Skill Basics
Skills are one of the most important character components in Myth of Empires. Skills carry over if you die, if you switch regions or servers, and are usually the way you gain level experience, as well. The skills tree can be found in your character menu in the tab next to inventory.
On the skills tree, you will see five skill categories, and groupings of numbers at the bottom of the menu. Across the bottom, you will see most of the relevant resources to advancing skills.
Copper coins: used to advance certain skills, particularly high level crafting and armor skills and taming skills.
Perk points: Points gained by "perceiving" at talent steles on the map. Perk points are used only for specific higher level skills (usually in the weapons and armor categories).
Expertise points: Unspent expertise points that can be applied to speed the advancement of certain skills.
Skill common xp: This is more obvious from your warriors, but can be used to immediately add experience to specific skills if you acquire any.
Unspent expertise points: respawn at the beginning of each week. You get 5 free expertise point respecs per week. One expertise point can be respecced for each point you spend here. (Note: you can spend copper coins to continue respeccing if you run out of these).
Unspent item expertise points: I'm actually not sure what these do, I haven't run into anything that uses these or gives these.
You can add expertise points to the individual skills by using the plus symbol on the skill. The minus symbol removes the expertise point from the skill.
EXPERTISE POINTS ARE MULTIPLICATIVE: Each point you add to the same skill increases the experience gain by a multiple. 1 point gives you 1.43 times the skill experience, where 5 gives you 6 times the skill experience. Therefore, it is best to focus all your expertise points into your critical skills.
Levels 450, 600, and 750 represent training barriers. You need to go to a neutral village and pay the skill trainer 8500, 25000, and 90000 respectively to pass the barrier. The river bandit neutral village will be on your map at the beginning of the game, but the rest must be found.
Not all skill experience gains equate to level experience. The experience that pops up on the HUD is your level experience, but the skill experience will be applied silently in the background.
Your skills have the bonus suggested on the talent tree, but they also build your stat trapezoid (you can find this through your inventory screen). Strength stats of any kind improve all melee damage, agility improves ranged damage, physique improves hit points and damage resistance, wisdom (crafting skills) improves siege, and charisma improves damage, hit points, and damage resistance for your npc's.
The rankings provided are my own opinion, but I highly favor skills that synergize with other skills or that can be used even if it isn't active.
Strength Skills
Strength skills are the four melee skills and heavy armor. None of these skills builds level experience by default. Level experience from weapons can be earned when you kill animals, npcs, and other players, but the individual hits either given or received only build profiency.
One Handed: Tier S
One handed weapons are easy to acquire throughout the game, and most of your tools count as one handed weapons.
Pros:
*Fast attacks
*Easiest weapon skill to build up
*synergizes with recruit (wooden clubs are one handed)
*synergizes with mining, lumbering, scything, hunting (all these tools are one handed, so durability loss decreases should apply)
*Can be used with a shield
Cons:
*lower damage
*doesn't have the really fun abilities found in two handed and polearm.
Leveling:
The easiest and best way to level all melee skills is doubly so for one handed. To develop one handed, capture an npc, place them on the torture rack, put the best heavy armor you can on them, then beat them to within an inch of their life with stone axes or hammers. You will need to feed them so they can restore their health.
**Even better leveling: Once you are strong enough, you can capture a level 30 dragon npc. These are the best due to extremely high hit points, meaning they can serve as a long term punching bag. To make the most out of this and to build the most ridiculous npc follower you can, DO NOT ADVANCE THE RECRUIT PERK THAT ALLOWS RECRUITING ABOVE LEVEL 25. So long as you never raise that, they will never be recruited, and you have a permanent punching bag. The npc punching bag is THE MOST EFFECTIVE means of leveling all melee skills, and the least resource intensive.
Shield: Tier A
Shield is often disliked by players, mostly because it is unclear how to use it. To block with a shield, you can hold it up in front of you with the right mouse button. This can be used to improve your chances of blocking. When in melee, it works best if you treat it like a more generous parry. It will occasionally block ranged attacks without you doing anything. This would be a lower tier if it wasn't for the turtle shell perk.
Pros:
*Can mitigate damage
*somewhat easy to level
*Turtle shell perk reduces ranged damage, and you don't have to have the shield in your hands, just in your tool bar, meaning you can take advantage even when using a two handed weapon.
