Overview
Basic tips and tricks on progressing in the early stages of the game. I am no longer actively playing the game so this guide will probably not be updated with further information.
How to advance through the early game stages
At the start of the game you dont have a whole lot to work with, spam wheat fields and buy workers like you would in any other idle game. Resetting comes early in this game (availaible once you have built on every tile) and is important to advance with the game, for every 10 yield in resources you produce you will gain 1 gold on reset, gold yield is rounded down so aim for multiples of 10. Your aim here should be to buy additional tiles until the next one costs 100 gold.
At this point it makes sense to evaluate the value of the 4 basic structures:
Wheat fields, forest camps, farms and quarries.
The wheat fields and farms have a special interaction as farms increase the wheat fields worker yield by 1 for each worker in the farm. Since all buildings require wheat to increase their worker count you will need a combination of both as the base of your economy and as your primary source of gold at this point.
The forest camp is your source of wood, but requires purchasing 500 wood (10 gold) to set up after each reset. The only real use for this is getting access to farms and quarries, so 1 or 2 should be as far as you go buying these, they do feature cheap and fast recruitment upto about 40 workers so they can function as a gold source on fast resets early in the game to hit your first 100 gold.
Quarries are the way to unlock the next 4 buildings in the game and thus function as the first larger bottleneck in the game. 25 000 wheat is required for the first worker so rushing wood production is not advised here, since even the most basic tier 2 building requires 5000 stone and further investment of wheat. While essential for unlocking later buildings more than 1 or 2 would be a waste since space is limited and the yield can be improved significantly through schools later.
The progression here would be to use wheat fields to gain 10 gold, then build 1 or 2 wheat fields and buy 500 wood to build your first lumber camp and fill up your tiles with lumber camps which you level as far as possible before abdicating. Repeat this until you have unlocked your next tile for 100 gold and saved up at least another 10 gold. Then only build 1 lumber camp and switch to building a mix of farms and wheat fields. This way you should be able to generate gold rather quickly and gain 1000 gold for the next tile and with a bit of patience 10 000 for the one after that.
Tier 2 buildings
Once you have a bit of gold ( 720 gold at least for the next step) saved up and gained access to 7 or 8 tiles it is time to step into the higher tiers of buildings. After building the quarry we gain access to 4 new buildings: The temple, the school, the academy and the cathedral. Only the temple is necessary for our plans at this point but i will explain a bit about the buildings.
The temple grants access to a fourth resource: Faith. This resource can be used on temporary rituals for various bonuses or to unlock pantheons and religions, for additional bonuses.
The school works almost identical to the farm except for the much higher price of 100 000 wheat, wood and stone, the big advantage here is that the improved yield is not just wheat fields but also lumber camps and quarries, which is the only way to improve stone yields enough to buy the higher leveled buildings of this tier.
The academy is your new way to unlock new tiles, by hiring heroes to fight monsters and capturing tiles, this takes some time since heroes cost 5 million wheat each and can only kill about 6-7 monsters without improvements (100 monster kills to gain the first tile) each academy can only capture 1 tile per reset and their cost scales per academy, so keep that in mind.
The cathedral is similar to the farm and school, but improves the yield of temples instead, while also providing access to relics. While it is impractical to unlock many of the relics without this building, it is possible to do so with the right strategy, which will be covered later in this guide.
Faith, Pantheons and Religion
After building your first temple you will start accumulating faith, which grants you access to rituals and pantheons and eventually a religion and relics.
Rituals are an active way to improve some of your yields, recruit monks or automate/improve hiring. You can have all ritual effects active at the same time, but the ritual price will increase accordingly. The price of rituals also imrpoves with each use, so it is best to have all desired effects active at once instead of constantly switching. I personally always include the effect that grants free monks every 15 seconds since it can offset the scaling faith cost of rituals. An important thing to know about rituals is that each completed ritual increases the gold yield when abdicating by 10%, which adds up rather quickly. Each active effect also improves the base ritual time of 30 seconds by 5 seconds (35 minimum since at least one effect has to be selected), so less effects are better if you just want to improve your gold yield.
Pantheons all require you to pay an amount of faith to unlock and are required for picking a religion. The options are many but for the start there are two that will benefit us the most: Goddess of Nature and Sacred Path. These will help us generate even more faith and enable us to unlock a religion without too much effort.
Upon picking your first pantheon you will notice the option to turn it into your heritage for 500 gold, this will unlock it at the start of all future playthroughs and enable you to pick two pantheons at once. Sacred Path is my personal favorite for a heritage since it improves your faith gain by 5 per monk and is hard to unlock, you will most likely have to declare Goddess of Nature as your first heritage and then switch to Sacred Path on another playthrough since the 5 million faith cost will take a longer time to obtain with no improvement to faith gain than grinding 500 gold. Anyways get both in any order your like, your goal is the nature religion.
