Royal Revolt II complete strategy guide, also by very far the best on the Internet.

Authority. As it is sadly the case with pretty much all dumbphone games, there exists absolutely nothing out there discussing them in any terms befitting a human being.

There's an abundance of "overviews" published, which all to the last one consist of a paragraph or two worth of meaningless word salad (which the inset to the right commemorates) -- unactionable nonsense equally "applicable" (and factually applied) to any other of the ten trillion shit "games" pointlessly crowding the various "app stores". If you're the sort that readily reads MFAs without as much as realising it then get the fuck lost offa Trilema, you discredit to the human race you.

There's also some video content "discussing it", which reliably falls in one of two categories : either footage of game content, or footage of a disgusting dweeb, both set to the whiny voice of a disgusting dweeb unnaturally reading word salad directly equivalent to the "overviews" above.

Outside of these, there's absolutely nothing, not anywhere online. Human games, back before the dumbphone hordeⁱ, were reliably doubled by ample (player-provided!) documentation, discussing in detail all the numerics : how much experience per level, as a number, how much blunt damage per star per type of tower and so following. Sadly, all that is gone, this new generation of imbeciles utterly worthless in all respects.

Price. It costs about 200 dollars to play Royal Revolt 2, upfrontⁱⁱ. If you don't have that much / can't afford it / blabla bla -- get the fuck lost, poorfuck. You've got more urgent things to do besides playing video games.

That out of the way, the right move is to buy the 40`000 gems (20k + 20k one time bonus) for a hundred-something. This is a better gem-per-dollar return than the ~10 bucks monthly card (admittedly a rare situation in games) : you only get 56 or soⁱⁱⁱ gems per day for 30 days plus 200 upfront from the card, which eventually falls under 200 gems per dollar ; with the bulk purchase you get in excess of 300 gems per dollar, making it simply the best deal available.

Use those 40`000 gems as follows :

• Buy a few workers for gems ; how many exactly is entirely up to you, but I expect you don't want to spend in excess of 1`000 gems for one (the price increases with every buy).
• During the event buy all the rune generating slots at the blacksmith at the 30% discount, thus paying 7k for the 3rd slot and 16k gems for the 4th slot. This is by far the best thing you can do with gems in game, the abundance of runes falling out of those holes every day will by itself ensure you win the game, whatever that may mean to you.
• During the other event buy all the gear melting for pearls slots at the blacksmith. This is the 2nd best gem deployment available -- it does take some work to provide the items and the cash to melt them down ; but if you're playing cash is rather more like garbage : something you're forever looking for a place to dump it into.

That's it for the mandatory gem list ; you'll have a few thousand gems left over^iv to do as you will. Probably the best thing to do is wait for the inventory slot discount event and buy a bunch of those ; then use the remainder gems for buying food. Do not buy resurrects, they very much aren't worth it.^v

Now use the remainder of those two hundred dollars to buy the special offer packages in the shop that include workers, after you bought the package that gives you the 3rd spell (otherwise it's 600 gems, so easily worth the coupla bucks they're asking for it). That's it for the mandatory dollar spend, you should have a minimum of 8 to maybe a dozen or so workers now. The difference between the two is rather an academic point, if you're a true vidya maniac go for the dozen, if you're a respectable gent with a harem nine or so should amply suffice.

Construction. The base construction order is as follows :

1. Throne Room. Always upgrade the throne room first and foremost, as it controls the maximal levels of everything else as well as the value of blacksmith rune drops and such things.
2. Whatever impedes the upgrading of the throne room. Usually it's the Troop Academy, but it varies.
3. Silo. Allows higher level farms be built (and increases how much bread you store, but really, it's the farms).
4. Farms. They produce bread, you use bread to play, farms have to be the core of your kingdom. Pump them up as high as you can as soon as you can.^vi
5. Alliance Tower. Yes, it costs gems. Still an excellent choice because it's so important to be in a good alliance^vii.
6. Wizard Tower. Not only opens up new spells, but allows higher levels of upgrade for earlier ones.
7. Troop Academy. Same as the tower, it opens up new troop choices and raises the upgrade bar on your current set.
8. Blacksmith. The higher the level, the more pearls faster. Pearls are essential to success, because you can't deploy the 2nd rune in items without doing a whopping 75 upgrades, and other than a long ass time what 75 upgrades take is a whole lotta pearls.
9. Treasure chamber. Storing more gold means more people can be tempted to attack you and perhaps leave you some gems overnight.
10. Castle Guard / Castle Gate / Inventor's Workshop. These allow a more intensive obstacle course, which is always welcome, plus they're needed for various quests.
11. Actual traps and towers. These similarily increase the heat on would-be attackers, and occasionally (though more rarely) satisfy Royal Progress quests.
12. Taverns. If it wasn't for the quests, they wouldn't even be on the list. Really, don't bother with them unless you're well and truly out of useful work to do.

