Review | League Of Kingdoms

over 3 years ago (Edited)

League Of Kingdoms is a kingdom builder strategy pvp browser game with a twist of “blockchain” added into the mix. You don’t need to connect an ETH wallet to the game to get started. Chances are unless you’re spending ETH on cash shop items you won’t be doing anything with a blockchain anyway. Unless you are one of the rare players who own land or are selling resources for a couple of bucks externally.

If you have played a game like Game Of Thrones Winter Is Coming than you will already have a decent understanding of how League Of Kingdoms works. You increase building levels and do research intending to raise a giant army to go farming, kill NPCs, and enter into combat. With the ultimate goal every two weeks of acquiring and holding shrines with an alliance in pvp. Meanwhile, the whole time you are performing daily tasks and spending on people's land so they can make some DAI and other resources.

Building

I got decently far on realm 2 in this game getting up to castle level 23 for a while I was in the top 40 of all players on the realm. You have quite a few different buildings that require resources and real-time waiting for them to build unless you spend crystals.

This game has food, lumber, stone, and gold as the main resources. You also have a protection building that can safely hold a certain amount keeping it from getting looted. One of the big things I did like about this game is you can earn from quests, events, and killing NPCs resources bundles (along with buying from the cash shop.) Those bundles can’t be looted from you in PvP until you open them.

Each building has a max level of 30 and the final level requires an item called Golden pillar that costs 2k crystals. To put things into perspective if you purchased just the crystal pack for only crystals which is a very bad deal you could buy 2,300 crystals for $19.99. At least in this game, you can buy bundles and other kinds of packages where you get resources, boosts, and even other things for around the same amount of crystals as you would get out of those bundles as long as you have not gone over your weekly quantity caps on bundles that I assume would require 1k’s of dollars spent.

Early on buildings are quite quick and joining an alliance with active members can make a big difference. Each member can press a help button and depend on how high your Hall of Alliance is you could several days or even longer in time reduced. To upgrade my castle to level 24 would require just over 5 days of real-time which is not that compared to my research where unlocking a tier 4 unit takes 31 days.

The good news is you do get quite a lot of time speedup boosting. The game has four different kinds: troop training, buildings, healing, and research. If you are a patient player like myself you saved your speedups the best you could so you would get even more from using them during events.

There is some difference between games like Game Of Thrones Winter Is Coming and other browser city-builder type of games when it comes to healing troops in this game. Instead of being able to build a bunch of hospitals you are limited to just one. This means most high-ranking players are significantly past their healing capacity if they take a massive hit and lose they are having a bad day. I had over 820k troops but my level 22 hospital could only hold around 381k. That leaves a lot to be lost if I end up facing a higher level player.

There are several other buildings as well some of them are quite important to keep checking in on every so often. In the trading post for instance you could spend gold sometimes but it was mostly crystal spending. Every four hours you would get a new caravan offering discounted items from speedups to resources. They also had a VIP shop that reset every week getting up to VIP 8 which you can do for free by just playing daily allowed you to buy 20 million gold, food, lumber, and stone if you had enough crystals.

You also had the treasure house building where items you got from opening chests, farming NPCs, or generic rarity pieces that you could spend on an item to wear. Leveling them up could provide a small bonus like 4% to troop health, 5% cavalry damage, 10% lumber gathering speed was just a couple you could get. Once you start mastering by leveling out different boosts on the item you can unlock buffs that have a limited use time and a cooldown like increased attack for an hour.

As you level up your castle it will require different perquisites that over time will require you to level up different buildings in your kingdom. While the game does give you some free golden hammers to unlock a second construction slot when you start I don’t recommend buying any out of a shop for crystals or money. Once you progress far enough along in the game you unlock it free which is kind of them to not lock that behind a paywall after a couple of levels usually within your first week of active gameplay.

The end game will be waiting around many months on a single building as one should expect from a game like this. The costs will be huge in terms of resources that will take quite some time to acquire on your own.

Farming NPCs

League of Kingdoms monsters on the map.jpg

There are three different kinds of NPCs things to farm in this game once you have raised an army. You have your gathering nodes, and two different kinds of NPCs to fight of which the majority of players do not know about one of them.

