Conquer the World and Become the Author of Your Kingdoms's History.
Rise of Kingdoms: Lost Crusade, formerly known as Rise of Civilizations is a mobile device strategy game developed by Lilith Gaming. It was released on September 20th, 2018. It's available on both iOS and Android.
You play as a governor in one of the 11 civilizations as your city will rise from humble beginnings into a mega city as you start in a newly born Kingdom as you fight your way against barbarians and opposing governors by upgrading buildings and training troops. As you play, you will be able to recruit commanders that were widely known in historical times as they lead your troops in battle with their array of skills and talents. Your commanders need experience and sculptures in order to get stronger. However, you can't triumph over your enemies alone as you must join alliances to expand territory and capture important sites.
Eventually, once your kingdom has been stabilized, you will enter a new chapter in the Lost Kingdoms where your Kingdom will matched up against 7 other Kingdoms where you team with your fellow alliances to conquer the Great Ziggurat and prove that your Kingdom is the strongest in all of Lost Kingdoms.
Rise of Kingdoms contains examples of:
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- If the alliance leader is inactive for 1 week, the alliance will automatically promote another leader based on activity and rank.
- Any AP spent will be returned if the player has not engage in combat with the target.
- Even if the threshold for Stage 3 of Past Glory is already reached, players can still donate sculptures so they can exchange the Hero Medallions in the shop, ensuring that players who slept through the event can still receive the rewards.
- Arbitrary Headcount Limit: How much troops you can run per commander is dependent on their level as well as your City Hall level. Higher levels means you can utilize greater number of troops. Additionally, commanders with the leadership talent has skills that enable them to amass even greater number of armies.
- Awesome, but Impractical:
- Siege troops beyond the first level count as this. While they are able to deal greater amount of damage to watchtowers and garrisons, they are also equally weak to other unit types not to mention that there are no commander that specifically benefit them besides gatherers. True they do have greater loads for gathering and plundering but if you got attacked while gathering with higher level siege equipments, you will be incurred with a huge amount of hospital costs, easily greater than whatever resource you will get while at level 1, the costs to heal them is minimal while also being healed at an incredibly quick rate.
- Even though Richard is a commander specialized at garrisons due to his skills, his healing ironically does more harm than good as having units healed while he is the garrison commander meant that your slightly wounded troops becomes severely wounded instead and in long drawn-out battles, this fills the hospital very quickly until you can hold no more space and your troops will die. The only scenario where his healing isn't harmful are during Ark of Osiris and open field battles where the former has unlimited space for hospitals while the latter don't have much space for Hospitals in the first place due to the maximum amount you can carry.
- Battering Ram: They are available as the first tier of siege units.
- The Berserker: As expected of the Viking civilization, they have the Berserker as their unique unit.
- Bonus Feature Failure: Both Richard and Yi-Seong-Gye are available to be purchased in the Daily Special Offer where players can purchase the daily bundle for a random amount of said sculptures. However, they are only purchasable after the player has maxed out all the Gold Key commanders where by the time they're finally expertised, would very likely been power crept out of the meta and probably already maxed them out anyway given that they're infinitely more useful than them.
- Boring, but Practical: Tier 1 siege units don't proved as much troop power and obviously aren't as strong as the higher tier siege units but they provide the highest troops load for it's training cost and in the event your gatherers are attacked, you only need to expend a minuscule amount of resources to heal them not to mention that they recover incredibly quick.
- Bribing Your Way to Victory: While the entire game can technically count as this, there are two commanders in the game (Minamoto no Yoshitsune and Hannibal Barca) that can only be obtained and maxed out by directly purchasing their sculptures. The number you get is fixed and they can't use Universal Scultpures to level up their skills.
- Contractual Boss Immunity:
- Holy Site & Pass leaders and Ancient Ruin Barbarians often tend to be immune to all debuffs which meant governors couldn't just surround and debuff them until they can't fight back.
- Arms Master Lohar in "Lohar's Training" event is treated as an "Elite Barbarian" which means he isn't treated as a Barbarian that Peacekeeping commanders deals bonus damage against.
- Disc-One Nuke: Minamoto no Yoshitsune is a Legendary Commander available to be purchased as soon from the start of the game and he easily surpasses all other Epic commanders that are given to you when you first play the game thanks to his bonus damage against Barbarians. While he is not the best, he is the easiest Legendary commander that can be maxed out relatively speaking and remains useful even after stronger Legendary Commanders have been released.
