Age of Origins Warplane Guide: Levels, Phases, Blueprints & Equipment

Part of the Troops series:

• Troop Types & Tiers: The army your warplanes fly above.
• Titan Guide: The other late-game force multiplier.

Quick Answer

• Warplanes unlock at the Airport; your city level determines how many you can field, up to five.
• Planes advance through phase modifications — each phase unlocks skills and stacks troop buffs and battle power.
• The one skill everyone talks about is Dodge: a percent chance for the plane to evade an incoming attack entirely.
• Fuel for the system: Warplane Components, Warplane Alloy, and Warplane XP, farmed from events, Alliance Bounty, and the daily Benefits Card.
• Warplane Equipment follows the golden rule of every gear system in this game: skip green and blue, build from purple, gamble to gold — a level-2 orange piece beats a level-3 purple.

Where Warplanes Fit

By the time the Airport enters your build queue, you've learned the game's pattern: every few city levels, a new system arrives that multiplies the army you already have. Warplanes are exactly that — a march-level force multiplier that adds its own damage, its own survivability tricks, and buffs to the troops underneath it. They don't replace your troop core; they make the same core hit harder in every battle report.

Because plane count is gated by city level (up to the cap of five), warplane progression is partly a city level story: each new slot is a flat power jump, and it arrives on the Main Hall's schedule, not yours.

Phases, Levels, and the Dodge Skill

A warplane's growth runs on two tracks:

• Levels, fed by Warplane XP — the steady stat climb.
• Phase modifications — the milestone track. Each phase is a step-change: new skills unlock, and the plane's troop buffs and battle power contribution jump.

The skill that defines the system is Dodge — a percentage chance to evade an incoming attack outright. In a game whose combat meta is burst-versus-mitigation (the whole Zeus/Tifa-versus-Alexandria argument from the officer tier list), a proc that deletes an entire hit is disproportionately valuable — it's mitigation that sometimes rolls 100%. Prioritize the phase pushes that unlock and improve defensive skills on the plane escorting your main march; a plane that survives keeps buffing.

Exact phase thresholds and per-level XP curves shift with updates and aren't reliably documented anywhere — read your own modify screen before planning a material burn, and distrust any site quoting precise tables without a patch date.

Feeding the Machine: Components, Alloy, XP

Three materials, three jobs — and all of them arrive through the same faucets:

Material	Sources worth planning around
Warplane Component	Event redemptions (notably zombie-attack event exchanges), Alliance Bounty
Warplane Alloy	Alliance Bounty, events, packs
Warplane XP	Daily Benefits Card, events

The pattern to notice: warplane progress is event income. There's no farmable map tile for components — the pipeline is event participation plus Alliance Bounty plus daily claims, which means consistency is the whole strategy. The commanders with phase-maxed planes aren't the ones who grinded harder one weekend; they're the ones who didn't miss bounty windows for six months. Same compounding logic as everything else in this game, one more system deep.

And as with all material burns: spend inside scoring windows when a matching event phase or bounty task exists. Materials are points you haven't claimed yet.

Warplane Equipment: The Familiar Gamble

The later-added Warplane Equipment layer imports the rules veterans already know from Elite and Officer Equipment:

1. Green and blue pieces are not projects. Don't level them; they're placeholders.
2. Purple is where investment starts — build purple pieces honestly.
3. Gamble to gold/orange deliberately, with a failure budget, because quality upgrades in this game are coin-flips at the top end.
4. Rarity beats level: the community shorthand is that a level-2 orange piece outperforms a level-3 purple. When choosing where the next material goes, upgrade quality first, levels second.

If you've internalized the equipment economy from the officer gear grind, nothing here will surprise you — it's the same slot machine wearing a flight jacket.

Priorities by Stage

• Just unlocked the Airport: get every available plane slot filled — a plane at modest phase still buffs a march. Spread XP evenly until slots are full, then focus.
• Mid development: concentrate phases on the plane attached to your primary combat march. Your Void War marches deserve the Dodge plane; your gathering marches don't need one at all.
• Late game: warplane equipment becomes the marginal power frontier — run the purple-to-gold pipeline, and let Alliance Bounty pacing set your upgrade rhythm.

The honest summary: warplanes are a discipline check dressed as an aircraft. Claim the dailies, hit the bounties, spend in windows, and the phases take care of themselves.