Lake-Town 5th City: All you need to know

laketownarticleheaderLake-Town is the new expansion city to the Kingdoms of Middle Earth that was released late November, and which will be available to everyone after the 4th of December for free! Unlike the 4 older cities, the style of the city matches that of the human Lake-town from the movies, instead of the familiar Elven or Dwarven theme. Although a lot in the city will seem familiar, some key differences with regards to gameplay and buildings also come with the 5th city. In this article I will sum up all available information on this newest city.

  • 1. The Basics
  • 2. The Buildings
    • 2.1 Familiar Buildings
    • 2.2 The new and changed Buildings
  • 3. Construction
    • 3.1 Lake-Town architects
    • 3.2 Pearl and Lake-town architect full overview
  • 4. Oysterboats, Pearls and Tactical training
    • 4.1 Pearls
    • 4.2 Oystering Research
    • 4.3 TT training
  • 5. Heroes
  • 6. How to start with your City construction

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Hero Equipment: How and where to Embed Gems

Gem Embedding enables players to make their gear perform even better in war, enhancing attack, defense, and/or march sizes. But the higher level runes are difficult to acquire, as it takes to 1 year and 8 months to just farm one level 6 Gem from scratch with the picks regenerating for free. Although we are helped by Gem Shards and Gems in chests and tournaments, it’s still inefficient to just start combining them to level 6 Gems, so choices have to be made.

In this article, I will look at what the Gems do in each gear piece type, what gear should be Embedded first, and how to most efficiently upgrade Gems along the way.

  • 1. Buff types and Gem effects
  • 2. Diminishing returns
  • 3. Best Gem Embed gears
    • 3.1 Offensive
    • 3.2 Defensive
    • 3.3 Campaign
    • 3.4 All-round set-up
  • 4. Efficiently upgrading Gems

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Hero Equipment: Mining Gems

dwarf pickAs proposed earlier, I have put this subject in a separate article, to keep the information on both Gem mining and Embedding separated and thus hopefully easier to comprehend. The main purpose of mining in Kingdoms of Middle Earth is to acquire the Gem Shards needed to make the Gems used for embedding in gear.

Here I will give an overview of the things necessary to find the mines on the map, mine them successfully for Gem Shards, and other possible benefits from mining. To mine we need to know the following things:

  1. What is Mining exactly?
  2. What types of Mines are there?
  3. How do you find Mines?
    • Watch Tower
    • Search Results
  4. How do you start mining?
    • Attacking a Mine
    • Mining progress and report
    • Reinforcing a Mine
    • Gem Pouch research
  5. What are the possible drops?
  6. Defending Mines
    • Strategy
    • Use in TKing
    • Alliance agreements

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How to get Great High Scores on Campaign with Tactical Troops

master rangerSo, when I first wrote about this subject in the older articles, Tactical Troops (TT) had not been released yet or just shortly, and I never added a new article about getting good high scores for CHS events. But every major CHS event I see an enormous spike in views, so I guess people are still looking for the ultimate guide. And although such a guide does not exist really, here are the steps you can take yourself to make you personal best CHS guide using TT!

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Hero Equipment: Update or Enhance first?

valar stoneSo apparently the options of Enhancing and Upgrading hero equipment/gear have left some people to wonder whether it is better to first enhance or first upgrade? Does it cost more items to enhance a lvl 10 item versus a lvl 1 item? Or do the Valto runes have less effect on fully enhanced gear compared to non-enhanced?

Nobody really seemed to be able to provide a good answer, even though it didn’t make much sense in my mind for such a thing to exist. But I thought it would be good to figure it out once and for all and give you the answer to the question “does it matter what you do first?”. And of course the answer is:

NO

I tested this on two pieces of Wartorn gear, and seeing whether doing one option first meant differences for the second. Results can be seen below the fold, but if you do not need much persuasion, just follow the above answer.

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KoM 101: Getting through your first 7 days

bubbleWhen 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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Forge runes: All you need to know

forging runesWith the new update to the game, 4th cities can be runecrafted, and runecrafting up to level *11 is finally possible, although a pain in the ass. Just think about the number of Hobbit Runecrafters you need to to be able to train all Tier 4 units and then think about how available these things are to get your hands on. But I think it is a great time to go over the topic of forging runes, the runes you need to get to level *10 in the first place.

So where do you get these runes? What do you use them for, and how? Which trade from the Sage tower is most profitable? And how many do you need to upgrade your buildings. In this post, I will try to combine all available information on the topic.

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What to spend your Hobbit Building Crews on

HBCA couple of times I’ve heard people ask, both in GC and AC, what the best building to spend a Hobbit Building Crew on is. Although I recognize that for many players this question will be obsolete by this point in the game, some newcomers might find my views helpful in deciding where to spend their HBC’s.

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How to train Tier 4 troops

dwarfphalkanxIn light of Tier 4 troops now being almost completely available for training (just waiting for Ranged troops atm), I thought it would be handy for those that do not train them yet, to chart which buildings and researches you have to upgrade to train them. It’s gonna take a lot of time to get there, and once there, the troops also train hella slow, but here goes.

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