TunaWars

Welcome to TunaWars

TunaWars is a turn-based strategy game of the ancient Mediterranean — the age of the Peloponnesian War through the wars of Alexander’s Successors. You rule one nation among many: Hellenic cities and their triremes, Macedon’s pike phalanxes, Rome’s early legions, Carthage’s elephants, Persia’s cataphracts, Celtic sea-raiders, Scythian horse nomads, Numidian light horse, Iberian hill-fighters and the archers of Nubia. Expand your cities, work your land, feed your armies, out-scheme your rivals, and lead them to a conquest — or outscore everyone when time runs out.

Download on the App Store

For iPhone, iPad and Mac (iOS and macOS 27 or later). The complete game — every age, scenario and seat — with nothing to buy inside.

The TunaWars board on a Mac: painted hexes, cities, armies and roads The same board on an iPhone
The board on a Mac and an iPhone, in The Mithridatic Wars of the Late Roman Republic. Tap a hex to read it; the dock along the foot opens the Strategika, Chronicles and your desks, and End Turn sits beneath it.

Five things make TunaWars feel different from other 4X games:

Everyone moves at once. You give standing orders — marches, stances, recruits, trades — then end your turn, and every nation’s orders resolve together. There is no waiting for your opponent’s go: the game is about committing to a plan under uncertainty.

News travels by courier — and so do your orders. Word of a distant battle physically rides from where it happened to your capital. Far-off events reach your chronicle turns late, marked “As of ~N turns ago — news travels by courier” — and your commands ride back out the same way. Roads aren’t just for marching: they are how you govern.

Armies eat. Grain doesn’t teleport. Your nation’s stores sit in a physical supply depot, your produce travels there by cart, and an army in the field must be able to trace a line home to it. Cut that line and the army starves whether or not it ever loses a battle.

The world remembers. Rival nations bear grudges for lost land and lost battles, rulers and generals have hidden characters your wars slowly reveal, beaten enemies submit and scheme for independence, and in an endless campaign your own dynasty ages, dies, and passes the crown on.

Taking a city and keeping it are two different wars. A conquered city has a populace with its own loyalties; hold it badly and it revolts or defects to a neighbor. And an empire outruns its couriers — so a distant frontier can be handed to a satrap who governs it in your name, for good or ill. Winning the map is one thing; ruling it is another.

Beyond the Classical world lie six more ages — the Early Bronze Age of Sumer and Akkad, an age with no horse, the chariot kingdoms of the Late Bronze Age, the Archaic age of Assyria, Phoenicia and the rise of Persia, the Late Roman Republic of Marius, Sulla, Pompey and Caesar, the Age of Migrations of the late Empire, the Goths and the Huns, and the Dark Ages, an age of legend with no sorcery in it (see The Ages). And a throne is not the only seat: you may instead govern one province of another king’s realm as his Satrap, run a merchant house with no land at all as a Trader, or captain a free company as a Mercenary, selling its swords to the realms for a term — in the Late Republic, if you like, as pirates (see Satrapies, Merchant houses and the Trader and The free company). And if you are new, the Paideia teaches the game in ten short lessons from history (see The Paideia).

TunaWars runs on macOS and iOS (version 27 or later), with async multiplayer over Game Center — and hosted play-by-post matches you play from any browser.

Using this guide

This page is the full player’s guide to TunaWars. You don’t need to read it before you play — the Paideia teaches the game through lessons from history, and the in-game Strategika handbook explains every rule with your own world’s live numbers. Come here when you want the whole picture in one place.

New to the game? Read Getting Started, then The Campaign Turn and Supply, Depots & Plunder — those three explain most of what will surprise you in your first campaign. Dip into the rest as each part of the game comes up, and keep the Quick Reference at the end for numbers.

Every number in this guide is a default: a world’s Tuning can change any of them, and a shorter game scales prices and waiting times (see Pick a world). When the guide and the Strategika disagree about your world, the Strategika is right.

The Ages

Every world is set in an age, chosen once when you create it and stamped on the world for good. An age is the whole cast: which peoples take the field, the troops they raise, the ships they sail, the names of the seasons, even the look of the map. The rules of war in this guide hold across every age — what changes is who fights and with what.

The Classical World — the whole game as described in this guide. The age of the hoplite phalanx and the citizen legion, from the Successor kings to the rise of Rome around the Middle Sea. Thirteen peoples contend (see The World), across seven historical scenarios and random worlds. The battle line is the massed spear, cavalry the decisive wing, the sea belongs to the trireme and the great polyremes, and the year runs Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter.

The Late Bronze Age — the age of chariots, palaces and the tin roads, set around the eastern Mediterranean in the last century before the great Collapse. Nine palace kingdoms contend — New Kingdom Egypt, the Hittites of Hatti, Assyria, Babylon, chariot-aristocratic Mitanni, Mycenae, Alashiya, Kush and Elam. Here the mass of an army is foot, not horse; the chariot is the arm of decision — devastating on open ground, near-useless in the hills — and the sea belongs to the bronze galley, and to the heavier palace galley of Egypt, Mycenae and Alashiya that outfights it by boarding. A people’s finest troops — the Maryannu chariotry, the Boar-Tusk Champions, the Sherden Guard — are few, capped so no realm fields them by the score. Bronze is the point: metal is rare, remote and clustered on the copper island and the far tin-road edges, so every bronze unit is metals-expensive and losing the tin road doesn’t starve you — it stops you replacing armies. Horses are scarce here too: pasture is thin on the ground outside Mitanni’s own herds, so chariotry and cavalry are priced by a real shortage and not merely by silver — and every chariot costs gold besides. Bronze is copper and tin, and this is the age that arms in it: every fighting company asks one to three tin beside its copper (the palace elites and the chariots the most), and tin lies far from home — a mine on ground no city claims, as far from every capital as the world allows — while copper is found near every city. A company raised without its tin is armed in copper and fights a fifth worse until it is re-armed (see Armies & Units). The palace owns the whole harvest here (see The people’s share), silver goes by weight, so a sale at a market pays only 40% of the price and tribute goes in kind; the court’s merchant is the Tamkar, the palace’s own merchant house the Palace Tamkar, the luxury of the age is incense, and a gift between two great kings asks a gift in return (see Diplomacy). Slaves work the palace workshops here, and a palace with gold to spare can post its merchants beside a foreign city (see Diplomacy). The seasons are the farmer’s year: Sowing, Drought, Harvest, Flood. Its agent abroad is the envoy rather than the spy (same rules, era-correct name), and three historical scenarios ship alongside random worlds — The Amarna Age (seven great kingdoms), Ahhiyawa (a small, naval, raid-heavy Aegean), and The Trojan War, a scenario of asymmetric aims where a coalition sails to take one prized citadel — Wilusa (Troy). The scenario names The War’s Aim for each side: the Achaeans must take Wilusa and hold it for three turns — a city held by a realm of their league counts — by turn 60, or Troy wins; a majority of the world’s cities does not end this war, and every court pursues its side’s aim (see Victory). Wilusa is worth many ordinary cities in the final reckoning, and in this scenario it cannot be stormed at all: its walls stand at full height and no people seated here brings the engines that could bring them down. Only a naval blockade can starve it out — the beached-ships siege of the epic.

The Collapse. Every Late Bronze world can carry a scheduled Collapse (on by default, set only at creation): a doom seeded a hundred-odd turns out. First come turns of public portents — refugees, drifting grain prices, darkening advisor lines that every nation can read — then onset: the Sea Peoples, a cityless raider horde, fall on the coasts in waves while the tin roads shut (the tin mines yield nothing through the aftershock), harvests fail, and vassal loyalty everywhere takes a lasting shock that sets revolts cascading. Nothing is scripted beyond the shock itself — no forced defeat, no scripted ruin. The simulation plays it out, and surviving it well is the endgame.

The Archaic Era — from the Assyrian empire to the rise of Persia, about 1150 to 539 BC: a world rebuilding on the ruins of the palaces, around the Near East and out across the Middle Sea. Its own eleven peoples contend beside the Greeks, the Italic and Iberian peoples, the Celts and the tribes: Assyria, with a standing army, armored horse, chariots and the ram; Chaldean Babylon; the Medes and Persians with their Immortals; Phoenicia’s merchant cities and galleys; Lydia and its horse; Urartu in its mountains; Elam; Saite Egypt and Kush, both peoples of the bow; Aram — Damascus, Israel and Judah; and Scythia’s horse-archer camps. Assyria, Babylon and the Medes move conquered peoples at half the price anyone else pays, and Assyria’s conquests sit uneasily — a city Assyria takes rests well below the loyalty another conqueror’s would. The Assyrian Guard and the Immortals are the age’s finest foot, two to a realm; the heavy chariot is iron now and costs no gold; the ram is raised by Assyria, Babylon, Lydia, Urartu and the Medes. Hired companies are for hire again, but never a siege engine or a realm’s capped elite. Coin is the shekel — and Lydia struck the first coins, so a sale at a Lydian market pays 80% of the price where everyone else’s pays 60 — the luxury of the age is purple, found only on shores that touch the sea, the agent abroad the envoy, and the year is the farmer’s year of the Bronze Age.

Two things make the age play differently. Land is open. A realm holds only the ground within three hexes of its cities; beyond that the country is open, with old ruins on it, and anyone may found a city on open land or on ruins — by land, or by sea: embark a founding party on a fleet, sail to an empty coast, land them and found. And peoples arrive. Three events are scheduled in every Archaic world (each can be switched off when you create it, or given a first possible turn of your own choosing), announced by portents and listed in the Strategika under Events of the Age: the Cimmerian Raid, a horde through the northern passes that burns every city it takes and rides on; the Scythians, who ride in from the north and found a nation of camps; and the Rise of Persia, a new realm in the east with Immortals at its back. A people that arrives is a nation like any other from its first turn. The age’s scenario, The Assyrian Century, sets 76 cities of 22 realms on the map around 700 BC, from Etruria to Elam, and leaves Sicily, the Black Sea, the steppe and Persis open.

