YMMV / Rise of Kingdoms: Lost Crusade

• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • By the lategame, Germany became the most popular civilization to play as due to having a bonus on cavalry while also having a cavalry unique unit while also having a boost to training speed, allowing them to retrain their lost troops in battle. They also have a boost to AP recovery which can be used to defeat Barbarians and Forts for Individual Honor.
  • When fighting in open field combat, expect half of them to be led by Guan-Yu due to possessing a huge 2000 Area of Effect damage while also silencing them, perfect for racking up their kill-count not to mention that he's available simply by maxing out his first skill which makes him the ideal commander for non-whales to use.
  • Whenever you see a Rally on an opponent's building, expect said rally to be a combination of Attila and Takeda Shingen most of the time. This is due to the fact that they give Cavalries sizeable amount of boosts and their King of the Huns skill also deals bonus counterattack damage, discouraging other governors from swarming them, allowing them to get positive kill trades most of the time.
• Demonic Spiders: The Barbarians encountered in the Season of Conquest version of the Lost Kingdoms. Not only are they much much stronger than the ones fought in the Home Kingdom or in the regular version of the Lost Kingdoms but they also require more AP to fight them. In just a couple of fights, your marches would have already been severely weakened and also fills your Hospitals a lot.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Cavalry in general are significantly more overpowered than all the other troop types as they have a huge march speed boost that enable to either catch fleeing troops, mobilize to the battlefield quickly, and even flee from battle while also gaining a sizeable attack boost for themselves. Indeed, many of the best commanders in the game such as Genghis, Attila and Takeda are focused on boosting troops that exclusively contain cavalries. It's the reason why many whales pick Germany, Arabia, Spain or Byzamtium as their civilization boosts cavalries while also gaining a unique cavalry units themselves.
  • Sun Tzu is easily the best Epic Commander in the game to the point of even surpassing a couple of Legendary Commanders especially once he is maxed out. His first skill if expertised, deal a damage factor 800 plus an additional 200 damage to 5 targets and he gets 50 rage with each targets hit so in best case scenario, he will get 250 rage back and paired up with other skill-based commanders such as Aethelflaed or Charles Martel, you'll easily outlast your opponent. And being an Epic Commander meant that he is significantly easier to max out than a Legendary Commander and furthermore, he also makes a good garrison commander thanks to his talent and skills so even at lategame after other Legendary Commanders are released, he still remains a great alternative in absence of them.
  • Even though he appeared early in the Kingdom's timeline, Yi-Seong-Gye remains among the best and most versatile commander even late into the game. His Rain of Arrows skill deals 1400 damage up to 5 enemies in front of him but when expertised, said damage increases to 1700 but more importantly, it's area-of-effect spreads to the whole area around him which allow him to, for instance, chain farm Barbarians or inflict splash damage to enemies that come too close. And even though he specializes in leading archers, he can still be used as a secondary commander for non-archer commanders such as Alexander or Minamoto since his Art of Archery also gives free rage while Destiny increases his skill damage dealt. As a result, he is often recommended by non-whales as the first commander to max out in the game.
  • Zenobia brings a whole new meaning to the definition of a Stone Wall whose garrison abilities made other similar commanders obsolete. For starters, her Queen of Palmyra when expertised, not only heals herself but also temporarily gains health for 2 seconds which itself already massive contributes to her survivability while her passive skills also gives even more survivability & damage output and unlike Yi-Siu-Sin, she only requires infantries in her garrisons which themselves are incredibly durable. She is so powerful that even the mighty Attila/Takeda are unable to break through her defenses and any commanders that attempts to rally her will almost always never gain any positive trades unless the attacking kingdom gained massive field advantage.
• High-Tier Scrappy: Attilla is widely considered to be most unbalanced commander when it comes to PvP-based combat especially in a rally attack. His troop specialty is cavalry which are considered the best unit types in the game while his skills give huge attack boost particularly against garrisons while also giving a sizeable amount of counterattack damage (allowing him to retaliate against any enemies attempting to swarm his army). When paired with Takeda, a similar cavalry-focused commander with similar skills, they're virtually unstoppable and even if they successfully defended against them, the trade almost always favor Atilla/Takeda most of the time. To make things worse, he can only be obtained from The Mightiest Governor, which is an event where only the whales can consistently score top 15 to get at enough sculptures to summon for him so Free-to-play and light spenders are permanently locked out from getting him.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • The 3 Legendary commanders (Cleopatra, Seondeok, and Ishida Mitsunari) that have gathering as one of their speciality are easily considered to be the worst Legendaries in the game with multiple Epic commanders surpassing them. And to add further insult to injury, they are available in the Golden Key pool, turning them to Junk Rare pulls if the player gets any of them instead of more useful Legendary commanders such as Cao Cao or Richard Martel.