*Shield bash, when high enough, can knock enemies on their backs, giving you free hits.
Cons:
*Often difficult to use
*Experience gain drops dramatically after 450
*Slow to develop
Leveling: Make the cheapest shields you can (wooden), and shield bash your punching bag described in one-handed.
Two Handed: Tier S
Two handed has some serious pros that make it worth considering.
Pros:
*Synergizes with planting (hoe damage to dead plants is based on two handed skill, allowing you to re-fertilize your fields faster)
*Very easy to level.
*There is a perk that makes you regenerate after killing an enemy.
*There is another perk that prevents your opponent from successfully blocking (npcs do this ALL the time).
*High damage.
Cons:
*Slower attacks
*Slower to level than one handed (but everything is)
Leveling: Make stone hoes at the crafting bench and hit your punching bag (described in one-handed)
Polearm: Tier S
Polearms are very popular in the game. They can provide the highest damage of all the weapons.
Pros:
*Many can be "couched" on horseback, making a huge damage multiplier.
*Long range for melee
*Perks can allow you a decent chance to unhorse enemies.
Cons:
*hardest melee skill to level
Leveling: Follow the instructions for your punching bag from one handed. The reason this is harder to level is because there aren't any polearm tools, so your lowest damage polearms (wooden spears and rakes) do almost three times as much damage to your punching bag, which means you can hit them less before you have to let them heal.
Heavy Armor: Tier S
Heavy armor is by far the best armor choice in the game. Unless you want to attempt to be just a ranged sniper, heavy armor should be your armor of choice.
Pros:
*Best damage mitigation
*Seriously, best damage mitigation
Cons:
*Slows you down more.
Leveling: Heavy armor is leveled by being hit while wearing heavy armor, and by losing stamina while wearing heavy armor. The safest and most cost effective way to level heavy armor is to sprint. All heavy armor experience gains are low, so sprinting will be the least resource intensive and fastest way to level the skill. A more resource intensive way is to practice your bow skill. Each strike from a bow requires stamina, which will level your armor skills.
Agility Skills
Agility skills include the three range skills, riding, and light armor. None of these skills give you direct level experience. All ranged abilities have a huge advantage against NPCs if you level them enough, in that one shotting an NPC doesn't alert nearby NPCs to your presence if you do it at range.
Throwing: Tier B
Pros:
*synergizes well with crafting in the early game (turn excess rubble into throwing stones while you mine)
*Decent damage
*Fast reload speed
*Easiest ranged skill to level
Cons:
*Extremely resource intensive
*Short range
Leveling: Throwing has two ways to level. First, throwing stones do so little damage you can throw them at your punching bag npc. Second, you can throw stones at player buildings on PVP servers to level the skill. You don't have to succeed in doing siege damage, you just have to connect.
Bow: Tier A
Pros:
*Good range
*reasonable reload speed
*Even stone arrows can be useful
Cons:
*Least ranged damage of the three skills
Leveling: The minimum damage is too high to use on your npc punching bag. Attacking other players structures that you cannot destroy is the quickest way to level this.
Crossbow: Tier B
Pros:
*huge single shot damage, good for one shotting NPCs.
Cons:
*Slow rate of fire
*EXTREMELY resource intensive to level (there are no stone tier crossbows or bolts, so the minimum crossbow bolt requires smelted metal)
Leveling: The damage is too high to use on your punching bag. Firing at an enemy PC's building is the most effective way to level this. The only thing that brings it to Tier B is the high damage.
Riding: Tier S
Riding is a vital skill in the game. The perks that really bring this up are quick mounting and quick dismounting.
Pros:
*Absolutely necessary to travel anywhere or carry even remotely reasonable amounts of materials.
*Makes you go fast
*Horsey go Neigh
*You don't have another choice, really
Cons:
*Need to keep horse fed
Leveling: you don't really need to invest points in this one, as it will advance steadily throughout your play of the game.
Light Armor: Tier B
Light armor lacks the damage mitigation of heavy armor, and the difference in speed is inconsequential. It's only value comes from light armor deployment, which increases your ranged damage.
Pros:
*Synergizes with ranged damage, increasing damage dealt by ranged attacks
*Can be developed just by putting a dragon banner over your heavy armor
*Can be leveled at the same time as your ranged skills
Cons:
*Damage mitigation is barely equal to the previous tier of heavy armor
*If you don't one shot NPCs, they will try to close on your position
*Some animals can outrun your horse, and light armor will not do much to protect you.
