When you start playing Kingdoms of Middle Earth, you are thrown into a busy, confusing world, with cities, wilds, goblins, alliances and players yelling in GC. It can be difficult to get a grasp of the many game aspects. I remember my starting point as extremely slow in hind sight…Figuring everything out by myself, occasionally guided by the KoM wiki, progressing ever so slowly. If I would have known what I know all now, progress would have been much faster.

This article is meant for new players who, instead of figuring out everything by themselves, want to get a head start. Starting a new game, you are placed in your safe bubble for 7 days. But how do you start your journey? What should you build and train, what aspects to focus on? All this and some more tips after the break!

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1. Getting started: Navigation

So you’ve started your game, and have successfully completed the short tutorial. Your beginners bubble protects you from attacks from other players for 7 days. What do you do next? Well, most importantly, you need to get familiar with the navigation within the game. Look around in your city, and switch to the resource plot and map screen. Get familiar with those.

Look at the bar at the bottom of your screen. Press the icons and get comfortable switching between mail, quest, campaign, gear and other menus.

Start building some resource plots and 2-3 homes to see the building progress. And don’t forget to look at the general chat channel (GC) and say hello to the other players in the server. This all shouldn’t take too long, perhaps half an hour.

2. Gaining your focus

Now for some focus. Without it, you’ll have no clue what you are doing or what it will mean in the long term. So what is the game about? As this game is a strategy/war game, here are a couple of aspects of the game in both the earlier and later stages:

Constructing your city. The main focus in the early stages of the game is constructing your city. Get it up and running to access higher level buildings, unlock troops to train and research to increase your skills. In later stages, you will unlock your 2nd, 3rd and 4th city! So make sure you understand what the buildings each do and what you need to construct a certain building.

Training troops. As a war game, you need to train (or buy…) troops. This is done in your barracks through a combination of player, barracks and research levels, which will steadily increase. But dont worry about training troops during your 7 day period. Your focus should be on getting your first city up and running, so focus your resource spending on that goal.

Gathering resources. To construct buildings, do research and eventually train troops, you need resources. Resources can be given to you by alliance members (see below), produced by yourself, or farmed. Farming means attacking other players on the map. If you win, you get all the resources that they forgot to protect or use up. Resource production can be boosted by owning Wilds, pieces of land you can see on your map view. There are other ways, but I will not discuss these here now.

Alliance play. Playing solitary on this game is possible, but greatly reduces the fun and interaction with other players. Joining an alliance gives you the benefit of help and protection, resource gifts from team members and a great social aspect that makes it so much more fun to play. Also, many tournaments within the game are for alliances only.

Rankings. Competitive players will try to compete in one of a number of rankings withing the game. The Might you have (from your troops) is an important indicator and ranking value in game. Another great one, with probably even more prestige, is the TK ranking. TK stands for troop kills, and counts how many troops (might) from other players you have killed. Tournaments also usually focus on these values. You can check your rank(s) with the “ranking” button in the bottom button bar.

PvE. There are two ways to do battle in the game: against computer controlled enemies (PvE) and against other players (PvP). The PvE part consists of attacking goblin camps on the map, or goblins in the campaign quests.

PvP. Ultimately, you will be fighting against other players. Either for competing in tournaments, wars between alliances, defending your pride, or getting troop kills (TKs). You can attack other cities or wilds, or defend your own.

In-game troops and items. It is really worthwhile to get familiar with the troops that are in the game and the items that are, or will be available. In these articles I highlight the Dwarven and Elven normal troops, and the Wall troops, which you can construct to defend your city (but which you shouldn’t actually build, for reasons…).

Now that you are somewhat familiar with the game menus and have a basic grasp of what the game is about, it is time to move on and start progressing. First up:

3. Joining an Alliance

Joining an alliance is the best thing you can do, for reasons mentioned above. Protection, a social environment, resources, help and advice and a lot of fun. Look around in GC and check out the different alliances. Request to join or wait to be invited, but try to do this as soon as possible.