The Late Roman Republic — from Marius to Actium, about 107 to 31 BC: the last century of the Republic, around the Middle Sea. Thirteen peoples contend: Rome; the Hellenes and the Makedonian kingdoms of the Successors; Mithridates’ Pontus, with its phalanx, its Cappadocian cataphracts and its scythed chariots; Tigranes’ Armenia of the mailed horse and the horse archers, +20% in the hills; Parthia (the Iranian people); the Levant — Judaea, the Nabataeans, the Arab dynasts and the ports of Tyre and Sidon — with its desert camelry; Cilicia, the pirate shore, seated only where a scenario’s board draws it; and the Celts, Iberians, Numidians, Nubians and tribes of the edges. Carthage, the Italic cities, the Mauryas and the Scythian steppe belong to other ages and are absent.

Rome’s legions are cohorts of professional heavy foot — the same line as the old maniple, fighting as one block rather than relieving its ranks, and a little dearer, since the state now arms the man. Rome raises no horse and no light foot of its own: it borrows them from allies and buys them from sellswords. And its armies belong to their generals (see Generals): a renowned or feared Roman general is hailed by his soldiers as Imperator. The age’s signature arms are Pontus’s scythed chariots — devastating on open ground, near-useless anywhere else, at most three to a realm and paid in gold besides — the camel riders of the Levant, bow-armed and at home in the desert, and the hemiolia, the pirate’s galley of Cilicia, Pontus and the Levant: no ram, but a deck full of boarders and a raider’s appetite for a coast.

The Early Bronze Age — from the kings of Kish to the fall of Ur, about 2500 to 2000 BC: the city-states of Sumer and the first empire, from the Nile to the Indus. Thirteen peoples contend: Sumer, the cities of the southern plain, +10% on the irrigated fields; Akkad, Sargon’s empire, with the Royal Guard and the composite bow, deporting the peoples it conquers — whose cities rest less loyal under it; Elam of the eastern hills; Ebla and Mari on the Euphrates road; Urkesh, the Hurrians who breed the kunga; the Martu of the western steppe and Gutium of the Zagros, tribes who hold towns; Old Kingdom Egypt, its bowmen +15%; Gubla, the cedar port; Dilmun and Magan on the copper sea; and far Meluhha on the Indus.

There is no horse in this age. Nothing is ridden. The war beast is the kunga, the donkey-onager cross the age prized, which takes the place of horses on the pastures and in the markets; it draws the Battle Car, a heavy four-wheeled car that charges home on the plain and the fields and is a cart in the hills, the forest and the marsh. A car is no faster than the foot beside it and pursues nothing. The line of battle is the shield wall; the Sappers breach a wall with picks, ladders and fire, more slowly than a ram. The reed marshes of the southern plain are ground of their own. Copper comes up the sea, tin from beyond the mountains, and Lapis Lazuli is the age’s luxury; there are no sellswords, courts exchange gifts, and a Karum may stand beside any foreign city. Four events are scheduled (each can be switched off, or given a first possible turn): the Gutians come down from the eastern mountains as a new nation, the Martu come in off the western steppe, the Years the Rivers Failed cut the harvest and the herds and shake every client city, and at the end the Sack of Ur sends raiders out of the eastern highlands who burn what they take. The age’s scenario, The Land Between the Rivers, sets 74 cities of 19 realms on the map around 2350 BC, from Egypt to the Indus, with the Gulf reaching up to Ur and Eridu.

An Early Bronze Age world on a Mac: the cities of Sumer around Kish, their hosts and caravans on the plain The same age on an iPhone
The Early Bronze Age: Sumer and Akkad around Kish, in The Land Between the Rivers. The hosts march under their city gods, and the donkey caravans carry the stores.

It is a rich age. Coin is the denarius, struck in its millions to pay the legions; a city taxes 2 and a harbor 3, half again the Classical rate; a miner’s camp works its mine harder than in any age before — two and a half times the hex’s yield, against the Classical double; a sale at a market pays 80% of the price; and the free-company market is deeper — up to six companies to a realm. Gold and the luxury lie far from the capitals, in the provinces Rome’s governors went out to take. The people’s share is the Classical one: your depots take 30% of each hex’s yield. The court’s merchant is the Negotiator, the city market the Forum, the barter abroad the Emporium, and the merchant houses take the Classical charters — but Rome’s negotiatores traded inside its provinces, not from emporia beside foreign cities, so this age has no trading posts. Power is exercised through others: the score weighs client kings as the Bronze Age weighs the palace’s clients (see Victory), and provinces a courier-season away sit under proconsuls who may break away and found a Rome of their own (see Satrapies).

The wealth that pays the legions is worked by slaves on the great estates — the latifundium, the age’s own building (see Buildings) — and in the mines. The Servile War is the age’s event: a realm that keeps enough slave-worked estates and mines without a guard of its own standing on them builds unrest, and past a line each turn may bring a rising beside them — a servile host of no nation that frees every estate and mine it reaches, each one adding to it, and burns the cities it takes. Portents give some three turns’ warning; a host of your own standing on a site keeps its gangs at work. Once a rising is destroyed another may come, if the realm is still over the line.

Seven scenarios ship alongside random worlds, and three line-ups for a random world — Rome and the West, Rome and the East and The Civil Wars. The annalist sets the record down year by year, and the prose edition of the bound book is Ab Urbe Condita. Its seasons run Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter.

The Age of Migrations — from the death of Marcus Aurelius to Heraclius’s victory over Persia, AD 180 to 628: the Empire is no longer one thing. Eleven peoples contend: Rome, one people for East and West, so two Romes are two realms of the same people; Sasanian Persia with its armored horse, horse archers and elephants, deporting the peoples it conquers; the Goths and the Vandals, warbands whose camps ride with them; the Franks of the axe, kingdoms from the start; the Huns of the steppe, whose horse archers come at half price; the Moors, the free kingdoms beyond the African provinces, light horse at half price, javelin men and camel riders under the camel emblem; and the Levant, Armenia, the Celts and the tribes of the edges. A city of the Goths, the Vandals or the Franks pays half tax and their companies eat a ration less, chiefs’ warbands rather than a state’s (see Gold & coin); the Goths and the Franks are hill peoples, crossing hills and forest at the quick rate.

Rome’s field army is the comitatenses, heavy foot on the cohort’s ratings, armed from the state’s own fabricae; the frontier limitanei are cheaper foot, steady behind a wall or on a hill and of little use in the open; the clibanarii, horse and rider armored head to hoof, are decisive on the flat and blown in the rough — Persia rides them too. Its generals keep sworn retinues of bucellarii: armored horse paid from the general’s own purse, at most two to a realm, raised only where an army of yours stands under a living general, and never parted from that army (see Armies & Units). Rome’s armies belong to their generals, as in the Late Republic, and a governor a courier-season from the emperor may proclaim a Rome of his own (see Satrapies). The peoples fight with the warband, free warriors who charge, and the Franks with their throwing axes, at home in the forest; the sea belongs to the Roman dromon and to the raider’s hemiolia of the Goths and the Vandals.

A people of camps becomes a kingdom. The Goths, the Vandals and the Huns keep moving camps, as the Scythians do (see Cities), until they take a town and keep it: at the end of the next turn they still hold it they settle — their camps become towns where they stand, they found towns from then on, and they are a kingdom. Burn the town instead and it is ruins, and the people ride on with what they carried off. The choice is the raze order at the captured gate, the same for every court and every age: keep the town through the turn and your people settle; while a raze order is on the road the town is not kept. On a random world of this age the Goths and the Vandals are seated as kingdoms already, ruling Roman towns where their own people are 15 in a hundred; only the Goths who cross the river come as camps.

It is a rich age, and a tired one. Coin is the solidus; a city taxes 2 and a harbor 3, as in the Late Republic; a sale at a market pays 80% of the price; your depots take 40% of each hex’s yield (the annona); a miner’s camp works its mine at a little over twice the hex’s yield. Gold and silk, the age’s luxury, lie far from the capitals; silk also comes by the Red Sea ships to every harbor and by the silk road from the east. The court’s merchant is the Comes Commerciorum, the city market the Forum, the barter abroad and the trading post the Emporium — beside any foreign city, harbor or not; the armory is the Fabrica; up to six free companies serve a realm; a lord may reward his own host with the age’s luxury, and the score weighs client kings. The raider bands are Isaurian bandits, Saxon raiders and Moorish bands, the extraordinary tax is a superindictio, and drought, plague, earthquake and locusts may all strike. As in the Archaic Era, a realm holds only the land within three hexes of its cities, and old ruins stand on the open ground beyond.

Three events are scheduled (each can be switched off when you create the world, or given a first possible turn): the Goths cross the northern river with their wagons before the middle of the game — two camps and a host, looking for a country; the Huns ride off the eastern steppe past the middle of it, a new nation of camps; and the Bagaudae, the age’s servile war, rise from a Roman realm’s estates and mines when it keeps too many unguarded — the coloni and slaves take up arms, free every estate and mine they reach, each one adding to the rising, and burn the cities they take. Portents give some ten turns’ warning of the peoples, three of the Bagaudae; a host of your own standing on a site keeps its gangs at work.

Four scenarios ship alongside random worlds (see Pick a world), and three line-ups for a random world — The Crisis, The Fall of the West and Rome and Persia. The chronographer sets the record down year by year, and its seasons run Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter.

The Age of Migrations on a Mac: Alaric's Camp in Italy, the Gothic standard, Roman wagons at Ariminum on the road to Rome The same board on an iPhone
The Age of Migrations: Alaric's Goths in their camp in Italy, AD 410, with Roman wagons on the roads at Ariminum. Rome is three marches south; keep it and the Goths settle, burn it and they ride on.

The Dark Ages — an age of legend, on maps of kingdoms that never were, with no sorcery in it: only steel, stone, bread and loyalty. Crowned kingdoms of men hold the river plains behind castle walls — feudal realms whose knights are the hammer of every battle, the heir of an old empire with its legions, the sea-raiders of the north, the horse peoples of the steppe, the emirates of the desert’s edge, the free clans of the hills and the merchant princes of the southern coasts. The elves keep the deep forests, deadly archers under the trees with a handful of knights; the dwarves hold the mountains with heavy axes and crossbows and no horse at all; the gnomes of the hill burrows are engineers whose engines bring down any wall. Out of the wastes come the orc hosts — orcs, hobgoblins and goblins, many and cheap, with wolf riders at their head. Only men and elves put to sea, in war galleys and merchant ships. Old hatreds run between the peoples: a city of another people than its ruler’s is never quite loyal, and orcs make no treaty and no trade with elves or dwarves — no truce, no pact, no submission, no barter — though gifts and ultimatums still pass. Its ground is wilder than the Middle Sea’s — marsh that swallows horses, tundra where the herds graze thin, trackless jungle, broken badlands, and ice no army crosses — and its wall-breaker is the trebuchet. Coin is the mark, the luxury spices landed by sea, the trading post a wic, and a lord who gives rings may reward his own host with the age’s luxury (see Diplomacy). Its seasons run Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter, and its handbook is The Book of Lore. A world of this age is drawn with the Peoples slider beside its line-ups: from a world where the elder races are but a legend, through the age’s own mix, to one with no realm of men at all. Fewer men leaves more realms to the elder races, shared among them by their numbers — the orc hosts the most, the elves the fewest; when men hold half the realms or fewer, every people holds at least one, a city on the coast always goes to a people that can sail, and a world of this age never seats fewer nations than peoples.