Leveling: As with heavy armor, light armor levels when you take damage or use stamina. The safest, least resource intensive method of leveling the skill is therefore sprinting, but training ranged skills also takes stamina while aiming, so that can give you two skills for the effort of one.
Physique Skills
Physique skills comprise virtually all of your resource collection skills.
Physique: Tier S
This is one of the most valuable skills in the game. The skill provides you with extra hit points, greater carry weight, the ability to climb over obstacles, and some other perks.
Pros:
*You definitely need more hit points.
*You definitely need to carry more stuff.
Cons:
*Levels slowly
Leveling: Physique levels with resource collection activities, stamina draining activities, and taking damage. As such, you'll want to level it while you are leveling other skills. In the early game, mining, an armor skill, and physique match well. Just sprint between the nodes of minerals that you are mining while your horse follows.
Mining: Tier S
This skill is necessary for crafting weapons and armor, particularly higher level equipment.
Pros:
*Gives you the materials you need for crafting at all stages in the game
Cons:
*Usefulness peaks around level 525 when you get the last collection bonus perk. The node finding perks aren't really necessary
*Early game materials can be gotten easily from mining shacks and resource collection points
Leveling: Mine mineral and rock nodes. Experience seems to be based on the quality and amount of the resource you extract. Higher level mining tools will allow you greater success in mining nodes, thus speeding up the leveling process.
Lumbering: Tier A
This skill is most helpful early on, but diminishes in usefulness as higher level weapons and armor don't utilize much wood.
Pros:
*Good for early game crafting
*Good for ranged weapon production
*Good for building (particularly in PVE servers where you don't need to worry about wall strength)
Cons:
*Like mining, usefulness peaks around level 525
*Nearly all wood based products can be produced at resource collection points
*Governs the scythe skill as well, but doesn't have any scythe based perks
Leveling: Like mining, harvest nodes (trees and fallen trees). Also like mining, the experience is based on level and type of resource gained. The major difference is you also gain experience from scything grasses, but not from using the "collect" option without the scythe. Always use a scythe for harvesting plants in the wild.
Hunting: Tier C
This skill is only useful in the very early game, after which much better options become available. The only major advantage provided is that it improves survivability with animals, as it increases damage done to them and decreases damage received, which is useful when you find tigers and crocodiles.
Pros:
*Has perks that make you more survivable
*Synergizes with taming (the sneak skill lets you get closer to horses you want to tame)
Cons:
*Every resource you get is significantly easier to acquire from animal pens, and animal pens will produce them in MUCH higher quantities.
*Fairly slow to level
*The best leveling materials are tied to extremely dangerous animals
Leveling: Hunting experience is gained from the level and amount of resources extracted. Hunting experience is also gained from fishing. Since Fishing with a pole is far too time intensive, the safest way to level hunting is to spear fish around lakes and rivers in the starting areas. It's also probably the easiest way to level it, since animal resources are harder to acquire.
Planting Tier S:
One of the best skills in the game. Absolutely every guild needs a high level planter (but every guild really only needs one high level planter)
Pros:
*Synergizes with medicine (pretty much necessary for all medicine, high level foods, and nearly all alcohol)
*Synergizes with armor crafting (all mid to high level armors require higher level cloth than can be acquired in nature)
*Barren field resource collection points can allow you to raise the skill very quickly
*Probably the best source of money in the game
*Skill modifies the amount of seed and crops acquired when they are collected, so it doesn't require the master planter to be the one who does the planting
Cons:
*Low level foods can be completely supplied by granary collection points
*A guild only needs one high level planter to do all the harvesting
*Best planting fields are barren field resource collection points, which will make you or your guild a huge, easy to find target on PVP servers.
Leveling: This is leveled by plowing fields and collecting crops. This is not leveled by hoeing dead crops into the soil for fertilizer, fertilizing crops, or from the player watering crops. In early game, the fastest way to level this is to make a bunch of stone hoes, find a barren field resource point on the map, and hoe it all. This remains the most effective way through the mid game. Unlike most resource collection points, the amount of gathering experience seems to be tied only to the tier of crop harvested (and maybe the quality of the harvest) but not the amount harvested.
