Mechanics

The turn cycle

Whoever opens the turn, the seating is fixed: you, then the opponents — in the order you laid their cards out on the setup screen. What changes is not the seating but where the turn starts: the starting seat shifts by one every turn.

• Turn 1 starts with you.
• Turn 2 starts with the first opponent; every turn after that starts with the next seat, and once every seat has opened a turn it comes back around to you. In a match with one opponent (two seats) turn 3 starts with you again.
• The cycle length equals the number of seats at the table; bandits hold no seat (Bandit camp).
• Eliminating an opponent does not shorten the cycle: the shift is counted over every seat, so a dead seat drops out of the order while the rhythm stays. Elimination changes who plays, not how long the cycle runs.

What you see as a player: on some turns, after you press "End turn" the opponents play twice (the rest of that turn plus the start of the new one) and your turn opens after them. The turn report still tells you what happened in one place. Waiting is symmetric across seats: over one cycle every seat gets the same long wait and the same short wait. With only one opponent at the table (a two-sided match) the rotation puts one side's two turns back to back — that too is symmetric, as the other side gets the same in the next cycle.

Why the order rotates: with a fixed order the same seat opened every turn, and moving first in the early turns is a structural difference. Rotating shares it across seats.

There was a second thing skewing seat shares, and it was the bigger one: your starting position on the board was tied to your seat number (Map and terrain). That has been fixed too. In AI-vs-AI measurements no seat now wins meaningfully above its expected share — the seat you sit in makes your match neither better nor worse.

Your opening turn 1 is still a deliberate choice: the game starts with your own move, and you decide whether to make contact — the opponent does whatever its evaluation tells it to.

One turn

1. Turn report. Resource income and spending, finished production, events. The report only lists what concerns you: your own income, production, growth, healing, rallying, promotions, routed and disbanded units, the event card that came to you and your choice (Mid-game events), and the battles you took part in — "Battle" if you attacked, "You were attacked" if you were the target. Public news is added on top: a city was founded, a city changed hands, a revolt, a capital moved, a seat's dominance counter advanced or reset, a seat queued the Observatory, a truce, a pact, a player was eliminated. Cities transferred when a capital falls are gathered into a single line (Victory conditions). A pact line names the members and the target together; if a pact was formed against you, you see it in the report. An offer for a pact that has not been accepted, though, is visible only to the player it was made to (Diplomacy and truces). An opponent's production, buildings and battles between opponents stay out — hearing about a clash behind the fog would give away where it happened. A line that is an opponent's doing also says who did it ("unknown" if it happened on a tile you could not see); pressing a line that has a tile moves the camera there, and the Journal tab next to the report keeps every report since the start of the match, turn by turn (Hotseat: taking turns on one device). The Standing tab shows the match's score curve before the match ends (Replay and score curve). Outside the report, a few important moments on your side — a promotion, researching a grid node from the tree (except Wisdom; the card appears at the moment of purchase and does not wait for the start of the turn), a reward from a ruin, a city conquest, a Monument; and also a rout, a revolt and a lost city — are announced by a single card that stays briefly and by their own sound. Two more warnings are aimed at your side: when a pact is formed against you and when a rival queues the science wonder (the wonder is a public victory race, see Victory conditions) a card appears; neither names who did it, the detail is in the report the card opens. The card relies on text, not colour, says "+N more" when there are several, and opens the report when pressed. An opponent's promotion, research or ruin produces no card; neither do a truce or pact being made or ending, an event card, or the dominance counter — those are report lines, and the event card has its own window. While the opponents' turn is being played back, or while the turn passes to another player on the same device, the card is held back: it appears once the playback ends or the curtain lifts, for the player whose turn it is.
2. Orders. Move units, adjust queues, found cities, start buildings, rush with gold, repair a damaged city with gold, add a tile to a region, offer an opponent a truce or a pact or answer one you were offered (Diplomacy and truces). If an event card has come to you, you can answer that too; if you leave it unanswered, the first option is applied at the end of the turn (Mid-game events).
3. End turn. Opponents play in order until it is your turn again — including the ones opening the next turn, when that is where the order goes. Opponent turns are played back step by step: each move is one step, and only what is inside your vision plays on screen; what happens behind the fog does not play, and the report only carries it as far as it concerns you. The board is locked while playback runs; a bar describes the current step in one sentence. Skip or Esc cuts playback short and applies the result at once; the Normal and Fast buttons change the speed even while playback runs. When playback ends the camera returns to where it was.

Playback is a presentation: it does not change the outcome. When you skip it, or set it to Off (a per-device setting, described on Getting started), the opponent turn jumps straight to its end and the turn report says the same thing. Playback is only set up when you press "End turn"; it does not exist when you continue from a save. In hands where an opponent turn runs long, Skip becomes the prominent button on the bar.

Bandits hold no seat, but they still move once per turn: their moves resolve the moment that turn's last seat closes its turn, just before the turn counter advances (Bandit camp). So a unit you left inside a camp's reach takes its hit before the order comes back to you.

