Mechanics

The AI opponent

Opponents do not cheat. They use the same rules you do, see the same fog and play under the same resource constraints. Their decisions derive from the seed: the same seed and the same command sequence reproduce the same match.

Personalities

A personality is not a hidden behaviour script — it is a set of weights. A dynasty is a separate thing from personality: a separate layer that changes the rules. A rival takes its dynasty from its personality (see "Rival dynasty" below).

Fortification is one of the visible personality differences: the Expansionist never fortifies — an expansion army does not dig in, it walks.

The growth focus (Cities and population) is not an opponent difference: none of the three personalities sets a focus, so food follows the default rule — the least populous eligible city grows. The Defensive used to make its capital the focus, and measurement took that back. The rule has changed since: a city at the population cap can no longer receive food, so nothing flows into a full store any more (Food). The arm was measured again after that fix and the Defensive's win share still dropped — feeding one strong centre leaves the border cities small. That is why setting a focus is a tool in your hands; the opponent does not use it.

The opponent does see the cap: in a city whose population sits at the cap it wants the building that opens it more (Farm — the Yurt for a dynasty-bearing Expansionist — and Almshouse once the quota is full). When none of its cities can take food, its surplus goes to its granary too — the rule lives in one place for both sides.

Truce appetite (Diplomacy and truces) is the second visible difference: the Defensive pays for time, the Opportunist uses a truce to close one front, and the Expansionist never begs for peace — it accepts one when crushed but never offers. An opponent only weighs the force it sees: it never asks peace of a player it has not met.

Pact appetite is the third difference: how much each personality wants a partnership against the player in the lead varies (Diplomacy and truces). An opponent also carries a memory — it accepts neither peace nor a pact from a side that recently attacked it first.

Rival dynasty

The Rivals have dynasties switch at setup (on by default on the setup screen) decides whether rivals carry a dynasty. While it is on, each rival takes its dynasty from its personality:

A mixed rival's personality comes from the seed, so its dynasty comes from there too. This mapping is fixed and consumes no randomness; the same seed gives the same rival dynasties. With the switch off, rivals have no dynasty and play with the base rules. Bandits and neutral villages have no dynasty.

A rival's dynasty is not a cheat but a rule modifier you could pick yourself: the same effects, the same calculation. That is why the combat preview includes the rival's dynasty contribution too. A rival's dynasty does not depend on your choice: you pick your own dynasty, and the rival's comes from its personality.

The rival picks the dynasty's variant building itself: in place of the Farm, Walls or Market it was going to build comes the dynasty's building, and its score is computed with that building's own cost and effect; the personality weight stays the same as the base building's. So a Defensive rival with a dynasty wants a Citadel with the eagerness it has for Walls — and the Citadel's higher cost lowers the score.

What an opponent builds

When a city adds an item to its queue, it asks a single question: which item returns the most value per unit of production spent? The score is the personality's weight, scaled by a situational multiplier, divided by the item's cost — so a cheap item beats an expensive one unless the personality wants the expensive one distinctly more. The multiplier is a condition read off the board ("my city quota is full", "an enemy is near", "I know where a rival city is"), and it is what moves a personality from one item to the next. For the location-bound buildings (Farm, Workshop, Market; the dynasty variants Yurt and Inn follow the same path) the score is also multiplied by a location factor: the income the building would yield in that city, read through the very same income calculation the engine uses, divided by the building's middle income. So the opponent leans toward putting a Workshop in its forested city and a Market in its coastal one; it does not forbid the building in a city without matches, it just wants it less. The Pioneer's rising cost enters the same division: as the city count grows, the Pioneer's score drops on its own. The Pioneer's score is also multiplied by the match's remaining-turn share — (last turn − this turn) / last turn, the same share research uses: a settler is an investment that pays back in the turns after the city is founded, and a city founded near the end of the match does not see enough turns to repay its cost. So the opponent expands early, and wants the Pioneer less and less as the match nears its end. Units and buildings compete in the same queue (The production queue), so a city filling a building slot is a city not raising an army.

