The field manual
How the world works
Every number on this page is the game's own — read straight from its configuration, the same way the in-game Codex reads it. When the game is rebalanced, this page changes with it.
Population & Food
- People are your workforce
- A city works one tile for every 2 citizens it has. Own more ground than you have people and the extra tiles sit idle — the Land tab shows which.
- Everyone eats
- Food upkeep is 1 flat plus 0.02 per citizen, every tick. Fields are always staffed to appetite first, so labour caps your surplus, never your dinner.
- Growth needs surplus, not survival
- A city grows only while food production exceeds upkeep by 25%. Base growth is 0.01% per tick — a fed city roughly doubles in a day and a half.
- Small cities rebound fast
- Below 60 citizens, being fed at all is enough, and growth is multiplied by up to 24×, fading to normal at the threshold. A shattered city recovers in hours, not days.
- Starvation is a day-scale death
- Out of food, a city loses 0.02% of its people per tick (at least 0.005), halving in about half a day. Unrelieved, it collapses.
- Fat cities are trimmed
- A city already sitting at zero net food drifts back down toward the surplus line at 0.2% per tick. Feed it or it shrinks to what it can feed.
- Soldiers are people
- Every unit costs its size in population when it finishes, and refuses to recruit if the city can't spare them. Demobilizing returns 80% of them.
- A new city starts at
- 20–40 citizens.
Land & Economy
- Extraction
- Each worked tile yields its biome's table × 0.05 per tick. Extraction buildings multiply their own tile's target resource by 2.5.
- Plains
- 3 food per worked tile
- Coast
- 2 food, 1 gold per worked tile
- Forest
- 1 food, 3 wood per worked tile
- Hills
- 2 stone, 1 iron per worked tile
- Mountains
- 2 stone, 2 iron per worked tile
- Warehouse cap
- 5000 per resource. A Granary lifts the food cap only — stockpile to outlast a siege.
- Who works what
- The governor staffs food tiles first, then fills the rest by your Focus pick, which pulls 3× harder toward its resource. Pin a tile by clicking it on the map and it is worked no matter what.
- A floor under the workforce
- Below 5 workers a settlement always has hands for that many tiles, so a husk can still feed itself back up.
- Raided land heals
- Plundered tiles recover 1 yield point per tick back to 100. A raid costs the victim time, not permanent ground.
- Outposts claim ground
- An Outpost takes the 2 hexes around it and can be raised up to 4 hexes outside your border — the only way to take land without founding a city.
- Settlers get dearer
- Each city you already hold multiplies the next settler's cost by 0.5 — city #3 costs twice city #1. Sprawl is priced.
Cities & Queues
- Two lanes, not one
- Construction and Training are separate queues. They run at the same time and never block each other.
- Pay as you go
- Nothing is charged up front. The item at the head of each queue draws its cost spread over its build time — run dry and it STALLS where it stands until income catches up. Nothing is lost.
- Reorder or cancel freely
- The ▲ ▼ buttons move an item; ✕ cancels it. Whatever it has already drawn is spent, so cancel early.
- Claim radius
- Tier 1 claims 3 hexes, and every tier adds one more ring.
- Tier is bought, not earned
- Tier rises only through a Tier Invest project: 6h, cost × current tier, and it is gated on population — 50, 120, 300, 700 citizens for tiers 2, 3, 4, 5. Tier never drops.
- Each tier picks a governance branch
- Military, economic, population or vision. Investing off your established branch costs extra gold, so a realm develops a character.
- Stack cap
- A city fields 15 units per stack, rising to 25 through military picks (+3 each). Settlers and wagons are exempt.
War & Siege
- You must declare war
- Realms start neutral. No attack lands until you declare — and an ally cannot be attacked at all.
- Sieges are timed by tier
- Ringed and cut off, a city falls in 10h / 20h / 1.7 days / 3.0 days / 3.0 days for tiers 1–5. A frontier holding can fall overnight; a core city takes days.
- Or storm it early
- Once a siege is 12.5% of the way through you may assault instead of waiting — faster, and much bloodier. A Keep adds 200 wall HP to break through, a Garrison Wall 120.
- Walls defend
- A Keep adds 50 to the garrison's strength while besieged, a Garrison Wall 30.
- You must actually surround it
- A besieging force has to hold at least 50% of the ring around the city. One stack parked next to it is not a siege.
- Capture keeps the city
- Taking a city costs it 30% of its people, and the rest is yours.
- Razing takes time
- Burning a finished structure (an outpost, a road) means standing on it for 10m without leaving; half-built work goes in 3m. Cities themselves cannot be razed — capture is the only way to take one.
- Field battles give you a deploy phase
- When you are watching, a fight pauses for 10m of world time so you can place your line before it joins.
- Armies eat on the march
- Outside your own territory a stack lives off what it carries and what wagons bring to a Supply Depot. Starve and it withers in the field.
- Mercenaries stand in camps
- March an army beside a neutral mercenary camp to hire: 60 gold and 0.15/tick after.
The Round
- How you win
- Most territory when the clock runs out wins. That is the whole victory condition — the score on the standings board is tiles held.
- Round length
- 7.0 days of real time. A tick is 15 seconds, and the world runs whether you are watching or not.
- Ground counts three ways
- Tiles your cities claim, tiles your outposts claim, and neutral ground within 1 hex of a standing army of yours. Marching claims nothing permanently — plant an outpost.
- It is a persistent world
- Nothing waits for you. Leave a city undefended overnight and it can be gone by morning, though a core holding takes days to crack.