New Players Guide to Conqueror's Blade
Since Conqueror's Blade launched into beta, I have led House Tuatha (Now Gaiscioch) which focuses on helping new players learn the ropes before sending them off to the big war. There are several key things I've learned along the way that are imperative to your success and enjoyment as a warrior in Conqueror's Blade.
1. Built on Rock, Paper, Scissors Warfare
Conqueror's Blade is a massive rock-paper-scissors battle. A weapon will have strengths vs certain other weapons and it will have weaknesses to others. The key is to find the players wielding the weapon that you're strongest against while avoiding weapons that are designed to kill you.
The same is true for units. Every unit is strong vs their optimal enemy yet weak against their strongest opponent. For example, Winged Hussars are strong against most melee units but are weak to Rattan Rangers. Rattan Rangers are strong to most Cavalry but are weak to ranged units. Every unit has a strength and a weakness. This is one of the reasons I love this game.
2. Fief Quests are the Key to Honour Gains
Most houses in Conqueror's Blade are so focused on taking over everything that they miss out on one of the best aspects of the game. Gaiscioch has prided itself on having low taxes to make their fiefs available to all. This in turn has led to a relatively safe area for us to upgrade. By the time our fiefs hit rank 6, they are kicking out weekly 5-star Fief quests which yield 400 honour. People come from far and wide to complete them which helps our fiefs grow even more. If you do 20 5-Star Fief quests you'll be bringing in 8,000 - 12,000 honour per week off fief quests alone, making it one of the easiest methods to stockpile honour. Be sure to read our guide to building honour for additional reading on the topic.
3. How Fiefs Work
All fiefs have a prosperity rating. This prosperity determines what percentage of the payout goes to the owning house at the end of the week. It also will reduce the level of the Fief if it reaches 0. If the Fief does not generate the upkeep required by players completing Fief quests it will reduce by 10% every week. If the Fief changes hands it will be reduced by 30% every time a new owner claims it. By fulfilling the upkeep requirement it will go up 30%. If a Fief downgrades you will lose a big chunk of resources and have to build it back up. Protecting and upgrading your Fief is the way you generate the highest payouts for your members. It also allows your Fief to have better quests and more influence for your house leader to assign titles for.
4. Bronze and How to Earn It
This is one of the misconceptions this game has. I hear a lot of people talk about how they have no bronze. Many have quit the game altogether because of it without knowing my secret. I just bought the Monastic Knights along with a full set of kits using bronze alone and still find myself sitting on a 3 million bronze surplus. How? The key to building bronze is not letting your troops die. Battles like Expeditions, Rebels, Training Camps, and Free Battles all feature ways to minimize kit loss. Instead of having to farm supplies for new kits or spend all your bronze repairing soldiers, you'll be stockpiling it in droves. Siege, Field Battles, and sometimes Rebel Camps can be money drains because of the high probability of losing troops.
To avoid heavy setbacks rotate your troops at half dead. Don't let them drop below half and you will minimize the kit loss. If your unit is completely wiped you will have 2-4 kits to replace which will negate any profits you made.
5. Your Warband and How to Train Units
I recommend all newcomers focus on unlocking Incendiary Archers and Spear Sergeants. Then focus on leveling them to Max level. Once you have them max level you can use them to push exp to other units.
All units you bring into battle will split the unit exp you earn. The units you use in battle will split 82% and the units that don't enter the battle will split 18%. Units that are at max level do not take any Unit Exp so all exp is distributed to the other units. If the units you use in battle are at max level and the unit you never used in battle is the one you're trying to level, it will still only receive 18% of the exp.
Make sure to always bring the troop you’re leveling into battle. You can swap them out immediately when the match begins and they will still get full credit. This is exceptionally helpful when leveling tier 5 units. You can bring them in and swap them out before they take any damage preventing expensive kit losses.
6. Build a Serf Army for Better Gathering
I recommend everyone recruits, 5 serfs, as soon as they can. Always bring the lowest level serf into battle with you until all 5 reach level 7. Make sure to take the bottom path. You will use these 5 serfs to gather 4x the amount of resources you normally would in the open field. The Labor score and bonus to resource gathering are what make this unit optimal for gathering. You can learn more about building a gathering force in our Resource Gathering Units Guide.
7. Don't miss special events
Throughout various seasons the Great Wall map and the Rattan themed Into the Breach and Sea Raider's maps make their appearance. Each of these is a great source of bronze, unit XP, and honour. Make sure to do them daily if you can and you will see some pretty massive gains.