Here too the difference between personalities is not a hidden script but the result of their weights:

The prerequisite binds opponents too

The strategic resource rule (The production queue) applies to opponents exactly as it does to you: an opponent with no Horse pasture in its territory builds no Raider, and with no Iron deposit no Siege. It never even queues those items — it does not produce commands the engine would reject.

The shortage shows up in two ways:

The practical consequence is an opportunity for you: take an opponent's horse pasture or iron deposit first and you deny it not just income but a whole unit.

Research and imar buildings

The rival also does its research with science points (Research and the tech tree): the very same gain, cost and lock rules you use, with no separate path. It spends its points at the start of its plan each turn, before the production decisions — so a unit or building it unlocks can enter the queue the same turn. Since research no longer competes with units and buildings in a city queue, there is no gate such as the city quota or a production surplus either.

The decision comes from a score: for every available node, the weight the personality gives that branch is divided by the node's cost and multiplied by the hand's remaining turn share; the node with the highest score becomes the target. Because it is divided by cost, cheap tiers come first; the expensive tiers are reached only once the branch's weight rises. If its points cover the target, it buys it; if they do not, it buys nothing that turn and saves its points for that target — it does not buy a cheap node right away and delay the expensive target. The target is derived anew every turn; there is no stored plan. Every node in the grid carries content, and the nodes of imar, muhafaza, harp and the doctrine-free iskan branch can all be candidates. The mastery nodes (kanun, kapikulu, seferberlik) carry one more condition on top: they are only a candidate for a rival who has chosen their own branch's doctrine.

Wisdom is the last-resort candidate: it opens only when no node in the grid is available — once the tree is done, or the remaining nodes are closed off by doctrine; it is the only outlet for the points.

The three personalities do not choose a doctrine the same way: each one takes the doctrine that carries the highest score among the doctrine branches' weights, and there is no tie, because each personality has one branch distinctly ahead (Research and the tech tree). The personality that carries harp as its main branch and actually reaches all five of the branch's nodes is the Opportunist; it is also the one that chooses gaza and builds Forlorn Hope. You do not see a rival's point balance; only the doctrine it has taken appears, in the badge on the score strip.

Five imar buildings follow the same pattern: base zero, and the multiplier kicks in once the quota is full. None of the six gets built while an enemy is near — a border city produces soldiers, an interior city builds. The Bedesten's quota multiplier is higher than the other four buildings'; the Divan's base is above zero and it is already a candidate before the quota fills (Divan).

The iskan branch takes no part in the doctrine choice — tapu is not a doctrine — and its branch weight is the same for all three personalities. Its buildings follow the imar pattern too: base zero, kicking in once the quota is full; the Mill, Foundry and Land Registry are not built while an enemy is near. The Watchtower carries no such guard: it is a border city's building and stays a candidate with an enemy near.

The science victory and the seat closing in on a win

The Observatory is a candidate for the rival in the same pattern as the imar buildings: base zero, kicking in once the city quota is full, not built while an enemy is near. Its weight comes from the personality and differs across the three: the Defensive wants it most, the Expansionist least, and the Opportunist sits between them. Because its cost is high it behaves like a threshold — as long as the weight stays small, the rival never queues the Observatory at all. Since it cannot be rushed with gold, the rival builds it with production alone (Victory conditions).

The rival also tells apart the seat closing in on a win in its campaign target: the cities of a seat whose dominance counter is running, or that has queued the Observatory, are counted as more valuable when picking a target. This is not a leader multiplier; it marks whoever is advancing on a victory path, not whoever leads on score. The rival reads this from only two pieces of public information — the counter and the city where the Observatory is queued — and still picks its target among the cities it sees in its own fog. A city behind the fog is therefore never a target. All three personalities play this with the same weight: stopping a victory is not a personality stance.

