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, turn 3 with the second… and then it comes back around to you.
• 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: the attacker is the side that takes the counter-damage (Combat), so whoever makes contact first pays for it — and with a fixed order that burden structurally landed on the same seat every match. 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.
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 answer one you were offered (Diplomacy and truces).
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. Only actions inside your vision are animated — the fog is never violated; everything else resolves instantly. The animation can be skipped.

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. An empty queue spends none of that turn's production.
• 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: an unfortified unit, or an unset growth focus (Cities and population), does not count as unfinished business. Both 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 expiry — truces 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 ends must be possible that turn.
2. Income — gold and production land in the pool. Cities in revolt contribute nothing (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.
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 lost; it lands in no store at all.
5. Healing — wounded units standing in your own territory recover HP.
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. Refresh — units get their movement and action back.
9. Fog — vision is recomputed; newly revealed tiles show up in the report.
10. Truce offer — the opponent whose turn begins may offer you a truce (Diplomacy and truces). The step sits last because the offer reads both the purse and the balance of power, and both were refreshed by now.

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).

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. 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.

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.