Buildings and settlements

Placing Buildings

• The ghost clears the ground before you click: your influence, the slope under the footprint (15 degrees by default, 35 for a wall tower), blocked ground, roads crossing the plot and whether workers can reach the doors. Move or turn the ghost until the reason line clears instead of forcing a placement and fixing it later.
• Laying a foundation costs nothing, and the building is paid for as villagers carry its timber, ore, planks and metal to the site. Queue only what your haulers can feed, because an unfed site waits where it stands.
• A settlement allows one town centre and your god allows one Fanum, and the Fanum must stand outside every district on a plot that stays nearly level. Choose the Fanum’s plot early on flat open ground, and remember that trees inside a footprint are felled rather than blocking the site.
• The ghost snaps to a neighbouring ground level within 200 cm, to a matching neighbour at its own spacing, to a district edge for stairs and to street frontage, and holding Alt places free of the grid. Use the snaps so fronts face the street, and hold Alt when you want a deliberate off-grid position.
• Cards unlock permanently from the tier your settlement earns (tier 1 at 25 people, 25 beds, 1 storehouse, 1 workplace, 1 field and 2 food days, tier 2 at 60/60/2/3/2/2, tier 3 at 150/150/4/6/4/2), from research, and from answered prayers (a shrine needs 1, a temple 5 and sacred rank 2). Read the locked card’s requirement line, which names the one thing you are missing.

Sites, Builders and Goods

• A site’s progress can never pass the share of its bill that has arrived, counted by cost across timber, ore, planks and metal. Deliver the whole bill rather than piling one good beside a site, and read the town centre’s petitions, which say plainly when the sites are waiting on planks.
• Dropping a villager on a site makes them a Builder, and idle villagers also volunteer on a four second roll about a quarter of the time. Keep a few villagers without a trade, because a settlement where everyone is employed stalls its own building work.
• A site admits 3 volunteer builders (6 on a Roman-style site) and up to 8 haulers, but a builder you place yourself is never turned away. Assign villagers to a large or urgent building rather than waiting for volunteers.
• Roman-style buildings rise piece by piece on scaffold, with ladders, a crane and authored work spots, while other cards rise behind a dissolving shell. Watch the pieces appear and the scaffold come down to judge how far a big site has come.
• The god hand can hand carried goods straight into a site, and holding a press over the site adds builder labour, but labour cannot raise a site that is short of goods. Carry the missing material there first, then hold to hurry the rest.

Improvements and Repair

• Buildings wear: condition falls about 0.6 percent a day, up to 1.4 percent for the cheapest huts, and once it reaches 85 percent your builders open a repair by themselves for a bill of about a fifth of the build cost. Let those repairs run, because a finished repair restores full condition, full tools and any parts that had come loose.
• Condition and tools set a building’s efficiency, and the floor is 65 percent, so a neglected workshop produces a third less than a sound one. Repair before the number gets low, and keep a little metal aside for workshops, whose tools wear as they work.
• Each building can take one paid improvement from its own card: homes insulate for 45 percent less household fuel, workshops run 20 percent faster, storage holds half again as much, and every improvement cuts future wear by a third. Start it when the building is not mid-repair, and treat it as permanent, because a building accepts only one.
• Fire is the fastest way to lose a building: a burning building loses condition over 45 seconds, throws parts loose at three quarters, half and a quarter of its condition, and is destroyed at zero, and while it burns it gives no appeal or impressiveness. Douse it with water, and remember that a Fanum at its first tier or higher cannot be set alight at all. (In testing.)
• Demolishing a building returns half of what has been paid for it at its current progress, and a Fanum at its first tier or higher cannot be demolished. If a building has to move, demolish it early rather than after it has eaten its full bill.

Appeal and Impressiveness In testing

• Every finished building pushes or pulls the mood of the homes near it, fading to nothing at its own radius, and industry carries negative appeal that raises Sad in the homes it reaches. Keep workshops, mines and mills away from housing, and check each card’s appeal line before you place it.
• A home’s appeal is its comfort, minus crowding above the number of residents it is comfortable with, plus hardship if it is a poor dwelling, and no home counts more than 20 points. Do not fill a house past its comfortable number, because the extra residents cost the appeal that house was giving your town.
• While you are placing, the ghost shows a face over itself and a smile or frown over each home it would affect, refreshed once a second. Place with those faces rather than with the price alone.
• Some buildings offer visits such as bathing, water, trade or leisure, and the Fanum offers worship; a visit lifts mood or faith, a worship visit feeds belief, and a villager must wait out the cooldown before repeating the same kind of visit. Spread a few different places to visit among the homes instead of stacking copies of one building.
• Impressiveness is what a town is worth to onlookers: it counts a building’s positive appeal, its beds and its build cost, with fixed values for famous buildings (a Temple 6.5, a shrine 3.5, a Fanum 4 at the first tier rising to 15 at the third), and each repeat of the same card is worth less than the one before. Build a few different landmarks rather than rows of one, and read the total by hovering your town centre or Fanum or from the laurel that floats up when a building finishes.