How an opponent spends gold

An opponent can also finish the head of its queue with gold (Economy), and it pays the same rate you do — there is no separate price for it. It treats the decision as a trade: the gold in its purse turns into score at the end of the match (Gold), so rushing gives up points in exchange for turns saved. It prices those forfeited points with an internal rate separate from the scoreboard's, and the worth of a saved turn with a personality weight; both are identical for all three today. If the item would finish next turn anyway, none of them rush.

So all three personalities convert their purse into time — the Expansionist too. This is deliberate: a personality that never spent its gold piled up a large stock in the treasury, and that stock was written into the score as-is at the end of the match. What separates the personalities is not their appetite for rushing but what they put in the queue.

The production left over from a rival's empty queue or unused cap turns into gold at the start of the turn, just like yours (The production queue). A rival has no separate spending path for the converted gold: it spends it through the existing gates in this section, and whatever it does not spend is written into the score at the end of the match.

Gold has a second outlet: upgrading (Economy). An opponent upgrades a unit that the engine's upgrade gate leaves open — region, technology, strategic resource and gold all in order — at a moment of its own choosing. The decision is the same trade as rushing and uses the same personality weight: it upgrades if the production value of the generation gap covers the points the gold would have been worth. It never upgrades on the last turn of the match: a unit spends its turn taking up the new weapon, and would have no turn left to use it. When it runs a food deficit it does not wait for the engine to disband a unit by force; it disbands its lowest-value unit itself — value depends on the unit's cost, its health and how much the personality likes that type.

Difficulty

Difficulty means better decisions, not more resources:

Difficulty also sets how deep the production queue runs: when what a city can draw per turn exceeds the remaining cost of everything already queued, the opponent adds one more item, but never past the level's depth (Easy 1, Normal 2, Hard 3 items). When a queue finishes with a single item, the rest of the city's draw cap that turn goes unused and turns into gold (The production queue); the production is not lost, but it goes to no real item. Several items let the rule that passes the unused cap on to the next item work for opponents as well; only the cap left once the whole queue has finished turns into gold. Depth is a budget, not a personality trait: all three personalities play at the same depth, and the difference shows only in which item they pick.

Setup: every opponent is picked on its own

Personality and difficulty are chosen per opponent; the setup screen gives each opponent its own card. A card's personality options are the three personalities plus Mixed.

Mixed is the default. A mixed opponent's personality comes from the seed: the personality pool is shuffled with the match seed and handed out to the mixed opponents in order. Two consequences:

Pinning a personality does not constrain the deal: if you say "opponent 1 is Defensive, the rest mixed", one of the mixed ones may still come out Defensive.

Difficulty is not mixed — you pick each opponent's tier yourself. The tier a match is recorded under in your statistics is that of the hardest opponent at the table.

Threat indicator — "it sees you as a target"

An opponent's evaluation is readable on screen. A threat mark appears next to every opponent in the score strip: the intent's symbol, the intent's short text and, when it can be measured, the power ratio. Only the "it sees you as a target" state is drawn emphasised; colour says nothing on its own, the information is in the symbol and the text. The selection panel writes one rival card per opponent: its personality, its intent, the power ratio, whether the late-game wake-up is in effect and, underneath, an attitude line (how the rival sees you, and why; Diplomacy and truces) and an information line — whether you have a truce or pact with it (with the turns left, if so) and how many cities you know of.

The power ratio is, as far as you can see, your attack strength over its strength. Below 1 means you are the weaker side — and that is exactly what an opponent's evaluation rewards: it turns on whoever weakens and pays a counter-damage penalty for attacking the strong (Combat). But the ratio is not intent: being the weaker side does not mean the opponent is marching on you.

Intent is read from the opponent's real campaign target (see "An opponent comes with an army" below) — from the very target choice that drives its army, not from a separate guess. The line says one of four things:

The rival card's information line

Both halves of the line come only from information you already hold. The truce half is the diplomacy record: if there is a pact or a truce the turns left are written, otherwise it says "no truce". The city half is the count the fog lets through: only cities you have seen at least once are counted, a city you have never seen does not enter the number.

