Which one is a better game, what are the differences between the 2. OR is Call of Dragons just a Rise of kingdoms re-skin with better graphics? So lets talk about the similarities and the differences so you can choose which game you would like to play.
I played rise of kingdoms for about 3.5 years. I started back in kingdom 1028. Before there was KvK, before Ark of Osiris, back when you could get Richard and YSG from Gold Keys. I mean you couldn’t even migrate. It is a fantastic game and is now the benchmark for the kingdom builder genre.
Dependence on Strong Players
One of the things I found frustrating with RoK is the dependence on the strongest players in the game. When I started fresh in Kingdom 2054, I was the only player to have T5 unlocked before KvK1. There was a huge amount of pressure on me during war, I had to be online all the time. I would stay up for days on end rallying and garrisoning. The problem was as soon as I went offline our opponents would run over the top of us. Call of dragons is much more focused on open field. To destroy or defend territory you must take and control the field. This reduces the importance of any single player and makes it more about the team.
I know in RoK we could defend a flag quite easily by city hopping and just filling up the flags. You cannot do that in Call of Dragons. In this game you push the enemy back past the tower (which is the same flag) hold the line there, then bring in engineers or normal infantry to destroy the towers individually. You don’t rally the towers each individual legion destroys it, much the same way as you destroy holy sites at the end of KvK3 light and darkness. This takes a lot of pressure off a small group of players and brings everyone into the action.
Alliance Hopping
Alliance Hopping for war. In RoK you can change alliances as fast as you want to teleport your city to where the fighting is. In call of dragons once you leave an alliance and join another alliance, you cannot teleport to the new alliance territory for a certain number of hours. I am Hall level 21 right now and my relocation wait time is 8 hours. The higher your hall is the longer you must wait. I admit this mechanic does need refining a little as that’s a long time to wait but the reason I believe they have done this is to balance the warfare out and stop stronger players from teleporting around to every alliance and interfering in every battle that goes on in the kingdom.
Hospitals
In Call of Dragons hospitals do not have a limit; you can have as many troops go there as you need. What happens in Rise of Kingdoms is your hospital fills up then any severely wounded after that die. In Call of dragons, they just continually go to the hospital. When your city gets rallied you lose a flat rate of 10% of severely wounded. Which brings me to the next point it’s extremely hard to get zeroed in Call of dragons. If you are offline and you get attacked you will only lose a max of 10% of your troops, even if you get rallied over and over and over again.
The city of the defender won’t lose any more troops until they come online and collect their healed troops and then you would have to rally them again for a further 10%.
Of course, all their resources are still up for grabs besides what they have in their store house. Saying that the downside to attacking a city is as the attacker 50% of your troops in the rally or legion die. It looks like the downside to attacking a city really doesn’t make it worth it.
Also, Healing does not require speedups you have two options. Daily free healing or resource healing. Each day you have a limit to the number of troops you can heal. This is determined by three things. Firstly, the level of your hospitals, Secondly the policies that you enact. There are multiple policies aimed at increasing both free healing and resource healing. And thirdly by the total number of troops you have. On top of that you can also buy medical supply tokens in the merits store which instantly heal a specified number of units. You earn merits through PvP fighting.
Currently, I have 332000 troops and my total hospital healing per day is around 310000. Remember though my max legion size right now is 60,000 troops. When you have millions and millions of troops though because the legion size is only around a third of the size they are in Rise of kingdoms, I think this is a lot less of an issue than I originally thought it was going to be.
I understand why they have done this, because in Rise of Kingdoms big whales can pretty much just fight non-stop, while low spenders and f2p are always hitting a speedup limit or a resource limit or a hospital limit. I think this is being used to level the playing field between high and low spenders and f2p.
Heroes
In Call of dragons your Heroes’ levels reset at the start of each season. You get to keep their star ratings and skill levels, but their level and talent trees are set back to the start. That means you actually have to grind your heroes to make them strong. So this is rewarding those players that are the real grinders. The more time you put in, the stronger you will be. On top of that your heroes also have stamina so they can only attack a certain number of times before they need to regenerate.
The way this works for open field is, the first time you attack another player in the field your hero will lose 10 stamina. You can stay out and fight as many legions after that as you like, and you will not lose stamina. Once you return that hero to the city the process starts over. every time you start or join a rally you will also lose 10 stamina and if you are destroying enemy buildings stamina will gradually reduce over time. In the longer wars You do get stamina fatigue especially if you are joining a lot of rallies to attack cities. When rallying though I join with heroes I don’t use so I am not consuming stamina on my main heroes.
