Roland, a mere farmer, is forced to watch as his life falls to shambles around him. All he wanted was to tend to his sheep and care for his farm, but fate had other plans: A demonic invasion rallied the forces of evil across the worlds, and his home was just another little victim of their endless quest to set everything that lives aflame.
Why him? What did he ever do to deserve this? He’s had enough, and now he lies alone surrounded by the corpses of the demons and kobolds who made the grievous mistake of destroying his home. It turns out, he’s a True Mage, and now the burden falls on him to end this unwarranted hell-on-earth, a burden he is hesitant to take on his own.
Thankfully, as Roland forges onward, he doesn’t stay alone for long. A Dragon Paladin joins him after a misunderstanding made right. A wandering Elven swordsman from the East tags along to avenge the disgrace and fall of his clan. A witch from the swamp decides they’re too much trouble to fight and would be of use to her as friends instead.
And finally, they find a Dragonkin priestess fending off the undead of Arekhon with her healing light. He won’t need to take up the burden of this fight by himself. Of course, he should be careful. After all, Roland’s made more enemies than he’s made friends, and someone is after him.
Welcome to our Age of Magic beginner’s guide! Age of Magic is a turn-based gacha strategy game that works similarly to the combat systems in old-fashioned RPGs such as Hero of Aethric, though without any exploration and most of the emphasis being put on making a strong team and tactical fighting.
Even though calling this an RPG is a stretch since you aren’t really roleplaying, a lot of tips that may apply specifically to turn-based RPG combat systems work here too. Such as the most obvious one, grinding a lot so you can just roll over your current foe with brute force if fighting tactically isn’t one’s strong suit, or because the enemy’s so darn tough that no number of brain cells can get through their sheer power.
GENERAL TIPS
Managing your resources and building a team is important in a lot of mobile games, and Age of Magic is no exception, especially if you’re going free-2-play all the way. Grinding is the name of the game, and you’ll be redoing previous missions more often than you’ll be playing new ones after a certain point. Especially since your Heroes’ maximum levels can only match your own account level after hitting level 20 as their initial maximum.
Age of Magic also has quite a few oddities specific to it, such as the Keyword System which makes it at once easier and harder to come up with team compositions, since it can be quite limiting, but gives you very strong clues about who goes well with who.
Factional Shenanigans And The Keyword System
Read your team’s skills very carefully. Not only will it tell you what the skill does, but sometimes it gives you an unusually overt idea of who they work well with especially with support skills. The game works with a Keyword system, where each hero has one to several Keywords associated with them, which in turn can affect some skills.
Some skills work only on friendly Heroes with certain Keywords: usually, factions, races, or job classes the Hero belongs to, such as Soothsayer Zytima’s support skills only working on her fellow Kobolds. Sometimes, they may work on all units but have additional effects on units that have certain Keywords on them.
If you’re gunning for new Heroes, we suggest inspecting them to see if their skills affect all units as opposed to very specific ones, especially if you’re new and lack a roster wide enough to start making factional teams. Later on, though, getting several characters who like each other in the same team becomes a powerful tool in your arsenal
Memory Spheres and Stamina Burning
Memory Spheres allow you to automatically win a battle you’ve three-starred before, though you still burn Stamina doing it. They’re your best friends if you ever get stuck in a level. The best places to use Memory Spheres are previous levels of a high-difficulty setting, even if it’s from a previous chapter. That’s because difficulties of Heroic or harder can drop Hero Shards and much more and bigger EXP potions than Normal difficulty, even if the “Normal” levels in your current story chapter might actually be harder!
Campaign missions also drop Equipment, which is highly important if you want to unlock new Skills for your Heroes. If EXP and Equipment aren’t what you’re looking for though, spending them in the Valley of Treasures might be a good idea. While the Valley drops less EXP compared to Heroic or Legendary difficulty Campaign missions and does not drop equipment at all, they DO drop Skill Cubes for upgrading existing skills, and while they rarely drop Shards directly, the special Runes currency the valley of Treasures missions drop can be used to buy Shards at the Valley of Treasures Shop in the Market screen.
Auto-Battle Is For Grinding, Not Winning
So you have an Auto-battle option. We don’t suggest using this if you’re currently trying to complete a new mission. After all, you’re gonna need to make sure you coordinate your attacks in conjunction with the enemy’s turn bars or target priority foes, and if the enemy AI isn’t doing that to you, then the friendly AI sure as heck isn’t gonna know to do that to the enemy!
