A good peacekeeper commander is essential for you in Rise of Kingdoms. You will use them for hunting barbarians and attacking barbarian forts. On any normal day, you can use your free action points to run barbarian forts and you, and your alliance, gets rewards. This adds up well for the alliance as a whole and most alliances should be encouraging a steady flow of dead barbarian forts.
This guide is for players building up who do not yet have expertised meta commanders. If you have an expertised Nevsky, then skip to the bottom, for example.
Aethelflaed / Minamoto (or Cao Cao)
Any commander with the Peacekeeping talent tree will work (and even non-peacekeepers when you get meta commanders such as Nevsky/Tariq/Huo/Zuge), but I recommend you focus on Aethelflaed from the Expedition regardless as you can setup your “fort killer” and not bother with changing it as you develop your other commanders.
Doing the expedition as far as you can gets you daily passive rewards and currency. Use -all- of that currency on Aethelflaed until you have her expertised. The reason I really like her for Peacekeeping efforts is that she can work with mixed units, she can do very well with sub-par gear, you can set her up and forget about it (no need to swap gear from other commanders, etc, no need to worry what type of unit people send to your rallies) and she is a “free” investment. (They say “time is money, friend”, which wouldn’t make it free, but you know what I mean).
For your secondary commander, remember that only their skills matter (gear, level, talents – none matter). So the very best secondary to Aeth is Minamoto or Cao Cao. Each has a talent that delivers +50% damage to barbarians. That’s just incredible.
If you don’t have Aethelflaed expertised you can use any peacekeeper and follow the same gear and talent advice below.
Peacekeeper Talent Tree
Gear
For gear I am giving advanced (green) and epic (purple) suggestions. I don’t recommend legendary gear as you will have so many reasons to do it for other commanders (unless you build a Leadership legendary set, in which case, good on you! That’s a big pill to swallow). When you refine your gear, pick leadership so you can use on Aethelflaed. The key thing to focus on is the +barbarian damage. When a piece has it, its likely a good pick for your peacekeeping commander.
| Slot | Advanced Option (+barb dmg) | Epic Option (+barb dmg) |
| Head | Helm of Fear/Helm of the Phoenix (+3%) | (no barb damage option, but most are still better than advanced) |
| Chest | Infantry Breastplate (+3%) | Quinn’s Soul (+5%) |
| Hands | Bronze Bracers (+3%) | Seth’s Brutality (+5%) |
| Legs | Ranger Trousers (+3%) | Gladiator (+5%) |
| Feet | Edged Boots (+3%) | Frost Treads (+5%) |
| Weapon | Blessed Blade (+3%) | (no barb damage option, but most are still better than advanced) |
| Accessory 1 | (elite) Savage Totem (+10%) [from Karuak Ceremony] | |
| Accessory 2 | Lots of options, I like Silent Trial (from barp camp) |
Results
When I run a fort, my Aeth has the epic options above and I use “Hollow Square” to keep damage down (but with armaments with +barb damage, of course). I like to focus on wounded when evaluating how good a march is at barbarian forts. Below is a barbarian fort 14 that I just ran. I had +292% barb damage and we had 1.3m troops in it (I do recommend at least 1m troops for barb fort 14s).
Retire Aethelfled when you have expertised meta commanders
Once you get Nevsky (or other) meta commanders expertised and with good gear, you can retire Aethelfled. My favorite is Alexander Nevsky (with a 2nd of Justinian or Joan Prime or even Minimoto), check out the low numbers of wounded here:
