Map and founding villages
The world is a map of 100 × 100 tiles. It has plains, forests, rocky tiles, mountains, fertile tiles, rivers with bridges and obstacles. A river or an obstacle stops a march — you cross a river only by a bridge. You cannot found a village on a river, a bridge or an obstacle. Coordinates you click in the game always take you to that place on the map.
Founding villages
- A new village is founded by a settler trained in the castle. You send them to a free tile and choose the village's name and type in the sending window.
- Founding costs 300 wood, stone, iron and food, taken when the settler sets out. If the tile is taken before the settler arrives, the resources are lost.
- You can have 2 villages plus one more per Palace level. Villages you occupy also take a place, and your own village under occupation frees one.
- You choose a village's type once and cannot change it later.
Village types
- Capital — the standard type: it builds and trains everything except production buildings and has a steady resource income. A capital cannot be conquered.
- Garrison — training in the barracks and the stable takes half as long. It produces no resources — it lives on deliveries from economic villages.
- Economic village — produces resources on the production spots of its tile and splits them between the capital and other villages. It can have a wall but does not train troops.
- Trading post — a trade route node. You can found one only within 10 tiles of another trading post (the world has its own grid of posts from the start). It does not train troops, it cannot be conquered, and foreign armies pass through it without a fight. It can be plundered as usual.
Production and its split are described on Production and economy, trade on Trade.
Moving the capital
You can move the capital to a garrison or to an economic village without production buildings — not to a trading post or to a village under occupation. The old capital becomes an economic village: its barracks, stable and castle disappear and their training queues are lost. Troops, settlers and support stay where they are. The Palace moves together with the capital. You can move it again after a day (sooner in faster worlds).
The tile of an economic village
A tile's terrain sets how many production spots an economic village has and for which buildings. The numbers shown on the map are the visible profile:
| Tile | Tree nursery | Quarry | Iron Mine | Mill | Any | Gold mine | Total |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Forest | 4 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 7 |
| Rocky | 1 | 4 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 7 |
| Mountains | 1 | 1 | 4 | 1 | 0 | 0 | 7 |
| Fertile | 1 | 1 | 1 | 4 | 0 | 0 | 7 |
| Plains | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 0 | 5 |
| Next to a river (extra) | +1 | ||||||
| Gold field (mountains) (extra) | +1 |
The real profile can differ: each kind of spot by at most 2 up or down, but a type shown on the map never drops to zero. "Any" spots and the gold mine do not change. You learn the real profile after founding the village or with the Surveying research. The map has 4 to 6 gold fields, always in the mountains and far from each other.
Bandits
- Bandit camps stand in various places on the map. Their crews grow over time, up to three times the starting size.
- For defeating a camp you get half the iron and food it would cost to train the defeated crew, the same amount of wood and stone, and a fixed bonus of 2,000 of each resource. Whatever does not fit in storage goes to the stash — the stash loses 4% of its contents per hour, so it is worth emptying.
- A defeated camp appears again somewhere else.
- There is one Bandit King per world. Whoever defeats him wins the world — the game ends.