The first allows you to gather a large number of resources over a long period from buildings. The larger your army is the more you can carry. The higher the level of the building the more it will hold. The great thing is no NPCs are guarding them. So if you happen to be in an area with level 5 lumber camps they hold 600k lumber and take quite a few hours to gather it all. The downside you are leaving troops outside of your castle which are easy targets for players to kill. It’s at least a decent risk to reward if you are paying attention just boring.

The next are NPCs that everyone knows about and they are golems, skeletons, orcs and if you are in an alliance there are many others you might be able to kill such as deathkar and dragons. These kinds of NPCs drop resource bundles, crystals, chests, and item treasures you can wear or use to upgrade.

For these kinds of NPCs, you don’t have to worry about getting troops killed when you attack them. As long as you have room in your hospital you can heal up any wounded. These, however, do cost energy to attack and if you are an active player doing your daily quests you will have a lot of action point potions. I had something silly like 16k action points stored up and it only cost 5 to attack normal NPCs.

Finally, you have the NPCs hiding among the players as kingdoms. This game has quite a high turnover rate so one might think after hitting a few of the players that never made it past kingdom level 1 and named their kingdom that they are not worth trying to farm. If you understand what to look for the game seeds kingdoms with 100k of each resource and you get one hit before they teleport away to gather as much of it as you can.

Alliances

If you do play a game like League Of Kingdoms always, always, always join an alliance. As I’ve already talked about you do get some benefits from joining them such as help speeding up building time by a little bit. There is also a huge social aspect from this game and that is a large part of your daily play.

While this did not apply to all realms in this game on realm 2 that I played on there was a social agreement between all the top alliances to not attack any non-farms (accounts that only farmed to feed resource into the main account) that were also in an alliance; unless the weekly kill event going on. Unlike the first realm, they wanted players to be able to grow and not live under endless fear of getting zero out daily and farmed by the top alliance.

The good news, if you are only expecting pvp during the weekly kill event or have a lot of agreements with other alliances you might only have to deal with pvp once a week. Even better the game gives you a weekly 1-day shield you can use to protect your kingdom from being attacked and people who wish to stay out of the kill events tend to use theirs during the time. While it does not apply to troops out in gathering nodes you don’t worry about getting flattened by one million high tier troops either hitting your kingdom.

Alliance can also rally attacks. This allows other players in the alliance to join in on a single attack. This can be done against certain kinds of NPCs along with other players.

Alliances tend to group around what they call a Hive. For the higher level alliances in power, they tend to be staying at one of their shrine locations for special buffs for holding them. This makes it easier for them to work together as a team. If you are in quite an aggressive realm they can team up better to take out players who teleport into hives to farm them for resource and kills. Safety in numbers as they say.

You also do have the end goal of most alliances and that is to acquire a Shrine. Every two weeks players can choose to battle it out by trying to capture an unclaimed shrine or attack one an alliance is already in control of. Players defending them will spend troops and depending on the tier of shrine it could hold a million troops or several million. Shrines themselves give that alliance bonus like increase health for a certain unit, gathering speed, building speed, and reduced death rates.

Alliance also makes a great place for players to talk and learn more about the game if they are new. With this game's high turnover rate chances are if you are an active player on a newer realm there is room for you in a top ten alliance.

You also get to hear about war stories and things that went down in other realms. The first thing you might hear about is a player named TUT who controls realm 1 and more or less makes your life there painful unless you do his bidding. Many might stress over the thought of a single player wanting to be a dictator over an entire realm. This game is highly paid to win and you should expect it to attract people willing to blow insane amounts of money to be “good” at a game and rule over others.

Alliances for the most part do their best to attract new players in combating the high turnover rate games like these have. So keep in mind that many alliances can have quite a few different languages speaking in alliance chat. While there is an in-game translation button it can get annoying to have to click it for hours on end and not fully understand one hundred percent of that time what is being talked about. You could have Spanish, French, German, and English all going on in the same conversation.

Join an alliance. It makes life better more times than not. Not to mention this game has a lot of drama in it. Make sure you have some popcorn standing by as well! Some days in a couple of alliances I was in the nightly chat was more like a soap opera it lived things up while you were farming as egos went at it.

