Everything you need to know about Kingdom.

Overview

This guide will cover the basics of the game, the game’s story, some tips and trips I have found useful as well as some advice for when you go achievement hunting.

Waking up

When you first start a game of Kingdom the game will show you the names of the companies that made Kingdom (as most games do) and then show you a loading screen. During the screen with the lone ruler riding a horse you can apparently change how they (you) look whilst the horse is galloping. You can change the ruler by pressing the down key on your keyboard. After the loading screen you will be shown a brief “cinamatic” of the ruler from the loading screen riding to the west (the right) side of the screen. Shortly after you will gain total control of the ruler. (During this the song “Wake” will play). After riding a short distance you will see a sign spelling KINGDOM fall to pieces before you. This is most likely a reference to the message available to the game’s thumbnail on the store page “,nothing lasts.” Finally you will come across some glittering gold coins as well as two vagrants and an unlit campfire. This is where the game truly begins.

The Basics of Kingdom Building

During your first day there are a variety of options available. If are starting from the tutorial the game will tell you what to do. If you skipped the intro you have more freedom in your choices. If you want you can try for the achievement “,On the first day I had an army.” by buying lots of bows and hiring as many vagrants as possible. You can try for the achivement “,On the second day I got a gift by using the vast army of archers to rapidly gain coin from hunting, then leveling up your camp three times. If you feel particularly brave you can try to get the achievement “,On the third day I lit a fire.” by waiting until day three to light your campfire, however who knows whether or not the monsters will still chase you.

Regardless in case you by some miracle haven’t discovered the controls yet they are:
Move: A/D Left-Key/Right-Key
Sprint: double tap in disired direction, or press Shift key.
(Watch out for fatigue!)
Throw a coin: (Tap) Down-key/S
Make it rain: (Hold) Down-key/S

The Royal Army

If you’re getting tired of Greed attacks at night and want a little more elbow room you’re going to need an army. Before you can get army though you’ll need a castle. To get a castle you must upgrade your camp to its max level. However, upon doing so you will only recieve 1 gold per day from the bonus chest. So before you upgrade your keep you must create a stable academy.
To create a stable economy make sure you have:
At least built one farm plot and hired a farmer.
Or cut down large numbers of trees and let the grass grow and hire extra archers to hunt the rabbits that will spawn there.
After completing at least one of the above steps you should have a stable enough income to replace the loss of income from your bonus chest. So now only one thing’s left, upgrading your keep! To upgrade your camp/tent/hut/fort/wahteveryouwanttocallit just simply hold the “S” or”Down” key on your keyboard.
Funfact: Sometimes upgrading your keep will give you “free” buildings.

Once you’ve completed the above steps and have a defensible sturdy castle you’re now ready to train an army. You should be warned that armies in Kingdom are quite small. Compared to other games with armies of 40-50 (Age of Empires Series), 12 (Sid Meier’s Civilzation V unit visual size) the armies in Kingdom are pathetic, do not lose hope, as against the Greed they’ll usually get the job done. By they I mean your army of a whopping 8 men. The armies in Kingdom are composed of the following:

• 2 Knights -These brave meat-shields lead the charge and can only be trained from a maximum level castle.
  6 Archers -You probably know about these guys by now, they’re men with bows.

Lastly you need to know how to launch a crusade on a portal. To launch a crusade you need to simply walk to your exterior wall (the one farthest from your keep on either side, excluding the two directly next to it.) and hold down next to a fence in the background with a banner on it. Once you have funded the campaign the men will begin marching (usually to their deaths). You can view their work from the safety of your castle by looking at the banners left by the knights when they picked up their shields. A standard banner means the knight is alive, if the banner is torn it means the knight is dead.
Funfact: Destroying a portal will release a surge of monsters that will attack your town.

The Monsters Within

Now you may be wondering what could possibly hurt you, or even want to threaten your seemingly peaceful pixelated realm that you rule over. Well the Greed want to hurt you, or at least rob you of eveything valuble (isn’t it amuzing how a King is literally fighting greed?). While at the moment the individual monsters don’t have names that I am aware of they all do have names the games fans have made for them.
Here they are:
– The “Little Trolls/Evil Jawas”
These little buggers will be your main enemy for most of the early game. They are obsessed with loot and will steal tools from stall racks, coins left on the ground, tools and weapons left on the ground, your peasants “loyalty clothes?” and your crown. While they may be annoying they have a valuble skill late game: they will run away if they get an item. This means you can deliberatley drop excess money outside the walls and these little buggers will grab it, then leave. They also have the lowest health of all of the Greed monsters (unless they have a mask on).