It may seem like the list is too rigid and you'll want to take your liberties with it at the onset ; but as you play you'll discover that's really not the case.

Obstacle course. There are some key principles to observe when setting up the visitor's welcoming committee :

1. Focus on Blockades and Barricades. The spike traps and jack in a box things are comparatively useless.
2. Pair towers of the same kind on either side of a barricade. If you have two poison towers and two ice towers, don't miscegenate them.^viii
3. Avoid triplets (those situations where three towers are placed adjacent around a bend in the road) as they are extremely vulnerable to Firestorm, elemental auras of the King's, the Sultan's normal attack area of effect, and all sorts of similar hazards. Heal towers in the very corner can be an exception, but the matter has to be well considered -- wouldn't those Heal Towers work better across a lane, where they can heal but can't be attacked ?
4. Always use Celestial Phoebe as your monster guardian, she's by far the strongest available currently. Join a guild that has a well developed one (level 4 is ideal, but you take what you can get).
5. Support your Phoebe by offering a Sultan bait at a reasonable position. Four Firebolt Towers work splendidly for this purpose, as most players will be tempted to jump on their cat and dump the gunpowder when they encounter the combination. Place it such that they hit the Phoebe in the next ten to twenty seconds and preferably at a bend in the road, so they're well and truly fucked.
6. When you select what to upgrade via the blacksmith, focus on specific advantages. Just as discussed at point 2 above, you desire concentration. It is better to put all the hp increases on one barricade, all the fire resistance on another barricade and all the blunt resistance on yet a third than to mix and match. Early in the game hp seems universally preferrable, but this isn't so. Build specialist obstacles in all three disciplines for the end game.
7. Firebolt Towers especially (and to a lesser degree Arrow, Bomb, Heal and Lightning Towers) are particularly well served by the range perks -- especially if you get them such that they can bombard an approach lane before they can actually be touched. Contrariwise, Basilisk towers particularly benefit from the rate of attack perk. Power perks are especially useful for Frost, Gargoyle and especially Snake towers (all of which merely seem weak, and entirely because you've not upgraded them sufficiently).

Hero gear & strategy.

