Mechanics

Territory and score

Region

A city's region is the 1-step ring around its tile — 7 tiles including the city tile itself. A city founded at the edge of the board has no tiles off-board; that region is simply clipped.

The ring ignores terrain: mountain and water tiles inside it are part of the region too (buying a tile works the other way round — see below).

A region does two things:

1. The resource nodes inside it produce income (Economy).
2. Its tiles count toward score.

The two work independently, and the difference shows up during a revolt: a revolting city yields no income, but its region and population keep counting toward score (Victory conditions). Ownership transfers at once; the prize is only delayed.

How a region grows

There are three ways, and none of them is a building.

1. Found another city (Cities and population).
2. Population. Once a city reaches population 3, its ring widens to 2 steps — 19 tiles. It happens on its own and costs nothing: it is the second reward for investing in food. If population drops (conquest), the ring shrinks back.
3. Buy a tile with gold. You pay out of the treasury to add a tile next to your region. The first tile costs 6 gold, and every tile already bought by that city makes the next one 3 gold dearer — so pushing a border has to be deliberate (Gold).

A tile can be bought only if it is adjacent to your region (neither inside it nor far away), belongs to no region at all, and is passable — mountains and water cannot be bought. The reason is mechanical: resource nodes only ever sit on passable tiles, so an impassable tile yields nothing and holds no unit; buying one would purchase score and nothing else.

Bought tiles belong to the city, not the player: if the city changes hands, they go with it.

A neutral village has no region (Neutral village): it sits on the board like a city but claims none of the tiles around it. So a resource node beside a village yields to nobody, and a village takes no room out of your own region. The moment it becomes your city it turns into an ordinary one and its ring opens up.

When regions touch

Cities must stay 4 steps apart, but once rings widen, regions can touch — both between your own cities and against a rival. A contested tile has exactly one owner and counts once toward score. The order is:

1. A bought tile beats a ring. A tile you paid for is not swallowed because a neighbour's population grew.
2. Otherwise the closer city wins.
3. If the distance ties too, city identity order decides — the outcome is always deterministic.

The same rule applies to income: a resource node caught inside two of your rings produces once, for the city that owns the tile.

Score

The score bar is visible to everyone all match long. Fog hides positions, not the score: keeping the endgame race readable is a deliberate decision.

Ties are broken by population, then region, then gold, then seat order — the outcome is always deterministic. The last tiebreaker is the seating, not who opened the turn: the starting seat rotates every turn (The turn cycle) while the seating stays fixed all match.

The tiebreaker looks at the gold stock, not the gold score: the remainder that rounding down swallows reappears here.

Buildings can score too

The formula's last term comes from buildings, and its only carrier is the Monument. The other terms have a weight — a region tile, a point of population and a city each convert with a fixed multiplier. The building term has none: the contribution is written on the building's own stat block, so "how many points" is a property of the building, not of the term.

This term differs from the others in one more way: it can change hands. The Monument lives in a city, not in a player; when the city falls its buildings pass to the new owner, and on that same turn the score leaves the old owner's breakdown and joins the conqueror's. Region and population work the same way, but there the loss is gradual — with a Monument it is a single block.

The term also has no ceiling: "one Monument per empire" is a building rule (The production queue), not an ownership rule. Raise your own, conquer a rival's, and both count at once. Unlike gold this opens no hoarding channel: the term only grows by taking a rival's city, and that road already leads to ending the match.

The gold term rounds down

Three terms (region, population, cities) convert with a multiplier; gold converts by division: every 5 gold is worth 1 point, and the remainder does not count. A purse holding less than 5 gold is worth nothing at all when the match ends.

The asymmetry is deliberate. The other three terms are bound by the board: the city count by the quota (6), population by its ceiling (5), and the region by its ring — a grown ring holds at most 19 tiles per city, and only purchased tiles stack on top of that, each one dearer than the last. Gold pays nothing of the sort: the purse keeps growing on its own until the last turn. Without a rate, gold was the one term that asked nothing in return and carried the largest share of the score; the division turns it back into one term among four.

Division was chosen because you can check it in your head: "every 5 gold is 1 point" is a claim you can test against the score bar. This game's promise is that there are no hidden numbers — the same reason the combat preview is the real calculation (Combat).

How to read the score

Mind the weights: a single city is worth more than several region tiles on its own, and it brings a whole region ring and population along with it. Coming into the endgame, the fastest way to close a gap is not hoarding gold — it is founding one more city or taking a rival's. Spending that same gold on rushing almost always produces more points than leaving it in the purse.

How tile purchases score depends on the price: the cost rises with every tile bought, so early tiles are cheap and later ones dear. The real reasons to buy a tile are the resource node on it, border depth, or cutting a rival off (Gold).

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