Ending a turn asks about unfinished business

If something is still open when you press "End turn", the turn does not pass right away — the game lists it first:

• Cities with an empty production queue. The line names every city with an empty queue and says that its production will turn into gold at the start of the turn (The production queue). The production is not lost, but a unit or building you choose is usually worth more than gold; that is why there is a warning.
• Your science points are enough for a research. It appears on every turn in which your points are enough for at least one node of the tree (Wisdom included). Pressing the line opens the Research panel; buying is not automatic (Research and the tech tree).
• Units that still have a move. The test is not the movement points themselves but whether the board actually marks a target: a unit hemmed in on every side never makes the list, because there is nothing you could do with it.

What the list leaves out is deliberate too: a fortified unit, an unfortified unit, or an unset growth focus (Cities and population) does not count as unfinished business. A fortified unit stays out of the box every turn until you take it out of its position, which is your own decision — the box does not ask about it. An unfortified unit and an unset focus are valid moves every single turn, so including them would fill the box every turn and turn the warning into noise — and leaving the focus unset costs you nothing, because the default rule keeps working.

The list is a warning, not a gate. Pressing a row takes you there (the city panel opens, or the unit gets selected), skip next to it silences that entry for this turn only, and the button below ends the turn regardless. When nothing is open the box never appears and the turn passes straight through.

What the start of a turn resolves

When the turn comes back to you the engine runs these steps in this order, and the turn report reads in the same order:

1. Truce and pact expiry — truces and pacts whose time is up are lifted (Diplomacy and truces). It is the first thing the turn does, because the first attack of the turn a truce or pact ends must be possible that turn.
2. Income — gold is written to your purse and production builds this turn's pool; the science point gain is added in the same step (Research and the tech tree). Cities in revolt contribute nothing — for the owner of Law, a share of their normal income (Victory conditions).
3. Production — cities draw from the pool; finished items leave the queue. A city in revolt draws nothing and its queue waits where it is. The production left in the pool after the draw turns into gold (a remainder too small for one gold stays); the gold is written to the same turn's purse and is a separate line in the report (The production queue).
4. Food and population — a shortage disbands a unit; surplus food is written into the store of your growth focus city, or the least populous eligible city if no focus is set — or if the focused city is in revolt or at the population cap (Food). If no city qualifies — all of them in revolt or capped — that turn's surplus is written into your empire's granary, and whatever exceeds the granary's limit is lost. If an eligible city exists, the granary tops it up to its growth threshold (Cities and population).
5. Healing and rallying — wounded units standing in your own territory recover HP. In the same step units gather morale: one adjacent to an enemy gathers none, and one inside your territory gathers more than one outside it (Morale and rout).
6. City repair — damaged cities that are neither under siege nor in revolt recover HP (Cities and population).
7. Revolt counter — every revolting city counts down by one; a city that reaches zero produces again from the next turn on. The step sits here so that a 3-turn revolt really lasts 3 turns.
8. Dominance counter — if your share of the seats' total cities is at or above the threshold, your counter goes up by one; below it, it resets; when the counter fills, the match ends (Victory conditions). The step comes after the revolt counter, so the share is measured against ownership once the turn's flow has been processed.
9. Refresh — units get their movement and action back.
10. Fog — vision is recomputed; newly revealed tiles show up in the report.
11. Truce and pact offer — the opponent whose turn begins may offer you a truce; if no truce offer comes up, it may offer a pact. Both are never offered in the same turn, and no new offer is produced while one is pending (Diplomacy and truces). The step sits last because the truce offer reads both the purse and the balance of power, and both were refreshed by now.
12. Event — if your event turn has come (for the interval and window see Mid-game events) and there is a card whose condition holds, an event card is drawn for you. The step comes after the offer too, because the card's conditions read the current purse, population and revolt state, and the option's reward does not enter this turn's income.

Healing: tending wounds on your own soil

A wounded unit standing inside your own territory (your cities' rings plus any tiles you bought; see Territory and score) recovers 2 HP at the start of every turn — 2× that if it is fortified: 4 HP (Combat). If the tile the unit stands on is in the region of one of your own cities with a Hospital, 1 more HP is added on top of that — fortified or not, the contribution is the same, and it comes from the city that owns the tile.

Two things are deliberately left out:

• No conditions. What the unit did that turn does not matter; if it is in your territory, it heals. A rule you can state in one sentence beats a "did it rest last turn?" ledger you cannot see on screen. The reward for waiting lives in fortification instead.
• No healing outside your territory — the one exception is an adjacent Physician. An army raiding deep wears down, and pulling back becomes a real decision. Because combat power scales with the remaining HP ratio (Combat), a half-health army is half an army. The Physician's healing has no territory condition: as long as the Physician is not routed, friendly units next to it — routed ones included — regain 1 HP per turn even in the middle of a raiding column; inside your territory this adds on top of the above (Physician).

What a unit can do in a turn

• It moves up to its move points — until it steps next to an enemy unit: entering a zone of control ends the move on that tile (Combat).
• Attacking ends its turn. Move-then-attack is allowed; attack-then-move is not. Being halted by a zone of control does not cost the attack.
• Fortifying spends its remaining movement and its action; defense goes up and it heals faster inside your own territory (Combat).
• One unit per tile — friendly units do not stack either.

Undo

Move orders that trigger neither combat nor discovery can be undone; ending the turn cannot. Undo works by rewinding the command log, so it replays the game's own history — it is not a hidden save/load.

The shape of a match

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

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