Dragons of Atlantis is a massively multiplayer online realtime strategy game on Facebook by Kabam. In it, you build a city, train an army, and raise a Great Dragon to defend the city. Then you go forth to conquer surrounding wildernesses, battle enemy camps (called the Anthropus), and raid other player cities. This Dragons of Atlantis guide explains how to get yourself off to a good start and the best ways to defend yourself against other players.

The Dragon and Storyline

The opening story premise has you choose to join one of four tribes resurrected by the Ancient Ones, which must fight each other until only one tribe remains to inherit the world. All of this may sound intriguing, but in practice tribe choice has no in-game effects whatsoever other than your avatar picture, which cannot be changed later. You can attack any player cities you wish regardless of what tribe they chose, and anyone can join any alliance with anyone else. There is no more to the storyline past the opener.

What about the dragon? Each city gets one to defend the city. In practice, the dragon works like any other building in the game - you upgrade it with resources and gold (for the nest) to hatch the egg and get the dragon to grow. The dragon then defends your city when other players attack, and has a health bar. (In the other Kabam mmorts games - Kingdoms of Camelot and Glory of Rome - the dragon is equivalent to wall defenses.) The Great Dragon can't be killed off entirely; after an attack is over, its health automatically regenerates back to full. As you advance, you can also find pieces of combat armor for it in the wilds, train it for aerial combat (researched in the Science Center), and attack other cities at the expense of your own city's defense while it's out.

The Basics About Resources in Dragons of Atlantis

You have four types of resources to build your city and train your army: food, lumber, metals, and stone. These come from farms, lumber mills, mines, and quarries which you build in your field. Other players can steal your resources by attacking. You can protect up to 900,000 units of each resource by upgrading your storage vault to level 9.

Upgrade your storage vault as fast as possible while still under beginner protection. You don't actually need more than 900,000 of anything to build most things in the game, so if you're careful, you can protect all of it by keeping your max cap for each resource below that amount. Later on when you're ready to go on the offensive, you'll need a lot more food, and you'll need extra stone to upgrade the wall past level 7. But as a beginner, 900,000 is plenty.

The Basics About Gold in Dragons of Atlantis

Gold is used to do research in the Science Center, upgrade your rookery and Great Dragon, and pay your generals. Gold comes from taxing your population, which comes from building and upgrading homes. Gold can't be completely protected. Other players can steal it if they can get past your wall and Great Dragon, which is not difficult if you're a beginner and they've been around a while.

Dragons of Atlantis: Fortress Showing Tax RateYou can control how fast gold accumulates by changing the tax rate in the fortress. To get more gold, increase the tax rate - but not too far or your population leaves. Max rate of gold income is when happiness is at 50%. The number and level of your homes gives you your max population cap, but happiness determines what percentage is actually occupied (and can therefore pay taxes). Happiness goes up as tax rate goes down, and as theater level goes up.

You can also get lots of gold at once through the trading post. The trading post is a button in the middle of the bottom control panel, and is activated after you research Mercantilism in the Science Center. In general, resources sell faster at lower prices - but lumber and food are in higher demand than stone, so you can set higher prices for those.

Once you have gold, spend it as fast as possible on research and dragons. Don't leave it lying around long enough for someone else to steal it.

If you've played Kingdoms of Camelot, in Dragons of Atlantis you can't hide gold or resources in your wildernesses, and you also can't increase gold at the expense of happiness for a levy economy.

Key Strategy Tip About Your Army

Once you start raising an army, you can choose whether to keep them hidden in sanctuary (the default) or have them defend the city. The button for that is located on the screen for the city wall.

Dragons of Atlantis: Wall Showing Troop SanctuaryIt may seem like the cowardly way out, but you want to keep the troops in sanctuary. Why? As a beginner being attacked by high power players, you will always lose. It takes time to accumulate enough resources to train an army, and then it takes more time to train the army. If you know you will lose, there is no sense constantly losing your army with every attack, as it's a complete waste of your time and resources. Put them in sanctuary so you can spend your resources on building up your city instead.

About Alliances

Finally, join an alliance. Just being in one will protect you from a lot of would-be assailants who fear repercussions from higher powered alliance members. Alliances can also help you build faster by sending resources. Most importantly, alliance diplomacy opens up whole new levels of gameplay complexity to the Dragons of Atlantis game.