To become Emperor, you have to be top of the leader board (with at least 50k AP on 30-day campaigns and 25k AP on 7-day campaigns), and your faction has to own all 6 of the keeps around the Imperial City (centre of the map). To lose emp, your faction has to have lost control of all 6 of those keeps at the same time. You can lose and retake individual keeps, and you won’t lose emperor until all 6 of the keeps are lost at the same time.
Traditionally, emperor has gone to the player who spends the most time, or farms the best.
If the current emperor drops campaign, there will be no emperor until the opposing factions take all the emperor keeps (effectively dethroning the empty throne).
In the early days of the game, there was a skill line called “Former Emperor” with passives that remained after becoming emperor. They were nothing like what emperors get, though 5% ultimate cost reduction and 2% extra resource regeneration did count for a lot at times. This prompted many people to “emp trade” on some campaigns, whereby one faction would crown emperor, then allow another to dethrone and crown their own emperor. The dethroned emperor would then drop campaign allowing the person in second place to be next in line, whereby they would crown that person. Residual emperor buffs were removed from the game in the hopes of eliminating this behaviour.
Read the info in the Making AP section. The most important point to make about making AP is that you have to keep playing. If you take a break, then someone else will probably pass you on the leader board. Everyone needs to sleep, so plan your resting hours for when the campaign is dead and there’s a lot less AP to be made. If you’re in it for the long run, then it might even be in your interest to sleep or take a break in prime time. With lag and disconnects / crashes happening often enough, you may make more AP with less population on the map. Record your AP per hour every hour and keep track of when works best for you.
Some people are natural leaders. Most aren’t. The more you help and coordinate, the more likely you are to be crowned. The social part of MMOs comes into play here. There have been many players in top positions on the leader board for days or sometimes weeks without being crowned. Do your best to be a positive force for the faction, and players will be more likely to want to help.
Emperors do double damage with siege (to walls/doors), so if you want to support your emperor, lay siege so that they don’t have to spend time dropping / picking it up. When the emperor has to get off his siege to kill something, keep firing it for him, and be sure to get off of it as soon as he is back! Synergies are great for the Emperor as they have a massive resource pool so will do much more damage/healing with them. Emperors also generate double ultimate, so you want your emperor to get kills, so that more ultimate is generated, allowing for more kills, and to further the goals of your faction. A good player as emperor can count as five or more other players working together.
The disadvantage of supporting the emperor is that the emperor almost always makes AP at a much higher rate than other players, as they have a lot more killing power. If you want to compete for emperor the next time that your faction crowns, then you might hope that the emperor’s reign lasts as short as possible! Some emperors have been dethroned in as little as 30 minutes when both opposing factions actively push to dethrone (there’s almost no way to fight a faction stack who force flips flags). The longest running emperor I’m aware of was Kamikazii who held for 8 months in Chillrend. My longest emperor run in Trueflame was about a week. These days emperors tend to only last a few hours due to game and population changes.
Some players run into problems in their pushes for emperor in that they have angered their faction (or an opposing faction). In the “good old days” when there were a lot of guilds playing regularly, and there was 24/7 coverage of the map by at least 2 solid guilds at any given time, some guilds would refuse to push for someone who they did not like. Some would even log onto other faction characters to actively try and prevent someone from achieving emperor and call in their friends from PvE to help when they were having trouble! With the mass exodus of players in early 2016, and most guilds now unable to run with the power that they used to, most of these challenges have fallen by the wayside and no longer exist.
The biggest challenge a potential emperor will face will be in coordinating their faction to take all of the emperor keeps. Many people don’t care about the map or campaign, many people prefer to run less “zergy” and keep to small groups, many people prioritize AP farming over map control, and many people understand that when one faction has emperor, the other two will focus on dethroning and cooperate (in a limited manner) to double team the faction that has emperor. The “good old days” where we could manage/direct multiple guilds and groups to coordinate are long gone. I remember the day we crowned Lightingale for the first time, I was directing six full groups of 24, each one from a different guild. We had over 190 people in TeamSpeak, and we were fighting on two fronts versus faction stacks of 150+ of each opposing faction. Those were the days of the #CrownZerg!
Now, people wanting to become Emperor in a populated and active campaign will either have to wait and hope that their faction happens to work together long enough to crown, or will have to try and gain the cooperation of the many smaller groups that play in addition to the one or two larger guild groups that run two or sometimes three times per week for a few hours. The challenge with those larger guild groups is that they get together less often, so don’t have the incentive to push for emperor in the few hours of prime time that they play together.
Alternatively they could wait for the middle of the night and bring in a solid group to night-cap, or go to a nearly dead campaign (one without people playing much) and wait for the keeps to flip back and forth. That tends to be looked down on, and someone who does that on purpose will usually not be respected for their skill – though most people don’t really care what others think and only want the Emperor costume and red dye, so it is a viable way to be crowned.
My first time as Emperor was achieved at 4:35am on January 19, 2015 after playing all night with DiE and friends. It was an amazing experience that I’ll never forget. Thanks to Minoa for recording it! I’ve posted the video below with music changed due to Youtube copyright challenges.
You should very rarely leave the last keep. If you trust the players there, and believe that you can take another keep before your opponents take your last keep then go and do your best. This is usually a very tough decision.
Expect lag. Expect lag to the point that many players will disconnect and won’t be able to get back in the game. Expect your FPS to drop such that the game is almost unplayable. Expect most players in your faction to get fed up and just let the last Emperor keep go in order to reduce the amount of lag and get back to playing normally.
The rush to achieve Emperor can be very stressful, very fun, or both. If you just want the costume and colour, wait for a Mayhem event and get it in one of the 7-day temporary campaigns. If you want to feel the pain, excitement, and achievement of going for it in the main campaign then good luck to you!