In my opinion these 2 games are phenomenal in their own ways and in fact have many similarities to one another.
It is also interesting because the 'ability to thrive with not spending hundreds and instead spending time' applies to both.
I have been spending a huge chunk of all spare time in my life the past few weeks on these types of mobile games, in fact one of the motives to do so as that I found an app that pays you to play games it recommends and it happened to recommend clan war games to me, getting me into RoK, to raise funds for my Mafia City gaming and that made me appreciate RoK.
In case you think I'd love all games of this type and this is just a cringey post, let me elaborate on two fundamental reasons why these two thwart other games:
1) The proportionality of 'have to pay' in both is significantly minimised by different variations of safety net for players. Mafia City is objectively the best game of all clan war games I have ever come across in terms of the raw actual safety that it gives a player. It doesn't matter what the hell the powerful players do to you, you can cope because of safe and protected resources as well as a wounded capacity that increases almost exponentially (and when it its maximum is lower than what you have and need, you should be powerful and aware of enough to last/thrive, if not that's your own fault to be frank). With RoK the safety net isn't as much a net as a bouncy castle. Everything about the game is much more about bursts of doing things, you gather in bursts, fight in bursts, rebuild troops after losing them in bursts, etc. If you master the ways to balance out each and properly stratify your time and effort, as well as choosing a city that suits a more survivalist type of statistics build, you will go very far in the game no matter how hard you get hit. It comes down to intelligence, awareness and ability. You can't properly survive big and bad hits in RoK if you're an unaware and low-ability player, unless you want to spend alot. This is why I actually like Mafia City even though RoK would be the easier one for me to stay loyal to for a variety of reasons (since I didn't have it already installed, the other app that pays you to play it gets credit for making me install the game and I get a very fast rate of rewards for playing it).
2) The sheer effort into the artwork and events hosted is phenomenal! In games like Clash of Clans, State of Survival (though that's not necessarily clan war it kind of fits the genre due to many resource-management and troop management similarities), King of Avalon and such variations of clan war games, you often find yourself in a very generic type of pattern after a while. I just named three extremely high grossing games, two of which are often ranked above Mafia City but I don't agree with this ranking at all. These games are stale. In fact, King of Avalon practically stole its entire artwork and stuff from GoT, it probably paid them royalty. Mafia City and RoK if anything stole from each other and improved. They host events in servers that massively benefit you as a free or cheap playing player. The artwork put into both games is simply so high effort and amazing, I don't know what else to say. RoK definitely has superior audio though but I think the production team of Mafia City don't know much English and struggle to sufficiently word things grammatically correct in English so even though the vocals are good acting in tone, a lot of what they say in the catch-phrases or plots for the cut scenes don't entirely make sense.
These two factors may seem small but imagine that these games are things where you spend your life playing it passionately. They are practically a fusion of MMORPG and action fused into one game format. It is just so ridiculously fun to play.
I would say that RoK will end up superior to Mafia City in raw grossing, consistently due to the fact that it markets smarter (it literally pays some streamers to dedicate to it, even making YT vids with tips and tricks, whereas Mafia City relies on content creators genuinely liking it, not that the RoK ones don't like RoK) and it's more kid friendly by a mile. I would say Mafia City is a solid 15+ game, it's actually rated 17+. There's genuine violence and raunchy artwork and scenes in it, the only child-friendly aspect of it is just how 'loser-proof' the mechanics of resources and wounded capacity are. RoK is very careful to have its animations and speech of characters be very sterile and friendly, despite 'wars' happening within the game.
Another thing I really appreciate in RoK is that it actually went through the effort of accurately depicting certain warlords of the past including my favorite Sun Tzu. On the other hand, Mafia City very accurately depicts certain aspects of mafia life and its mentality and makes you experience first-hand how psychologically it is to be part of the Mafia, I feel. I also think that the mechanics of migration in Mafia City are much fairer than in RoK. RoK anyone can migrate to a very new server... Imagine the kind of stomping going on for newer players... That said, as a newer player you get an immunity shield for many real life days there, whereas in Mafia City said truce/shield doesn't last as long.
Price-wise, you can't truly thrive in either game if you never want to pay money and that may disgust people who want games where only pure ability determines the winner. I would say that ability turns your five dollars into what a less able and dedicated players turns their $40 into (literally 1:8 ratio I would say is accurate) and that this is fair enough in my eyes.
The only issue with these games is they're so addictive because you can't stop playing them just 'like that', you need to constantly be active or your alliance/clan kicks you out and you wither away real quick and even MC's better safeguards against how much you wither won't matter because you'll be so behind the curve of progress of players within your city ('city' is a very different word in RoK, City in RoK is Turf in MC and City in MC is Kingdom in RoK).
There is one thing that's absolutely fantastic by RoK that MC really should take note of. Everything about the game guides a brand new player a little better on what to do and when. MC tries this and does a decent job of it but starts really suddenly throwing you in the deep end in terms of what to do. In MC you need to create new email addresses to make farm accounts (accounts that are never trying to 'win' they build weaker troops and solely use their levelling etc to gather resources faster, in MC it is common practise for these accounts to be attacked by the main account, willingly let it attack them without troops being on their turf whereas in RoK it's more common to have them join the alliance/clan of the main account and send resources, the cause of this is twofold and is correct for both game formats in terms of being superior to the other as a normal practise in resource-efficiency of transfer.
