New Player Roadmap

The single biggest mistake new players make is spreading resources thin. Everything below is downstream of that one idea.

The short version¶

Finish the tutorial and push the goblin path until your outpost is fully unlocked.
Join an alliance the moment you can — ideally a top-five one. Most of the reward economy is alliance-gated.
Build your economy first: left-side production buildings, housing, food quality.
Level two squads, not four. Same faction per squad.
Do not train troops until your training camps produce tier 4 or 5.
Do every daily event, every day. Use all your stamina.
Hoard gems for the Lucky Wheel and Hero Pass. Hoard power for the Regal Medal event.
Shield overnight. Keep resources packed — only the Warehouse can be plundered.
Bind your account to Google or Facebook before anything else. See Accounts, Servers and Support.

Step 1 — Clear the goblin path¶

Your outpost does not start unlocked. Goblins and other enemies block sections of it, and you open new areas, buildings, and features by beating them. Treat "fully unlock the outpost" as your first real goal, not base camp level.

The path gets harder as you go. When enemy strength outruns yours, the fix is hero power: recruit, level, and star up. Follow the chapter and progress tasks alongside it — they hand out the resources that fund everything else.

Do not over-invest in your starting heroes. Penny and Rick are story heroes. They carry you through the early goblin path and are dead weight afterward. Level them exactly as far as the path requires and no further.

Step 2 — Join an alliance immediately¶

This is not optional and it is not a late-game concern. Alliance help cuts construction and research timers, alliance gifts are free resources, and a large share of the game's content — the Ultimate Alliance Duel, the Guardian Altar, Dragon's Treasure, rallies — is either alliance-gated or dramatically better with one.

Aim for a top-five alliance on your server. If it contains a few big spenders, better: their rally power and their gift levels benefit you directly.

Step 3 — Build the economy before the base camp¶

The instinct is to rush base camp level. Resist it. Each base camp level costs more than the last, and the resources to pay for it come from the production buildings you are neglecting while you rush.

The order that works:

Left-side buildings first. Production buildings are the cheapest and fastest to upgrade and they compound. Housing gives you workers; workplaces put those workers to use; levelling the workplaces raises the yield.

A short list of right-side exceptions. Upgrade these alongside your economy even though they are not economy buildings: troop training camps, hospital, research center, alliance center, rally hall, rally center, arsenal, and reserve barracks. These carry the PvP side of the game.

Everything else waits. The hero pub and the trader shop building do not matter in your first weeks. Later, level the neglected buildings up evenly rather than leaving one at level 11 and another at level 1.

Set kitchen food quality to luxury as soon as you can afford it. It feeds directly into resident satisfaction, which funds the Resolution Chamber — see Economy and Resolution Chamber.

Push the adventure stages as far as they will go. Stage rewards are only half the value; clearing further also raises your offline gold and food income permanently.

Step 4 — Two squads, same faction each¶

You will be handed a lot of heroes early. You will not use most of them. Pick a faction, build a squad of five around it, then build a second squad in a different faction. Do not build four.

You will never have enough gear to equip four squads to a competitive standard. Two strong queues plus two functional ones handles every piece of content in the game: the strong pair does rallies, PvP, and event bosses; the weak pair does detection missions and occupation duty.

Same-faction squads matter more than raw hero power. Three heroes of one faction grant +15% attack and defense; four grant +25%; five grant +35%, with matching bonus damage when you counter. Players regularly beat stronger, better-researched opponents purely on faction advantage. Details in Heroes, Factions and Queues.

Step 5 — Do not train troops yet¶

Push your training camps as high as they will go before you train anything meaningful. Train tier 1 through tier 3 troops early and you will spend the mid-game promoting them — around 12 hours per promotion batch, for tens of thousands of troops.

PvP barely exists in your first weeks. You do not need an army yet. Camps first, then troops, starting around tier 4 or 5.

Step 6 — Do everything daily¶

Free rewards compound and they are the entire free-to-play engine.

Use all your stamina every day. You get two free loads, plus one more from Bach once you unlock him.
Run every detection mission, and raise the detection radar level fast — it increases both mission quality and mission count.
Kill the highest crystal giant and armored turtle you can. First kills on a new tier pay a bonus that never repeats.
Push the detection boss as high as you can manage; it is a strong hero shard source.
Complete daily tasks. They pay resources and recruitment tickets, and they are the ticket source for several rotating events.
Check the trade shop daily and use the free refreshes. Speed-ups and golden hero shards there are heavily discounted.
When you have nothing left to do, send every marching queue out to gather. Never go offline with idle queues.

Step 7 — Hoard before you spend¶

Two things are worth banking rather than burning:

Gems. The Lucky Wheel and the Hero Pass are the routes to legendary hero shards without paying, and each Lucky Wheel spin costs 500 gems. A commonly quoted target is about 4,000 gems banked per Lucky Wheel. Never spend gems finishing a building, a research, or a troop batch — that is what speed-ups are for. Saving 30,000 gems for one Lucky Wheel is worth more than every impulse purchase you would otherwise make with them.

Power. A few weeks after a server opens, the Regal Medal event and others appear that reward you for increasing power and spending resources during the event window. If you have already burned everything, you cannot score. Build a foundation first and go all in when those events land.

Step 8 — Protect what you have¶

Keep resources packed. Resources sitting as unopened packs in your inventory cannot be stolen — only what is in the Warehouse can be plundered. Only unpack what you are about to spend. And remember that resource chests must actually be used to grant their contents.

Shield overnight. You get five free shields a week. Use them when you will be offline for a long stretch, especially on a young server where you do not yet know who you can trust.

Turn on push notifications. You want to know when you are attacked and when your queues come home.

Use your offline time. Before you log off for the night, check what is running. If troop training has one hour left and you will be away for ten, speed it up and start a fresh batch. Ten hours of production beats one hour of production and nine hours of nothing. Over a month this is an enormous difference.

Reality check¶

The community's honest read: the first weeks are hard without spending, and orange gear plus beast stars are where paying players visibly pull ahead. But the leading free-to-play player on the official server states that all S-tier heroes are obtainable free by banking gems for the Hero Pass and Lucky Wheel. One free account reached 30 million power in about two weeks using the approach above. Play for the progression and the alliance fights, not the leaderboard, and you will have a much better time. See Spending Guide before you consider a purchase.