This religion works well with the Goddess of Nature pantheon since both require forests and temples. Get a good mix of both and invest into the first two abilities of the religion. This will improve both your faith per monk gain and vastly improve the yield of forests. The most important part here however is the improved ritual strength. With this ability you can add around 4-5 monks every 15 seconds to all your temples while the ritual is active. This makes it very easy to have more than 1000 monks per temple with each producing around 20 faith. This enables us to obtain enough faith to snatch all the basic relics as well as the forest one with minimal time investment, as a nice side effect the rituals and improved yields of forest tiles will add up to a rather nice gold bonus when you next abdicate.
Heroes and Capturing Tiles
Once you have gained a few tiles and were able to aquire a few relics its time to set your eyes on building your first academy. At 10 million stone it is advisable to rely on a school to increase your stone yield to get there quickly. Once the academy is built you will be able to recruit your first hero!
The hero is capable of capturing a new tile for you, provided he kills all the monster defending the tile. The amount of monsters is 100 for the first tile and increases exponentially. To do this effectively the hero needs a good combination of gear (since healing it costs 5 million wheat each time), which you can pick every time you send out your hero. Combinations vary depending on the hero class (unlocked through the Oni relic), at the start you will only have access to the Adventurer, but if you do have the relic already the Berserker is a superior choice especially up to 5000 tiles and even after that he remains excellent. The currently available classes are:
Adventurer: 100% more experience
Berserker: 200% more axe damage, 50% more damage for all other weapons, can kill 2 enemies if it has enough damage (must have damage > the combined HP, damage does not carry over), always at 0% evasion
Rogue: +25% evasion, double if capable of killing the enemy in 1 hit, no armor
Ronin: All items are free, gets 30 autoattacks per level (will heal and attack again on it’s own, still needs wheat to heal)
Which combination you use is pretty much up to you at the start (too many combinations to explain them all and differences are relatively low), but the best early combination comes when your hero reaches level 5 (levels are bought with wood and exp is gained for monster kills), pick the hammer that gains armor, the shield that blocks damage and the helmet that gives bonus damage per kill, with a berserker and oni religion bonus (most important is the last for extra life) you will be able to clear all monsters up to about 4000 with 1 hero.
Beginning of your empire
Once you have unlocked 15 tiles you will gain your first empire point, with these you can unlock abilities within one of the 6 empire themes. With 1 point only the most basic ability of each theme will be available to you. New points will be given after gaining another 15 tiles.
Although they are all great i personally think Russia has the best bonus, since it decreases both the scaling gold cost of tiles and the scaling amount of monsters that defend a tile, since heroes are the best way to expand at this stage of the game. Changing your bonus later will involve paying so you have to be careful with your choices, but the russian bonus is likely to be relevant at all stages of the game.
New continents await
Once you have unlocked 20 tiles the shape of your continent will be revealed to you, i do not have sufficient information to confirm this, but the layout of my continent was so that water always spawned 2 land tiles away from your bought tiles, so if this is indeed true the best way to buy tiles would be a straight line.
The goal at this point in the game is sailing to the next continent, which will enable us to get many boni like a gold modifier on abdications, great people (i have no information on those but one is needed to improve your hero weapons) and a way to reset your tiles while saving your empire points. To do this you will need a total of 25 tiles and 500 ships, the ships being the real challenge here.
Ships can be built on coastal tiles, you will first need to buy a shipyard for 600k wood and the hire ships like workers (initial price 40k wood). Ships are an amazing thing to get early after each abdication since they provide a good mix of resources. The yield per second per ship is:
1000 Wheat, 100 Wood, 10 Stone, 1 Gold
To gain 500 ships you will need a huge amount of wood, at 80 ships a new one will already cost you over 1 billion wood, so you will probably need at least 5 shore tiles, more realistically however you will need 6 tiles. This is why a straight shoreline is so essential, you will just need to get 1 tile to get to the shore and then you will be able to buy only shore tiles without wasting your resources on inland tiles. Shore tiles can also construct all other buildings so there is no drawback to this strategy.
For those wondering how they are supposed to get more tiles at this point since the cost will already be quite high, dont worry, building ships unlocks international trade, which allows the purchase of specialists, for an increasing gold cost these can halve the cost of: Tile purchases, hiring time, religion perks and hero healing. They persist between abdications so you will be able to gain new tiles relatively quick (comparatively at least).