Nothing to buy inside. TunaWars is the complete game: all seven ages, all thirteen Classical peoples, every historical scenario, every world size, game mode and seat, the Paideia’s lessons, world tuning, in-app AI training, world files and xenoi, with no purchase inside the app.

↑ Contents

Getting Started

The first page

Your worlds are the first page. Across its head runs a plaque: About and the Strategika on the left — About opens Feedback, the Bibliography and the Credits; the Strategika is the rules handbook — the game’s name in the middle, and on the right Sound, which turns every sound in the game on or off at a tap, and the gear. The gear’s menu holds the rest: Online Matches (with a count while invitations wait), Import World…, Writing Hands where a downloadable hand can run, Sound, Voice Commands (with the microphone’s state: Allowed, Not allowed or Not yet asked), Antipalos (see Commanding in person — the Field), and, where you keep xenoi, the Xenia roster (see Xenia and agents; it reads Sync when a nearby sync needs you), Agents and Lyceum — and Remove All Saga Packs once a saga’s plates are on this device (see The Illustrated Saga).

Under the plaque, two chips narrow the list: the era a world plays, and who it is played against — a xenos seated in it, or a Game Center player of an online match. Each offers only what the worlds on this device hold.

Above the chips, your active xenoi sit as a row of faces. Tap one to talk with it about how it makes war and whom it has met; Revise Configuration in that talk opens it in the Xenia roster.

The world card. Every world is the same card, and the list puts the one you played most recently first. Its era runs as a band across the top; under it is a plate of the world’s map, drawn as the Strategic Map draws it whatever board you play on, with your nation’s color down its edge, your seat’s mark in one corner and, in the other, the outcome of a finished world (Victory, Drawn or Defeated, and which xenos won) or an online match’s state. Then come the world’s name and its gear; your seat — Ruler · Autokrator, Ruler · Epistates, Satrap or Trader — and the realm or house you hold (a Satrap who broke away is called the Ruler of his realm); the season; a thin rule of the turn limit with Turn 12 of 90 (or open campaign, or the turns and battles of a finished world) and when it was last played; the faces of those in the world, under Against in a solo world, With in an online match or Seats at a hot-seat table (Built-in AI only when no xenos sits); and the fine print — the board’s size, Custom rules where the rules were tuned, and the day it was founded. A finished campaign’s card offers Bind the Book, and a world shared through your Lyceum carries its columns on the era band.

The first page on a Mac: the world list as cards, each with its era band, a plate of its map, the seat and the turn The world list on an iPhone
The first page: your worlds as cards, the one played last first — its era, a plate of its map, your seat, the season and the turn, and who sits against you. The plaque along the head opens About, the Strategika, Sound and the gear's menu; your xenoi's faces sit beneath it.

Go Back in Time. At each End Turn of a solo world, before anything resolves, the game keeps a copy of the world with every order you sealed. The world card’s gear offers Go Back in Time once there is one: it puts the world back as it stood at that End Turn, your orders given again and still open, so you can add one you forgot or fight a battle again. It asks before it replaces the world. A hot-seat or online world keeps no such copy.

Begin at once, or craft your own world

The first time you open TunaWars, Quick Start greets you with six cards: the Paideia, nine lessons from history (see The Paideia, below); Ruler, a full random Classical world with weaker rivals, ruled in Autokrator Mode from the first turn (Epistates is chosen under Craft); Governor, which begins a Satrap world at once (see Satrapies); Trader, a gentle world played as a merchant house (see Merchant houses and the Trader); Mercenary, a gentle world played as a free company (see The free company); and Craft. Craft Your Own World — and the + button on the world list — opens A New History, six pages asked in the order they depend on each other: The Table, Your Seat, The World, The Ends, Begin and Tuning. On a phone they come one at a time with Back and Next, and Cancel on every page leaves the sheet; on an iPad, an opened iPhone Duo or a Mac the pages sit in a sidebar beside the page you are on, and on a wide window a third column keeps the map preview and a one-sentence summary of your history in view — except beside the Paideia, whose lessons are not drafted on these pages. Begin the History works from any page; everything you have not touched keeps its standard value. The Paideia stands beside Quick Start as an entry of its own.

The Paideia — lessons from history

The Paideia — the Greek word for the education that makes a ruler — is a shelf of ten lessons from history. Open it from Quick Start, or from A New History, where it stands beside Quick Start. Each lesson is a real situation cut small: one theater of the real map, the real sides, and a short war with a stated aim and a deadline. Its three books are named for Xenophon’s works:

A grade of I, II or III says how much a lesson asks; I is a first game. If you have finished none, begin on Lesbos: the shelf marks it Begin here.

Pick a lesson and you read its Premise first: the situation as the sources tell it, your seat, the aim with its deadline and the one skill of the game the lesson leans on, and the sources it rests on. Begin the Lesson founds it as a world of its own, kept in your world list under the lesson’s name; its card wears Lesson. A lesson’s world is set as the history was: its own age, the real rulers and their tempers, the hosts that stood in the field, no merchant houses and none of the age’s own events, a short horizon, and a lesson’s own way to rule (some open as Autokrator, some as Epistates). Lesbos is gentlest: its rivals are weaker and its couriers ride at half speed, so its far city is a turn’s ride away.

As you play, the lesson’s cards teach the game at the moment each thing first matters — your first command, the desks, marching, an order out of your couriers’ reach, a march that would halt before a screen, a road short of food, a walled city, the harsh season, your first siege and battle — one at a time, with Read More on the Strategika page behind it. Its asides, headed From the Histories, tell what history did at the same moment of the war — when word of an arrival first comes, when it lands, at your first siege or battle — never what you should do now; each is kept in that turn’s Chronicles too. Some lessons ask a question before it comes — will the city fall before the fleet lands? will your lines hold against the relief? — with a choice for each answer and Skip; it is never scored, and the Verdict says what you expected and what came. Hide Lessons on any card, or the Lessons switch in the world’s settings, turns the cards and asides off; the Verdict comes either way. Teach me on the Court’s counsel starts on in a lesson.

When the aim is decided — taken, held, lost, or ended by your ruler’s fall — the Verdict comes after the turn’s replay: What You Did, told from your own record (the turns things landed, the battles, the cities taken and lost, and how your war ran beside history’s at the moments that mattered), What History Did, Where the Sources Disagree where they do, What the Lesson Leaves Out — the constraint the lesson models and what the game does not do — and The Sources. The lesson’s row on the shelf is sealed Won, Lost or Fell, and opens the Verdict again. The world does not end: its aims are retired and the war goes on as an ordinary war of its age for as long as you care to fight it. Play Again founds a new world; the old one stays. The works every lesson cites are listed together in About, under the Bibliography’s History.

The Paideia on a Mac: the shelf of lessons from history, each with its plate, place, date and grade The Paideia shelf on an iPhone
The Paideia: lessons from history on three shelves, each with its place, its date and its grade. Pick one to read its Premise, then Begin the Lesson.
The Sack of Rome lesson on a Mac: its plate, Rome, AD 410, Anabasis, Grade II, with the Situation and Your Seat beneath The Sack of Rome lesson on an iPhone
The Sack of Rome, the Paideia's lesson of AD 410: the Situation that brought Alaric to Rome, and your seat as Alaric.

Pick a world

On The World page the first choice is the age — the Classical World, the Early Bronze Age, the Late Bronze Age, the Archaic Era, the Late Roman Republic, the Age of Migrations or the Dark Ages (see The Ages). The age decides which peoples and scenarios you can pick from next; a Dark Ages world adds the Peoples slider. Then start from a historical scenario or a random world:

Every new world is a coined world — the Talents of the Classical World, the Shekels of the Early and Late Bronze Ages and the Archaic Era, the Denarii of the Late Republic, the Solidi of the Age of Migrations, the Marks of the Dark Ages — in every scenario and every random world alike. Gold is not a minor knob: mercenaries, the generals market, the city markets and the merchant houses, the slave markets (and with them the miner’s camp, the palace workshop and the captives led off ravaged fields) and enslavement plunder all exist only in a coined world. A world saved before gold became universal keeps the barter economy it was made with, and hires its troops with goods instead.

Map size hands each realm a founding cluster rather than a single town, and seats the merchant houses that trade beside the courts (see Merchant houses and the Trader):

Size Canvas Cities in the world Starting cities per nation Merchant houses
Small 15×15 8 1 2
Classic 20×20 16 3 4
Grand 30×30 32 5 4
Huge 50×50 64 9 4

A fifth board, Giant (106×66, twenty-five nations of seven cities, six houses), exists only for hosted play-by-post matches — see Multiplayer. A lesson of the Paideia seats no houses.

How long the game runs changes what things cost. A campaign is set to a turn limit — 90 turns by default, 45 at the shortest, or endless. The world is written for a hundred-turn game, and a shorter one is the same world with every price and every waiting time cut in proportion: at 45 turns a wall, a new city, an officer or a building costs 45% of the figures in this guide, a truce lapses in 45% of the turns, and a general holds his command for 45% as long. What does not change is how fast anything happens per turn — yields, odds, marching distances, courier speed, the score weights. A city reaches its next level sooner in a short game because the interval shrank, not because it grew faster. At the default 90 turns nothing is scaled at all, and every number in this guide is exactly what you pay.

