Basic Gameplay : Upgrading and Expanding

Starting a campaign

When staring a campaign you'll first have to select a culture and a fraction -

Each Culture provides some bonus to you and each fraction in a culture have additional bonuses and penalties -

Select your favorite ones

You can see winning conditions by clicking on the small button with the trophy in the lower left of the group selection window

For this guide we will concentrate on the military winning conditions

You can also change the the settings for the game with the button left to the winning conditions button - like difficulty and how high the advisers help will be -

If you are ready - click start campaign-

The Game begins

After the first introducing to your empire you should normally get your first Mission from the senate- it is your first chance to gain some extra cash , to earn some more influence - and of course to expand your Empire - what this Guide is all about

Strategic Overview

This is the really first round of the game- you should first get an overview by opening the tactical map in the lower right - click on it -

You will see a map wich show you some basic information

Let me do a quick introducing - there are some of the information we'll need later in the game to expand more professional

1- Faction ownership

Here you can see the regions and provinces that your empire already owns - marked in your factions colour - and you can see the other nations territories - if you have uncovered them

2- Diplomatic Overview

Here you can see the diplomatic situation - wich shows you who are your enemies and who are your friends

3-Public order

This shows you in wich provices your public order is high or low

4-Wealth

This map shows you your provinces and wich gernerates high or low wealth - wich means high or low gold production

5-Growth

This map shows you how much the region is growing - and as you will see you need growing for expanding a lot

Upgrading Units

When you send some new units to some provinces where there are some special buidlings that will provide better armor or weopons to the units - you can see a small yellow arrow over your unit cards - then you can upgrade this units-

If you have an experienced army that youll use often you definatly should always upgrade them to the maximum

So here is what you can do to build a strong and dominating army

- upgrade your military recruiting buildings to recruit better unit

- build and upgrade some crafting buidlings like the weopons-smith or armour-smith to get better armour and weopon-strenght

- upgrade your units in provinces with smiths

What it brings:

+ Deffense value
+ Attack value

this will result in

+ killing more enemys
+ surviving troops
+ more Experience for the army and general

Making more money

The small hammer over an city means that you have enough growing in this province to expand one of your cities there -

To make some more money you can build some buildings that are generating wealth - that will brings you more gold but later in the game when you can upgrade this buildings they will reduce the public order - So you have to find a right balance between building wealth generating buildings and building public order generating buildings

Click the expand button and choose a building that generates wealth

You will notice that building this buildings will take some rounds- always keep that in mind that the process of generating additional wealth can be very long and difficult - because later it will reduce public order and you need to compensate that by building public-order generating buildings

Upgrading buildings

to upgrade buildings you only need gold and the required tech - that must be researched first
When you click on a city and a yellow arrow is on one of your buildings you can upgrade it what can bring you additional wealth ( wealth = gold )

What it brings

As you can see, investing in more wealth generating buildings is the best way to expand - you can follow your progress by using the wealth overview map - here you can see which regions need to be upgraded in generating more wealth

Agents

Agents are are very usefull- With them you could explore the map and this will bring you some advantages
like

- uncovering more factions
wich will give you a higher chance that they will offer a trade aggreement

- giving additional bonus to your armies when the agents is within the army
they can make an army more experienced or add additional movement range on the map

Destroy one faction at a time

You should always try to concentrate in one enemy faction at a time -
its much easier to make war with one nation than beeing in war with a dozen nations

You can destroy one faction completly -when its done- you can move on to next

The best thing you can do is to choose a faction that owns a complete province - and to occupy it

Dominate the world!

You can complete victory condition as you like - but i prefer to elimintate all other factions as long as i can - this is a dominating style and it works

Keep on destroying anything that lies between you and the goal to be one and only dominating Faction on the campaign map

Of course this will take some time but if you know the basic gameplay and how to raise your incoming to build more and better armies you should could do it with no greater problems.