In Rise of Kingdoms you have like 80+ commanders to max out. They never reset. Your high spenders have most of these maxed out ready to go. So even if they did have stamina, large spenders would still have a massive advantage with the amount of commanders they had maxed at their disposal.
The system in Call of Dragons stops those players from being able to just non-stop attack whoever they want. They have to be more strategic so they are not wasting stamina attacking low level players, when they should be using it on other powerful players.
Fighting and Battles
Now on to the fighting. I find the open field battles more fun in Call of Dragons. Ranged units like magic troops and archers actually shoot from a distance. Flying Units actually fly over hills and rivers. Terrain is multi level, so you can fight from elevated positions, shooting down on melee units that have to march around to get to you, you build barricades to slow down the enemy at choke points all this adds a whole new dimension to field fighting. It’s more strategic and a lot more fun in my opinion. A lot of open field fighting in RoK was murder ball, then 5 march spam, back to murder ball rinse and repeat.
Saying that you only get to rally and garrison at the passes or cities in Call of Dragons. Being Garrison captain was my favorite thing to do in Rise of Kingdoms, and there is not much of that in this game. I do think they should allow you to have a limited number of towers that you can build into garrison towers to place at strategic positions like at a pass or choke point. I think this would be a good way to bring that mechanic in to this game without over doing it. Maybe a suggestion needs to be sent to the devs
Another reason I like Open field battles more in Call of Dragons is because when alliances are constructing their towers the builders around them are not safe from attack. In Rise of Kingdoms to stop a flag from building you must connect to it and rally it to destroy the garrison. In call of dragons, you still need to connect to the tower to destroy it but you can slow its build time down so much it gives you many hours to get to it just by killing all the legions that are building it. This will slow it down to take almost an entire day to build. The towers still build at a rate of 1 durability per second even when no engineers are there.
Behemoths
Behemoths add a whole new dimension to open field fighting. In Rise of Kingdoms, you have holy sites that you need to conquer which then gives you a buff. In Call of Dragons, they have been replaced with Behemoths. Once you defeat these you can summon them in battle. You can also train them up and make their skills stronger and make them harder to defeat. This is another mechanic I really enjoy in Call of Dragons.
You can also setup multiple garrison combinations on your wall. The higher the level of your wall the more combinations you can have in reserve up to a maximum of 5 hero combinations. If you are using your main garrison hero combo in the field you 1st reserve will defend the wall. If you are also using your 2nd hero combo, then the third will be used and so on a so forth. This is really just a quality-of-life upgrade over the single combination you have on Rise of Kingdoms
Similarities
The building and research systems are almost identical between the 2 games. Besides adding a new troop training building, for an advanced unit, Celestials, Eagles or Wyverns the rest is pretty much the same with new names. The troop training is also nearly identical except with siege units having its own building and queue. In Call of Dragons tier 1 cavalry are not cavalry they are transport units which are used to gather with.
I do like this especially for late game when you really don’t need gathering units anymore. Seems like a waste of time and resources a lot of the time on Rise of Kingdoms to train siege. As for the research system. Besides a few added technologies it is basically a reskin also. They have added a 2nd Research queue though which I do like especially when you are working on those 20, 30 or 50+ day technologies you can still work on other tech at the same time.
Gathering for resources in call of dragons are the same as in Rise of Kingdoms only that the resources are gold wood ore and mana as opposed to food, wood stone and gold. Darklings are the reskinned version of barbarians. There are three different types in Call of Dragons darkling patrols, Dark Creatures and Dark Guards. Darkling Patrols are for leveling heroes, dark creatures are for leveling artifacts. The Dark Guards are the equivalent to barb camps.
Conclusion
What you have to remember is that both these games are from the same developer and yes they are in competition with each other. Do I think this means Rise of Kingdoms will die? Well no both games have their pros and cons. Rise of Kingdoms is a historical gem, and when I first started playing I was looking up all the different commanders and what they were known for, some I already knew. That familiarity meant I felt comfortable with it right away. Lot’s of rallying and garrisoning to hold positions makes this game a lot of fun.
Call of Dragons is set in a fantasy world with humans, elves and orcs. Open field battles with multi level terrain and huge choke points adds to the strategy. As the game stands currently Call of Dragons is much more F2P friendly, they have tried very hard to make this a much fairer and balanced game. This game has so much potential and I am excited to see what they will bring to the table in the future. Personally, I will play Call of Dragons and I am hyped for Global release but for me, I have done everything I wanted to do in RoK. From a business standpoint I think that Legou Games developed Call of Dragons to compete with other titles such as Infinity kingdom rather than Rise of Kingdoms.