• Do not open chests. This is by far the most important advice you could possibly follow : every chest opened yields items based on your hero's level, meaning that a Pro chest opened at level 12 is simply thrown away. Chests are shelf-stable for two weeks in most cases, meaning how about you find out how many levels you can climb before you have to open them because they're about to actually expire ? The same advice applies to items found in the shops etc.
• Farmer. Absolutely. You must have a helmet with Farmer native on it (and upgrade that shit!) plus a Farmer rune in it. It's perfectly ok to spend 50 gems^ix again and again until you get it. You should have the Reaper items, a belt, a ring, boots, whatever you can get. My Farmer's 45% and it ain't nearly enough! Think of it this way : every battle you fight with 50% Farmer instead of 0% Farmer you save two gems at level 75. Two gems! Each battle! There's really nothing better, except
• Luck. Definitely. I have 5.12% from perks and 7.76% from pro bonuses, which (somehow, heh) sums to 12.49%, which is utterly not enough. Luck directly increases your chances to get stuff in the Chest Chamber, which doesn't just mean more gold / gear to melt and the occasional pearls directly. There's vouchers in there, there's actual gems -- by the hundreds! -- and during Alliance wars there's skulls. Those skulls matter, it's a 10% or so which you either get or don't get -- 10% in extra skulls on gear is a lot more expensive anyways.
• Treasure Hunter is pretty cool too (it increases the chances of Hidden Treasure drops while you fight). Mine's at 10% (the maximum is apparently 150%), and I can say it's absolutely worth the slots.
• Extra damage is good (ideally your shoulder pads should have two damage perks on them), Speed Boost, Scream Attack Rate, Intimidate, Confusion etcetera are all nice ; so are the Life-on-hit, Criticals etc specialist skills. They can work wonders in well tuned particular strategies, but they're great to have by and large anyways.
• Resistances, Hit points, Leadership, all sort and manner of defensive perks are also good.
• Extra Gold is terrible, worse than no perk at all. Extra XP is slightly better, but really not by much. Part of the problem is that Farmer improves exponentially, so adding 10% Farmer to a pre-existing 85% Farmer reduces the cost of battles by 66% (meaning, you can fight three times as much) whereas XP perks improve logarithmically, adding 10% to 100% counts as a 5% improvement only. Therefore no gear with either gold or xp on it can be taken seriously.
• Unit gear (like say the Cursed Deathmask or Effigy Shawl etc) is a special case -- it can be excellent, but only if you're actually using that unit. Otherwise it's just so much ballast.
• Pro items are always to be preferred, because of their extra luck, extra everything else. But especially the luck. It may not be feasible to don a full set, but there's good news : you get a free slot, because
• You want Phoebe for a pet, and get her to at least level 7. No, Tammy is not "just as good" : compare Phoebe's 2`221 attack, 12`400 heal and +1 pro perk to Tammy's 1`481 attack, 6`780 heal, no perk. Not the same thing at all! Moreover, learn to love that healing spiral, it's the backbone of soloing Guardian Monsters.
• Broadly speaking you want the Sultan for a guardian. The donkey's okay for a green ; but it can't compete with the blue. Technically the G-5000 is even better ; but the Sultan is absurdly common so relatively easy to get to level 5 ; and a level 1 orange can't really compete with a level 5 blue. The alternatives are cute (especially that unicorn, holy god have you seen that thing ?) but not really practical -- they're not enough better than the alternative Sultan to justify their relative scarcity.
• You want the archers upgraded. They will be the backbone of your army for a long time^x, because just take a look at that inset to the right : 1`011 damage (at 3.55 range) and 2`047 hitpoints ? All for 2 morale bars ? How the hell are you going to beat that ?

  You're not ; having an ever growing pile of dozen after dozen after dozen of these guys provides the best possible support for your King : go, hit things, if you run into something too stiff fall back on the archer line, for a sudden 500% increase in DPS.

  Moreover, the presence of the archers allows the King to simply bypass the short range towers (ice, fire, poison) in order to focus on the barricades, guardians and long distance towers (especially the bomb ones!), secure in the knowledge that the archers will methodically wipe all that shit, and from a safe distance.

• Given all the foregoing, you mostly want to focus on high-gold targets, ignoring the cups and (mostly) medals. After all, keeping a dozen builders + a maxed blacksmith going at all times takes a lot of gold, you're looking at tens of millions a day. The good news is that targets yielding slightly under a million are reasonably available at level 75 ; but the trick is to ignore that "find next" button that's trying to scam you out of all your cash 2`000 gold at a time in exchange of an endless procession of deadbeats. Instead, go to the alliance list, click the magnifying glass, select 1500 or 2000 cups, and pick alliances from there : click the i button, then check their member list, then scroll down until you find people worth fighting with, and let them have it.
• If you're interested in making decent medals for your league, there's a trick to it : once you have Farmer perks in excess of 15% put a farmer token on (and an xp token too, while at it) and spend the next two hours getting almost-three stars in the dungeon (preferably, the army caves, they pay better). Battles there pay 300, 500, even 1`000 medals, depending on your level, and with the token (meaning, 80% from the token + 15% from your gear = 95%, maxed farmer) you only have to pay 20, 30, maybe 50 food at the most. Two hours (at three minutes a fight = 40 fights) should net you a good ten to twenty thousand medals, enough to boss most leagues (excepting, of course, diamond) and five million experience at a minimum (and just think of the 20k+ food you've thereby saved!). There's a reason I've 22 mn experience after two weeks playing, while everyone else my level's been "actively" playing for the past year or two.

Thus arranged, your first order of business is to satisfy the 220 million gold collection quest (there's also a 1 gold set of magic potions to get you started in the magic shop -- try to buy mostly the specials, they're discounted substantially ; but by and large your alliance wars will provide most of the potions you use), which should keep you busy for a few days, after which you're just about ready to join a guild -- go for something active in the top few hundred, that does well in wars and conquests.

