Short Answer: Rise of Kingdoms is not a pay-to-win game unless you want to. Free-to-play players still can have a lot of fun and it’s proven.
Here are some of our best advice for you to succeed in the game without spending a dime.
Daily Tasks (Your Routine)
Farming Barbarians
Never ever let your action point sit if you want to be an efficient player!
Use 
Peacekeeping commanders for farming Barbarians!
Lohar is an essential commander for you as he does extra damage towards Barbarians and also gains extra XP as well.
When you go into the Peacekeeping talent trees, you can see that these commanders have:
- Bonus rewards when killing Barbarians.
- Extra damage dealt to Barbarians.
- Less Action Points required when attacking Barbarians.
Gathering
Resources are extremely important because
- You cannot do anything without resources (LOL).
- Train your troops.
- Upgrade your buildings.
- Upgrade your Technologies.
- Heal your units at a crucial time make sure that you level up your gathering
It’s highly recommended to equip your gathering commander with gathering equipment if possible.
Each gatherer will have a specific skill that can either amplify or boost the gathering speed of each resource:
- Constance = Wood
- Gaius Marius = Food
- Cleopatra = Stone
- Seondeok = Gold
- Centurion, Sarka, Joan of Arc = Universal gatherer.
- etc.
If you have a low-rarity Versatility commander (like Dragon Lancer) and you are running out of gatherers to use, you can out this versatility talent in here called Superior Tools, which increases the gathering speed of troop by 15%.
Events
Participate in all Rise of Kingdoms Events!
Make sure that you are doing the events and getting the rewards because these freebies will help you to succeed in Rise of Kingdoms.
Get and keep all of the 
speed-up tokens and 
resource tokens. You need them whenever you are in a battle or if you are going to be competing for an event.
Daily Quests (Objectives)
It is pretty simple to perform your daily objectives for a free rewards:
- 100
Gems – Wow! 
Magic Box: Get a chance of getting Teleports, Talent Reset Scrolls
Action Point Potion
Epic Commander Sculptures, extremely useful in the beginning.
Join an Alliance!
You get a lot of value being in an alliance.
Whenever you donate into the Alliance you’re getting 
individual credits, allowing you to purchase various item within the shop.
Why you should get in an Alliance as soon as possible:
- Resource rewards: Your alliance can capture resource points, giving you passive rewards every day.
- Gifts: A lot of gifts whenever your Alliance members defeating Barbarian Forts, Lohar, etc. or when they purchase game items.
- Alliance Technology helps you boost your progression into the game by a lot!
- Holy sites give you a lot of useful buffs once your Alliance captures them.
Alliance can protect you from the enemies and you of course can also attack the enemies with your alliance.
Alliance is definitely the biggest part of Rise of Kingdoms. No matter how strong you are, you cannot anything without having your friends with you.
Is Pay-to-win Really That Bad?
- Pay-to-Win Player: Who purchase a lot of bundles to get their accounts to a greater power.
- Free-to-play Player: Who play without spending (or just a little) into the game.
Pay-to-Win players are an essential part of any kingdom!
In the beginning, they may be too aggressive but at the end of the day, they will be your good friends.
P2Ws are going to be players who lead your rallies because they have the best commanders 
. If you are leading rallies with really horrible commanders, you will never succeed.
They are also an essential part of any Alliance because they drop tons of free resources whenever they purchase bundles. If you are in a high spending Alliance, you should be very grateful because you are getting a lot of free rewards and you want to do everything should to make sure that you are still qualified to be in that Alliance.
Being a free to play player, you can act as a support for the Clan.
- Play support commanders.
- Aid resources for the top players.
Pay-to-win players are your greatest investment as a free-to-play. Enjoying Rise of Kingdoms as a free to play player is obviously real.
Pay to wins are there to save you.
Imagine in KvK, if one flag is about to fall, it could destroy multiple flags, leading to a disaster. All the P2W will put every troops they have to make sure that you are safe.
They invest real value on you just to make sure that you are safe. How adorable it is!
As a free-to-play, you can also perform a lot on the open field battle.
You may not be a rally leader but you can still make an impact into the fighting by supporting the whales. You want to support them using supporting commanders such as 
Joan of Arc. If you want to be healer, you can also use 
Cleopatra. Or you can also act as a disabler using 
Hermann or 
Boudica, 
Baibars, 
Aethelflaed, etc.
The Community
Establish a fun community! It has to be fun. You’re not going to play a video game if you’re not having fun, right?
What hooked me into Rise of Kingdoms was not really about the game itself, it’s the community. (If you want to have fun, follow our Facebook Fanpage too!)
The game was much harder to play at the beginning, there are tons of bugs and restricts. Such as you cannot drag and drop your troops anywhere on the map like it’s now, instead, you had to point them to a certain target on the map.
However, I was still having tons of fun. It’s because of the community of the game.
Get to talk with other people, build that bonding with people, make some friends, interact with them, establish a Discord server, get into voice chat and have some laughs.
Conclusion
Rise of Kingdoms is the game with a lot of emotions! This is a game that requires a lot of strategies. you can spend a lot of money into the game but if you do not understand how the game works, you will not succeed.
Eventually, the best three things you want to have in order to have fun are great commanders, a great Alliance and a great Kingdom!