The Fanum and Worship

• Your Fanum is your town centre: it is spawned finished and free beside the starting camp, facing it, and a settlement is allowed only one town centre. Build your first homes and streets around it, because worship, your belief cap and your settlement’s standing all hang on it.
• The Fanum is raised through three tiers by lifetime devotion, the second at 200 devotion and the third at 800, and each tier is a site that villagers must supply and build, with no way to cancel it once begun. Begin a tier when the goods are ready and no repair is pending, because the building runs only one work at a time.
• Each completed tier raises your belief cap, from 750 at the first tier to 1250 at the second and 2000 at the third, and the higher miracles need that standing, with the second tier of miracle needing the second Fanum tier and the third needing the third. Grow the Fanum before chasing expensive miracles, because the cap is what lets belief gather for them.
• Villagers go to the Fanum to worship, standing in rings around it, and every worship visit feeds belief and faith, with the devout keener than the rest. Keep homes within reach of the Fanum so the rings fill, and watch them fill as your population grows.
• Once the Fanum’s first tier stands it cannot be demolished, pulled down or set alight, and its beacon flame and pillar rise with your belief pool and its tier. Put it where you can hold the ground around it, and read the beacon as a gauge of how full your belief pool is.

Hamlets and Regard In testing

• Hamlets appear beside the roads without your help: six early on and about one more every six game days, up to twenty. Leave them their roads and their space, and they will keep growing into useful trading neighbours.
• A hamlet ranks up at 5, 10, 20, 40 and 60 households and never loses a rank it has reached, and each rank allows more quarters and better houses. Give a hamlet you want time rather than help, since it grows on its own.
• When every plot stands and the rank allows another quarter, a hamlet founds a whole new quarter with its own street and a spur to the nearest road, and a plot refused for bad ground is retired so growth moves on. Do not fence off or build over the ground a hamlet is likely to expand into, or you will stall its growth.
• Regard is the quiet way to win a hamlet: once a game day, the nearest town of each owner within 1500 m that leads the hamlet in impressiveness gains up to 0.12 regard a day, every other owner’s regard decays by 0.04, and at full regard the hamlet joins that owner’s nearest town. Your soldiers will not sack or take a neutral hamlet, so out-impress the rival rather than marching on it.
• Deeds move regard directly as well: a helpful deed is worth 0.03 regard and a fearful one 0.02, scaled up to three times by how forceful it was, and each trade load delivered to a hamlet adds 0.01 more. Do helpful deeds in a hamlet you want, and set an import or export rule for a good on the town page, because nothing trades while every good sits at none.

Ramparts and Gates

• A rampart is drawn rather than built: arm the wall card, click to plant the first tower, sweep the hand along the line you want and click again to pay for and commit the whole run at once. Check the cost in ore per length and per new tower in the hint strip before that second click, because the goods leave your stores the moment the run lands.
• A run snaps onto a standing tower within 16 m, and the tower at the end of a committed run becomes the start of your next run, with grade limited to 30 degrees and a single run to 400 m. Start at a standing tower and let the snap join the pieces, rather than lining two runs up by eye.
• A gate or postern is cut into a standing wall and then raised as a construction site by your builders, with its own bill of wood and ore, and the opening stays unfinished until that site completes. Give a gate the same priority as any building, because a wall with no finished opening shuts your own people out.
• A finished gate shuts itself when a hostile company comes within 40 m and opens again once it is past 50 m, holding its state for at least 10 seconds, and the gate’s own panel can lock it shut. Lock the gates facing a rival you expect to raid, and leave the ones your villagers use unlocked.
• A ring of wall with no opening only warns you that the wall has no gate, and no siege can breach a rampart or an old wall run; what falls is a town centre that soldiers hold, not the masonry. Keep an opening in every ring your people live inside, and keep soldiers near the centre an enemy would have to hold.

The Rival God

• The rival god is a whole second settlement: it founds plots, lays streets and walls a town with the same cards and roads you use, paid from its own stores, and its hand shows in the world as a light you can watch. Hover its town to read its people, houses, walls, stores, army and mood before deciding whether to trade time with it or fight it.
• Its anger is a ladder that only climbs: heat grows with the days it has lived and with the hostile deeds you commit in its land, and at 2 it taunts, at 5 it warns with a fire past your outermost building, at 9 it burns your outermost field, and at 12 by default it raids. Keep your deeds inside your own land while you are weak, because killing its villagers, throwing things and burning its buildings cost far more heat than quiet building. (In testing.)
• A raid never comes without a warning line and 90 seconds, and it picks the richest cluster of your buildings at least 100 m from a settlement centre, counting stored goods and doubling planks and tripling metal. Use the warning: move goods out of outlying stores, and put your soldiers where the warning points.
• If few defenders stand near an outlying town’s centre, the rival can take that town outright by holding the centre rather than only burning buildings, and it warns with a capture line first; your main town is never its capture target. Garrison the centres of outlying towns, and out-build the rival near them, because a town can also be won away by impressiveness without a fight. (In testing.)
• To take the rival’s town, hold its centre with at least 8 soldiers for 90 seconds while none of its companies are within 100 m, and expect an alarm, a levy of a quarter of its people (at least 8) and a fire that targets only soldiers every 30 seconds. Its walls cannot be breached, so plan to reach and hold the centre with a strong company rather than knocking the wall down.