I guess that'd be it. Have fun now!

1. Hey, remember DLH btw ? [↩]
2. It's worth it, too. Based on my own experience you're a cinch to get that many hundred hours' worth of ersteklasse entertainment out of it, and what's a buck an hour. [↩]
3. It's not a fixed rate, you get a gem chest every day, it's guaranteed to drop a fifty-something plus a few more 1-2s. [↩]
4. Really, delivering a pile of 220`000`000 gold pieces allows you to acquire 4`500 gems from the Granny NPC (there's a special collection) while all sorts and sundry other game mechanics provide gems -- including a rebate if another player attacks you and uses resurrections or gem scrolls ; I've made over a hundred gems this way so far. Besides which, the biweekly league provides a gem prize, there's gems you can get in exchange for alliance war rewards, they drop from all manner of chests you loot, for quests and otherwise, there's gems dropping in the Chamber of Loots (and they even drop as secret treasures, happened to me, 22 pieces). In a word there'll be plenty of gems in your life, don't worry about it.

   There's even a little house (immediately to the right of the silo) which can be clicked once a day to help some invisible gremlin's constipation. You get one gem once he's relieved. And since we're giving away secrets, in the Alliance citadel screen, in the birthday skin, there's a cake cut into slices slightly South and East. Click on it a few times and a nearby chicken will drop a pouch, worth seven pearls. You'll know if you got the right item in both cases because clicking animates them.

   PS. As fate would have it, while penning this strategy guide the game went offline (it does that after five or so minutes of inactivity to give people the chance to loot you, because you can't be attacked (or attack others) while online -- I suspect this is to allow peacible testing of defense outfits, but anyway) and when I logged back in I was met by the screen inset. 8 gems, yay me! [↩]

5. Here's some math : at level 75, a the first resurrect costs me 16 gems. My 640 food silo costs 32 gems to refill. My cost per battle is 64 food. So the choice is either one more shot at this one battle that's already going poorly, or else five free battles ? Gee.

   I get it, it's tempting. It's also a stupid idea, in a purely ROI sense. But, that said, if you're enjoying yourself who am I to tell you where to throw your pennies, it's not like a resurrect costs more than a pinball token back in '59. [↩]

6. One catch here is that they do not produce bread while upgrading. In my own practice all four of my farms have been under constant upgrading for at least ten days of the two weeks I've been playing, meaning my bread production's dismal.

   The solution's called vouchers, you get a coupla thousand of them for various quests early on -- do not waste them on anything besides buying food. Everything else is overpriced in vouchers, say a 50 gem pouch can be had for 150 vouchers, which is outright insane considering 11 vouchers buy the same food 10 gems do.

   Anyways, farms increase food production by 4 to 10 units per level, such that a level 13 farm produces 80 food (and can store 200, meaning two and a half hours' worth of production -- yet another reason you don't want to stop upgrading them until they're max level : why waste so much food overnight ?). For the curious, a level 8 makes 36 food/hour and stores 120, a level 12 makes 60/hour and stores 180, a level 14 is at 85/220 (no, the growth's not monotonous) and so following. [↩]

7. This is what a good alliance looks like :

   [↩]

8. The reason is that what you're trying to achieve is overwhelming the invader's defenses (which is often the King himself, as most players use him as a spearhead).

   Follow the logic : if all your towers do say 100 damage, then same-element pairs will overwhelm all kings whose hp + resistence combinations aren't up to snuff. All kings whose hp + ice resistance doesn't sum to 200 die at the ice pair ; all kings whose hp + fire resistance doesn't sum up to 200 die at the fire pair, and so following with poison lightning etc. Meanwhile if you mix and match, only kings whose average resistence on the two items you matched isn't up to snuff will get killed. Thus a guy with 80% fire 80% poison 20% cold defense will die in a properly paired set-up, but perhaps survive if the cold towers are spread out ; similarily a guy with low fire or lightning defense would be wiped by the respective strongholds, but perhaps survive if they're disparate. In the end, force concentration is the name of victory ever since war was invented, there's nothing to innovate here. [↩]

9. You can delete any perk for a flat fee of 50 gems ; next time you improve that item a perk is selected randomly to fill the slot. [↩]
10. I'm not saying you'll never be moving on from the archers. But you'll be surprised how versatile, dependable and just all-and-all useful their extreme cheapness makes them. [↩]