It does have one good use though: If you run out of Memory Spheres, you can use Auto-Battle to stomp enemies you’re relatively overleveled for, though you might want to go a few levels back compared to where you got your last 3 stars just to be sure. Especially if you remember that fight being really close. Turn on Auto-Battle, sit back, and relax while drinking coffee or writing an article, then collect your loot. Nice and easy!
Hard Back Then, Easy Now
Some fights are harder than others, and there are often missions in chapters that are tougher than the ones coming before or even after them. You might have beaten them at 1 star or 2 stars at the time. If some time has passed and you’ve powered your characters up since then, it’s usually a good idea to go back and three-star that level. Getting three stars on a level not only rewards you with the Equipment that’s given for each star, but it also allows you to spend Memory Spheres to instantly redo that mission for quick loot.
The Loot Finder
If you’ve been playing mobile games for a while, you should develop a habit of tapping everything that even vaguely looks like a button. For this game, you can inspect the materials needed for anything, whether that be leveling up, upgrading a Hero’s Equipment Level, etc. You can do this by tapping the icon of the material, and you should find a nice shiny Find button on the screen afterward.
Tapping the Find button will send you to a screen containing all the missions where that item is a possible drop, with the easiest mission being the first on that list. This is very useful for managing your Memory Sphere use, so you’re always making progress with your Memory Spheres rather than guessing what levels to play at random.
Last Second Revive
If you lost a single teammate but have a healer with a revive skill, check if you’re about to win the match even without that dead character’s help. If it’s possible, it may be a good idea to hold off reviving that dead teammate until the last second. That’s because of how mission stars work: You lose a star for every dead teammate you have at the end of a match.
If you revive the dead guy immediately, you run the risk of him getting slapped and killed again, and revival skills typically have agonizingly long cooldowns. If you’re close to winning even with a dead teammate, reviving that guy at the last second can snag you a 3-star win!
Of course, if you actually need that guy to win, like say he got killed fairly early on and the match is going south, revive them anyway. After all, better a 2-star win than an outright loss! We’d have put this in Combat Tips except it doesn’t really help you win battles, it just helps you cheese that last star you would otherwise miss in a battle that’s as good as won otherwise.
Get A Friend!
Each team only has 5 slots you can fill, but by the time you’re reading this, you should have noticed a sixth slot. That slot can only be filled by Heroes belonging to someone on your Friend list! This is one good reason to go into the Arena since unlocking the Friends List also allows you to send friend requests to anyone you fight in the Arena after the fact.
You’ll probably want to pick either a Hero that fills a missing role or synergy on your team (Say, one more Kobold if you’ve got a few but not enough to really take advantage of a mostly-Kobold team) assuming you and your Friend are of equal level.
COMBAT TIPS
Age of Magic is a rather old-fashioned turn-based RPG, with a speed system determining who takes which turn and whether someone gets to have their turn multiple times in a row, and various character roles for each Hero on both your rosters. As such, many of the things that work in old-fashioned RPGs work here too, such as bullying healers and DPSes, timing your skills to ruin the incoming enemy’s turn, and doing your best so it doesn’t happen to you. Here are some tips regarding direct combat.
Inspect The Enemy
The tutorial tells you at one point to hold your finger over one of your units to inspect their abilities. You can do the same to the enemy! If you come across any new enemies, make sure to inspect them and check what their skills can do: This allows you to make a decision whether or not to prioritize that enemy.
Your priority is usually to kill support units and squishy assassin types first before they can deploy skills that prevent you from doing so. Then you kill the enemy tanks last if you can since the tank’s job is to soak hits and the last thing you want the enemy to do is their jobs. Of course, there is a priority target that deserves its own section due to how annoying they can be to deal with.
Kill The Healers First!
Yes, it’s against the Geneva Convention to attack medical personnel. Nobody cares in Age of Magic, because there is no Geneva or Switzerland or UN here to tut-tut at you for committing war crimes! Enemy healers need to go down first since they can heavily prolong what would otherwise be an easy fight.
If they can revive dead teammates, even more reason to get rid of them ASAP. They also tend to be squishy, so they are easier to kill, which in turn lessens the overall killing power of the enemy team since that’s simply one less nerd throwing attacks at you.