- Easy Level Trick: Ian's Ballads supposedly require you to beat all the mooks before facing the boss. However due to the fact that the enemies return to their original position if there are no more targets (and the rewards for beating them are incredibly miniscule compared to the ones you get from beating each bosses), most experienced players instead will ignore all the other enemies until they reach the respawn location next to the boss so that when all they all die, they respawn next to that location so they can fight the bosses without needing to fight through the other enemies first. Note that this does not apply to the Final Boss where you must beat all the enemies before the boss appears.
- Harmful Healing: Richard's healing ironically does more harm than good when he is commanding the garrisons as it would mean that you will have more severely wounded troops filling the hospital and if you don't have any space left, will die immediately.
- Hero Unit: Much of the core part of the gameplay revolves around your commanders as they are the ones who lead the troops to battle. Leveling them is one the key component of Rise of Kingdoms gameplay.
- Infinity +1 Sword: Tier 5 troops are the last tier of troops unlocked where they surpass Tier 4 troops by a wide margin. However, to unlock them, you need all other buildings upgraded to level 25 (and each of them requires 1 Masters Blueprint which costs 2000 Gems each, which could increment up to 40,000 Gems) and all Technologies upgraded to their max level where each of them can take months to complete.
- Jack of All Stats: Unlike other civilizations, the Japanese are not specialized in just one type of unit; their bonus gives all units a 3% stat bonus in contrast to a 5% bonus to one unit type and while they have a samurai as a unique unit, their Epic commander Kusunoki Masahige specializes in archer-related buffs.
- Mercy Invincibility: The game gives out Peace Shields that allow players to be immune to Governor attacks and scouts unless they attack at which point the shield is removed. However, they can also reinforce defending forts and flags and since you're not attacking, it won't remove your shield.
- Money Grinding: Given how expensive upgrades become in later stages of the game (and in the endgame, healing your units), it's inevitable. The main way of accumulating them involves gathering them from resources points with your commanders.
- Piñata Enemy:
- The guardians that periodically appears at Holy Sitse gives out a good amount of experience to level your commander as well as dropping runes that could potentially help you. And since each player gets the full amount, they would often arrange a daily meeting where their commanders attack the guardians for some free experience.
- While pre-kvk marauders themselves give the standard Barbarian loots, the Scraps of Parchments they drop can be combined for a supply chest where they give insanely good rewards including 3-day speedups, 1.5M resource reserves and 500 gem reserves.
- Power-Up Letdown:
- Guan-Yu's Lone Rider expertise gives him a boost to his Active Skill damage if he gains a shield. However, since Guan-Yu can't give the shield himself, this boost will only take effect if he is paired with shield-generating commanders such as Charles Martel or Alexander. But said boost only lasts 3 seconds which if they're paired as the secondary commanders, there won't be enough time for Guan-Yu to regenerate his Rage to use his skill-boosted attack. True you can get the boost if Guan-Yu is the secondary commander but his skill deals damage if he is the secondary commander. Pretty much the only way he can get the boost is if he is equipped with a Scholas Lucky Coin to give himself a shield (at an unreliable 10% chance and only 2 seconds for every 5), if he gets a lesser shield from Alexander's skill (but only to the weakest ally for only 2 seconds) or from Leonidas's third skill (albeit at a 50% chance when Guan-Yu's troops fall below 50%).
- Deceptive Troops doubles the number of troops shown in the report when an enemy player scouts their city. However most players can still count the approximate number of troops by looking at their power and can easily determine said enemy to have used the boost in order to inflate their numbers.
- Samurai: As expected of the Japanese civilization, they have the Samurai as their unique unit.
- Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors: Infantry beats cavalry, archers beat infantry and cavalry beats archers. Siege units are weak against all other unit types, making them unsuitable for combat operations, but make up for it by having the best resource carrying capacity.
- Translation Convention: Zig-zagged. On one hand, some of the foreign leaders spoke their own language but on the other hand, Commanders whose language have been lost or obscure spoke English. This includes Hannibal Barca, Tomyris, Ramesess and Nebuchadnezzar.
- Very False Advertising: Many of the online commercials for this game tend to be demonstrably fake.
