The Best Start: What to Do in Your First Five Minutes

📅 2026-11-07 · The Mini Kingdoms team

Battles in Mini Kingdoms are usually won in the first five minutes. Whoever builds a strong economy early has the bigger army when the real fighting starts. Here is a simple plan that works on every map and against every computer level.

Minute one: workers first

You start with a keep and a few workers. The first thing to do is train workers from the keep non-stop. A worker costs only 50 gold, trains in 4 seconds and pays for itself in under a minute.

• You don't have to place workers by hand: the smart worker manager sends each new worker to the resource you need most.
• To focus on a resource, tap its icon in the top bar: normal → high ▲ → paused.

Minute two: a house and a storehouse

Each house adds 5 population and costs 60 wood. Never let your population fill up — the keep stops training when it does. Build the house just before you reach the limit.

Then build a storehouse (80 wood) next to the closest thick forest or mine. A storehouse is a drop-off point: workers walk a shorter way on every trip, so they gather more in the same time. Workers move to the new storehouse by themselves when it makes their trip shorter.

Minute three: mills and mines

A mill (40 gold, 100 wood) gives you 4 gold every 5 seconds without any workers — about 48 gold a minute. Two or three early make a big difference.

Gold mines and quarries start neutral. The first kingdom whose workers mine one owns it: it turns that kingdom's colour and nobody else can gather from it. Send workers to the nearest mine before the enemy does.

Minute four: barracks and the first soldiers

Build barracks (80 gold, 120 wood) and start with a simple mix:

• Swordsmen in front: balanced and tough.
• Archers behind them: they hit from a range of 70.
• Spearmen if you see enemy knights — they deal triple damage to riders.

Set a rally point: select the barracks and tap the ground, and every new soldier walks there by itself.

Minute five: defend before you attack

On the hard levels the computer attacks early. One tower (50 wood, 80 stone) near your most important mine and a line of spear barriers (15 wood a piece) on the enemy's path are enough to break the first attack cheaply.

Quick summary

1. Workers from the keep non-stop.
2. A house before the population is full.
3. A storehouse by the forest or mine.
4. Two or three mills.
5. Barracks with swords and archers.
6. A tower and spear barriers on the enemy's path.

Try this plan in a direct battle against a "normal" computer, then raise the difficulty step by step.

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