Tuning lets you change the rules themselves — economy yields, combat odds, walls and sieges, razing and founding, market behavior, how many cities share a merchant house and how often a new house opens, diplomacy, seasons — every number in this guide is a default you can change. You can even train the AI opponents for your custom rules before you start (see The AI, below). A world’s World Settings (the gear on its card) later shows how it was made — the table, your seat, the world, its ends — and every rule that differs from the standard; a card whose rules were tuned says Custom.

All of it can be changed later: the advisers in the world’s World Settings or AI Settings, at any time, and the way you rule and the briefs under the crown seal.

Your first turn

A Welcome sheet opens the campaign and introduces your realm, your ruler, and — under Your Neighbors — every power that shares a border with you: their people and their way of war. Rumor of a neighbor’s temperament may reach you here; a firm reading never does. In a new Autokrator world, until the game has asked on this device, the Welcome opens with Rule by Voice: what the spoken turn is, and Allow Voice Commands (see Rule by Voice under The Court).

The map opens where you are — your Court, in the Metropolis or wherever your ruler has carried it (see The Court and the Metropolis and Rulers in the field); a Satrap on his seat, a Trader on his counting-house, a free company on its captain’s column — and the screen is laid out the same way on a phone, an iPad and a Mac.

The dock and the turn bar stay under an open page of the record, so the desks and End Turn never move; a desk row that points at a hex closes the page and takes you to the map. On a screen wide for its height — a wide Mac window or an iPad in landscape, say, where the five tiles fit beside the map — they stand as a rail down the map’s right side instead, and the map takes back the dock’s height; the turn bar stays at the foot.

The Strategika handbook's contents on a Mac The Strategika on an iPhone
The Strategika, the in-game handbook: every rule in this guide, with your own world's live numbers. Contents in its footer lists the chapters of each book.

Every Ledger tab wears its age’s art, and every roster row leads with the piece the map stands for it. Resources lists your resource hexes grouped by good, one card per good, with the ground, any building on the hex and Go To or Build on each row; Logistics shows each depot’s stores, production and consumption, and every convoy’s cargo, as goods plates with their counts; the Market holds the city markets, the barter and the Pheme page of what you know of each good (see Supply, Depots & Plunder and Resources, Trade & Gold). A Satrap’s Ledger swaps the crown’s nouns for his own — a Suzerain tab for the realm he serves in place of Satraps, his House in place of Dynasty, no Omens or Diplomacy, and only his province and roster under Forces, Cities and Resources; a Trader’s tabs are Lords, Yours, Forces, Mercenaries, Market and Rival Houses; a free company’s are Lords, Forces, Mercenaries and Market. A house keeps no realm, and its Chronicles read as the house: a Trader’s Gazetteer lists Courts & Markets, each marked by how it stands to your house — hosting your counting-house, open to it, or barring it — and a free company’s lists Courts & Paymasters — your paymaster, his allies and his foes, the realms at peace with him, any at feud with your company, and the one that hosts your camp — and its Prologue tells of the realms around the camp.

Armies are moved with the Move button on their card, or by dragging them (see Reading an army on the map).

The World Chart, under the Map menu, draws the world as you know it as a period map — your fog, the parchment frontier, the borders and cities you remember and the hearsay inked beyond them — on a framed sheet with compass, cartouche and legend, to share or save as a picture. Armies are left off unless you ask for them.

The board is the TunaWars board: an illustrated atlas with flat painted ground, woods in clusters with open country between them, fields laid into the land, thin roads, city names on cream plates, and the figures standing on it (see Reading an army on the map). The Strategic Map is the same game seen as a ruler’s chart: ink on parchment, the coast and the borders of realms drawn as lines, mountains, forests and hills as signs, every city named, and no hex grid until you are picking a destination. Everything you can do on the board you can do on it. Zoom out past the board’s limit and the board becomes the chart; zoom in again and the board returns. A new game opens on the board.

The chart is drawn in three hands, which say how far to trust what you see. Firm ink in full color is what is in sight this turn. A hollow, broken-lined sign with its age (“3 turns past”) is what a courier reported. Sepia with a “?” is hearsay, and may be false. Land once seen stays drawn in full; only what moves on it — forces, owners, walls — shows its age.

A host is a staff with a spearhead and one, two or three pennants hanging from it, the longest at the head — the same three sizes the board shows as one, two or three figures — and a host in sight carries its people’s device on the top pennant once the map is close enough to read it; a fleet is a hull with one to three sails, a spy of your own a hood, a baggage train a cart. Where several forces share a hex the front one is drawn whole and each force behind it plants a short standard beside it, so the staffs count the forces and the pennants the men; a fleet and a host on one hex stand apart, the fleet on the water’s side, and every force stands clear of a settlement’s sign. A convoy is a laden cart on land — its own sign, never a baggage train — and on a sea or lake hex a hull without a sail, stacked with amphorae, each on a thread to the force that escorts it. Your own carry their name, and a host its men under arms. A foreign spy is never drawn, on the chart or the board; what the chart does mark, with a gray hollow hood and a “?”, is where one was taken by you or did sabotage to you in the last four turns. Each realm’s name lies across its land and a band of its color runs inside its border. A city is a ring for a town, towers for a walled city and a pennant on the keep for a capital, with a mark for each course of wall and an anchor beside a harbor. A good’s disc is firm on land you hold and faint elsewhere. Ravaged ground carries a small flame over scattered ash. While you pick a destination, one dotted ring runs round everything the force can reach this turn — amber round what lies beyond supply, red round what an enemy can strike. With the switch on, the World Chart is drawn in the same hand.

When you’re done, end the turn. If word is still waiting unread — this round’s counsel, or a xenos with something to say — you are offered it first: open it, or Seal Anyway. Orders your adviser laid before you for your signature and that you have not answered come next (see The Court). Then every nation’s orders resolve at once, and the new turn opens on the Movement Replay of the season just past: the marches, captures and battles you were entitled to see, played out over the map. With the game’s sound and Auto-Narration on (see The first page) — and never over a screen reader — your chronicler tells the turn aloud over its replay: the season, what your word brought about, each battle and who carried the field, then the rest of the season’s record, weightiest first, until enough is said (“And more, in the Chronicles”). The replay waits at each city taken until its line has been told. Tell the Turn, the seal beside Close, tells any turn’s replay on demand and reads Stop the Telling while it speaks; a turn you have heard told does not read itself again when you open its page, though its Read Aloud still speaks it. Close ends the telling and returns you to the map, where the red dot on Chronicles calls you to the turn summary — what happened, from battles to omens to word arriving from afar. A season in which nothing moved has nothing to watch: you are on the map, and its summary waits behind the same dot.

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The World

Worlds are hex maps of the ancient Mediterranean: plains, cultivated fields, woods, forest, hills, mountains, desert, lakes, rivers, and the sea. Rivers run along hex edges down to the coast; a road network laid at creation links the cities. In the Classical age thirteen civilizations can hold cities, each with its own troop roster and character (the Late Bronze Age fields its own nine peoples, the Archaic Era eleven of its own beside five of these, and the Late Republic Rome, Pontus, Armenia, the Levant and Cilicia beside eight of these — see The Ages):

Civilization Character
Hellenic Hoplites and triremes — the classic phalanx-and-navy city-states
Makedonian The sarissa phalanx: an unbreakable wall in the open, brittle in rough ground
Roman Numbered legions of maniples that relieve the line, consuls rotated out of command, and deep home and allied levies
Italic The Classis — solid heavy foot that blunts a charge — and swift triremes
Punic Seafarers of Carthage, with war elephants for the charge and heavy quinqueremes
Celtic Warband infantry and stout ocean-going ships with huge carrying capacity — the invasion culture; a hill people that crosses hills, forest and even mountains at speed
Tribal Forest guerrillas, cheap and deadly in the wild, fast through rough terrain
Iranian Cataphract shock cavalry and massed foot archers — a land power with no war fleet
Scythian An all-cavalry people whose cities are nomad camps — no walls, but they can move
Mauryan Massed longbowmen and war elephants, and no warship to carry them
Nubian “The land of the bow” — all archer units fight 20% harder
Numidian Peerless African light horse and elephants, +30% in any fight and +20% in the desert — but no warship
Iberian Scutarii, caetrati and slingers of the peninsula, +30% in the hills, quick through rough ground and able to cross the mountains

Your cities recruit the troops of their own culture, so conquest changes what you can field. Five peoples build no warship at all — Scythian, Nubian, Numidian, Mauryan and Iranian — and none of them will be seeded on an open coast; the sea belongs to those who can sail it. They still put merchantmen to sea, and can hire or capture nothing that changes it: to win a fleet, take a coastal city from a people who has one.

Resource tiles — grain, cattle, wood, iron, stone, gold mines, fish shoals — dot the map. Everything you own is worked automatically: there are no workers to micromanage. What that produce is worth to you depends on whether it can reach your depot — see Supply.

Reading an army on the map

Each force is a painted figure standing on a base. The figure says what the force is, its color and its standard say whose it is, and its size says how much it matters. The figure is the force’s lead unit — the arm with the most strength under that command — dressed as its own people dress it: a hoplite for a host of the phalanx, a horseman for a host of cavalry, a chariot, an elephant. A fleet shows its leading warship, and a host carried over water shows the ship that carries it; a baggage train is an ox-cart or a cargo hull, a spy a hooded pedlar, and a convoy — cargo, not a combatant — a cart by land and a laden hull by sea. The figure’s cloth, its standard and the face of its base are painted in the nation’s color; the cloth on the pole behind it carries the emblem of the civilization — the owl of the Hellenes, the sunburst of Makedon, the aquila of Rome, the boar of the Celts — and a fleet carries it on her sail.

Weight. A fighting force — a host or a fleet — is the largest piece on its hex, standing on a thick base in its nation’s color that carries the nation’s letter in ivory on its front, its standard planted behind it: it is the thing to look at. A train — a baggage army or a convoy — stands half as tall and duller, on a thin plain base with no standard and no letter. A spy is small, wears no colors and is picked out by a pale edge, and only your own are ever drawn.

A fighting force also shows its numbers: one figure, two or three stand on its base, which widens to hold them — a detachment of up to 300 men under arms, a force of up to 1000, an army beyond that; a fleet by its warships’ crews, which comes to one or two hulls, three or four, five or more. Only the arm that leads is counted — never the train, the cargo hulls or the troops a fleet carries — and it is the men still standing who are counted, so a host that has bled stands smaller on the board. Where several forces share a hex, the strongest fighting force stands in front, whole; each fighting force behind it plants only its standard beside the front one, so the figures count the front force’s men and the standards count the forces. Trains and spies peek out from behind; select the hex to pick them apart.

