Introduction

Lords Mobile is a MMO strategy game with a medieval setting. The main focus is on building troops together with your guild, battle other guilds and ultimately become the overlord of your kingdom. There is a lot of focus on growing your own city with a very elaborate set of buildings with each their own function.

Tutorial

A new game starts with a tutorial. For first game players it is good to walk through this slowly as the game can get complicated because of its many different features. The tutorial does a good job of explaining the absolute basics.

Guilds

An important step is to find a suitable Guild. Via the Guild menu (first button on the menu bar at the bottom of the screen, next to the map) you can apply to join a guild or join one of the guilds that are currently open. The open guilds might not be the best and it might be good to shop around a bit. You can just look on the State Map, but it might be better to look at the leaderboard to get an idea what the large guilds are. Most guilds have stated their rules and entry requirements on their guild profile, which you can access by selecting a base and clicking the Guild button at the right top. Find one that you feel comfortable with. If you are in the game for the long run it is important you find some likeminded people in your guild. Give a guild a serious chance, but if you don't like it, do switch to another one.

Novice Relocator

When you start the game you get two Novice Relocators that you can use as long as your Castle has not exceeded level 5. If you have found a guild to your liking before you upgrade your castle to level 6, ask where most are located and relocate to the hive. It is appreciated and doing it after the upgrade requires a regular Relocator, which is costly.

Heroes

Lords Mobile comes with an elaborate Heroes feature. Via the Golden Statue in the middle of the turf you can access a separate game. This game is quite complicated in itself, and I plan to write a separate guide on it shortly, but for now I will just explain the very basics here, which allow you to unlock heroes and upgrade them.

You have Stamina that is required to play the Hero game and that slowly recharges. It is displayed to the right of the Leader Avatar at the top left of your Turf view, the one with the hearts.

By clicking on the Gold Statue in your Turf you enter the hero game. Initially you start in Chapter 1, here you can unlock a total of 5 heroes, next to the one you start with. This is enough for beginners. A chapter is divided into various stages. You can play a stage by clicking on the corresponding icon along the path. Once you select a stage you can select a hero team (for now just make sure you select as many heroes as you can, limited by either the amount of heroes you have unlocked or the slots available in your team). Playing a stage is relatively simple. Your heroes mostly operate themselves, but you can select when a Hero Skill is used (can be done when the yellow bar below a hero is fully recharged). Each hero has its own specific skill, for beginners it is important to know that the Prima Donna hero's skill recharges the health of each hero. It is important during the game to pay attention that no hero dies, I will explain the importance of that below.

Initially you can only play the first stage of chapter 1, and as you proceed new stages open up. You might be tempted to always play new stages, but it is possible and very beneficial to replay stages as well. Once you have completed a stage with all of your heroes alive, it will be shown in the overview with three crowns above it, and this allows you to Sweep through it. When you select the stage again, there are options to Sweep 1 or 10 (can be less if you have less Stamina) times. This plays them automatically and still gets you the experience and prizes from the stage. It is very fast and a good way to level up your heroes in a short time. If you do not have enough time to focus on winning new levels, it is important you use up all your stamina with Sweeps to still level up your heroes.

After you have played the hero game and you are back in your Turf overview you can access the Heroes via the Hero menu (the helmet in the bottom menu bar). I will explain details in another guide, for now just click whenever you see an exclamation mark. At the bottom is a button via which you can add the experience you got with your Sweeps to selected heroes.

Unlocking Regions

Initially only a very small part of your Turf is unlocked and you need to unlock other regions to be able to build more, and more type of, buildings. You can do this by clicking on the regions that are not yet accessible. There is a certain order, and you will automatically be pointed to the right area to unlock next when you click on any locked area. The battle is automatic and you just need to make sure you are strong enough to unlock the next level. The game will warn you if you are not strong enough yet for a battle. Typically you will need to fight a couple of times before you have killed all enemy troops to unlock an area. Important ways to become stronger for these skirmishes is by training more troops and by unlocking and leveling up your heroes.