  • Charlemagne is a Legendary commander that is obtained as a reward for the kingdom that has conquered the Great Ziggurat in the first Lost Kingdom but unfortunately, he is widely considered to be the worst non-gathering Legendary commander in the game with Mehmed who has the exact specialty completely outclassing him. Perhaps the best example would be his Eagle of Jupiter Active Skill that merely deals 1400 damage to the target. That's it. Compared to Minamoto or Cao Cao that deals similar skill damage^note The former has a 75% chance of dealing 1200 additional skill damage while the latter also reduces the target's march speed and attack for 3 seconds, that's comparatively lacking. Additionally, his expertise also made 10% of his troops being severely wounded instead of dying but given how horrible his kit is, you're probably losing far more troops with him instead of other non-conquest commanders.
  • Lu Bu is a Legendary commander that is obtained by purchasing the Demon God Bundle but unlike Minamoto or Hannibal Barca, he can be leveled up using Universal sculptures. However, compared to his Dynasty Warrior counterpart, Lu Bu unfortunately is considered to be a horrible Legendary for the amount of investment required. His kit specializes in Leadership (a talent that is unfortunately power crept out after the first Lost Kingdom as more specialized commanders are introduced), Conquest (but you wouldn't really want to rally enemy cities with him when other non-conquest commanders are more useful), and Skill. For instance, his Sky Piercer when expertised, deals 1000 skill damage to 3 targets while reducing their defense by 50% for 3 seconds but this is only a marginal improvement in contrast to the Free-to-Play Aethelflaed who deals 800 damage to 5 targets while also reducing their health, attack, and defense for 2 seconds. Supposedly he is designed to synergize with Diao Chan but given that she is an Epic rarity commander, you are better of pairing him with another Leadership commander for a better subset of skills. Granted, he does have some use in the first Lost Kingdoms as a rally leader but even then, you are still better off using Hannibal Barca who is far easier to expertise for whales who were willing to spend their money on him.
  • Besides Siege, archers unfortunately tend to be shafted for both Free-to-Play or low-mid spenders. In contrast to infantry's tankiness or cavalry's speed, archers focuses primarily on attack which while sounds good on paper, it means that their low defense tends to leave a lot more severely wounded units, easily filling up hospital slots. It doesn't help that there aren't any good Archer-based commanders in the early game; while infantry has Sun Tzu and cavalry has Minamoto (or Belisarius/Pelagius for Free-to-play players), the best choice for archers are only Kusunoki and Hermann neither of whom are considered very good until Yi-Seong-Gye once the Lost Kingdom begins. It doesn't help that El Cid is considered to be a mediocre Gold Key commander and the next best Archer-focused commander; Edward of Woodstock requires his skills to be fully expertised to be usable, which locks out Free-To-Play players from using him but even then by the time the Kingdom enter that late game, there are already far more usable archers to use for whales such as Ramesess or Artemisia.
• Memetic Mutation: "I have over 50-million power in Rise of Kingdoms!"^Explanation The game's ads have become quite nutritious on the internet. These two animated ads, in particular, are very notable, but there are also live-action advertisements like this where the game itself becomes involved in various social situations.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Healing your severely wounded troops tend to become really expensive by the late game. For example if you have say, 100000 severely wounded Tier 4 infantries troops in your hospital, then you have to pay as many as 12M Food & Wood and 800k Gold as well as 3 and half days of healing. But this is cheap compared to their Tier 5 equivalent where it costs 32M Food & Wood and 16M Gold and it takes 4 days and 15 hours just to heal them. Even whales who stock up to billions of resources during the resting interval tend to struggle with healing their T5 troops, let alone speeding them up especially due to the fact that you can only receive up to 1000 healing helps a day as detailed below.
  • You can only receive help from being healed up to 1000 times a day. While on paper it sounds fair, in Lost Kingdoms where players are constantly fighting, this will quickly add up and once it ran out, you can only speed up the healing process through healing speedups which again will quickly run out and force other players to buy them lest they are no longer able to continue fighting.
  • Unlike other similar online games, any items that were sent by mistake were taken away rather than being allowed to be kept and gave away to other players as well. This means that if you were to say, use 20 sculptures that were given out by mistake to level up a commander's skill, you ended up getting a -20 sculpture deficit meaning that you must pay back said cost before you can use it again to level up your commanders.
