Rise of Kingdoms Speedups Guide: Grind Smarter and Max Out Fast

Staring at a building timer with 10 days left while your alliance mates run wild in KvK sucks. If you are sick of crawling through endless construction and research waits, you need a better plan than just wasting gems every time a queue runs dry. Let's cut the fluff and look at how actual active players stack speedups, farm like mad, and keep their city queues moving 24/7.

Barbarian Chaining & Spawn Tricks

If you are free-to-play (F2P) or low-spend (LP), your main job is making every single Action Point (AP) count. Do not waste AP on random targets!

• The AoE Chain Trick: Grab your favorite AoE commanders like Aethelflaed, YSG, or Sun Tzu, pair them with Lohan for healing, and master barb chaining. You only spend 1 AP, but you pull 3 to 4 barbarians at once. Boom—free speedups, resource packs, and books of knowledge.
• Home Kingdom Chaining: Don't stop chaining just because KvK ended. Capitalize on high-level home kingdom barbs (up to level 40) during the off-season. Chaining them efficiently converts AP into a continuous stream of free minutes and hours of speedups.
• Spawn Chaining (Early Game Black Magic): Before KvK 1, use the "search" feature carefully to hunt low-level barbs. They spawn right around your city walls. Cluster them up and shred them for massive early-game momentum.

 

Alliance Perks & Kingdom Maps

RoK is a team game. If your alliance is dead, your speedups are dead too.

• Barbarian Forts & Keeps Daily: Never skip fort rallies and barbarian keeps with your alliance. They drop solid building, research, and training speedups alongside AP recovery pots and valuable blueprint fragments.

• Smart Sub-Alliance Rotation: If your main alliance gift level is maxed or stagnant, participate in off-season barb-clearing and fort rotations across active sub-alliances within your kingdom to trigger chest milestones faster and farm high-yield alliance gifts.
• The Kingdom Map Hoard: Don't use your kingdom maps right away to clear fog. Let your scouts do the footwork. Once the whole map is uncovered, pop your stacked maps—each one auto-converts straight into a 5-minute speedup. Talk about free value!

• Golden Chests & 24-Hour Cleanups: Join a whale alliance (a gold chest alliance) ASAP. Open those alliance gifts twice a day before the 24-hour timer expires so you don't miss out on juicy free speedups.

 

Events, Traveling Merchants & Daily Farming

• The Off-Season Courier Shop Exploit: Want free speedups without spending gems? Train a small batch of T3 troops (e.g., 300 cavalry) and manage your training cycles every few hours. This triggers the traveling merchant (Courier Station) to visit your city regularly. Use your daily free refreshes and basic resources to buy 6-hour speedups entirely for free!

• Lohar’s Trial & PVE Events: Go all-in on Lohan's event early on to farm necklaces for insane speedup drops. Never miss Ark of Osiris, Ceroli Crisis, and Sunset Canyon.

• The Expeditions Shop: Once you max out Aethelflaed, keep dumping your extra expedition coins into speedups. Every little bit adds up to a T5 finish line.

 

Gem Spending & VIP Shop Tips

Got some gems saved up? Don't burn them on random stuff.

• VIP Shop Bargains: Grab those cheap 5-minute speedups every week using basic resources. High-spenders can eye the 8-hour or 24-hour training speedups in the VIP shop if they need a quick power boost.
• Wheel of Fortune & Events: The best value for gems is spinning wheels or opening holiday chests. You grab top-tier commander heads and gear materials while stacking up massive piles of speedups on the side.

 

T4-to-T5 Conversion Guide

Even veterans mess up troop training. Stop wasting your speedups on raw, uncalculated troop creation:

• The T1 Trap: Avoid upgrading Tier 1 troops all the way to Tier 5. It costs 96% of the speedup time while netting you only 90% of the power. It is a total trap.

• The T4-to-T5 Leverage: Stash your time and resources into mass-producing Tier 4 troops normally. When a massive event or Zenith of Power drops, upgrade those T4s into T5s. This conversion costs only about 33% of the raw training time, yet yields roughly 60% of the power. It is the ultimate "speedup bank" for your account.

• Use T3 for Daily Events: The daily 24-hour training events (requiring 2,000–3,000 troops) are notoriously hard to finish on time with T4 without rare runes. Switch to Tier 3 training to effortlessly fit within the 24-hour window and secure free daily speedups without breaking a sweat.

 

Common Speedup Traps

Even veterans mess this up sometimes. Keep these rules in mind:

• Always Stack Your Buffs ("Triple Threat"): Never pop speedups on a whim. Wait until you have a Kingdom Buff, a Kingdom Title (like Architect or Scientist), and a matching Rune active all at once. Combine that with a major MGE or power-up event to maximize your gains.
• Fix Your Tech First: Once your City Hall hits level 18, focus on maxing out your building and research speed tech before dumping heavy speedups into advanced structures. Otherwise, you're throwing precious time value down the drain.
• Save Your AP Bottles: Don't blow all your AP recovery bottles on random strategic reserve events unless you're locking down a top rank. Save them for KvK battles and critical fort runs.

 

How to Beat DKP Woes as F2P

If you are completely exhausted by the constant anxiety of losing main-march power in KvK, take a page from veteran F2P off-season playbooks:

• Consider building a specialized Siege/Support march strategy for late-game KvK.

• While standard infantry, cavalry, and archer lines can get completely wiped out in flags and fortresses (causing your kill-to-death metrics and DKP to tank), a siege-focused account can utilize alternative frontline filling mechanics. You can act as an elite flag-filler and utility support, harvesting massive DKP while mitigating standard main-troop destruction. It’s an unconventional way to stay hyper-active in wars without burning through infinite main-march resources.

 

Summary

Master these strategies, and stacking and using speedups won’t feel like a headache anymore. Log in next time and give them a try! And if you're looking for a clever way to save a bit extra, Pop over to LDshop for fast, secure top-ups and packs to keep your marches ready for whatever comes next.