The rim of the base is the test: gold is yours, ivory an ally, red an enemy — and an enemy fighting force stands in a red glow where yours throws a shadow, so a hostile host is the loudest thing on the board. A piece also faces the way it fights: yours and your allies’ face right, their standards behind them, an enemy’s left. Your own pieces show everything: the bar under the base is strength against the full muster (green, amber, red), chevrons at the base’s shoulder mark seasoned troops, and badges over the figure’s head show the stance and any alert — out of supply, or a hired company’s coin. An amber hourglass means the army is beyond your couriers’ reach: the piece stands where it was last reported, not where it is now, its colors drained like a figure not yet painted, and from two turns old the badge carries the report’s age. A report says nothing of supply, so no supply alert is shown beside it. An amber bang beside a stack marks an order in trouble — a march halted short of its goal, an order no road could carry out, or a newer march still riding behind the one the army obeys — one mark for all of them; the army’s card says which. A piece whose orders changed this turn pulses once. On the painted board every piece is edged pale inside dark, so one of the two edges shows on any ground, a fighting force’s standard rises above the trees, and the hex a piece stands on is a clearing: its trees and fields are paled under the piece and the hex is edged in the color of the nation whose piece stands in front, so even a far-out dot says which hex it holds. A foreign piece shows only what your scouts could report: its lead arm — or, where a report named no make-up, the unit its people are known for — its numbers as the report counted them, in the same one, two or three figures, and, if the report is old, how old. A force reported but never identified is a gray shield with a dashed ring and a “?” — a last sighting, not a certainty. Zoomed far out, a piece shrinks to a colored dot that keeps its ring, a rough shape and its weight.

An army under march orders is drawn a second time, as a ghost, on the hex it is marching to: its own figures as one flat shape in your color, edged pale inside dark, on the dashed outline of a base — no base, no standard, no letter, so it is never taken for a force that is there — and a thin dashed line runs to it from the piece along the road the column is expected to take, around the ground and the forces you know of; where no road is known, the line runs straight. The ghost marks where the march ends, and the column may take several turns to get there. Where a piece already holds that hex the ghost is a small chip beside it, inside that hex; where several of your armies are bound for one hex, one ghost stands there and every line ends at it. An order still riding to the army by courier is the ghost’s outline alone, on a dotted line. Tap the ghost and its army opens at once, to Reroute or Halt it; tap elsewhere on the ghost’s hex (or on the army’s) to select it, and the line between them turns bold. Zoomed far out the ghost is a hollow ring.

Orders can also be dragged. Select one of your armies, then press on it and drag: the march is ordered to the hex you let go over, its route drawn as you go. Drag an army’s ghost the same way to send that army somewhere else. A drag that would start a fight still shows the odds and waits for you to confirm; letting go on the hex you started from calls the order off. A drag that begins anywhere else moves the map, as it always has.

Playing a Satrap, the map is drawn for a governor: the fighting forces inside your province, yours or anyone’s, stand in front with their standards raised, forces beyond it stand plain, and the baggage trains are dulled. Playing a merchant house, it is drawn for a merchant: every convoy — your caravans and hulls, and every other house’s — stands in full color and in front of whatever shares its hex, your own fly a pennant in the house’s colors with the cargo sign on it, foreign armies stand plain, every city whose market is open to your house carries a market sign, and the resources of the land are marked from middling zoom.

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The Campaign Turn

Turns resolve simultaneously. You queue standing orders; when you end the turn, movement, battles, production, sieges, growth, supply, trade, diplomacy and news all play out together, and the chronicle reports the results.

Movement

Each army has a movement budget of ticks (default 6). Open ground — plains, fields, cities, water — costs 1 tick per hex; woods 2; hills and forest 3 (2 for the hill peoples — the tribes, the Iberians and the Celts); desert adds 2 for any army not fully mounted; crossing a river adds 1. Roads halve the cost of a step, so a column that keeps to the roads covers at least twice the ground — far more where the country is rough. A pure-cavalry force rides 2 ticks faster; an army hauling a supply wagon moves at three-quarters speed. A spy or an envoy travels light: alone or riding with a column, he keeps the foot’s pace.

The real roads. On the historical boards of the Late Republic and the Age of Migrations the roads are the real roads of the age where they are known — the highways the Romans paved and the older royal roads they kept, drawn from the Itiner-e atlas of Roman roads — with tracks laid when the world is drawn only to join a city those roads leave out. Real roads wind, so a few routes are slower than a straight track would be. Every other board, and every random world, lays its roads when the world is drawn.

Mountains. A mountain hex is closed to most armies — the range is a wall, and columns march around it. Three things cross it: the armies of a highland people (the Elamites, the Iberians and the Celts), an army led by a legendary commander — the ruler-general an age rarely sees, announced when he appears — and a spy traveling alone. For them a mountain step costs 4 ticks, and 2 more if a single horse, chariot or elephant rides in the column: the mountain is the horseman’s enemy as the desert is his ground. Once up, any army may always come down. An army on a mountain can hold the pass — it projects its zone of control and is fed from the friendly ground it borders, but supply never runs through a range, so a march deep into one starves after its first hex. Light foot fights well up there, heavy foot is cramped, and horse and engines are next to useless. Elam’s armies fight a fifth harder on the heights.

Passes. Where one of those real highways crosses a range, the mountain hex it runs over is a pass, drawn as a saddle with the road through it. Any army may take it along the road, at the mountain’s price, and so may a cart, a convoy or a courier; supply runs through it along the road too. Off the road the range is as closed as ever, and the pass is still a mountain for holding, sight and battle.

A highland people may also hold mountains: its armies take one as they take any hex, its realm begins holding the mountains along its borders, and a held mountain counts as its land. No other people ever holds one — a mountain that would pass to any other people goes back to no one, and the mountains at the world’s edge are no one’s at all. No city or road is ever built on a mountain, and no cart, convoy or courier crosses one — but for the highways of the passes above. Where the age knows its luxury, some mountains hide gems: the hex reads Gems, and once worked the gems are the age’s luxury like any other — a highland realm works its own, and everyone else buys them.

A fresh army can always take one step. Some ground costs more than a slow column owns for the whole turn — a wagon train facing hills across a river, say. Rather than stand there forever, an army that has not yet moved makes the crossing anyway, and it costs the entire day: it arrives spent, and a battle it walks into is fought at dusk. The rule applies only to the first step of a turn, so it buys one hex, never a foothold to march on from.

Set a destination and the army marches toward it turn after turn until it arrives — you can reroute or halt it at any time. The command ring overlay shows how far the army can reach this turn and in the turns after.

Every order lives through the same stages, and the army’s card names the one it is in. Decided: you sent it, on a turn the card keeps. Traveling: a courier carries it, and it lands on the turn the card gives — until then the army does what it did before, still marching on its earlier goal or holding. Landed. Executing: it marches on its goal, holds, or stands at the goal. Reported: word came home of what became of it — halted, or given up for want of a road. Out of your couriers’ reach everything is as last reported, and an old report says so. Orders already on the road keep riding: a later march, stance or doctrine sent after an earlier one does not cancel it but takes over when it lands, so an order given on turn 10 that lands on turn 12 acts on turn 12 and one given on turn 11 that lands on turn 13 takes over then; the Couriers desk and the map’s ghosts show every order riding to an army, and Halt calls off the newest march. Ask an army’s card Why is it here? and it answers from the couriers first — an order not yet arrived, an earlier order still obeyed, word of a halt, your adviser’s command — and only then from the ground.

A march plans around a screen, but only so far. Your columns route around enemy zones of control where they can — and only as far as a detour they could actually finish this turn. An army will never spend a whole turn marching away from its objective to avoid a picket three hexes on; it takes the short road, stops if it must, and tries again.

Your march preview is drawn from what you can see. The world halts marches on zones of control you may not know about, so a column can stop short of the line you drew — when it does, the chronicle says so: "…was halted by an enemy zone of control short of its goal — it holds and will try again." An enemy column standing squarely in the only road gets its own word: "…found enemy troops astride its road and holds short of its goal." Either way the order stands and the army tries again next turn — a blocked march is never quietly forgotten.

Who reaches the road first. Columns of different nations march in an order drawn afresh every turn from the world itself, the same on every device, so no nation always moves first — and the first column into a narrow pass holds it against every column that comes after it that turn. The same order settles the beaches: the first landing party ashore holds the shore, and a rival’s later landing there that turn is refused. Among your own columns, which goes first is your own business.

The command ring and the march preview count everything the march itself will spend — boarding and landing included — and stop short of hostile troops in the road, as the march does; a spy’s preview ignores troops and zones, as a spy does.

A spy goes where no host can: he may be sent onto ground no one of yours has ever seen, while a fighting force marches only onto ground you know. The order is accepted on that rule alone — the game tells you nothing of the ground until he has seen it — and the board decides what he finds.

Zones of control

Any army of real strength (25+) projects a zone of control over the hexes around it. Marching adjacent to an enemy zone halts your army for the turn, and supply lines cannot be traced through one. Enemy zones show as a faint wash on the map — screen your borders, and remember a battered remnant is too weak to hold a line.

Breaking contact is free. The halt applies to marching into a zone, not out of one, so a beaten army can always disengage. What you cannot do is walk through an enemy: a hex holding a hostile force may be entered only to fight it, however weak, resting or wagon-laden it is. A single cheap company on a bridge is a door, not a speed bump. Troops may land on any open shore, even one inside an enemy zone of control — otherwise a defended island could never be invaded — but never onto a hex where an enemy force already stands; clear that beach first, or land beside it.

Recovery

Idle armies mend slowly (half rate). Give the Rest & Refit stance for full recovery — 1% of strength per unused tick in the field, 2% in a friendly city — but a resting army projects no zone of control. Armies that fought this turn recover nothing.

A day in camp is a day in camp whatever the column’s marching pace: a wagon-slowed force that stands still all turn rests as fully as the foot beside it.

