The Hobbit: Kingdoms of Middle-Earth Guide

Starting out in The Hobbit, you must first choose Elves or Dwarves. This decision really has no bearing on the game except for the looks of your city and names of your troops. I personally like Elves better so I picked them. No you will have to go through the tutorial which should give you a pretty good idea of how to play the game. If you have friends in another world that you want to play with, you will have to go to "Worlds" and select the world they are in and you will have to go through the tutorial again. Now that you have your city, I suggest doing most of the quests available, build all available buildings, etc. Once most of the buildings you need for quests are built, you should start making a good resource base. Do this by leveling up you farms, arboretums, ore veins, and quarries. You will probably mainly use wood in building things initially, but later on in the game the main resource you will need is going to be food so you should focus mainly on leveling up your farms.

While leveling up your farms is important, you should also be sure to try to unlock troops along the way. This is done by upgrading buildings and researching things. More troops is your main goal in the game as that is what will allow you to defeat other cities and it will raise your might, which will get you respect from other players. On a side note: building up defenses on your wall will raise your might significantly more than the troops that are available at the start, but in the end, training regular troops will pay off a lot more than wall defenses because wall defenses can easily be wiped out by other players that are stronger than you. We will get to training wall might later on.

You should aim for these goals by the end of your city protection which lasts for a week:

15k+ per hour on wood, ore, and stone

30k+ per hour on food

30k+ offensive might

level 3+ Vault, level 5+ Academy, level 5+ Barracks, level 3+ muster field

I also recommend you join a decent alliance whose criteria you meet, as they can help protect you from attackers.

Level 1 Upgrades - Things that should be your top priority when upgrading and researching.

Farms - Raises food production - Building

Fertilizer - 10% raise in food production - Research

Barracks - Increase troop training speed, higher level allows for better troops to be trained - Building

Siege Weapons - 10% decrease in time taken to train troops - Research

Engineering - 10% decrease in time taken to build - Research

Keep - Get more spaces to capture and build things

City Wall - Can train higher level defensive troops and more of them

Level 2 Upgrades - Things that you need to upgrade, but are not imperative.

Great Hall

Muster Field

Forge

Stables

Houses

Metal Alloys

Horseshoes

Honed Blades

Vault

Armory

Level 3 Upgrades - Things you really do not need to upgrade unless there is nothing else you can.

Arboretum

Ore Vein

Quarry

Watch Tower

Tavern

Sage's Tower

Salve

Far Seeing

Saddlebags

Cartography

Once your shield goes away, it becomes a lot easier to allocate resources. Look for cities around you that are level 6 or up with less than 10k might. If they meet those criteria and are not in a high ranking guild, go ahead and attack them, you should get a pretty decent amount of resources. Keep doing this, and if you have a level 3+ Muster Field and Great Hall, then you can do it to 3 people at a time. You can pretty much repeat this process for your entire duration of playing the game, raising your great hall and muster field, and attacking stronger enemies as you get better.

While it is important to attack people to get the necessary resources to build your kingdom, you should also be careful not to make people in power angry. I recently killed all the troops of a local alliance leader, and as a result, he had his alliance raid me for about 3 hours straight, which very much hurt my resources and might (this is the reason you should focus more on troops than wall defenses). If you have resources left over every time you train offensive troops, then feel free to put the rest into training defensive troops as it will raise your might and help fight off enemy troops.

Training defensive might is really a roll of the dice. While it does add significantly more might to your total than offensive might, it can also be destroyed very easily. If you are usually attacked on a regular basis, I do not recommend starting to build defensive might until you have at least 750k+ might. If people usually don't attack you, it's fairly safe to go ahead and take the chance, but still be careful. If you always have a ton of extra resources and population, then you should be fine to keep training defensive might, since you will at least be killing some of your enemy's troops when they attack.

You can train both offensive and defensive troops at the same time.

You can research and upgrade buildings at the same time.

Assign positions to your heroes when they are not being used in order to boost production.

Join a decent alliance as soon as you can.

Try to make peace with people unless you are stronger than everyone around you.

Keep upgrading your farms throughout the game.

Always use your gollem tokens (I just got a second city deed from one!)

Wilds are very important in maintaining food upkeep, especially once you have 500k+ might. Grasslands and lakes will add to your food production. For every level high a wild is that you have captured, 5% production will be added to the production that wild adds to.

When capturing wilds, make sure you have enough space to capture more in your keep.

When attacking wilds, try to attack ones that are controlled by other low level, or inactive players, that way you will not lose troops.