Mid-game-guide and what to focus on

This guide is based on the author's personal experience and is only relevant to the current game’s content.

Some of the guides I've linked might not be up to date.

This guide provides you with directions for mid-game gameplay when you are unsure of what you could do next.

At this point, I imagine you have already unlocked T4s and are not sure what to focus on next. Within the next chapters, I’ll explain the milestones you will need to achieve and what to do in general.

If you are still unsure what your game style is, here you can find a useful guide that describes the most common type of players.

While the first 4 types are freestyle players and can just follow their guidelines, Strategists, Champions and Fighters will follow more precise guidelines and will look for ways to get the most benefits the game can offer.

It is important to know beforehand what your game style is so you don’t waste time and resources on features that won’t help you in your end-game.

Patience

Consider your in-game development as a long-term journey and play patiently while looking to use every element in the game to its fullest potential.

Develop your masterplan

Most players won’t have the budget to buy everything instantly so some regular payments are okay. Just consider the time you play the game and compare it with other hobbies like cinema or whatever you might want to do. Whatever you might want to spend is ok and even if it’s zero, you can still have lots of fun. Just remember that there will always be someone with deeper pockets and a higher cc limit. 

Big picture

If you want to grow your account properly and not take ages, my advice is to join an Alliance that is active in the main events and has a decent minimum requirement of daily Rebel Leaders count. That way you will get the 3 most important resources you need at this point:

• Speed Ups 
• Gold
• Diamonds

If you focused on getting T4s fast and neglected the other researches, now would be a good moment to finish your Expedition & Pacification research tree and aim to be able to kill a Rebel Leader level 3 in 1 hit or a level 4 in 2 hits. When you get to this point, you will feel how much easier you get the resources I previously mentioned.

Here is the link to a guide with a summary of the main events

Here you can find an Advanced guide on Rebel Leaders:

Daily Duties

Besides your Alliance requirements, you will need to complete certain daily duties. Even if they can seem insignificant things to do, they  will help you in the long run:

• Trade with the merchant ship.
• Send out your troops gathering as often as you can.
• Claim all Active Rewards, try to optimize your recharges by either recharging daily small amounts or whenever the wheel has useful options or both.
• Claim your VIP, your Monthly Card, and your Nobility.
• Attack Rebel Groups twice daily. Ideally use the ones near your limit, higher levels offer better rewards.
• Spend your Stamina at least twice per day: focus on the useful Commanders.
• Do Expeditions versus Rebel Leaders and share damaged leaders in the alliance chat so others can finish them if you weren’t able to.
• Attend Training Grounds and spend your attempts wisely. Aim for a higher rank so you get a major amount of diamonds.
• Claim your Tavern rewards (3 times/day). I recommend stacking the speed-ups you receive and using them only if necessary. 
• Join rallies on Rebel Camps and trade the spoils in the Merchant Guild. 
• Buy the items you have previously set up in your shop. At this point, you should have speed-ups, Stamina, Motivation, and Lord Exp bonus. You will gradually add books, banners, Elite and Epic tokens, etc. 
• Hit the Alliance and Elite Bosses
• Send your dragon on Exploration. Except for the times when there are events that require a certain amount of dragon explorations, you should send it for 12h.
• Use your free dragon skill raffles daily

Under the City Affair icon, you can find a faster way to finish most of the daily duties

Research Speed

I’m guessing you already worked on your research speed for finishing the Army Upgrades necessary for unlocking T4s and I'm sure you thought those researches were long but guess what? there are even longer researches you will need to work on. 

Here are some steps you should take to increase your research speed whenever you need to start a long research plus the ones you should have accomplished at this point:

• Commanders: Soren, Varys, Margaery, Raymond, Sabrina, and Tyrion grant it. Both Soren and Varys are free and give 25% each on golden quality.
• Equipment: Eye of R’hllor (Champion set - resource nodes) has 20% on golden quality, Kraken Pendant and Seven-pointed Star Pendant (both Rebel’s End set - Rebel Groups)  have 7.28% each on blue quality. A full-blue quality Maester’s Set (Old Town Students) grants 17.47%. 
• Nobility: until you hit Lord Commander III you will get a gradual increase to a max of 25%
• Talent tree: make sure you have both maxed
• Refinement: my advice is to keep and upgrade research slots until you are done with most of the long researches. You get a 25% bonus for each gold slot.
• Research buffs and scrolls: the Grand Maester title from King’s Landing (15%), the Scholar Fair also from King’s Landing (10%), and Crone’s Blessing scroll that drops as a reward (10 or 20%)
• Buildings bonuses: Maester’s Tower normal grade (30%),  Maester’s Tower glory level (12% for level 10), and different castle skins like Crimson Fort which you’ll need to be using as the bonus is an active one (10%)
• Album Collection
• Honor Token gives you an additional 20%. 

Before you start researches that take very long, make sure to check your research speed under the Details - Economy bonus and that you are not missing anything.

Researches

Several research trees are not necessary, either because they don’t help you in battle or because they are meant for end-game players, the latter being the most expensive.

• The City Defense and Advanced Defense trees boost your fortifications, but at the moment they’re not effective. Your defense is based mainly on your troops, commanders, and your dragons.
• The Iron Defense and Great City Military are meant for later and only for the players that will tank rallies or contest Great Cities.
• The Strangely-Garbed Army is the research for getting T5s and it’s the end-game research at this moment.

The researches you should be focusing on at this point are the ones that will either boost your battle stats or unlock features that will help you upgrade certain bonuses. My advice is to focus on one research tree at a time and follow this order:

• Formations: up until you unlock New Procedures III. When you get to this point you have added a training speed bonus of 16%, an additional 10k Iron Bank investment, the battle formations, a 10% battle bonus on your total attack, health, defense, and an additional regiment deployment. Perception, Disrupt Logistics, and Break Morale are expensive researches for reducing the enemy’s battle bonuses and can be left for later.

• Refinement: this is a fairly easy-to-finish research tree and I recommend doing as much as you can up until the most expensive one, the Badge Master will unlock the 4th badge slot. Working on your refinement will increase your stats that either assist you in battle or help you grow your account.

If you are unsure how the Refinement feature works, here you can find more information about it.

This is a complete list of the bonuses you can get depending on their upgrade level:

• Advanced Military: this research tree is, as its name says, the tree that gives you additional military perks and will help you train T4s at a reduced cost. When you finish it you will have a T4s cost reduction of 30% in addition to a healing speed bonus of 80%, 24% training speed, and 2 more deployments. Before you start building your army of T4s you better finish this research tree.

• Commandership: the most important bonus this research tree gives when finished is the 10% on your total attack, health, and defense but only when in fervor. My advice is to finish first Perception, Disrupt Logistics, and Break Morale from Formations and the Badge Master from Refinement then start this tree.

*Tip: finish the researches that require a great number of speed-ups during events like Lord of Lords on the increase power phases. They give a great amount of power and will help you get a better rank, therefore better rewards. 

Commanders

There are currently 56 Commanders in GoTWiC at the moment and they will be the ones that will help you in battle, defeat Rebel Leaders, get better ranking in events like Training Grounds for example or successfully finish events like Weirwood Memories.

Here you can find an overview of all Commanders

Do you remember the need to know what type of player you are and set your game style beforehand? The Commanders you choose to upgrade play a big role in your long-term development. That means you don’t need to have all the Commanders or just buy them without knowing if they will help. 

Except for the ones I mentioned for their Research speed bonus, this is the point when you should decide on the battle formation you are going to use and upgrade the Commanders needed for that formation. Keep in mind that not all your battle formation Commanders will help you defeat Rebel Leaders so you’ll need to focus on those as well.

If you are not sure how Commanders work, you can check out this guide.

A commander I recommend for low spenders is Seg. While the other commanders have more than one source for getting the 330 medals needed to upgrade them to gold, Seg has currently only one source, The Amethyst Shop under the Benefits tab. You can either spend 1 black diamond and buy 1 medal daily or spend 10 black diamonds and get 3. Also, another advantage Seg has is that he requires Elite tokens for his Awakening which are easier to get.

After deciding your battle formation, you have two options: working toward a normal setup or a synergy, the latter being the stronger one.