Sickness in camp, storms at sea

Disease kills more men than battle. A camp that stays put can sicken — the more men crowded on and around one hex, the longer they stay, in summer above all, on marsh or before a besieged city most of all; a camp in its own city least. A sickness takes 15% of the host at once and 8% on each of the next two turns while the camp stays; a camp that moves leaves it behind. Before a city, the sickness is the town’s too: its hunger runs a turn ahead. A city the plague holds is worse than any marsh: a host that camps in it or beside it sickens sooner, even in a city of its own (see Calamities).

The sea takes more ships than the enemy. Hulls at sea at a turn’s end may meet a storm — 5% a turn in spring, 2% in summer, 15% in fall, 30% in winter, half that beside a shore of your own or a friend’s. A storm takes 20–60% of a fleet, the heavier hulls worst, and the men and cargo aboard go down with them. A harbor is shelter; convoys at sea run the same risk.

Seasons

A year is 10 turns: three Spring, three Summer, two Fall, two Winter. In Fall and Winter, units in the open take attrition (2% and 8% a turn), marching costs extra strength and saps morale, being out of supply hurts more — and winter ice breaks every naval blockade. Shelter armies on or beside a friendly city to spare them. Once a year, on a warm turn, the great tuna run lands a windfall of fish (+8) in every free coastal city — the game’s namesake.

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Supply, Depots & Plunder

Your nation’s bulk stores — grain, cattle, fish, wood, stone, metals — do not float in an abstract treasury. They sit in one physical place, and they have to get there.

The depot

Every nation keeps a single supply depot, opened at your ruler’s seat with your starting stores. It holds the six bulk goods; gold stays in the treasury. The depot feeds your armies, pays for your recruits, and receives everything your land produces.

You may relocate it to any city you own. It marches like a laden cart — about two hexes a turn — and while it is on the road no recruiting happens anywhere in your realm except mercenary hire. Moving the depot forward shortens a campaign’s supply line; moving it is also the moment your realm is most brittle.

If an enemy army stands on your depot’s hex, the depot falls: half its stores march off as the captor’s convoy, the other half burns. A depot sitting in one of your cities is safer — it is taken only when the city itself is conquered, not merely occupied or besieged. Lose your depot and a fresh, empty one is raised at your ruler’s seat the next turn, absorbing whatever goods your armies standing there are carrying. The evacuation play is real: load the wagons before the walls fall.

The captor’s half sets out as a plunder convoy for the nearest of its own depots that its road reaches, and folds into that depot when it arrives. It re-picks that depot every turn, so if the one it was making for falls it turns for the next; with no depot left to reach it waits where it stands until one is raised. On the road it is a convoy like any other — escort it, or anyone who runs it down takes it, you retaking your own goods among them.

Production travels

Resource tiles are worth double what they once were — but their output does not appear in your stores the moment it is dug. It travels to the depot at courier pace: 8 hexes a turn over open ground, 16 by road. Produce from the depot’s own neighborhood lands the same turn; produce from a newly-taken frontier province may take several. Move your depot and everything already on the road re-targets to its new home automatically.

Goods arriving above 40 of a resource are simply lost — the depot cannot hold them.

Supply lines have two legs

An army in the field is supplied when both are true:

  1. it can trace a path home to a friendly city without routing through an enemy zone of control (fleets trace to a home port), and
  2. that city can be reached from your depot across friendly ground, again clear of enemy zones.

That second leg is new and it is the interesting one. An army can be standing beside a friendly city and still starve, because the corridor between that city and your depot has been cut. Besieging the one relay town on a road can starve out everything beyond it. An army standing inside an enemy zone is not cut off by that alone: its line may lead out from its own hex, so long as it crosses no other hex of the zone — a column halted by a screen on its own ground still eats the turn it arrives.

An army eats its own carried stores first, wherever it is and whether or not it has a line home. Only then does it draw from the depot, and only with a line. Cut off, it draws nothing.

It draws from the depot its line actually reaches, which is not always the nearest one on the map. A depot two hexes away across a mountain wall feeds nobody; the one six hexes off at the end of a clear road does the feeding, and pays for it. Watch which store is emptying — it tells you which corridor your armies are really living on, and therefore which one an enemy should cut.

Units eat by their weight: a tribal warband eats little, hoplites more, cataphracts and elephants the most. Ships and wagons draw no rations at all — only fighting men on land eat. When the depot runs short, the armies farthest from home starve first. An army cut off from supply bleeds strength; a partly-fed one bleeds in proportion to what it lacked. An army pressing a siege pays a further tithe of its strength every turn, and mends nothing while it sits there.

Supply from a friend’s city

Another court may give your armies leave to eat from one of its cities — a supply grant. While it stands, that city is a source of supply for every army and fleet of yours, as if it were your own depot: your lines may cross the host’s land to reach it, a harbor city’s waters are a home port for your fleets, and the city shelters your armies from the season and lets them recover at the city’s rate. The food comes out of the host’s own stores, after the host’s own armies have eaten, and in a world with coin you pay for every measure at that city’s market price. A grant does not open the city’s market to you, lets you forage nothing on the host’s ground, and never gives you its gates: you are fed and housed, not trusted with the walls. A grant makes no peace of its own: it needs a truce standing between the two courts, and it ends when the truce does. An army’s card says when it eats by a friend’s leave (“fed at Plataea by Thebes’ leave”), and the host’s turn summary says what its stores fed its guests. See Diplomacy for how a grant is asked for and ended.

Wagons

A supply wagon carries the host’s goods — 10 units of stores per wagon, food and plunder alike, so a column fat with spoils has less room for bread. Without a wagon an army can carry nothing: no plunder, no provisions, no evacuation. Wagons slow the march to three-quarters speed.

A host eats what it carries first, before it draws on any depot, in or out of supply. While its line holds, its wagons are topped up again from the depot it draws on once every host has eaten (a host fed by a friend’s leave is not), so a supplied column marches with full carts. Cut off, it lives on what it carries and then starves like any other, unless it can forage: the wagons are endurance, not a shield. What the wagons can no longer hold — after a wagon is lost in battle, a split or a boarding — is given up before the host next eats, cattle first, then fish, then grain; a split shares the stores by the wagons each half takes, and a column’s stores board a fleet with it and land with it as far as the landed wagons can carry.

An army standing on its own depot’s hex can load and unload freely: fill the carts before a campaign, or empty them into the stores when you come home. It is also how you evacuate a depot that is about to fall. The wagons and their Load, Unload and Dispatch convoy orders live on the army’s own card. The load matters where the line ends, so your adviser counsels three turns of food before a host marches out of reach of your depots, and emptying the wagons of one that stays inside the line, where builders and recruiters can spend what they carry — the rival courts do the same. A battered wagon mends under the same conditions that let a fighting unit reinforce, so a damaged cart is no longer a permanent cripple.

An unescorted baggage train — wagons or merchantmen with no fighting screen — caught next to an enemy force is run down: usually captured intact, otherwise scattered.

Convoys

Goods on the road are convoys. A captured depot’s plunder walks home as one; you can also dispatch a convoy from your depot to a city or an army, or send one from an army’s own wagons under escort, and recall any convoy of yours to the nearest depot from its card (a free company keeps no depot, so its convoy turns back to its nearest column). A convoy is cargo, not a combatant: an enemy zone of control halts it on the hex it enters, as it halts a march, and there it stands in the raider’s grip for that turn — a ring of pickets is crossed one hex a turn, by land or by sea, so a fleet lying off a port’s approach really does catch what sails in. Stepping onto its destination delivers even under a hostile zone. An escort protects a convoy only while it stands within a hex of it; march the guardian away and the cargo is bare. An unescorted convoy is run down by an enemy force whose zone of control covers it at the end of the turn — one on Raid Supply reaches two hexes out for this, though its zone of control for halting marches and convoys stays one hex. A force that takes a convoy while it has no orders, or is set to Raid Supply, falls in as the prize’s escort; under any other order it keeps to it, and the goods travel unguarded. Either way, you are told what it took. A convoy’s card warns you when raiders stand within reach. A rival’s convoy shows on your map only while your own eyes are on its hex, and its card tells you what a watcher on the ridge could see — whose colors, road or water, what is piled on the carts, whether troops ride with it — and says plainly that where it is going is the other ruler’s to know.

Every convoy of yours carries its forecast: its road played forward on the rules convoys move by, holding every army where it stands, so the card names the turn the goods reach their store — or the hex where hostile troops you have seen will halt it, or that no road leads there and it waits where it stands. A convoy that was raided says when, and whose it was. Nothing a convoy carries is lost on arrival: goods its destination can no longer take — a full wagon, a vanished army, a lost market city — go to your nearest depot instead. A convoy of yours standing in or beside a city trades at its market as a caravan at the gate does: it sells what it carries there and takes on what is bought, then goes on with what is aboard — and a second buy at one city for one depot in one turn joins the caravan already standing at the gate, so one load rides the road and raiders get one target.

Living off the land

A land army with no supply line survives anyway if the country around it can feed it: it takes no starvation losses when it stands within two hexes of at least three friendly-owned land hexes per fighting unit, reachable without crossing an enemy zone. It still draws nothing from the depot and takes no reinforcements — it merely stops dying. (Its card will still read as having no supply line; that is the honest state of its couriers, not of its stomachs.)

Pillage

Set an army’s stance to Pillage and it stops taking ground and starts burning it. Marching onto an enemy hex outside a city ravages it instead of capturing it:

Each successful ravage mints one wagon to haul the spoils, up to four per army; anything beyond your carts is left burning on the field. Cities are never ravaged this way — a pillaging army besieges and sacks them normally.

A ravaged hex yields nothing to anyone — not to its owner, not to you if you later take it — until it recovers, and it recovers only once a Spring turn and a Summer turn have both come round again and at least five turns have passed. Burn a field in high summer and it is dead until the next growing year. Ravaging the same hex twice gains nothing and only resets the clock. And the victim remembers: a burnt field books half again the grudge of a conquered one.

Where slaves are sold, a ravage also leads off the hex’s people as captives — one from farmland, one more from any hex with a resource. Captives walk (they take no wagon room), each of your units can guard two, and each carries two goods like a porter, so a column that burns farmland can carry more home. They eat the army’s food — from the wagons, or its depot while the army is in supply — and slip away if unfed or unguarded; march them to one of your depots and they become slaves there. Lose the battle and they go to the victor.

Pillaged gold is dead weight — no one can spend goods carried in a cart. Take the grain.