– The “LOTR Cave Trolls/Evil Hulks/Big Trolls”
These massive hulking brutes don’t care for you wealth and are one of the two Greed monsters that will kill your peasants. Their only perks are that they are the slowest monsters and that they often die at sunrise (if summoned during a blood moon). However their adeptness in smashing is a serious threat as they tend to tear down your walls quickly and have lots of health. Not to mention sometimes if they bash the ground and you are close enough with no coins your crown will fall off of your head and fall into the lake, instantly ending your Kingdom.
Fun Fact: They can also throw boulders at archers to knock them off of towers and knock their bows out of their hands.

– The “Dragons/Flying Purple People Eaters”
These terrifying abominations will lift your peasants into the air and attempt to eat them. Sometimes your archers can down the behemoths before they eat your men and save their lives. However, often you are forced to watch your loyal peasnts get eating alive by a flying nightmare that will usually go on a little killstreak before it is slain, taking the lives of 1-3 of your peasants on average.

The Basics of Defense

So you may be wondering: “, How do I defend my people from the monsters and the things that go bump in the night?” Well this is a highly debated subject as you will encounter those supporting towers, and those supporting ground archers. Either way here are some tips and tricks that have worked in keeping King AngryHobo2’s Kingdom relatively safe from harm.

1) Archers – This goes without saying, you NEED archers to win the game, whether thier hunting game, slaying monsters, knocking down portals on crusades, these guys do most of the work in keeping your kingdom safe. You can make archers with one unemployed peasant and one bow, a total cost of 3 gold. (1 to recruit him, 2 for the bow. 1+2=3) If you want to be super effective you can use the archer shrine (5 gold per “prayer”) the shrine increases accuracy (this I can clearly see) as well as damge (less certain) per prayer.

2) Walls – Walls are important because they give your archers something to stand behind when the hordes of Greed monsters come rushing at them. It also protects your farmers and builders that have gotten behind it. However it also makes ground archers shoot straight up to get their arrows over the wall reducing accuracy. Overall you will use walls to slow down the monster horde and buy
your archers more firing time.

3) Towers – I personally love using towers as they do 2 great things. (1) They make your archers immune to the “Evil Jawa” monsters once the tower is tier 2. (2) They give your archers better shots at the monsters both on the ground and in the air. I personally recommend building towers (Tier 2!) outside of your walls so that on most regular nights they will make dents in the rampaging monster hordes as they stampede towards your Kingdom before they even get there! They also work well just outside a wall so that when the monsters throw themselves against your walls the archers in the towers have clear shots directly at the monsters.

4) Catapults – These massive machines are capable of killing large clusters of “Evil Jawas” and “Flying Purple People Eaters” in one fell swoop. However only “engineers” can use them, and it takes a few shots to hit targets usually.

5) Crusades – Once you have upgraded your castle to the max you can train knights. These knights will act as a human shield for you archers when they go out crusading to detroy the Greed Portals. Once broken, a portal will spew forth a large cluster-fun of monsters that will often slay your puny human soldiers outright and then head towards your town. This is a good defence because once a portal is gone that means less monsters can come at night. And if you clear both portals on one side of the realm you now have a new area to expand freely into.

The Golden Harvest

So by now you will have realized that almost everything in the game uses gold. From hiring vagrants, to funding build projects you will always need money. While hunting and tree-chopping might keep you stable in the early stages of the game, you will undoubtedly need more money in the late game. So how do you get more money? Agriculture! Lots of Agriculture.

Even building just one farm will make you quite a bit of coin however farms are tricky. First off farms often take longer to produce a reward, so while a single plot can make up to five gold per day all at once, rabbit hunter can make five gold a day in small payments of one – two gold at a time. We can’t forget that the hunter’s bow costs two gold, whereas the farmer’s scythe is five gold. Additionaly farm site are often, outside your walls. This means that when night falls the farmers have to retreat to your keep (or in some cases the nearest farmhouse). Now you can shorten the morning commute by building a farmhouse on the farm which will cause the farmers to stay by their fields at night. However the farmhouse does not protect them from the greed. Don’t fret though, as you can easily counter the greed invasions by building walls around your farms before you upgrade the farm. Just make sure that you leave enough room for the farmland. If you space your walls and farms out well enough you can have up to six farmers working one farm which is quite a save. Overall farms are a worthy investment as just building two farms with two farmers each can create excess gold.

Note: Farms are most likely the easiest wasy to get the acheivement: By Day Six I Was Rich.

Winning the Game

Currently in Kingdom there is one way to win the game, destroy all four portals. After doing so you will face a massive two-pronged attack on your domain from both directions as the monsters “last invasion”. After this event I do not believe that the monsters continue to arrive, thus you completely protect your Kingdom from harm.

Note: There are multiple achievements for “finishing” the game often given the name : Safe in (Insert Roman Numerals Here). However there is a special achievement for “finishing” the game by day ten.