Buildings

Monument

The Monument is the most expensive item that can enter a queue — no building and no unit costs more — and your empire can hold only one. The other buildings change a rule — income, HP, defense, vision, repair; the Monument gives score directly.

Its effects

• Score +12

The score stays in your breakdown for as long as the city holding the Monument is yours. It changes no rule: no income, no extra toughness, no vision. Its only job is to turn production into score (Territory and score).

One per empire

The limit is per player, not per city: if any of your cities has a Monument — or one waiting in its queue — you cannot queue a second one anywhere, and the command is rejected. Counting the queue is deliberate; otherwise queuing one in two cities on the same turn and finishing both would turn the rule into a race.

The Monument still occupies one of a city's 3 slots. So the decision has two layers: you hold one Monument's worth of entitlement, and you spend a slot in whichever city receives it.

Uniqueness is the Monument's only gate. It has no strategic-resource prerequisite like the Raider or the Siege — no building has one (The production queue). Queueing a Monument does not require finding anything on the map; the only thing you have to set aside is production.

When to build it

The Monument is a late-game building, and the reason is arithmetic. Before your city quota (6) fills up, the best use of production is another settler: for the cost of a Pioneer, the city it founds returns several times the Monument's score through city score, territory and population (Territory and score).

Once the quota is full, that door closes. Territory then grows through population and gold rather than production, and population grows through food — so production has no path to score left except conquest. The Monument fills exactly that gap: it is the one item that converts the production of an empire with a full quota, built-out slots and no appetite for war.

Capture it and the score changes hands

The Monument lives in a city, not in a player. When a city falls, its buildings pass to the new owner (Combat), so on that same turn the Monument's score leaves the old owner's breakdown and joins the conqueror's.

That has two consequences:

• Placing the Monument in a city far from the front, one that will not fall easily, is a real decision. Your capital is a good candidate: if it falls you are eliminated anyway.
• A captured Monument counts. Take a rival's and you can hold two, and both score — but you still cannot build a new one: uniqueness is a rule about building, not about holding.

Rivals build them too

The opposing AI only treats the Monument as a serious candidate once its city quota is full, and the personalities diverge here: for a The AI opponent with nowhere left to expand it is the most natural continuation, while for the one hunting attack opportunities it is the last choice.

The numbers on this page are read from the game’s balance tables.