Loot

Goods ride in wagons, and wagons change hands. When an army is beaten, its entire baggage goes to the victor — up to what the winner’s own carts can hold; the rest spoils on the field. This applies even to a force annihilated outright. The battle summary reports the seizure, and the loser’s chronicle records the loss.

The people’s share

Your palace does not own the land. Of what each hex yields, your depots take the age’s share — 30% in the Classical World and the Late Republic, 40% in the Archaic Era, 50% in the Dark Ages, and the whole harvest in the Late Bronze Age, where the palace owns everything — and the rest lands on the market shelf of the city that hex feeds, as the townsfolk’s own produce: the people’s stores. They eat from it first, and what they do not eat is for sale to anyone the market admits — you, a Trader, a merchant house. The people’s stores hold a season’s yield of their lands (what the city’s country lands on its shelf in six turns, or the market’s own room if that is more), and what comes in beyond that is never brought to market. Your own works’ output, your mines’ yield, gold and the state’s goods — wood, stone and slaves, which your building and founding live on — are yours whole: a quarry’s and a forest’s whole yield goes to your depots. A shelf full of the people’s grain is a city that feeds itself without touching your stores; buy from it at the city’s price, feed a host from it the same way, or requisition it — a city gesture beside largesse, a festival and a purge, sharing their eight-turn wait: every grain, head of cattle and fish on the shelf goes to your depot for nothing, and the city loses 10 loyalty, a point more for every five food taken, up to 20; its townsfolk then eat from your stores.

City markets (coined worlds only)

Every city runs a market on that shelf, and in a world with gold you trade at it from the Market tab of the Ledger. The Market opens on your markets, one row per city as the Cities ledger draws a city; a row’s Trade, and every Market link elsewhere in the game, opens that city: its goods as plate tiles, your stores there — the depots within reach, a host or caravan at the gate, a convoy standing there — as tiles to trade through, then the trade the two name as a counter: Buy or Sell, the unit price each way, the lot, the total, and the engine’s quote for that exact lot (the toll, the purse after, how many sell at full price, why fewer than asked), with a receipt and Take Back. Below it, Elsewhere lists what is held of the good at your other stores, and the turn’s trades here. A host, caravan, fleet or convoy standing where it can trade wears a Trade button of its own that opens the market with it picked. A buy loads straight into wagons at the gate, or goes to your depot: at once when the depot stands in that city, otherwise by caravan to the nearest depot whose road reaches the city — raiders can take the caravan on the way. A sale from the depot draws on every depot whose road reaches the city. While enemy troops stand at a city’s gates, or no depot’s road reaches it, nothing passes between its market and your depots; an army at the gate can still trade.

One city's market on a Mac: the goods, the stores to trade through and the trade counter A city market on an iPhone
A city's market: its goods as tiles, the depots and forces you can trade through, then the trade itself — Buy or Sell, the lot and the total.

A sale beyond your reach. A sale is made at once only at a market inside your command radius, where your word arrives the turn you give it. At a market farther off it is queued — Sale queued, settles at resolution — and is made when the turn resolves, once your courier has carried it there; until then you can withdraw it. A slave sale is made at once wherever the city lies.

The market deals in copper, a hundred to the coin, and the desk’s band shows your purse in copper while the Market is up. A small buy costs what the goods are worth, not a whole coin, and the change stays in your purse for the next trade. A buy rounds up and a sale rounds down, and a realm’s sale pays only part of the price — this is an age of struck coin in the Classical World and the Late Republic, so a sale pays 80%; in the Archaic Era 60% (80 at a Lydian market), and where silver goes by weight, in the Late Bronze Age and the Dark Ages, only 40%, so barter and trading posts pay better there and a client’s tribute goes in kind. A merchant house takes a merchant’s whole price wherever it sells. So a good bought and sold again at the same market always loses; profit lies in carrying goods from where they are cheap to where they are dear. Only your latest trade of the turn can be taken back, and it refunds exactly what it cost. Nothing trades for less than one copper a unit, bought or sold. A market holds at most 10 of a good (20 with a Market building), and buys only what fits on its shelf and what its townsfolk will eat this turn — the rest of a lot stays with you.

Every city its own price. No two markets ask the same. A city prices each good off the world’s price by two things of its own: its shelf — a full shelf sells cheaper, a bare one dearer — and its region: what the country within six hexes made of the good last turn against what it ate and spent there, measured against the world as a whole. A valley that eats more food than it grows buys food dear; one that grows more than it eats sells it cheap. Only what was actually made counts, so fields raided, ravaged or cut off make a market dear again, and a hungry army camped in a region drives its food up. The difference is held between 50% and 300% of the world’s price, worked out anew each turn, and every market row says why: “Dear here: the country around eats more food than it grows, and the shelf is thin.” What a good is worth for its weight decides how far it pays to carry it: bulk goods — grain, cattle, fish, timber and stone — cost as much to haul a few days as they fetch, so their price is their region’s and the world moves it only a quarter as much; precious goods — tin, the age’s luxury, weapons — travel the length of the sea, so their price is the world’s and the region moves it only a quarter as much, between 75% and 150%; metals, horses, wine and slaves sit between. The sea carries what a cart cannot: a harbor’s region reaches along its sea lanes three times as far as a road would take it.

Carry goods to where they are dear. Goods sell at a city’s price only when they are at the city — in a depot in that city, or in wagons at its gate. Sold out of a depot elsewhere, they fetch no more than they would where they lie. So buying where a good is plentiful pays only once you have hauled it to where it is scarce, by depot convoy or wagons, over the road’s turns and past its raiders. The gap between the cheapest and the dearest markets is wider than the gap between one market’s buying and selling price, so a guarded haul can pay; a raided one pays the raider.

What a market will take. A market takes only so much of each good a turn at full price — four in a town, two more for each level of population. Sell past that and each further good pays less: never nothing, never refused, but less and less. The townsfolk eat through one turn’s worth each turn, so a flooded market pays full price again soon enough. The row says how many more it takes at full price.

Tolls. A city’s ruler tolls what comes in, not what is bought: 2% of the worth of goods landed or sold in his city by anyone who brought them from outside — a merchant house selling what it carried in, a court selling at a market not its own, each goods leg of a barter the moment it is struck, a trading post’s shipment leaving its host’s land. The one who brings the goods pays it, out of his own purse, so a toll moves coin and makes none; the townsfolk’s own buying pays nothing, and neither does your trade at your own markets or a governor’s at his province’s. Goods landed from beyond the known world, at a harbor or by a far caravan at the city it is bound for, pay that city’s ruler a frontier toll of 25% as they land: new coin, entering the world with the goods. A realm that holds a far road’s gate, where it is not the caravan’s city’s owner, takes its own as the caravan passes (see Far roads and trading rounds). A barter your merchant officer strikes pays half the toll where the goods land. Tolls come into your purse as copper as the goods come in; each city’s card shows what it took last turn.

Good years and bad years. Rain is fickle and falls by region. At each harvest every region draws its year: about one year in five is poor, when its fields and herds yield 60% of their usual, and about one in five good, at 125%, until the next harvest; no region is poor three years running, and fish come from the sea and keep their catch. A bad year shows on the city card, makes the region’s food dear, and travels as news — traders talk of a harvest that failed. Granaries, grain bought where the year was kinder, convoys and largesse are the answer; the other courts lay in grain against a bad year too — and against a drought or locusts, the worse years described under Calamities.

Calamities. At each harvest a region may suffer worse than a poor year, by chance and of the kinds its age knew. A drought (6% a year) leaves its fields and herds 35% until the next harvest; a flood (5%) drowns the grain fields of the river and the shore as a raid ravages them and sweeps away half the food on its cities’ shelves; a plague (4%) takes a level of people from every city of the region above the first, costs each 6 loyalty, and for 4 turns sickens any host that camps in or beside its cities; an earthquake (3%) brings down a building and a course of the walls of each city, a quarter of its stores and 4 loyalty; locusts (4%) leave the grain 25% and spare the herds. The Classical World knows drought, plague and earthquake; the Late Bronze and Early Bronze Ages drought, flood, plague and locusts; the Archaic Era and the Late Republic drought, plague, earthquake and locusts; the Dark Ages all five, its locusts called blight. A region struck one year is spared the next, a drought never falls in a good year, and a plague raises the chance of plague in the regions beside it the year after by 12%. No one orders a calamity and none can be turned aside; it shows on the city card and travels as news. Grain laid in, a host kept out of a plague city, and coin to rebuild are the answer — and the other courts do the same. New worlds have calamities on; World Settings can turn them off (Make It Yours).

Food and the year. Grain, cattle and fish are cheapest just after the harvest (the first turn of autumn), a quarter below their usual price, and grow dearer every turn until the lean months before the next harvest, a quarter above it. Stores laid in cheap in autumn sell dear in spring — if they keep.

Pheme — word from abroad. Merchants and travelers talk about other markets: a good wanted at a town across the border, a harbor whose shelves are glutted, a slave market a sack has filled. The Market’s Pheme page gathers what you know of one good at a time. First your own markets, every one, with what lies on the shelf and the price to buy one and to sell one. Then the towns you have word of, newest first: your agents’ reports carry prices and the shelf (an agent inside a foreign city, or at its gate, reads its market as a trader would and sends it home each turn, a courier’s journey late), a merchant house’s own book the price it saw, and hearsay only whether the good is wanted or cheap and why, never a figure. Last, hearsay of towns known only by rumor. Every word is as old as the road it came by, and each row says how old; hearsay is forgotten after eight turns. What a rival’s city wants is what a barter can offer it, and a city glutted with metals, timber or stone is a place for a trading post.

The Pheme page on a Mac: what you know of fish at every market The Pheme page on an iPhone
The Pheme page for one good — here fish: how many markets you have word of for each good, then Where You Can Trade Now, with what each market has for sale, its price, and why it is cheap or dear.

Recruiting through the depot

Recruits are paid for out of the depot, not out of thin air, and they muster only once both your order and their provisions have arrived: the order rides from your ruler’s seat to the city, the supplies ride from the depot, and the slower of the two sets the date. Recruiting at home is unchanged — next turn. Recruiting on a far frontier while your depot sits at the other end of the empire is a decision, not a formality.

