Vikings: War of Clans – Tips and Tricks for Beginners
Vikings: War of Clans may be an older mobile strategy game, but make no mistake about it. The game world is just as brutal as those of the most recent releases in the base-building war genre. Turn away for a couple of hours and players who are stronger than you can essentially delete your elite army and pillage all your hard-earned resources.
While it is true that you get a 2-day shield for your kingdom when you start a new game, this period of time will fly by in the blink of an eye. After all, there’s only so much you can do in 48 hours and it almost never prepares you to stand tall against the most vicious players on your server. Nevertheless, a few actions will help more than others, so we wrote a list of tips and tricks for the early-game that are guaranteed to give you a better start than most.
1 – Find an Active Clan
This is perhaps the most important thing for you to do in the first 2 days of gameplay. A clan can help you develop your base faster, while also granting you access to a special shop full of extraordinary goodies. Furthermore, it gives you the opportunity to earn currency by helping others with their construction and research tasks.
More importantly, a clan will protect you while you’re too green to protect yourself. Players with remote kingdoms that have no back-up from others are often the target of relentless pillaging campaigns. You don’t want to be in that situation. Ever.
2 – Plan Your Base Early
If you’ve never played a similar mobile strategy game before, you’ll rely on the tutorial to construct and upgrade your first buildings. Then, you’ll likely follow the quests that you are given, which are designed to help you grow a balanced base. This, however, is not necessarily desirable.
Early on, your goal should be to reach Palace level 10, which only requires you to construct and upgrade some resource buildings, the forge, and the wall. At this point, there is no use to wasting resources on other goals. If you try to spread your currencies across your entire base, you’re likely going to fall behind and find it increasingly difficult to reach a spot where you can defend yourself against common attacks.
3 – Learn the Basics of Hyperfarming
It won’t take long before you realize that your base cannot possibly produce as many resources as it consumes. The solution to this is to raid other kingdoms, but this can be next to impossible when you’re fresh off your first 2-day shield; not to mention that it can get you in all kings of sticky situations.
Alternatively, you can set up multiple farm accounts and focus each on a specific resource. You can then use the army on your main account to attack these subordinate bases and take the rewards for close to no losses. If you’re playing Vikings: War of Clans on PC with BlueStacks, hyperfarming is even easier.
4 – Treat Gold like a Rare Commodity
Because that’s exactly what it is. Because it takes a long time to train decent troops early in the game, you might be tempted to use Gold to revive them once they die. This is one of the worst possible ways to spend premium currency in Vikings: WoC.
Instead, you should save your Gold to level your hero or shaman, but also to obtain more hero energy and be able to forge better equipment.
5 – Don’t Neglect Your Hero
Speaking of levels and equipment, your Hero can make your life much easier if you use them properly. They have skills that can help your kingdom grow faster, while their presence in an army can significantly boost your chances to win an engagement.
Most importantly, though, Heroes can equip amazing items that can make every aspect of the game more accessible for you. From faster building times to faster research, farming, troop training, and plunders, different sets allow your Hero to excel in different activities. This, in turn, helps you develop quickly and better prepares your base for an attack.
6 – Research Wisely
Almost everything in Vikings: WoC is fleeting. One poor choice and your best troops can all die in an instant. Your resource silos are full one moment and empty the next. Your entire base can be redesigned since buildings can be removed and rebuilt. Yet this is not the case with the way you spend your resources in Research.
The Oracle is perhaps the most important building in your entire base. This is where you unlock powerful improvements for your kingdom, troops, hero, and more, but the further you go down in a research tree, the more resources you have to spend to continue your progression. Couple this with the fact that you can never un-learn a specific piece of knowledge and you can understand why it is essential to plan your research carefully from the very beginning.
7 – Stick to One Type of Troops
One of the most significant boosts that will take you further into the game is upgrading your troops. But, you’ve guessed it, the more you enhance a troop type, the more expensive it and its future enhancements become.
This is why it is considered preferable to pick one favorite troop type and stick to it until the very late-game. This might put you at a slight disadvantage in certain engagements, but the upside of having a powerful unit to spearhead your attacks outweighs the drawbacks of relying entirely on this unit.
8 – Always Protect Your Kingdom
We’ve said it before and will say it again: other players usually behave mercilessly in this game. If your kingdom is unprotected by a shield and it looks like you don’t have a clan to back you up, you will be attacked repeatedly and will likely eventually quit. To avoid this situation, join an active clan, participate in their coordinated attacks, and always keep a shield on your kingdom when you’re not there to defend it.
These tips and tricks are just the beginning. Once you’ve got the hang of being a Jarl, you’ll want to look into coordinated attacks, advanced combat tactics, as well as farming for resources and equipment materials. Until then, we hope that the advice we’ve gathered here will give you enough time to put together a solid defense before your first engagement with another player.