Cash Shop

While this game is heavy pay to win the population on a couple of the realms are low enough where you could get away with not spending and still be a “top” player at least according to ranking. People can and will spend a massive amount of money on this game.

The biggest thing you can buy in this game is going to be resources, speedups, and crystals. With that, you can boost out large armies, unlock high tier buildings, and even research. While there are a couple of $4.99 packs you will notice those don’t go far and it’s just best to farm at that small amount. On the higher end, there are $99.99 packs that offer 20 million of each resource, lots of crystal, and boosts as well.

League of Kingdoms when to buy crystals.png

If you’re going to spend a little each week or on occasion on this game make sure to wait for the crystal buying event is active which tends to be called For The Victory. Buying a lower end pack for $4.99 525 crystals and some other stuff nets you an extra 500 crystals. On the higher end of a $99.99 pack that comes with 12,500 crystals, you will get an extra 18,500 crystals and many millions of resources to use.

During my almost 50 days of logging into this game, how much did I spend? $0. I focused more on being a daily active player than someone trying to spend money. Because of that and playing this game “smart” I was able to pass up most spenders in this game on the realm I was on. With the expectation of about 30-40 players. Do keep in mind the biggest spender was a little more than double my power and could crush me without even trying. Still not bad for not spending anything.

Blockchain

Since most that end up playing this game is going to be interested in the blockchain part and more than likely trying to earn from playing I’m going to go over the little I know. This part of the game can get pricy and be hard to partake in due to a few players wanting to own everything.

The basic is this game has land that the players can buy. Once in a while, the game developers sell off some. You can also buy from players if someone is willing to part with theirs for the right price. There is still a fair bit of land that is showing up as unclaimed.

For those that own land, they can level them up by spending developer points. This increases the monster level and gathering builds in that area. Making the area more attractive for a player or players to want to relocate their castle too.

So how does one get developer points? There are two ways that I know of acquiring it. The first one people spend crystals on your land. The second being you buy developer points with Victor’s Medals that are earned and reward by the alliance for capturing and holding shrines in the shrine shop. Each shrine has a limited number of developer points for sale every week.

Land ownership can be great if you run an alliance and form a Hive around your lands. The issue is land itself is quite small. I have seen some players try and incentivize this by offering players a share once the land sells or even issue their own “token” as some kind of internal and non-official reward system that represent shares in the land itself. That requires a fair amount of trust and waiting for land to be worth selling.

Anyone that seems to have any land buys it on Open Sea from other players. Some of the cheaper land on sale is listed for $114 at the time of writing this and they have earned a total of 4 to 5 DAI with DAI being around $1 each. $5 in 6 months is going to take over 11 years unless can develop the land quite a fair bit to recover from earnings. That assumes the game is even able to afford to pay that amount over the long run.

As such I never bought any land. With the way these pvp city builder games can go I’m not quite sure I see a long-term community of high spenders continuing to play this game for a decade. Even more so with how similar this game is to the vast majority out there with just the blockchain part being a major difference.

There is one final way to make money and that would be from minting into packages your resources from farming. The biggest issue is going to be acquiring enough without someone attacking you for being a farm since no one should have that much resource just sitting around. The markets have also crashed quite a bit 10 million food is selling for 0.005 ETH or around $3 before any gas fees are taken out for listing and selling. That is a lot of farming in hopes of making very little if anyone is even buying.

I earned nothing from playing this game for nearly 50 days. I didn’t buy any land and it’s just not worth the time investment into farming and whatever the minting costs and transaction fees on ETH are going be where I assume you could end up spending more than you will be able to sell for.

Final Thoughts

For me at least games like these become frustrating to play over the long run. To be able to stay completive and enjoy the game you either need to spend a fair amount of money or time or both. While I was able to maintain a high ranking in the realm I was on I was highly active. If you are a free player like myself over time you just become frustrated with the pay to win and the increasing time things take to complete. Being able to earn a little from playing is not a thing unless you are going to buy and hold land for many years.

Would I be willing to play this game again? No. Just too much time out of the day to get everything done. Was not happy with the “blockchain” part as I see this as more of just a city builder browser game. If I wanted to spend it would have to be a greater amount than I’m comfortable with for it to be noticeable and chances are it would be spent on boosting out troops that can get killed.