Barring particularly deadly debuffers or nukers who might annihilate your team before anyone even gets a chance to heal anything or any opportunity to kill someone right as their turn comes up, healers are your first priority. Don’t forget to cheer “Honor and Light!” as you beat down their healers, doctors, and medics. It’s totally an honorable and not at all underhanded tactic.
Little Yellow Bars: Check Your Turn Orders
Make sure to take note of everyone’s turn order, friend, OR foe. If you check your units’ HP bars, you’ll notice there is a smaller yellow bar under it: If it fills up, that unit gets to take its turn. Use this to determine whether or not to fire off support skills and attack skills that have cooldowns. If your attacker is going first but your support is going right next, hold off on using that super special long-cooldown attack unless you’re 100% sure you’ll kill something important with it, and fire a normal attack.
That way, your support can fire off their buff or debuff skill, which usually lasts long enough for the turn order to loop back around and make that guy’s super-powerful skill hit harder. You can also use this to mess with the enemy: if you have a skill that can force an enemy to skip their turn, you have two ways to use it.
First, you can hit an important enemy with it to prevent them from doing stuff like healing or resurrecting an enemy in an untimely manner. Second, and more urgently, you can use it on someone whose yellow bar is almost full, and waste their turn immediately. If you can kill someone who is about to do their turn, all the better, since their teammates will have to wait while you commit another round of violence against them.
Taunts Beat Turn Skip Spam
If you see multiple enemies who can skip individual Heroes’ turns, say, those horrid Abyss Hounds that keep barking at your team, a good way to counter them is any Tank hero with a global taunt. Say you’ve got several Abyss Hounds ready to bark at your team, they would usually bark at different targets so many of your heroes skip their turns.
If you Taunt them before they can do that, the AI will usually waste all of their Abyss Hounds’ turn skips on the single taunting Tank, so only the Tank skips a turn while your whole team still gets to wail on the enemy since turn skips don’t stack. The next tip talks about the flipside.
When Taunted, Hold Off On Single Target Skill Attacks
On the other hand, the enemies have access to Taunts and Hides too, which render you unable to attack certain foes. Usually, an enemy Tank will taunt and render himself the only possible target of attacks, while sneakier foes will only render themselves or other certain teammates un-targetable by hiding, throwing smoke screens, or generally being cowards.
Unless your intelligent discretion says otherwise (Usually if there are certain juicy targets still exposed somehow or the enemy tank is one skill away from death anyway), it is normally a good idea to hold off using your big offensive hitters while an enemy Taunt or Hide is active. You usually want those to delete squishy high-value targets like healers and damage dealers, and if you use them on the tank, even if the tank dies the enemy team might nuke you with their remaining mates since you can’t kill them fast enough with basic attacks.
On the other hand, getting taunted is a great time to do other things like heal up, set up shields, taunt the enemy right back, or use Multi-Target spells that don’t give a hoot about Hiding or Taunts. Taunts and Hides typically last a certain number of turns rather than a certain number of hits, so once it’s over, it’s usually a good idea to nuke the squishy ones before the Tank’s taunt is ready again.
GETTING STRONGER
Even in older RPGs and RPG-style games, grinding to power your team up was a fact of life. From Final Fantasy to EarthBound to the advent of Action RPGs to Age of Magic, this did not change much apart from what to grind for, and how much.
A simple, time-tested way to beat a fight you’re stuck in has always been to grind for levels, gear, money, and anything else to eventually overpower and bludgeon that enemy to death through ruthless, unyielding, violent force. Unless it was something with a blatantly obvious weakness of course. Tactics are also important, but even the most galaxy-brained tactics need a measure of oomph behind them to work! So here’s how we get that oomph.
Leveling Up
As with any other game, the first solution to getting stuck is to level your Heroes up so they can hit harder, take more hits, and generally turn the bad guys into a magically infused slurry before the same happens to them. For this, you’ll need Silver and EXP potions. You can get both from any mission you play, and a quick and dirty way to get more is to burn Stamina and memory Spheres on previously 3-starred missions, especially on the Heroic and Legendary difficulty.
Early on, a great way to get EXP potions is via the Valley of Treasure, since it has higher EXP Potion drop rates, but as soon as you finish one of the story chapters, you can opt to grind the higher difficulty levels instead, though each level only has 5 tries per day. Note that past level 20, their max level will match that of your account, so you won’t be farming EXP potions for that long early on. Though your needs will likely pick up again once you get further into the game and start getting more Heroes.