  • The Crystal Mining Research system in the Season of Conquest version of Lost Kingdoms. Basically, these resources are used in order to conduct research for exclusive technologies that provide the player a whole array of benefits such as reduced AP cost, discounts, speed, boosts to your troops, an extra deployment queue and many more while also giving out Season coins that players can use to purchase useful rewards such as Legendary Blueprints. However, while it is possible to attain them by exchanging resources to the Crystal Mine as well completing Bastion quests, these methods are incredibly slow and without making any purchases, an average F2P player will probably only research like the first 10 out of 100s of them as the mining process is incredibly slow and that is not to mention that upgrading them requires Crystals as well. So pretty much the only way you could research them all is to purchase the Crystal bundles which includes their supply depot as well as popup bundles everytime your mine reaches a new level but this is incredibly expensive, potentially costing up to thousands of dollars just to be able to keep up to heavy spenders lest you fall behind and your army gets easily curb-stomped by their superior technologies, filling your hospitals very easily. To make things even worse, all those research and crystals disappear once the Lost Kingdom ends, leaving away all the money you spent down the drain and come the next Season of Conquest, you are required to start all over again, potentially wasting away another thousands of dollars down the drain, all to be able to fight in the Lost Kingdoms just for a meagre amount of rewards for the amount of money spent. This in effect, made the mode a heavy Pay-to-Win that drives away any and all Free-to-Play players.
  • The Legendary City Skins that are won from previous Lost Kingdoms as the top rank reward can be purchased in the Season of Conquest where they are available to be purchased by spending 650,000 Season Coins or 6 Conquest Coins which is achieved by completing the Crystal Mining Research (which could potentially cost thousands of dollars if you want to get the maximum value), crusader achievements (which requires a lot of honor farming as well as fighting), getting to the top of the ranking in terms of Individual Honor (which again, is really tough to do if you're not a mega-whale especially because the Barbarians and Forts are really strong). While that already sounds problematic enough, the problem is that you can only get up to 500,000 and 5 Coins respectively with each Season of Conquest even after you push as far as possible and spent thousands of dollars. This means that in order to accumulate enough coins, you have to get the maximum value, wait another few months for the next Season of Conquest and do it all over again. This wastes a lot of time and potential investment not to mention that you'd probably have to another thousands of dollars if you even want to compete again in the first place.
  • The Legendary Tavern that is available once the Kingdom enters the Season of Conquest allows players to use Sovereign Keys for a chance to pull Legendary Commanders that are not available in the Gold Key Chest such as Atilla, Zenobia or Guan Yu. Additionally with every 10 Keys used, you get a random guaranteed Legendary Sculpture while using 200 Sovereign Keys allows you to get 10 Sculptures of a Legendary Commander of your choice. Additionally, if you pull a Commander that is already expertised, you get 50 Legendary Marks that you can use to exchange them in the shop where 1 Universal Sculpture requires 100 Marks. On first glance this sounds like a great way for Free-to-Play and low spenders to catch up to whales and allow them to get the late-game commanders that they could not normally get without immigrating to said Kingdom. Except that said event ended being an extreme pay-to-win event that only caters whales that originated late in the game. For starters, just getting a single Sovereign Key is very expensive; while there are events that give you Keys, they only give as far as 20 at best while a single Key costs 1000 Gems or 600 Gems for 40 in the VIP shop while purchasing the complete bundle only gives 43 Keys in total a day. To make things even worse, they give one (out of 700 needed to expertise a single Legendary Commander) Legendary Sculpture at a 35% chance with the other 65% being useless junks like resource tokens of Experience Tomes. Yeah true they do have a chance of pulling the Legendary Commander themselves but the chance of doing so is only 1% combined. And their rates are altered based on their availability. For instance a Wheel of Fortune Commander available after 140 days like Alexander has 0.111/3.617 pull rate while a Mightiest Governor Commander available after 300 days like Atilla is an absurdly low 0.024/0.789 chance. This essentially makes getting the 200 Key needed for a guaranteed commander all but impossible without spending an absurd amount of money and given that there are already events like Wheel of Fortune and Card King that allow you to attain the commander you need without any random chance, it makes you wonder why they design an event that is locked out for all but the most heavy spenders.
• That One Achievement: Theocrat requires an alliance to control every single holy site in a kingdom. The problem is, not only aren't there enough flags to cover the whole kingdom even with the flag capacity maxed out but an alliance that has full control over the kingdom is pretty much perceived as dictatorship, driving away other governors who object their decisions.
• That One Sidequest: One of the Bastion Quest involves raising your troops power by 140,000. This is easier said than done given the fact that a single Tier 4 troop gives 4 power and a Tier 5 10 power. So in total it takes 35,000 Tier 4 troops or 14,000 Tier 5 troops which can take weeks to fully train them, forcing you to use a lot of resources and especially speedups just to receive a meagre amount of rewards and Bastion Experiences for the amount of speedups required.