How the game works

Time is the currency

Everything in Hinterkeep takes time. Buildings take hours or days, research takes longer, and armies march in real minutes. Nothing needs you to click to collect it: production and growth add up on their own, and a job finishes on time whether you are online or not.

Provinces and your empire

A province is one town on the map. Your first province is your capital, and your empire is every province you rule. You gain more provinces by annexing empty land next to your own. See The world.

Each province has its own buildings, people, army and stores of wood, iron and stone. Gold is shared by your whole empire.

Resources

Resource	Where it comes from	Worth in gold
Wood	Lumbermill workers	0.5
Iron	Iron mine workers	2.5
Stone	Stone quarry workers	1
Gold	Tax on working people	1

"Worth in gold" is how the game compares resources when it counts your points and prices rewards.

Production gets bonuses on top of your workers:

• Your capital produces +10% more.
• Every castle level adds +5%.
• Terrain matters. Forests favour wood, mountains favour iron and stone, and plains give bigger farms with a little less of everything else.

People

People are the base of everything. They work your mills, pay your tax and become your soldiers.

• Houses set how many people a province can hold. Level 1 holds 11,400. When housing is full, growth stops.
• Farms set how many people a province can feed. Past that, growth slows down the further you go, and it never stops completely.
• Your population grows every hour while there is room.

Happiness

Every province has a happiness score from 0 to 120. A new province starts at 100.

• Above 100, every point speeds up growth by +1%, up to +20% at the top.
• Below 50, people leave. The population falls by 0.5% every hour until happiness recovers.

The happiness target

Happiness moves step by step. Every province has a target, and happiness moves toward it by 2 points each hour.

The target starts at 100. Then:

• Tax is the big lever. Tax free raises the target, every higher level lowers it.
• Your castle, temple, university and a garrison at home each add a few points.
• Your capital adds 20.

Short boosts move the target for a while. A feast, a happiness chest, a won battle or a new castle level raise it. Recruiting soldiers, a lost battle or being pillaged lower it. A feast lasts 12 hours, the others 1 day.

Points

Your points measure the size of your empire. Every 400 gold worth of resources you spend on buildings, research and troops adds 1 point. What you spend on soldiers counts ×2.

Points decide your place in the ranking, and they decide who you can attack: players far bigger or smaller than you are out of range. Your alliance's points are the total of its members' points.

Fighting earns you military points and changes your honor. Both are covered in The military.