Kingmakers Early Game vs Late Game Builds: How Your Strategy Must Evolve

Something weird happens around the 15-hour mark in Kingmakers. The Swordsmen and Archers that carried you through the first half of the campaign suddenly start dying. A lot. Your trusty assault rifle feels like a peashooter. And the enemy officers seem to have twice as many bodyguards as before.

This isn't bad game design. The game is telling you to evolve your strategy. Most players don't listen, myself included on my first playthrough, and they hit a wall around mission 12 or 13.

Let me walk through how the game shifts and what you need to change.

Early game (missions 1-5): the Swordsmen era

In the opening missions, Swordsmen are your everything. They're cheap, they're durable, and in shield wall formation they stop basically anything. Pair them with Archers on elevation and you've got a winning formula.

The enemy in these missions is straightforward: basic infantry, one or two officers, maybe some cavalry if you're unlucky. There's no real combined arms coordination from the AI. You can win by forming a line, waiting for the enemy to engage, and then flanking with whatever cavalry you have.

Your personal weapons during this phase should be the assault rifle for range and the shotgun for close-up officer kills. Ammo is scarce but you don't need much. Two shotgun shells per officer, maybe three or four assault rifle magazines per mission.

Base upgrades to prioritize: blacksmith to tier 3, stables, then fortifications to tier 2. In that order. I rushed fortifications on my first run and regretted it. They don't matter until the siege missions later.

Mid-game transition (missions 6-10): the Cavalry awakening

Around mission 6, two things happen. Enemy cavalry units start appearing in every mission, and enemy formations start having three officers instead of one or two.

If you're still running pure Swordsmen-Archer at this point, cavalry will flank you and kill your Archers before you can reposition. The solution: Spearmen on the flanks. Just one unit of Spearmen on each side of your formation is enough to deter cavalry charges. Spearmen in Kingmakers have a brace mechanic that isn't documented anywhere (hold position and they'll automatically counter-charge any cavalry that targets them).

This is also when you unlock Men-at-Arms. They're expensive, costing almost twice the resources of Swordsmen, but they have armor that shrugs off arrows and they don't rout as easily. I replace one of my Swordsmen units with Men-at-Arms and use them as the center anchor of my line.

Your personal loadout should upgrade here too. The sniper rifle becomes available around mission 7. It's slow to fire but one-shots officers from across the map. I run sniper plus shotgun at this point. Snipe the officers from a hill, then sprint in with the shotgun to clean up stragglers.

Late game (missions 11+): combined arms or die

The late game in Kingmakers doesn't mess around. Enemy armies have cavalry, infantry, archers, and multiple officer layers. If you kill one officer, the others rally the remaining troops. The AI starts using actual tactics, cavalry feints into infantry pushes, archers repositioning after each volley.

At this point you need a combined arms composition: Swordsmen or Men-at-Arms for the center, Spearmen on flanks for cav defense, Archers behind for ranged pressure, Cavalry for your own flanking, and Berserkers for breaking stalemates.

Two units of Men-at-Arms center, one unit Spearmen on each flank, two Archers in back, two Cavalry on the wings. That's your core 8-unit comp for late game. Add Berserkers as a ninth if you can afford them.

Berserkers deserve their own paragraph because they're misunderstood. In early game they feel useless because they die before doing anything. In late game, when you have a solid frontline holding the enemy in place, throwing Berserkers at the enemy's strongest formation creates chaos that lets your Cavalry find gaps. Just accept that Berserkers won't survive. They're a trade, not an investment.

Weapons in late game: the grenade launcher finally shines

I barely used the grenade launcher in early game because ammo is rare and splash damage kills my own units. Late game, enemy formations are so dense that a grenade launcher shot into the middle of their infantry is worth the ammo.

One thing I figured out around hour 20: you can destroy enemy siege equipment with the grenade launcher. Catapults, battering rams, siege towers. One grenade each. The game doesn't tell you this and most players waste time sending cavalry around to deal with siege equipment.

Attack helicopters and armored SUVs are in the full release build (confirmed for PS5 and Xbox Series X/S versions in 2026) but Early Access on PC mostly locks you to the guns and vehicles you find blueprints for. The armored SUV specifically is mentioned in the Steam page trailers and it's going to change late game dramatically when it's available.

The respec trap

You can't freely respec your units. Once you invest XP in a unit type, that's where it stays. The game lets you disband units and recruit new ones, but you lose all the XP you invested.

This means you need to plan your late game from early game. Don't dump all your XP into Archers when you know they'll be less useful in late game sieges. Spread XP across the unit types you'll need later: Men-at-Arms, Cavalry, and Spearmen.

If you're deep into the campaign and realize your unit comp doesn't work anymore, your only real option is to grind side missions with your new preferred units to level them up before continuing the main story. It's tedious, which is why planning ahead matters.

The morale late-game difference

In early missions, killing one officer usually breaks the enemy. In late missions, officers are protected by elite bodyguards and there are more of them. The officer kill order matters. Kill the highest-ranked officer first and the lower-ranked ones take a morale penalty. Kill the banner-bearer and the entire formation loses cohesion for a few seconds.

This is where the RTS mode shines. Zoom out, identify all officers, mark them with pings (right-click in RTS mode), then execute them in order from highest rank to lowest. Your units will do the rest.