Age of Empires Mobile – F2P Heroes Guide: How to Invest In

Guide to Invest in F2P Heroes

By kaity

Some heroes are good to invest in although they are not necessarily strong in combat, these heroes are known as the gathering heroes, but I will expand this guide a little bit to include them in the early stages of PvE in the game.

Typically when you start the game you need to:

• Have a main lineup, this is the lineup where you will invest most of your resources including XP (hero levels), Skill points (used to upgrade skills), Rings, and hero medals.
• Budget gathering heroes, these are the free heroes the game gives you, some of them can be good for combat but most of them will be used first for gathering.

The gathering heroes:

• Nino tactician swordsmen
• Baldassi tactician swordsmen
• King Derrick warrior swordsmen & archers
• Cleopatra tactician swordsmen & cavalry
• Leo marshal Pikemen
• Darius warrior cavalary and pikemen
• Thanus marshal Pikemen
• Diao Chen tactician cavalry & archers
• Narres cavalry warrior
• Kaso cavalry warrior
• Yuan Xia
• Leon marshal archer
• Yi Sun-Shin tactician archers

Only King Derrick, Cleopatra, Darius, Diao Chen, and Yi Sun-Shin are legendary heroes, the rest are purple heroes.

• Gathering heroes have bonuses when they gather resources, these bonuses are obtained from skills or talents.
• For the skills, I don’t recommend upgrading them, that’s because upgrading them costs materials “skill points” that you should save for your main march.
• For talents, you will need to level up these heroes using XP, there are two sources of XP, one is attacking the tribes and the other is using XP tomes.
• For the main march that you choose to use for Combat (not gathering), you will use them to kill tribes and level them up from tribes without using XP tomes on them.
• For the gathering heroes, use XP tomes to upgrade them.

It’s worth mentioning that the talents that boost your gathering (image above) are at level 36 hero, but to get more talents that increase your gatherings furthermore, your heroes need to be around level 100 (a hero max level is 120), of course, you need to keep the gathering heroes at level 36.

The bonuses above increase how fast your troops can gather resources from resources tiles, and they increase the amount you get after gathering them.

Now I will glimpse how the PvE content in AOEM looks in the coming image of Island Tactics’ permanent event.

This event is important to push for the equipment materials you can buy from the shop in this event so you need to push to the highest levels possible.

• As you can see I have 3 marches dropped against 3 enemy marches.
• If you look closely there are yellow and red lines between my marches and the enemy marches.

These lines indicate who will fight who:

For example at the bottom (in the red circle) there is a yellow line coming from my march (Josephine as lead) towards the enemy march (Richard as lead), and there is a red line and vice versa, this means they will fight each other 1 v 1 before they move to the next target.

Why is all of this important? We were just talking about gathering heroes!

Well, have you heard of the troop counter system? Swordsmen counter pikemen. Pikemen counter cavalry. Cavalry counter archers. Archers counter swordsmen

Or as some people like to type it: Swordsmen>Pikemen>Cavalry>Archers>Swordsmen

For example, if a swordsman march is fighting a Pikemen march, the swordsmen will do 125% of their damage to the enemy, while the Pikemen will do only 80% of the damage they are supposed to do to the swordsmen.

In other words, when a troop type counter another they deal 25% more damage and take 20% less damage from them!

This means you can’t expect one march to carry you through the whole event, but at the same time, it’s not advisable to invest in too many marches!

This is why my approach here is to use the gathering heroes that are recommended anyway, for PvE

Let’s look at the image again now:

In the bottom (red circle) my Josephine Hammurabi and Harald who are all warrior swordsmen heroes, are fighting against Richard who is a Pikemen hero.

• As you can I made my swordsmen fight their Pikemen to counter them.
• I met the synergy bonuses of putting the heroes with the same troop type (swordsmen) and military specialty (warrior) so they get the highest stat bonus possible.

In the right (yellow circle) we see King Darius with Narses and Kaso, all of these 3 heroes are not good for combat and are only good gathering heroes but I used them to counter the enemy archers with cavalry!
On the left you can see Yi Sun-Shin Leon and Yuan Xia, who are archers against the enemy swordsmen.

This is what you typically need to do in this PvE event.

Of course, these heroes are not the best or combat or the event, but they serve another purpose gathering first, then helping you early game with the PvE event second.

• Note: if you paid attention Harald was not mentioned in the gathering heroes, and he is a hero I don’t recommend using in general, the reason for this is King Derrick is only obtainable during an event in the early game and this account has missed it!
• Note: you don’t need to perfectly match the line-ups for stats, the troop counter system is strong and thus more important.
• Note: It’s always better to level up a legendary hero over the purple hero because they have more stats (and the XP required to upgrade them is the same).

Finally, I want to mention that King Derrick, Yi Sun-Shin, and Cleopatra are generally good heroes, especially Cleopatra and Yi Sun-Shin who I consider the best two tavern heroes

• King Derrick is used for a good swordsmen line-up as Josephine KD and Hammurabi, while also able to be used in archer line-ups.
• Cleopatra is a great hero who can compete against other heroes for a spot in their line-up, she can be used as a swordsman or cavalry, I strongly recommend her as an F2P player.
• In my opinion, Yi Sun-Shin is better than Seondeok (sorry waifu).

To conclude this I advise as follows:

• Upgrade Joesphine King Derrick and Hammurabi, they are generally versatile, good early game, and may be used as a second march mid-game.
• Upgrade the gathering heroes above to level 36, Yi Sun-Shin, and Cleopatra are exceptions to this rule because they are good.
• Invest in a main line-up from this guide.

Additional info about refund, payments and more

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