Best Commander Pairings 2022 in Rise of Kingdoms (Reworked)

Pairing Commanders in Rise of Kingdoms can give you amazing synergies but using the wrong commander as your secondary commander can put you on a disadvantage as well. In this guide I wanted to show you the best option of secondary commanders to use with every commander that’s in Rise of Kingdoms.

So, my biggest problem when trying to create this list was… how should I do it? My first approach was listing every commander and then show which commander will be a good pairing. This was something I gave up pretty fast because some commanders are only good as secondary commanders and there wasn’t much benefit for you when I make such a list.

So, I was thinking that it will be a lot more helpful for you when I put here the main objectives (like raiding other people’s cities or hunting barbarians, etc.) and give you the best pairing that you should use for that.

Please note that I have this in close conjunction with my commander tier list so I only show pairing that work well for every cause. You can find my commander tier list here.

How The Pairing Overview Works

I decided to put the pairings here that work well so you can take the ones that you can run or want to work on without bloating the list completely. You will find the best pairings for the different game modes in the color blue in the table, very strong ones are in green and the ones in light green are the ones that are more suitable in the earlier stages of a kingdom but will fade off quite quickly.

Hope this makes sense in the way I described it 🙂

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Best Commander Pairing Ranking

Let’s start with the pairing grouped by the mode you’re playing (defense, open field, rally etc.).

Best Open Field Pairings

While you see below very specific commander pairings, I wanted to keep the open field part as universal as possible as many players simply won’t be able to run the meta setups. What I have here is the best primary commanders for openf field and what you can combine them with, so every player will find a setup to run…

Nebuchadnezzar as the primary commander with his march speed, area damage and buffs/debuffs, he’s a beast in the open field. Great to pair with secondary commanders like YSG, Gilgamesh or any other archery commander (see link below) for great success.

Best Builds & Pairings for Nebu

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Guan Yu is so evergreen for open field and his silence and area damage is simply too strong and I think he will be in the meta here for a lot longer. Still one of the best options here will be Leonidas but click the link below and you will see more great pairing options to run with Guan Yu in the open field

Best Builds & Pairings for Guan Yu

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Alexander Nevsky with his crazy defense reduction and his bulkiness combined with a hard-hitting punch. When not paired with Xiang Yu, you have William as a great secondary commander option for him but Minamoteo, Chandragupta, or Saladin are also viable options you have with him in the open field (read more below and click the link):

Best Builds & Pairings for Nevsky

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Xiang Yu  with his area defense reduction and low rage requirements is also a great primary commander here and you will also deal a lot of damage with him. Great secondary commanders, if you don’t run him with Nevsky, is Hoda, Mehed or even Chandragupta.

Best Builds & Pairings for Xiang Yu

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With the increased skill damage debuff Boudica Prime offers, she’s also a beast in the open field and can be paired with so many different commanders to work well here. A great pair will be Honda as secondary commander or literally any of the archery commanders available.  Even leadership commanders like Mehmed will run well as secondary commander with her

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Scipio Prime is also a crazy commander to run in the open field with his hard-hitting skill plus the debuffs that come along with it. You can pair him with Guan Yu or any other commander secondary that has silencing effects, as this will boost Scipios output with the extra rage pretty well.

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Last but not least, Trajan is still a very popular primary commander int he open field and can be paired Harald, Aethelflaed or even Cyrus.

Best Builds & Pairings for Trajan

Best Rally Pairings

Xiang Yu + Nevsky are crushing it right now, with extreme damage and a fast-paced skill cycle and also Nevsky provides a lot of tanking abilities that it’s also durable, too. To cool thing here is that it works great against archers, other cavalry combos and also against infantry. Unfortunately, Zenobia & Flavius counters that so you need to run a different setup against that very specific setup to deal with the silence effect that Falvus has.

Best Builds & Pairings for Xiang Yu

With Alexander Nevsky + Joan of Arc commander pairing you also deal a ton of damage and it runs really wild. I see it rising more and more but this is always the case in Rise of Kingdoms if you see new commanders being introduced that kind-of either boost of existing ones or neutralize other commanders that run the show before.

Best Builds & Pairings for Nevsky

And last but not least, the pairing of Nevsky + Attila, you run a pairing that’s tanky on one side from Nevsky and provides a lot of anti-swarm from Attila – so, it’s not the craziest rally setup for cavalry to run, but one that punished any opponent that tries to swarm your march heavily. But mind that this rally pairing will not deal much damage so rather one to launch into a swarming situation to stall.

Best Builds & Pairings for Alexander Nevsky

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If you’re looking for a archer rally setup that works pretty much against everything, Henry + Boudica is your go-to option and deals great damage, provides lots of other treats and works really great. You can swap out Boudica for Nebuchadnezzar to get more anti-swarm abilities with his insane counterattack that swarming your rally will backfire so hard for the opponents.

For the case that you run into a Zenobia setup, use Gilgamesh and you have an insane setup to deal with Zenobia. In this case, Gilgamesh should be your primary commander to reduce the health and gets his passive buffs in, especially the boost against remaining troops.

Please mind! With Jan Zizka that counter archer rally quite well, this might see some downfall in the future, but unless you’re attacking into that setup, this is one of the best rally pairings to run with right now.

Best Builds & Pairings for Gilgamesh

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Pakal + Harald are the only infantry rally combo I can recommend if you really want to run a rally pairing with infantry. It’s not as good as the other ones, I just have it here in case you want a infantry rally setup that makes somewhat sense. Depending on what kingdom you’re playing in, this setup can work fine, but in the tough kingdoms where you’re supposed to run the meta pairings or you will get crushed, I can’t recommend it. In general Harald provides a lot of damage while Pakal mitigates the downsides of the defense reduction, making them a great commander pairing in general.

Best Builds & Pairings for Pakal

Best Garrison Pairings

With infantry you’re running the garrison commander pairing right now in Rise of Kingdoms and Zenobia + Flavius is the best setup that works against the meta rally marches the best and protects most efficiently with the silence effect that Flavius provides.

You can also use YSS as a secondary commander (like towards the end of KvK when everyone is running lower on troops) or when you don’t have Flavius and get benefit from the mixed troops from YSS and still benefit from counterattack and other treats that work well.

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For running a archery setup here, options are quite limited these days and Amanitore + Artemisia is pretty much all you can do to get something good out of it here. It can work against swarming and deal a lot of damage but with how cavalry is running the show right now, archers aren’t that great right now.

Best Builds & Pairings for Amanitore

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For cavalry, Jadwige + Jan Zizka is the setup to run right now and can work great against Pakal/Herald rally setups extremely efficiently as Jan can remove buff effects from the attacker and also works well against archers as well.

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Conclusion

I hope this frequently updated guide here gives you some insights what commander pairings are working well right now and run the show in the stronger kingdoms. Please mind, just because your pairing that works is not on the list means your commander pairing is bad as this list is from what the strongest kingdoms in Rise of Kingdoms run and should be an inspiration what setups you should aim for.

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