• Normal setup: it’s the setup used by players that don’t spend or spend very little and, while it’s not as powerful as a synergy setup, you can still do a good amount of damage. You can start by upgrading the Commanders that will boost your attack, health, and defense for your first line. Two of the fairly easy-to-upgrade Commander formations are infantry - cavalry or infantry - spears. 

These are the infantry Commanders that can be awakened to 4 stars at this moment and will give you a nice stats boost from their Quality + Awakening and 4 stars awakening useful skills that don’t need much spending.

And here is an Awakening costs chart:

While some would prefer to also use Commanders that boost their second-line attack, my advice is to increase that bonus by other means like badges, refinement, troop appearances, etc., and keep the 5 Commander available slots you can use in your battle formations for those that boost your first line.

• Synergy setups: these setups use the Commander’s 4 stars awakening skills and they will complement and boost each other. There are currently 3 synergy setups at this moment, Weakness, Female, and Normal attack, and each revolve around 1 main commander: Jaime for Weakness, Leila for Female, and Sinara for Normal attack. 

As I mentioned, these Commanders require spending but you can optimize it by procuring the Recruitment Pass and getting 60 medals/Pass, and if you want to finish them fast, buy the weekly packs.

Here you can find useful and easy-to-follow guides for each of the setups: Weakness, Female, Normal attack

Main-hand

The newly introduced system of Main-hand or Weapon System will boost your Commanders by giving them basic and random attributes that will greatly increase their power or skills. There are several weapons and events where you can obtain them. If you don’t want to spend to get them, then hope you will be lucky enough and you get them as drops either in the Fiery Mines or the Archery Contest event. 

Another way to get weapons is by collecting weapon fragments. You will need 100 fragments for each weapon that you will get from different events like Weapon Depot, Fiery Crystal Mine, or the Archery Contest. As the feature is pretty new, I’m sure there will be more events that will grant fragments and weapons as rewards.

Here you can find a more detailed guide for the Weapon System.

Dragons

The battles are not just decided by the troops and commanders, the dragons play a great part. 

As you know, there are 3 dragons available at the moment and while Darkfyre and ShadowMoon just require easy-to-obtain Essences and time to grow them, you can get and upgrade Sapphire only by buying the Sapphire Essences.

While they do some damage by themselves, the most important aspects of the dragons are their Talents and Skills.

• Talents: are active skills that range from helping you reduce the time of your research or building, to getting a badge every 120 hours or even putting a debuff on your enemy using the Dragon Bite that will reduce your opponent troops' attack by 15% and injure up to 27000 troops. This debuff will last for 120 minutes. 

Sapphire has even more advanced talents that range from troops’ stats increase to even being able to lock your opponent on the tile he’s on and not being able to move for 30 mins. This particular Talent is called Blockade and will lock your opponent for up to 30 mins while it reduces his training speed by 30% and healing speed by 40% when maxed.

• Regular Skills: passive skills ranging from Uncommon to Legendary quality that will either help you with your gathering speed when sending your dragon or boost your troops' stats. These skills are easy to obtain. You can get them either from the Skill Raffle or Raffle Shop

• Advanced Skills: Ancient skills that are battle focused and harder to obtain. 

You can obtain health and defense Ancient skills by getting 300 fragments in the Skill Raffle using Advanced Skill Raffle Tokens. 

For the attack Ancient skills and those that will grant you special perks like healing, getting extra troops in your attacks, increasing your rally size, etc you will need to procure and collect the number of fragments needed in the Kingdom Celebration event. My advice is to get the 10 “free” keys and buy the key packs available in the shop using discount coupons till you get to the 50 draws chest. That chest will give you 30 fragments. Stack the fragments from event to event and when you have the amount required, get the Ancient skill you want, Reroute being the first skill you should get.

Training

I know how you must be feeling after unlocking the T4s and I’m sure you want to train as many as you can, but remember, patience is the key to success. 

As with the Research, you don’t need all the troops you can train, waste your speed-ups and resources just so you increase your Power, or br how most of the players name it. Having a big number on your profile with no real strength won’t help you. Nowadays what is known as “troops whales” are the perfect targets for merit hunters - players that travel from kingdom to kingdom just to attack such players.

My advice is to ask yourself these questions first and remember the type of player you are:

Will you be tanking rallies? Then train as many troops as you can with a great amount of “meat shield” - lower-tier troops like T1s f.e. Remember you need to have real strength (16 million troops with low stats won’t make you a rally tank)

Will you be a rally leader for merit hunting? Merit hunters tend to keep low power so their moves are less expensive (transnational relocations). You will need troops to cover your army size and as much as you can hide in a short amount of time if you don’t have enough to defend against solo attacks.

Will you be a filler for merit hunting? The amount your army size allows you + shelter. Take more troops only if you know how to hide them fast. You will be an easy target for the players your group is attacking.

Will you be a rally leader/filler for events with no real troops losses? Then around 3 million t4s should suffice. 

Make sure to check your Training Speed before starting to train a great number of troops under Details - Battle Preparation Enhancement:

You can also add a Warrior’s Blessing of 10% or 20%, Master of Whisperers title for 5%, and Clash of Steel favor of 10% from King’s Landing.

It would be wise to wait and train a great number of troops during events that will get your rewards for the increase in power - Lord of Lords for example.

Ancient troops or T5s

Now that you know what you should be focusing on and after you achieved everything that was mentioned above, it will be time to focus on the even more advanced troops, the T5s. To unlock them, you will need to finish the Strangely-Garbed Army research tree which will require the use of a certain amount of Ancient Scriptures for each research.

Here is a cost sheet for the Ancient Scriptures needed to finish the research tree:

You can prepare by starting to buy them early on so that when you get to the point where you feel like you can unlock them, you have a great amount saved already.

Training T5s will require a special material, Valyrian Steel, which you will start producing once you have the Ancient Foundry. My advice is to not start producing it unless you are close to finishing the research tree as it will only add to your power and you won’t be able to use it. 

Smart spending

The smart way to go about spending is to work towards premiums that you can get without recharging. For example, Refinement can be done without spending as long as you are active in events, the same goes for buildings, Kingsguard set gear, Elite and Epic tokens, and troop appearances.

The game’s packs offer advancements in a variety of different things but the most important ones are:

• Commander medals
• Commander awakening tokens
• Dragon Blessing
• Tier 5 books
• Packs of various event currencies such as keys etc

Having identified what you can achieve by being active, we can now look at what you’ll need to be focusing on If you decide to spend:

1. Epic medals, they’re just never enough. This is because there are multiple synergy formations and you may want to work towards more than just. Awakening is of extreme importance as the skills can severely affect the outcome of a battle.

2. Badges, one could argue they could grind them but getting x8 troop attack for each type is no easy task, and would take several years before someone does it. Lucky discount is the best event to get badges from at very low prices. The more tickets you have saved up the more 70% off you may be able to use.

3. Dragon skills, are very powerful and even more so when they can be combined with your synergy setup. Kingdom celebration is where you’ll be able to find those.

4. Seven treasure (Deer event) is a great way to get lots of epic medals whilst also working towards other goodies such as exteriors or the marching skin that gives army size. For only 1760 BD you can get 1,485 deers, 95 epic medals, and 85k blue diamonds. Doing this event twice will get you close to acquiring your first premium SS quality exterior as well!

5. Totals stats badges, and Beach Party packs available every Tuesday provide the best opportunity for someone to work towards getting higher total stats. For 980 BD and if you’re lucky enough you can get anything from 2 blue total badges up to 1 purple along with other grey and green badges that you can merge to create higher quality ones!

6. Dragon blessings can be found in the Path of Ascendance packs, they give a whopping number of 4,100 blessings along with 65 epic medals and 30 SS troops appearances at the price of less than 1k black diamonds!

7. SS Troops Appearances, available at Lucky Discount at very low prices as long as you save up on coupons and purchase when you get a higher % discount.

8. Iron Bank is the only way to get gold health badges. Besides, for 200 black diamonds, you don’t only get 1 health gold badge chest but also rewards that range from blue diamonds to Ancient Scriptures and SS Troops Appearances.

I know it’s a lot to take in but think about it like a journey. Every achievement you will complete will feel like a small victory and if you have friends that will cheer right beside you, the journey will feel even more enjoyable.