8. Repair Often & Recondition
I can not stress this enough. Every time you come out of battle, repair. The difference between current durability and total durability determines how much durability loss you will suffer on each repair. If you repair when the numbers are close to each other you risk losing durability less than you do if you wait till it warns you to repair.
When your weapon or armor gets low, recondition them. This gives you 2 outcomes that you can choose. 1 you keep the item you have with its durability restored or it has an RNG of becoming better or worse. Sometimes the weapon can even upgrade to a new color. If the stats are not great, take the version you had previously on the left. There is no risk involved. You either get what you have or walk away with something better.
9. Use Silver and the Trading Post
Not many realize this, but you can use the silver you earn from expeditions and selling things on the Trading Post to acquire your first set of Purple Gear, Skill Pages, and Keys for those secret vaults. I typically won't spend more than 10k silver on a skill page, or 3k silver on a vault key. Weapons and armor range from 20k to 70k depending on the piece. This is a great way for us who have terrible RNG to get things we need.
10. Foghladha's Patented Utility Build
Every new player I come across I recommend one simple build that helps them get their feet firmly planted.
- 45 Strength
- 35 Agility
- 30 Toughness
- 30 Armor
This is the setup I use that allows me to effectively play every weapon without respecing. New players often come into the game with the idea that one weapon is for them, only to learn that they enjoy another.
I started with a longbow, went to dual blades, spear, short sword, longsword before I finally gave poleaxe a try. The Poleaxe, by far, is my favorite but I would have never expected that out of the gate. I recommend everyone learn longsword for its fundraising potential. Being able to heal your troops in the field makes life so much easier in expeditions and training battles.
The key is that you provide yourself the option of trying more than one weapon. Being the game is rock-paper-scissors based you might want to change your weapon if you have to defeat your weapon’s nemesis. You can do this during battle by visiting the heal station. Be warned you can only swap to weapons acceptable by your armor class. No heavy armored dual blades here.
11. How to Gather Gold Dust, Powdered Silver, and Other Hero Crafting Materials
This is one question I am asked daily and it is easily solved with a quick trip to your Horse Seller. Simply purchase green saddles for 500 bronze and salvage them at the Smith to have a 20% chance to get some Powdered Silver. Purchase the blue saddles for 2000 bronze to get a 20% chance to receive some Gold Dust. In addition, you will receive several other materials every time you salvage.
You can also earn Powdered Silver and Gold Dust from the seasonal store though I suggest using the above as your primary source of those materials.
12. Equip Every Weapon and Armor Before You Salvage It
This is a trick I didn't learn until I was around level 450. The stencils are not automatically saved in your "Wardrobe" like they are in other games when you salvage. To add them to the available stencils found at the Artisan, you will need to equip the item first. This adds it to your collection and can later be applied to any matching piece of armor or weapon. This allows you to customize your style any way you like.
13. Avoid High Taxes, Use Requisition Tokens
This is the biggest annoyance and oversight most houses place on users. They stick their taxes at 200%+ and expect people to come farm their supplies because they need to. They sit back and wait for the profits to pour in. Yet houses like ours charge a 20% tax and find our coffers fuller than theirs. Why is this? Because Requisition Tokens allow you to avoid the Taxes and deny the fief of any capital gains. They get nothing and you get to mine the node at a low cost. So these houses that are price gouging think they are winning the economic game but really they're crippling their own gains with high taxes.
Nobody is dumb enough to spend 3,000 bronze on one hit of a Rough Cotton Field node that costs 500 bronze and 1 requisition token. They simply avoid the taxes, farm the supplies and the fief gets squat. You can even use requisition tokens to farm nodes that have collection prohibited.
Earn requisition tokens by doing your 1, 3, and 5 battles daily. These can even be done in Training Yard (AI) battles that have a fast completion and pretty good gains for bronze, honour, and skill points while keeping troop loss to a minimum.
14. Use Auxiliary Units
You can access Auxiliary Units by pressing U, then click Mercenaries, the click Auxiliaries. These units are available to you at level 30, cost you nothing, and allow you to try before you buy. All unit experience you earn applies to the first unit of this type you recruit. It is a great way for trying out the units you'd like to work towards and build them up before you actually own them.
15. What to do with these strange Exotics?
This is something I didn't learn until after I crossed the level 550 mark. I never even thought to look. If you go to your home city, open your inventory (I), click the Supplies tab (3rd icon on the left), click Supply Dump, and then on the drop-down on the left side select "Exotics". Many of these supplies will be used for siege and kit crafting later in the game, however, there are Epic (Purple) Exotics that when moused over you will see a "Selling Price". These items are not used in any recipe.
