It seems that you did not buy daily chest buy you are able to max Charles soon, that is brilliant. Did you put many universal sculptures into Charles, or you win a lot of MGE (Charles season).

Well there are many approaches of playing this game.
1. Some F2P would only focus on one Legendary Commander at a time until expertised. With that you can have a powerful commander for attack/defense (but only ONE queue). But you know that this game has been a while (almost 500 days). Many high spenders already have 5 queues of maxed Legendary Commanders. You can't even tank or win them. Of course, if 1vs1 is another story.

2. Some like to at least 5111/5511 more must-have Legendary Commanders for more attack/defense queues. With that, you can explore and use all the new Legendary Commanders. You can swarm them with 5 queues of usable Legendary Commanders and probably win the attack.

3. Some think that this game would not last long and it's impossible to max another Legendary Commander even with vip10/12. Why not enjoy with other Legendary Commanders. Who knows maybe you will max them after trying them.

You need 640 gold heads for Richard, that is like 1 year or 2 years for VIP12 and VIP10 respectively. Of course, you have other sources of gold heads.

Must have commanders: Richard, YSG, Alexander, Khan, and Edward (from a website). It could change from time to time.

Who do you pair with Sun Tzu, Pelagius, and Hermann? Are they level 60 expertised? From the gold chest, do you have Cao2?

We shall expertise all Epic Commanders as much as possible if we can't get many Legendary Commanders. We can pair Epic with Epic or Epic with Legendary, they are totally fine i.e. Pelagius/Baibars, Pelagius/Belisarius, Pelagius/Cao2, Hermann/Kusunoki, Hermann/YSG, Sun Tzu/Eulji, Sun Tzu/Richard, etc.

If you watch Youtube, someone did a video of top3 5111 Legendary Commanders, Richard is one of them.
YSG is very good if you manage to get him expertised due to circular-shape aoe. But as a F2P, it's kinda long to get him done.

I came from kingdom where YSG is not in the gold key. Thus, I'm happy that my YSG is 5511 now. I even try Khan with 5111 which I'm regretting now as the second will get me killed. And the 3rd and 4th skills are contradicting. I'm like you with Richard 5221, and I wanna try Alex 5511 now, maybe in 1 month time. I don't have goal to max them as I'm in top 32 kingdoms. And it's not fun to play in dead kingdoms even though you can win MGE.

To go full defensive is that mean you max Richard? You might lost the fun without other Legendary Commanders to play with you. So it really depend of yourself. Of course F2P (real F2P) could get few expertised Legendary Commanders. In your case, Charles/Richard/YSG?

1030 1293 many malaysian

my kingdom 1280 also have some, and the king is malaysian