Dark Ages 2 (also known as Dark Ages 2: Before the Empire) is Simpy’s sequel to the surprisingly popular strategy game for the iOS platform, Dark Ages. Gameplay-wise, the game doesn’t stray too far from its Kingdoms of Camelot-based influences. Your goal is to build up your kingdom, train troops, and attack and dominate other player and their kingdoms. Read on for some tips and tricks for Dark Ages 2!
There is a lot to do in this game, especially early on, so make sure you use the “free speed up” option whenever possible. Anything that takes less than six minutes to accomplish, whether it’s a new building, an upgraded building, or research in the magic lab – anything except for training troops – can be sped up for free. Use this to expedite the building of your kingdom, especially while you have the beginners protection bubble.
As far as training troops goes, your most common barrier to building them is lack of population, so make sure that your population high by building and upgrading more houses. Each time that you upgrade one of your military camps you unlock a new type of troop. There are four types of troops, and three tiers of each of the four types.
The four types are looters (goblins), artillery (archers etc), ground (warriors on foot) and horse (cavalry etc). Horse is strong against artillery, ground is strong against horse, and artillery is strong against ground. Scout out other players beforehand to see what kind of a troop mix they have. Always send lots of goblin/looter troops, so that you can steal resources easily.
You won’t find them so much early on, but always be on the lookout for other players who have abandoned their cities. You will know who they are because they will be on the map, never leveling up and not training any new troops but always producing resources (use scouting to verify this). They will be an extremely easy source of resources, so raid them as often as possible in order to get rich and provide for your own city.
Take over as many wilds as you can in order to boost your own city’s overall production rates of whatever resources you are running out of the fastest. If you want to build a second city, take over an empty plain. Second cities will allow you to boost literally everything, due to having double the overall potential number of buildings.
Free gems can be had surprisingly often. The mystery chest refills itself every six minutes, so check it as often as possible for the highest amount of free stuff possible. Most of the time it will be one of the five resources (gold, stone, iron, food or wood) but sometimes it will be gems.