Academy

One of the buildings in your turf, inside the castle walls, is your academy. Here you can do research and by researching you can improve all kind of facets of your game play. Basically you should try to make sure you always have some research project active and you should make your research speed as fast as possible, but I have found gold will typically become a limiting factor, you need quite a lot of it for researching. Unless you are planning to go to war right away, it might be good to focus on the first research tree first, Economy. Here are a number of projects that allow you to increase the production of resources and speed up gathering resources via increasing your gathering rate, troop load and construction speed.

Barracks

The barracks are the building you can use to training troops. Troops are important for combat (attack and defense), but it is also important you have sufficient troop to gather resources. Also best to always train some troops. If you are not planning to go to war soon just training tier 1 troops is fine. They are trained fast, cost little resources and are good for gathering resources. You need to research in the Academy to unlock higher tier troops.

Upgrading Buildings

The game suggests some order of building and upgrading buildings, you don't need to pay attention to that. For some of the buildings (the ones outside the wall and the barracks, infirmary and manor) you can build multiple. There will be another article on considerations on how many to build of which. Unless you are an experienced player and follow a specific strategy of your own, for beginning players it is best not to focus on getting your castle to an as high as possible level as soon as possible, but focus on upgrading the other buildings, including the ones you have many off, and research projects as well. It is also recommended to always have an active building upgrade, unless you have everything upgraded to a certain level and consciously don't want to increase the castle further yet.

Castle Wall

Traps in the Wall will give defense against attacks. On the long run it might not be worthwhile to put a lot of effort on wall traps, because if you have comparatively very large amounts of troops the wall traps will add little value. However it early stages it might make quite a difference. The idea is if you have 20000 wall traps and 10000 troops when your turf is attacked one third of the incoming troops will fight with your troops, two third with your traps (based on the ratio of wall traps and troops you have). If you are hit by a much stronger player or even rallied, traps are easily completely destroyed, so don't feel like you have to place the wall full with the highest available tier traps.

Aiding Guild Members with Research and Construction

Often during the game at the right bottom corner of your turf view you will see an Aid icon (shaking hands). Selecting this allows you to click Help All which helps active research projects and constructions of your guild members. This will deduct for each the maximum of 1 minute and 1 percent of the remaining time. The amount of Helps you can receive depends on your castle level (castle level + 5) and upgrades and especially research projects are going to take a lot of time later in the game. Giving and receiving fast Aids will be an important part in growing fast as a player and as an guild.

Using Gems and Speed Ups

During the game there are various ways to get gems and speed ups. Once your times start to be more than just a few minutes you might get tempted to use these to speed up research, construction and troop training. Our general advice is don't just use these, only use them if you can get something back by winning prizes in the active Events. Saving up some gems and speed ups is important so that it will be easier to win the prizes of those Events.

Might

Although the might of a player has no direct meaning for your strength in combat, it is often used by players as a quick measurement of strength anyway. Typically guilds will set certain might requirements for their players which increase over time. As such it is important you get your might up as well. There are seven basic categories of might, research, building, troop, traps, player level, heroes armies and quests. It is an extra reason to always have active research projects, building upgrades and troop training. Your player level might increases by leveling up, and one of the easy ways to receive the necessary experience points for that in the beginning is completing quests. The turf quests give you some might as well. We will write a separate article about beginners's tips to increase might. You see your might at the left top of your screen, and you can see a breakdown by clicking on the Avatar, followed by clicking on the button with the bar chart, and scrolling down a bit.

Leader Talent Points

After each level up you can assign leader talent points. The Talent tree can be accessed by first clicking on your Avatar in the left top of your Turf view, followed by the shield button a the left. In the Talents tree there are two sides. The left side is focused on combat, improving e.g. the strength of your troops and training speed, the right side gives economic boosts, improving e.g. construction and research speed and increasing the resource production. Unless you plan to go to war right away, it is best first to focus on the right side. Spend your Talent points to max out Research and Construction I and II, only spend minimal points in the tree to unlock these. Experienced players typically reset the points (there are items for this available in the Gem Mall and Guild Shop) to focus on combat before they go to battle.