Shards For Stars
Whether you buy them, fork money over to the Gacha, or nab them from missions and events, you will eventually get Shards for your Heroes. Shards can be used to unlock new Heroes, with a new recruit arriving if you grab 10 of his shards. Once you have them, any future Shards for that Hero can be used to increase their Rarity, which is a fancy way of saying star level.
Heroes have up to 7-star levels to unlock, and each one comes with hefty stat buffs. Once their stars are all full, any extra Shards belonging to the max-starred Hero will turn into Soul Stones, a mileage-style currency for the Soulwarden Shop, which sells Shards for other Heroes.
A Weird Equipment System
In most RPGs, equipment is something for heroes to wear, which can be interchangeable and might be swapped out depending on the current build you want. That is NOT the case in Age of Magic, with Equipment being a bit similar to Star Levels: Each hero has 6 slots for various, incredibly specific items which, when filled, are permanent and allow a Hero’s Equipment Level to go up if you shove some Silver into it too. Some individual slots also require equipment crafted from multiple pieces of smaller equipment, which can just be put in the slot directly.
Usually, Equipment Levels can be used to unlock new skills for Heroes, which means getting this up is important if you want to get the most out of a hero. And if all of a Hero’s skills are unlocked, their Equipment Level determines the maximum Skill Level their Skills can achieve. You can tap an empty Equipment Slot and press the Find button to check which missions drop the item needed for that slot.
Skill Cubes
One important drop from the Valley of Treasures is Skill Cubes. Skill Cubes can level up individual Hero skills. What gets boosted is dependent on the individual skill and level: Sometimes, leveling a skill up will cut its cooldown by a turn, other times it will make the skill hit harder, and sometimes it merely makes the skill harder to dodge. You’ll need these cubes so your Heroes can make the most out of their high-power skills. They can also be used to boost a Hero’s basic attack, since those count as skills too!
STUFF TO DO
There are quite several different game modes in Age of Magic, meant to be unlocked and played as you go along in your game career. You have the main modes of the Dark and Light Campaign and the Valley of Treasures, and you unlock more as your account levels up, and as you do those modes often require more heroes in your roster to do effectively.
Dark and Light Campaign
The game has two story campaigns, each requiring its own type of Hero to do:
The Light Campaign is the one you start with, following the story of Roland, Rogar, Taneda, and Bellara as they travel across worlds to destroy the forces of “Fyre and Murk”. The jerks wrecked Roland’s home and won’t stop messing with him even though all he really wants to do is go home, plant turnips, and live out his life, but no, to his horror he’s now the chosen one and he’s gonna make it their problem!
Only Light Heroes can be used to complete the campaign, and you are unable to put any Dark Heroes in squad slots. Thankfully, the missions can drop Shards for Dark heroes and Light heroes alike, which leads to…
… The Dark Campaign, where you gather up all the Dark Heroes you have and hunt down Roland as the changeling assassin Sharazar, who you get for free once you beat the first mission! You don’t have this unlocked immediately, as your first batch of Heroes will be Roland’s all-Light squad. Instead, you need to have your account be level 18 and have at least 2 Dark Heroes on your roster, since Sharazar can’t do all this work alone.
The initial missions of either campaign drop normal stuff like EXP potions, Silver, and Equipment, while higher difficulties will drop Hero shards from either Dark or Light rosters regardless of the campaign.
Valley of Treasures
Arguably Age of Magic’s true main campaign, the Valley of Treasures allows you to form a team out of any heroes from your roster, whether they be Light or Dark. It is very similar to either story campaign, though it comes with its own stamina meter, colored purple rather than blue. That being said, the Auto-Win orbs used to repeat story missions are good here too, and unless your main campaign progress is far enough ahead of your Valley progress, you’re usually better off spending them here.
Arena
The Arena is similar to the usual PVP games you’d find in most other mobile games, in that you fight other players’ team compositions, albeit controlled by the AI. You have a powerful advantage in that you can control your units directly while the other player simply has to pray that the AI doesn’t do anything stupid that costs him his Arena ranking.
You have five matches per day, though every match you play has a timer of roughly 5 minutes before you can fight again. Winning Arena battles let you earn Crystals of Power, which can be spent in the Arena Shop to buy Hero shards.
Challenges
A training zone for heroes, with each mission tailored to their roles.