Wisdom Skills
Wisdom skills are all of the crafting skills in the game. Most of the time, if you are crafting anything, it is going to build up one of these skills. Sadly this does not seem to apply to the early game crafting MVP: the straw rope. Through the game, there are also a few other things that don't seem to advance a crafting skill.
Crafting Tier S:
The most important and versatile crafting skill.
Pros:
*Crafting all weapons and tools is governed by this skill, and these are extremely necessary for all early to late game activities
*Higher levels give you access to better quality weapons
*Higher levels improve durability of weapons and tools.
Cons:
*Harder to level in the late game
*Quality improvements only apply to weapons, and only to items made at the forge or advanced forge.
*To make higher quality weapons, you need to buy special quenching materials from the guild store
Leveling: With all crafting skills that can be leveled with intermediate materials, making the intermediate materials is the fastest way to advance the skill. For crafting, that means smelting ores into ingots. NOTE: the tool tips say repairing weapons and tools advances crafting. It does not. You should almost never, ever, ever repair anything for two reasons: first, it takes a proportional amount of materials to the amount of damage done, but its rounded up, so it's going to take more resources to keep repairing. Second, repaired items actually lose a significant amount of max durability, giving you diminishing returns, even on high quality weapons. The only advantage is you don't have to requench the item, but with animal pens that doesn't matter at all.
Siege Tier C (F in PVE)
Siege is pretty much only useful for PVP guilds, it's a very late game skill, and it's difficult to advance without the backing of a guild.
Pros:
*Siege equipment is fun to use
Cons:
*Siege equipment is expensive to make and maintain
*Difficult to level siege outside of PVP
*Almost absolutely useless on a PVE server
Leveling: Siege weapons also count wheelbarrows and carts. Crafting these will advance your siege skill. Crafting at the siege workshop should also level this. The ammo is probably the most useful crafting choice to advance the skill.
Building Tier D (F in PVE):
Building is pretty much worthless outside of PVP servers. Even on PVP servers, they are mostly unnecessary. The advantage to a high building skill is shorter building production times, cheaper building repair (the best perk offered) and faster building hit point acquisition (useful in PVP only). The extra mining huts exist, but by the time you can make them, you probably don't need them anymore.
Pros:
*Reduced repair cost (when repair even works) can restore buildings if you forget to maintain your flags and monuments, or if you are being attacked in PVP.
Cons:
*Builder doesn't influence building HP, so all buildings are equal regardless of who made them (even if it was no one)
Leveling: Like all crafting things, the intermediate materials are the best for leveling. In this case, it is stonework from the kiln or carpentry pieces from the carpentry workbench.
Armorer Tier B:
Armor is very important in the game, but the perks are lack-luster, and durability of armor goes down much slower than tools or weapons.
Pros:
*High level armorer skill can produce higher quality armors which will take a long time before deteriorating.
*Lots of options for leveling with intermediate materials (cloth and leather)
Cons:
*Armor weighs almost nothing in this game as it is, so the decrease in weight is meaningless
Leveling: As always, the most efficient method is intermediate materials, in this case cloth and leather from the spinning wheel, tannery, advanced tannery, and loom. Just like with weapons and tools, repairing is worse than making fresh, but with armor you can make an exception for very high quality items.
Medicine Tier B:
Medicine would be Tier S if the skill tied the bonuses to the item made by the medicine practitioner. Instead, it is tied to the person or npc consuming it. That means to get access to the bonuses, you have to have leveled this for your character. That said, the perks are very good.
Pros:
*You constantly have to eat in the game, so food fulfilling you further is excellent.
*Each item of food and alcohol has a secondary effect.
*Easy to level by using the stone mill
Cons:
*A guild medicine expert does almost nothing for the rest of the guild except potentially make more medicine.
*Medicine creation bonus ONLY applies to medicine, not any other craft associated with medicine (so not alcohol, food, or stone mill products).
Leveling: Animal fodder at the stone mill seems to be the most effective, but any grinding at the stone mill is exceptionally good for leveling medicine. Ironically, medicine, food, and alcohol are very slow levelers for medicine.
Charisma Skills
Charisma skills mostly modify your NPCs, with a few exceptions.