Monsters

On the Kingdom map you see monsters of levels 1 to 5. In the Monster Hunt research tree you need to unlock the corresponding level. Hitting monsters will give you some goodies and will give your heroes experience. Killing a monster will result in a gift for all guild members. It is worthwhile to at least research the project to unlock hitting level 1 monsters. Each time your energy is full (in the kingdom map view next to your leader avatar) is close to max, consider sending a hero team out to do a maximum hits on a nearby monster. If possible work together with guild members so that you don't only get the goodies from the hits, but also give a gift to your guild by killing the monster.

Guild Gifts

At the right top of the Guild menu there is a gift icon. If there is a red square with a number on it, there are new unopened gifts. If this is the case always go there and open the gifts. Your guild receives gifts when a guild member kills a monster, when a guild member buys a pack, or when your guild has won one of the stages in an Guild Events.

Materials and Gear

Materials are used for forging equipment for your leader. Equipment can give your leader all kind of different boosts and further on in the game you will likely have different sets of equipment for different activities and your leader will wear equipment based on what you are doing, e.g. research, construction, troop training, attacking. As a beginner it might be best to not forge anything at the start as it is easy to make mistakes and waste your valuable materials on useless equipment.

Events

Once your Castle reaches level 5 you can participate in Events. The Events are accessible via the Event icon (with alternativing Solo and Hell in it and a timer), to the right of your avatar and gem and stamina. You can win prizes by completing various stages of Events. Initially the Solo and Hell Events will be most interesting. Typically with a combination of Research, Building and Training you can score points and once you meet certain point levels you can win prizes. Make sure you pay attention to the active events and consider using speed ups or gems to complete research projects, buildings and troop trainings, especially if you can win more than you spend.

Admin, Guild, and VIP Quests

Each 6 hours you get a number of Admin and Guild Quests (if you are part of a guild). The number depends on your VIP level. While online you should start and collect as many as possible. If you feel you can't do all, pick the important ones based on material drop (you can select a quest before starting to see what you get, materials are shown at the top in the left Quest Rewards pane) or based on level (there are five levels, same is used for the grades of materials and equipment, white, green, blue, purple and yellow), better gives more XP and resources.

Depending on your VIP level you daily get a number of VIP chests that you can open. Once you open a VIP chest there is a cooldown timer before you can open the next one.

Shelter

There is an option to protect your troops for 1, 4, 8, or 12 hours in the Shelter building next to your Castle. In case your kingdom is aggressive and you are hit frequently, you might consider storing your troops in the Shelter when you are offline. It means you leave your Turf vulnerable for attacks, it is easy for attackers to take your resources, but at least your troops will be safe.

Check List of What to Do When You Log In

Most of the things in this section we already mentioned, but it might be good to have a reminder of what you should look at as a minimum when you log into the game:

• Click on the Shaking Hands item and Help All to aid all guild members with research and construction
• Collect the gift chest at the right corner of your turf view if the timer has run out
• Collect and Start Admin and Guild quests, open VIP chests
• Hit a Monster if you have enough energy
• Sweep through an earlier completed Hero Stages to get Hero XP
• Look at the Events, see whether you can win gems and speed ups by completing your current research, building and/or troop training
• Start a research if none is active
• Start a building upgrade if none is active
• Start a troop training if none is active
• Send out your troops to collect resources
• Open all gifts
• Read your e-mails

If you have more time consider:

• Opening any unopened chest in the Bag – Chests section
• Use Hero XP items in the Bag – Unique section to level up Heroes
• Play a new Hero Stage
• Unlock an area if you have not unlocked all yet

Compared to Game of War and Mobile Strike

If you have played Game of War or Mobile Strike before you will find this game quite familiar. It's not as similar to these titles as they are to each other (they are basically the same game with just different names for things), but still a lot of elements are the same.

The available buildings are the same (although named differently), the initial 4 research categories are the same, although not all research projects are the same. The setup of troops is the same, including the difficulty of unlocking tier 4 troops. The concept of quests is identicial. A lot of the available items are the same.

One major difference is the concept of multiple heroes, including the separate game to level up your heroes, and the feature to unlock areas of your turf.