A city you saw and then left under the fog is counted too, but the line says so: "under fog, information may be old". Something about that city may have changed while you were not looking; the line does not guarantee its current state.

What the indicator does not say

The ratio and the intent rest only on the units you can see. An army behind the fog is not counted, so:

An opponent comes with an army

An opponent does not send its units one at a time; it plays as a pack. At the start of every turn it builds a danger map from the board its own fog shows: every tile within reach of an enemy unit it can see is dangerous. Only task-free units (scouts, Pioneers, support) avoid that map — walking into a dangerous tile costs as much as the damage that unit would deal, and personality scales the avoidance: Defensive avoids danger the most, Opportunist the least. A Pioneer also will not found a city on a dangerous tile. Army units do not avoid the map; they march on their target. An army inside the fog is not on the map; an opponent cannot know your unseen army. It knows a city only as it last saw it: it does not read the health of a tile it saw long ago. It does not know a resource node or a ruin on a tile it has never seen either; it only walks toward those on tiles it has seen.

Combat units take one of three tasks:

Pioneers, Scouts and support units do not join the army, and a wounded unit returns to its city. Target choice is weighted, with a tolerance band so it does not flip on small differences. Bandits do enter the danger map — walking in their reach is costly — but the army never picks them as a target (the bandits described below, see Bandit camp).

Opponents also play each other

In a three-opponent match there is a genuine three-way struggle; there is no permanent alliance. What opponents can form is a truce or a pact with a fixed length; a pact is aimed at the score leader and can be formed against you when you are the leader. Whoever weakens, the Opportunist turns on them.

Opponents offer each other truces too: the side that sees itself as weaker makes the offer. Acceptance can come from either of two reasons — the receiving side also sees itself as weaker, or it is dealing with 2 or more fronts at once. Because of the second one a stronger opponent comes to the table too: closing one front is how it turns its advantage on the other rival. The rules of truces and pacts, and the memory, are on its page (Diplomacy and truces).

An opponent can offer pacts to the others and to you as well; it does not form a partnership against a leader it does not know (has not seen, or whose city it does not know). While a pact lasts, the opponent that is a member of it values the pact target's cities more when choosing a campaign target; outside a pact it gives the leader no separate weight.

How an opponent answers event cards

Opponents get event cards at the same rhythm and answer them on their own turns (Mid-game events). It chooses by weighing the engine-calculated outcome of the two options with its personality's weights; on a tie the cautious option wins. Personalities can choose differently on the same card: on the Volunteers card the Expansionist takes the unit while the Opportunist and the Defensive prefer the gold; on the Public unrest card the Defensive does not risk the revolt and pays from the treasury, while the Expansionist and the Opportunist risk the revolt. An opponent's card and choice do not enter your report.

Neutral bandits are not rivals

There is one more side on the map besides your rivals: the bandits inside a Bandit camp. They carry no personality, have no difficulty tier, found no cities and never enter the scoreboard — they are not a fourth archetype alongside the three above.

Their behaviour fits in one sentence: they stay within a fixed ring of their camp, hit the weakest adjacent unit and never touch cities. When they walk, they close on the nearest unit without leaving that ring. There is no personality weight, no difficulty tier and no risk calculus — the whole test is one line: hit the weakest one. The threat indicator does not show them either: the indicator reads a rival's campaign intent, and a bandit has no campaign to read.

To the opponents, though, a bandit is an ordinary target: every neutral unit they can see goes into the combat calculation, and they strike when it pays (Combat). So clearing a camp is not necessarily your job — in some matches a neighbour does it.

The same holds for the Neutral village: a village is not a rival but a settlement that can be taken. Rivals do treat it as a target and take it by war — annexing one with gold is, today, the human player's decision alone.

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

© 2026 Parva Machina