You will need to construct an Embassy to be able to join (or create) an alliance, so make this one of your first buildings.

4. Building your city

You’ve got a grip on the game, and are in an alliance that can help you. Now it is time to continue constructing your city. Where do you start? First the basics.

4.1. As you will see, after completing the tutorial, you will have a home, barracks, a few resource plots, and your Keep and Great Hall, where your Heroes are.

4.2. Next construct another small number of resource producing buildings and a few homes. Get some resource production going, and get your population up to man the farms.

4.3. Now it time to construct two important buildings: The Vault and Musterfield. The Musterfield is needed to send out armies and resources to fellow alliance members, and you need it if you want to attack wilds or goblin camps.

The Vault is used to protect your resources, except for gold. Because you are in your protective bubble, people cant attack and steal your resources yet, but the 7 days are up very quickly, and it is good to be able to protect and actually use the resources your alliance members send you.

4.4. Fill out your city next. Basically, you will need to construct all available buildings in your first city, except for maybe the tavern and watchtower. So construct a forge, stable, armory and sage tower whenever they become available. The first three are used for training troops, while the sage tower helps in collecting various items in the game, as well as enabling various events that will come on on the server.

The tavern increases traveling speed between your cities and those of alliance members. The Watch tower warns you of incoming attacks from enemies. Some players do not build these to have more barracks for faster training, but I advice to build them in your first city at least.

Once you have all these buildings (of which you can only build one), construct more homes till you have about 6, and fill the rest with barracks. The more barracks, the faster you can train troops, and this will become very important later on.

4.5. Leveling your buildings and research comes next. Try to keep buildings and research levels at around the same level and keep building. You don’t have to have every building at lvl 9 after 7 days, but if you joined an alliance, you could easily get everything up to about lvl 5-6 with the resources they can provide you with.

Research can be done at the same time as constructing a building, so make sure it’s running in the background at all times as well. Especially the higher levels of research can take days to complete, so don’t expect your levels to be high at the end of your seven days as well. But it should be possible to keep up with the overall level of your city buildings.

5. Training troops

Nearing the end of your 7 days, if you played smart and dedicated, you should be able to start slowly training some troops. For the time being, only focus on training Tier 1 units. Training times will not be that fast, but it will slowly increase. Gather resources and slowly start cranking out numbers to be used for example in farming, but always make sure to have enough resources to keep Research and Construction underway.

6. Campaign

As you will know by now, there is a campaign mode, a linear game-play fashioned part of the game in which you attack ever increasingly large Goblin camps on a map, unlocking the next stages as you go with the keys that drop from boss maps. Now, with the little troops you have, you will most likely not be able to unlock all maps yet, but do become familiar with the set-up and the maps available.

Campaigns are used in tournaments frequently (campaign scores (and part 2) to be exact), and you get forge runes, relics, resources and other items from them. Don’t waste too much on it early on, but when you get a decent hero to lead your armies, try to unlock as many maps as possible. See my campaign spreadsheet guide for what Goblins are in each map and what drops in a certain level.

7. Carry on…

By now, the seven days should be up. Your bubble popped, and with any luck, other players will start attacking you every now and then to get the resources you didn’t protect, so stay under vault level. You can also start attacking other players for resources as well! Other than that, not much will really change.

Keep constructing and researching your city, or even see if you can get your second, third and fourth cities going. Keep training troops and unlocking campaign maps. Get to know your alliance members, and be an active part of the AC. Participate in tournaments, and don’t be afraid to ask questions to players who know more about the game.

Also, follow this simple list of Daily Things to do. All in all, you should be getting the hang of it pretty fast, if you are eager enough to learn fast from other players. Getting out of beginner protection isn’t really something to worry about, but I hope this information here will give someone a small head start in the game.

If I’ve missed anything, let me know! Cheers!