Your first day

What you start with

Your first province is your capital. It starts with a full set of buildings: town hall, lumbermill, iron mine, stone quarry, farm, houses, university, temple, town centre, castle, warehouse, barracks, archery range and stable.

Resource	Amount
Wood	12,000
Iron	10,000
Stone	10,000
Gold	10,000
Population	7,500

You also get a small army: 100 swordsmen, 100 archers and one spy.

For your first 7 days you are under beginner protection. Nobody can attack you, and you cannot attack anyone. See Protection and inactivity.

Step 1: Put your people to work

Your people start idle. Idle people produce nothing and pay no tax, so this is the most important first step.

Click your lumbermill, iron mine and stone quarry in the town and hire workers. Every 100 workers produce, per hour:

Building	Produces
Lumbermill	20 wood
Iron mine	4 iron
Stone quarry	10 stone

Each building has a limited number of seats for workers. A level 1 building seats 275, and every level adds more. Once you rule more than one province, Assign workers lets you staff all of them in one place, and Optimal production splits each province's people evenly across the three buildings.

Step 2: Set your tax

You start tax free. Tax is your gold income, and only working people pay it. Click the tax in the top bar to change it. Higher tax brings more gold and makes your people less happy:

• Tax free pays nothing and adds 5 to the happiness target.
• Very high pays 10 gold per 100 workers per hour and takes 75 from the happiness target.

Gold pays your army's upkeep: every soldier in the field costs gold each hour.

Step 3: Queue buildings

Click the town hall to open construction. Buildings are split into two tabs, Economy and Military. Each tab has its own queue:

• 4 slots per queue.
• 2 jobs build at the same time. The rest wait their turn.
• A job that takes less than 10 minutes shows Instant. Click it to finish right away at no extra cost.
• Cancelling a job returns 50% of what you paid.

Good first picks are your mills for production, houses so your population can keep growing, and a bigger warehouse. At level 1 the warehouse holds 50,000 of each resource, and a store that is full stops growing.

Step 4: Start research

Click the university to research. Research makes your whole empire better: faster building, stronger troops, better trade. It has the same two tabs and the same queue rules as construction.

Step 5: Open a chest

The temple gives you a free chest every 12 hours. Chests hold resources, troops or happiness. The town shows Chest ready over the temple when one is waiting.

Step 6: Follow the starting guide

Open Quests from the left rail. Your first quests are the starting guide: 30 short steps, one at a time, that walk you through the whole game. Every step you finish pays a reward:

Chapter	Steps	Reward for each step
1. Running the town	10	1,500 400 1,000 1,000
2. Growing it	10	4,000 1,000 3,000 4,000
3. Defending and expanding	10	10,000 2,500 8,000 10,000

When the last step is done, the regular quests open. Those are goals in four categories, Economy, Military, Realm and Alliance, each with several grades. Reach a grade and press Get reward.

About your army

Newly trained troops wait 3 days before they join your army. While they wait, they cannot fight, cannot be killed and cost no upkeep. Your starting army begins in this waiting period.

When the time is up they join your army on their own. You can also press Mobilize to bring them in early. From then on they cost gold every hour.