.
In the following paragraphs, you’ll find numerous Rise of Cultures beginner tips and tricks to help you expand your settlement as fast as possible. Alternatively, if you’re just getting started, we suggest reading our beginner’s guide for Rise of Cultures first.
Always Max Out Your Facility Slots
One of the main factors that limit your progress in Rise of Cultures is the arbitrary facility slot limitations imposed by the game. In other words, you can never have more facilities of the same type than the game allows, which significantly restricts certain aspects such as the amount of food and gold you can generate, but also the number of troops and workers that you can have at any given moment.
Nevertheless, every time you achieve a milestone in your town, such as advancing to a new age, or researching specific technologies, you might unlock additional facility slots. It’s crucial that you always max out these slots whenever you can, as this will ensure that you’re producing as much as you can, and that your army is as strong as it can be at the moment.
Expand Your Settlement Whenever Possible
Another important aspect that limits your potential in this game is your actual territory. After all, even if you have building slots available, you might not have enough space for everything that you can build. For this reason, expanding your settlement is as important as actually constructing new structures, and you should always increase your territory whenever you have expansions available.
Most of these territory expansions come from the PvE aspect of the game, which you can find on the world map. By defeating the combat stages, you’ll progressively unlock new expansions. In this sense, these battles should be among your highest priorities if you want to advance quickly.
Your Positioning in Combat is Important
While the base building aspect in Rise of Cultures is laid back and relaxing, the combat is intense and hectic. Regardless, even though it might look messy, the fights are mostly automated, with your units engaging and attacking automatically, whereas your role is merely to watch, as well as to use your special skills at the right moment. However, your role also involves positioning your troops in optimized formations before the battle starts. These formations are crucial since they will determine the effectiveness of your troops.
Luckily, you don’t really have to worry too much about the positioning of your troops early on, especially since you won’t have much variety. Regardless, as a general rule of thumb, you always want your infantry front and center, tanking the brunt of the enemy forces. Meanwhile, your ranged units should always be behind your infantry, where they can attack from a safe position. Furthermore, once you unlock cavalry units, you should always position them to the flanks, so they can circumvent your enemy’s infantry and go straight for the archers, suppressing their damage in an instant.
As you continue unlocking more barracks and troop types, you’ll be able to adopt tactics of increasing complexity.
Use Your Abilities Wisely In Combat
While your army size and positioning are quite important, you can also give your troops an extra push by using your abilities effectively.
Your combat abilities are essentially spells that run on a cooldown, and whose effects can often be quite strong. You start your game with Harald as your only commander, who has the “Boulder Smash” skill. This ability lets you chuck a large rock on the battlefield every 15 seconds, dealing tons of damage to all enemies in an area. Correct use of this skill will often be crucial for winning battles in the beginning, so make sure to use it whenever it’s off cooldown.
And as you unlock more commanders, you’ll also gain access to bigger and better skills.
Prioritize Building Homes Over Other Edifices
If you can decide which buildings to construct in your limited territory, you should always go for the homes. This isn’t necessarily because they produce gold, which is required for many upgrades and processes, but because every home increases the number of workers at your disposal, which in turn lets you work on more things at the same time.
Use BlueStacks to Automate Production
Producing resources in your town is mostly automated in the sense that, as soon as you assign a production order, your workers will labor until the project is finished and your resources are generated. Nevertheless, despite the process being mostly automatic, you still need to issue the orders manually. Moreover, considering that some of these production orders, initially, can be completed as fast as in 30 seconds, this means that a significant chunk of your time will be spent going back and forth between your farms constantly making them produce food.
Luckily, if you play Rise of Cultures on PC with BlueStacks, you can get access to a variety of tools to help significantly improve your experience with this game.
Among some of these tools, we can find the Macro Recorder, a feature that lets you record yourself completing monotonous and tedious tasks, and then use that same recording to automate the process on all subsequent attempts. For Rise of Cultures, this means that you can effectively automate tasks such as producing food, by using a macro and setting it to loop as many times as you want. In this sense, you can run your macro, go AFK or minimize the emulator and do something else on your PC, and come back later to find that your food stores are bursting with produce.
Aside from food production, the Macro Recorder can be used to streamline similar processes that are repetitive and don’t require much user input other than a few clicks.
Work on the Main Quests
While facility slots and territory will slow down your progress often, your scientific prowess will also hamper your efforts to develop your town. However, while expanding your settlement and facility slots is fairly straightforward, researching new technologies, if not any more complex, takes significantly more time.
Researching technologies is the basis for progressing in Rise of Cultures, and is what will allow you to advance to new ages. However, every research project requires science points, which are very limited in the game. You can get these points either by investigating incidents, which we’ll talk about shortly, and by completing the main story quests. The latter, particularly, is a great source of science points since they involve tasks that you’d do regardless of these assignments. In this sense, as you continuously improve and expand your settlement, you’ll also be able to claim science points whenever you complete any of these tasks.
It’s also worth mentioning that science points are also generated automatically over time, but very, very slowly; at a rate of one point every hour in the beginning. This generation is better suited for overnight farming, when you’re done playing for the day, so you can start the next day completing a few research projects.
Happiness Matters
While constructing more buildings is the most effective way of increasing your town’s production of various resources, you can also significantly increase your output via the happiness system.
By constructing cultural buildings near your production structures, you will increase the happiness levels of the workers. And when you increase it enough, you will start boosting their production, up to a maximum of double the base production rate. However, this is where things get a bit complicated since, in order to boost the production of most buildings, you’ll need to carefully plan the layout of your settlement. Luckily, you can always move your buildings by clicking and holding on them, which will let you tweak your layout in order to optimize your happiness levels.
Keep in mind that, just like with any other building, you can research technology boosts that will allow you to create more cultural sites, as well as different types of these buildings.
Always Scout Your Town For Incidents
Last but not least, one important aspect that can help to speed up your progress in Rise of Cultures are the incidents that constantly pop up in your settlement. These elements are represented by the blue exclamation marks, and involve simple tasks that your workers can complete. Despite their simplicity, however, some of these incidents can give valuable rewards such as science points, food, and gold, among others. In this sense, it’s always worth going out of your way to complete these incidents, so make sure to leave a few workers free now and then.
It’s worth pointing out here that these incidents don’t last forever, and that they disappear if left unchecked for a while. In this sense, try to investigate them as soon as you find them.