There are a few things you can do with these.
- Donate them to the Quartermaster (1,000 Points)
The primary thing most people are using these for is donating them to the Quartermaster to earn Fame quickly. These give 1,000 points of donation credit which can be quite a significant boost to someone's weekly fame growth. - List them on the Trading Post (10,000 Silver)
Since the addition of the Quartermasters, players have been using these to speed their seasonal donation credit to the max. These typically will sell mid to late season for the maximum price (10,000 Silver). - Sell them to the Apothecary (1,000 Silver)
They can be sold by placing them in your wagon and traveling over to your local Apothecary for 1,000 Silver each. By the time I reached level 550 I was sitting on quite a few of them which turned into a nice little nest egg of silver. If you're just starting out and desperately need silver, this is a great way to get some fast.
16. Expand Your Storage with Silver
Purchased at:
- Smuggler for 200,000 Silver
- Item Market under Items, Rewards typically less than 200,000 Silver
Logistics Charter - This item improves your storage efficiencies at your Supply Dump increasing its storage volume by 500,000 and may increase your Supply Dump Capacity up to 8,000,000 in total.
Purchased at:
- Smuggler for 150,000 Silver
- Item Market under Items, Rewards typically less than 150,000 Silver
These two features you'll want to work toward expanding to their maximum capacity as you earn excess silver.
17. Use Silver to Buy Keys on Item Market
I didn't realize that keys were such a cheap commodity on the trading post until late in the game. Typically the only way to get keys is by completing weekly challenges while being a Premium Account or by getting very lucky collecting Derelict Huts outdoors. There's an easy and rewarding way to get these. Simply pop open your Trading Post window and navigate to the Item Market then Rewards. You will find key prices between 1,000 and 3,000 per key. Every Secret Vault you open will contain between 2,000 and 4,000 silver and I tend to find spending less than 3,000 per key will yield you a silver gain. You will have quite the return on investment here and I highly recommend buying your keys from the Trading Post as a way to earn silver fast.
18. Identify People by their Chat
Ever wonder who someone is. There is no easy /who command in Conqueror's Blade but there is one little function most people only find by accident. If you hold shift and click on a person's name in the chat window it will print their name, level, house, and alliance. This is a great way to identify people via chat messages.
19. Understanding Scoring
This is by far one of the most common frustrations I see. After a match, you might have killed 10 people and a hundred troops but you did not get MVP. This typically sends people into a flurry wondering why oh why did they not perform well enough to warrant the coveted MVP role. This is because the equation that decides this does not just take Hero Kills, Unit Kills, and Participation into its scoring. It also includes the number of times you died, the amount of damage you absorbed, the amount of damage your units absorbed, and the amount of damage you and your units put out. While you might be good at sniping heroes to steal the glory and earn the medals the total war score is based on how much damage you put out to your foes as well as how much time you spent both fighting on and clearing the objective. For those that want to dive into these numbers, you can click on a name in the post-battle recap to view detailed statistics. You can then compare your stats with theirs and see why they earned that MVP award.
Closing Notes
If you ever have any questions about Conqueror's Blade be sure to swing by the Official Discord or if you'd like a little one-on-one coaching, come find me over in the Gaiscioch Discord and I'll be happy to give you some pointers. This game doesn't have the best tutorial, but it makes up for it in the community. There are a lot of really great content creators out there and communities available to help you learn the ropes. Trust me, the game seems scary and a bit intimidating at first, but once you figure out the ins and outs it all goes a lot smoother.
About the Author
Foghladha
Managing Editor
Foghladha founded the Gaiscioch Social Gaming Community in 2001 and has since been the founder & activities director for this well known community. His role has gone beyond just running the Gaming Community and now includes running the Athletics Program in Portland, Oregon, as well as acting as the Managing Editor of the Gaiscioch Magazine, and is the Lead Producer on the Gaiscioch Livestream Productions. Additionally he networks with game developers to form relationships between Gaiscioch and development studios.
His experience in publishing dates back to helping his Grandparents who operated a printing press for over 40 years. In high school and college Benjamin excelled in journalism and played an active part in the school newspaper. Foghladha currently works full time as the director of technology for a franchise trade publication & education company.
About Conqueror's Blade
Command your armies to secure dominion over a vast open world in Conqueror’s Blade, an all-new, free-to-play tactical action MMO. Use devastating siege weapons to attack enemy castles in large-scale PvP battles, send forth your units to secure land and power, and forge or forsake alliances with rival warlords as you attempt to become history's greatest conqueror!