Command Tier S:
This is one of the hardest skills to build, but definitely outrageously valuable. Without advancing command, you'll have few followers (only one allowed to follow you in combat at a time), they will be slow and weak.
Pros:
*Faster NPC followers
*NPC followers have more hit points
*More followers can be recruited
*More followers can be brought into battle
Cons:
*Very resource intensive to develop
*Slow to develop
Leveling: To level command, you need to bring your warriors into battle and let them fight. This has the obvious risk that they will die. You will also need to bring a lot of resources for them including kitting them out with strong armor and extra weapons (for when the ones they use break), as well as food and probably medicine. It's probably a good idea to level up the follower first before sending them out, then take them to a low level npc area and let them loose.
Drills Tier B:
This mostly controls how fast your npcs level up, how easy it is to keep their loyalty up (spoiler, it is very easy to keep loyalty up), and how much they need to eat.
Pros:
*First two perks involve reducing the amount your NPC needs to eat. This is unquestionably the only thing you need drills for.
Cons:
*Loyalty doesn't go down as long as you pay your warriors, so bonuses to loyalty don't matter
*NPC skill experience gain is so slow and the speed increases come so late that they barely make a difference
*It takes a long time to develop unless you want to run multiple training dummies and dump food into them constantly.
Leveling: This is leveled by your NPCs gaining experience. The more NPCs you have, the faster it will go up, but only if you have them assigned to stations or training dummies and keep them fed and working.
Recruit Tier A:
Recruit governs how well you can violently recruit NPCs. It also makes recruited NPCs stronger from the start.
Pros:
*Increases damage from wooden clubs
*Can be used to make perpetual punching bags to level your own weapon skills (see one handed leveling for more details)
*Can help identify the qualities of a recruit before you get them, wasting less of your overall time
*Easy to level
*When you are finally done with your punching bag and recruit them, their physique and armor skill will be outrageously high
Cons:
*Doesn't help NPCs after you have recruited them.
*Advancing recruit decreases the time it takes to recruit subjects, which reduces physique and armor skill gains for the NPC
Leveling: Knock out an NPC with a wooden club. Tie them to a torture rack of some kind. Hit them with the weakest tools/weapons you have.
Taming Tier A:
Taming would be a lower tier skill if it didn't improve all of your mounts all of the time. Plus, you need horses in this game just to get around.
Pros:
*Decreases stamina loss for mounts
*Decreases food consumption for mounts
*Improves outcomes for breeding horses
*You can sell horses at the fair if you find good enough horses to do so
*Makes it easier to tame higher tier horses
*You can kill horses after you tame them and harvest them
Cons:
*You really only need a few horses to do everything in the game, so you need to go out of your way to reach higher levels
*If you stockpile horses, you have to keep them fed
*You can't really tell horse quality until after you've tame them
Leveling: The only way to level this is to tame horses. The less the horse obedience increases per second, the easier it will be to level the skill, so go for those harder horses.
Renown Tier D:
Renown mostly only impacts people on PVP servers, but even that is minimal. Renown makes it a little easier to get titles of nobility, and has one useful perk if you get to 900 (which is crazy, why would you ever do that?)
Pros:
*Marginally increases the speed at which you can acquire titles of nobility and the minor boosts that come with them
Cons:
*There is pretty much a soft cap on how much renown experience you can get in one day
*Bonuses for being a noble are small and expensive to acquire
Leveling: In the very early game, you'll only be leveling this by getting achievements. Eventually, the rate of getting those slows down dramatically, so you need to shift to buying goods from NPC merchants. Note, it is not the sale of the goods, and your renown does not change how much they cost or how much you can make. The NPC merchants have a limit to how much they can sell in a certain amount of time, and it is for everyone on your server, which means if someone beats you to it for the time frame, you get nothing. Also, the NPC villages that will trade with each other are spread out or in the middle of dangerous territory. The shortest trade route is yellow turban rebellion to vagrant camp, but you need to travel through the swamp to get there. The earliest functional trade route with the least danger is rebels to yellow turban rebellion and/or back, but the distance is great. The bandit camp is found in the desert (not super dangerous, but you do have to have heat resistance). The hunter camp is on the snowy mountain in the center (very dangerous region), and the vagrant camp is on the western end of the swamp (also very dangerous, crocodiles move far too fast).
Note: this can also be leveled by joining the prefecture battles or county battles.
Source: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2729255895
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