Challenges are a rotating set of missions where you can use very specific Hero types to get specific rewards. You have 5 battles a day, so use them wisely to get what rewards you want out of what’s available. The earlier missions are easy enough to do with a lone Hero by the time you unlock them, though the later you go, the more heroes you might need.
The fact you need specific hero types to finish certain missions means you’ll need a wide roster to get things done later on. The Tournament is similar, but unlocked at level 30 and only available on Fridays.
Tomb of Horrors
The Tomb of Horrors is as simple as it gets: You pick your best squad, and run through a gauntlet of enemies until everyone on your entire hero roster keels over and dies, or the enemy does the same. You pick a team of 5 at every level and may have to swap some members out if they’re too badly injured or dead to keep going. Your roster isn’t healed between levels, so it becomes a very tense game come the later battles. In any other game, this would likely be called Survival Mode.
A strong or heavily upgraded healer would be highly recommended here so you can beat the long drawn-out fights and recover some HP mid-battle since you can’t do it out of battle. Not to mention you might want that healer to be hardy enough not to get sniped early. Many early Tomb of Horrors teams use two healers, though once your roster gets stronger, you get more room to experiment. You can get special gems here that can be spent in the
Cradle of Chaos
The Cradle of Chaos is a level 80 unlock for a good reason: You will embark on a long run through three regions, wherein you can only use your heroes once per level. This means you need one heck of a big roster if you want good progress, and you’ll need to use them in such a way that your best squad is reserved for the hardest mission you can access.
You’re also graded for how many turns it takes you to beat a level: Fewer turns mean more rating points, which then get calculated at the end of a Cradle of Chaos season to get you your reward. Give it a shot once a season, perhaps during the tail end of the season so your roster is as beefy as it can get for that timeframe.
Events
And finally, you’ll notice the ominous Events vortex under the Valley of Treasures. Events are usually mission sets that are on a limited timer, usually celebrating the release of a new Hero or something else. These missions offer large rewards, usually in the form of Shards for any new Heroes that might be out.
That being said, they often come with fairly strict Hero composition requirements, along with a minimum account level requirement before you can enter the said event. This is generally something you’d do later on once you have a wide and strong roster of Heroes. But if you can do them, do so! Especially, keep an eye on events that don’t have hero requirements or come with their own campaign map, since those are far more accessible to new players.
MARKET
The Market isn’t just there for microtransactions: That’s also where you get to spend some of the various currencies you nab as you play the game, not to mention where they put most of the free stuff that isn’t a daily login reward or part of a big event. Checking the Market a few times a day is usually a good idea since a lot of things here have several-hour reset cooldowns as opposed to day-long cooldowns.
5 Gifts A Day
Buried very, very deep in the Chests section of the Market is your daily 5 free chests, usually containing Equipment and EXP Potions, and more rarely containing Hero Shards. Always check on these every hour since these chests might just give you that last piece of Equipment you need to upgrade a Hero’s equipment level, get you a new Hero or raise their star level if you’re very lucky.
The Market in the Market
In the Market screen, there is another tab also named Market if you scroll to the right. At the bottom of the item listings are Equipment being sold for silver. Always buy these, since Silver is seldom something you’re running low on, and you’ll need the Equipment to unlock new skills for some of your Heroes, or simply power them up. Besides, they’re so cheap they might as well be free. Just don’t spend your Gold on anything in there!
Valley of Treasures Market
The Valley of Treasures shop is pretty much the main reason other than Skill Cubes you’re going in the Valley itself. The shop sells two things: Skill Cubes, and Hero Shards on a rotation. Always buy the Skill Cube, since it’s cheap enough that burning all your purple Stamina in a day makes you more money than the Cube costs. You need Skill Cubes to make the most out of your Heroes, and you’ll still save enough money to get those Shards eventually.
Soulwarden Shop
The Soulwarden Shop is what other games would call a Gacha Mileage shop: You spend Soul Stones which you can get from the Hero Summon gacha, and for any excess Shards you get for a Hero you’ve max-starred. Shards for certain Heroes are sold on rotation here, usually rather rare ones.
You’ll likely make the most of this store later in the game once your hero roster is already really strong, though the fact just rolling already gets you Soul Stones means you will use this a few times earlier in your career.
And here’s the end of our beginner’s guide for Age of Magic. We hope this helped, and if you have any tips of your own to share, don’t hesitate to leave them in the comments below!