Paying where the work is

Every purchase of goods — a recruit, a building, walls, civic works, fostering, a rebuilding, a founding, slaves sold, a barter — is paid from the depots whose supply line reaches the place of the work, the nearest emptied first. Land cut off from your depot raises a depot of its own; that depot pays only for work inside its pocket, and your home stores cannot pay for work there until the road is open again. A refusal says so: “40 Stone held at Pella, cut off from Therme.” A founding is outfitted from the city that sends the colonists (or your own city nearest the site); a trading post from your own city nearest it; a barter, a gift or a vow at your ruler’s seat. Gold stays at court and pays anywhere. The same holds for your rivals: cut an enemy’s road or raid his depot, and his distant cities can build nothing.

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Cities

Cities are your engine. Each yields grain every turn, has a chance to quarry stone, and grows: population starts at 1 and rises to 3, each level adding metal and food. Growth is a meter — every 5 turns a city banks a quarter of it, so a city reaches its second level around turn 20 and its third around turn 40, and you can foster it (5 food + 5 wood) to bank more and bring both forward. Civic works (12 wood + 6 stone, two levels) add permanent yield — the mid-game outlet for surplus timber and stone.

The Cities ledger on a Mac, one card per city The Cities ledger on an iPhone
The Cities ledger: one card per city, with Go to, its Market and its Details.

The city card. Select a city of yours and its card is a stack of parchment cards: a header with the city’s figure, its people, its name and its dials — loyalty with its band, Resolve, its status and its faction; its orders; its buildings; and a ledger of its growth and defenses.

A city’s orders come in three groups: Works (civic works, defense, buildings, fostering, a camp’s move), Arms (recruits, the summer levy, an agent, a deportation) and Rule (the gestures, the remission of taxes, the reduction of a conquered city, a governor’s seat, moving the Court, and Rename except in a Game Center match). Each group states once the rule its orders share — the recruit slots left this turn, the one gesture a city takes a turn. An order that cannot be given now stays in its place, dimmed, with the reason in place of its description; one you gave this turn reads Ordered. Every order opens one page: what it does, its effects, a bill of what it needs — what is Needed, what the stores that pay at the city Held, and what is left After — the choices where it has them, and Confirm; nothing is ordered from the row itself. A new army’s name starts as the one the game would give it (Host of Samuha); type another if you like.

When the bill falls short. A good the bill lacks offers Buy N here where the city’s own market sells it, or Find N: your depots, your hosts’ baggage and your convoys first, then the markets you know of, with hearsay marked. A depot or a host that can send the goods offers Send, which attaches the shipment to the order: Confirm sends both, and the order waits for the goods and is given the turn the stores cover it — or, if they have not come two turns after they were due, it is judged on the stores as they stand. Withdraw the order and its convoys turn home. Coin the bill lacks offers Raise N: the ways to raise it, soonest first — a sale here or at another market, the income the turn brings, the extraordinary tax, a loan, tribute owed you. The realm’s alignment is the Court’s decree, not a city’s; the card says where the realm stands and opens the Court.

Building works on a conquered city makes it yours in more than name. New settlers, new patronage: a taken city that you develop stops counting as taken — you lose the conqueror’s premium on it in the final reckoning, its former owner stops being paid for the land he lost there, and it can no longer be reduced to a subject people as a foreign city. The other side of that bargain is the price: works on a city you took cost double, for the lack of collaboration you would expect from a conquered population, and you pay it once.

The townsfolk eat. Every city eats each turn, after your armies have: one food for each level of population, with a little wood and stone besides. They buy it off their own market’s shelf first (see The people’s share), and draw on your depots that reach the city only when the shelf is bare. A city short of food or wood banks no growth that turn, and a hungry one loses 2 loyalty a turn — never below restless by hunger alone. A city whose country is raided, or whose depots were emptied for the war, goes hungry without a siege: no growth, the loyalty loss, and in time a famine that costs it a level of its people (after twelve turns of hunger). Hungry cities are what the Quartermaster’s food target covers. Beside what they need, the townsfolk enjoy wine and the age’s luxury when they find them — up to half a measure for each level of population a turn, the wine first, off the shelf and from your depots after, even under siege, for the walls do not ration a comfort. When they find none, nothing is lost; when they take their full share, the city’s resting loyalty rises — by 4 in the Classical World, 2 in the Late Bronze Age, 3 in the Archaic Era and 6 in the Dark Ages — for as long as the share keeps coming, and by half that for half a share; the luxury is an elite’s good and lifts a town half as much as wine. The city’s card shows what its townsfolk eat, how the last basket went, and what its table held.

Walls (levels 1–3, one level per 10 stone) each add 18 points of defense to the garrison — about two full-strength hoplite companies. Never leave walls unmanned — an empty city is the easiest to storm.

The Court and the Metropolis. Your Court is where your ruler is: at rest in a city, on the road, or with the host he commands. Orders ride from the Court and news rides to it; your command radius is drawn around it. The Metropolis — the mother city — is the city the Court last rested in: the realm’s name and treasury, where hired companies muster, the star on the map, and the city whose fall is the realm’s catastrophe. From a city’s Rule orders you may Move the Court to any city you hold where your own people live, even a few of them; it travels at half a courier’s pace, and the city becomes the Metropolis when the Court arrives — seat it central and defensible, and shift it as your borders move. The Court cannot be sent while it is already on the road, or while your ruler is with his host (see Rulers in the field). If the Metropolis falls, the Court flees to a city of your people, and that city is the Metropolis from the day it sets out; a Court left in the field when its host is destroyed withdraws to a city, and command is disrupted until it arrives. The March to Court order brings your hosts to the Court wherever it is.

Scythian cities are nomad camps: no stone, ever — but they can pick up and ride. A camp relocates to open ground anywhere within one courier’s ride overland, refusing a road that carries an enemy army or crosses an enemy zone of control, and it claims the ring of hexes around wherever it settles. Instead of walls a camp keeps a wagon laager: it starts at level 1, is raised like walls but paid in wood, cattle and horses (6, 4 and 2 a level), defends at half a stone wall’s strength per level, and travels with the camp. It counts only in the battle on the camp’s own hex — no siege can be laid against a camp, no breach or hunger can take one, and a camp taken by riding onto it keeps its laager and its buildings. A camp raises the market and three buildings of its own — a corral that breeds a horse a turn, a wagon shrine that steadies its people as a temple does, and felt works that yield cattle — and all of them ride with the horde. And pasture thins: a camp that stands eight turns without moving has its herd’s food docked a quarter until it moves, and grazed ground remembers — a vacated hex recovers only slowly, so a horde eats by riding a circuit, not by shuffling between two hexes.

The Goths, the Vandals and the Huns of the Age of Migrations keep camps too — until they take a town and keep it. A people of camps that holds a town it took through the next turn settles: its camps become towns where they stand, unwalled, it founds towns from then on, and it never goes back. Burn the town instead and it rides on. This holds in every age: a Scythian nation that keeps a Greek city settles as well.

The peoples of a city

A city is its people, and a people changes slower than a border. Hold a city of another people a full year (10 turns) and one in a hundred of its people are yours; every further year held adds as many. They come at the cost of the people who came last: a conqueror before you loses his men first, the people the city was founded by last. Lose the city and the year starts over for its next master, so a city taken three times holds three peoples. The city’s card names its peoples — “Romans 85 · Goths 15”.

Every people living in a city, however few, musters its whole roster there, calls its summer levies and raises its works — so you raise your own men in a conquered town once you have held it a year, and its own people’s from the day you take it, save its guard (see Armies & Units). Each recruit row names the people that raises it. Your Court may rest, and your Metropolis stand, in any city of yours where your people live. When your people outnumber every other the city is theirs: its people turn, the turn’s summary tells you so, and like any city of your own people it may no longer be put to the torch by you. A camp neither takes in a people nor gives one up. The pace is a world setting: Peoples’ drift / year held, 1 in a hundred by default, 0 to stop it.

Recruiting

Across all your cities you may raise two units per turn, mustering once orders and supplies arrive (see Supply); warships only in coastal cities. A nation fallen far behind the leader may raise one extra — a desperate levy that keeps the game close. Allied cities add one more recruit per turn, of their culture. Disbanding an army refunds up to 80% of its recruit cost, scaled by its remaining strength — and the disband order rides out by courier like any other.

A recruit is raised from the peoples who live in the city: any of them may muster its whole roster there (see The peoples of a city), but a people’s guard only for a realm of that people.

Summer levies

In summer the fields need few hands, so a city of yours may call its farmers to arms: a Javelin Levy, a Spear Levy, and a Bow Levy where its people draw a bow. A levy costs 4 food and nothing else — no metal, no wage — and does not count against your two recruits a turn. Each city may call as many levies a summer as its population level, and none while besieged; the call rides by courier like any recruit and must muster within the summer. Levies are a point weaker than the troops they imitate on every ground, muster Raw, eat like any army, and can never be made Regulars.

At the harvest — the first turn of autumn — every levy goes home, wherever it stands: in the field, in a garrison, before a wall or aboard a ship. An army left empty breaks up and its stores go to your depots, and men who never come back set back their home city’s growth. So a levy is a summer’s spears: for a campaign that must be won before the harvest, or a city that must not stand empty.

A levy is no secret. Every court that knows you hears by courier that you have called one, and where, in its news from afar — and a neighbor who hears of it may well call its own. Your adviser and the Master of Levies call them too.

Loyalty & politics

Conquest is the easy half. Every city has a loyalty to the ruler it now serves — a mood of its own, not to be confused with a unit’s morale or a vassal nation’s allegiance — shown as a band: devoted, content, restless, seething. It drifts a few points a turn toward whatever the city’s condition warrants, and a city you storm starts low: cowed at first, then, as the shock fades, showing its true temper.

Each city also leans one way — toward the many (populist) or the few (oligarchic). Your ruler stands for one of those poles, declared at accession and reversible by any ruler (yours or a rival’s) after a cooldown. Cities that share your pole grow loyal; cities that don’t chafe. So declaring For the Few or For the Many — on the Court’s Decrees page, under The Realm’s Alignment — re-sorts which half of your realm is content — the one great strategic lever of the whole system, and never final.

What raises loyalty: a matched faction, prosperity (civic works and population), holding a city close to your Court rather than at the empire’s edge, and the measures worked from a city’s orders — Largesse (free grain, a loyalty jump and a populist nudge), Festival (where the stores that pay at the city hold 6 wine, the festival pours it and asks no gold: loyalty rises 6 and the city’s Resolve rises 10, above its loyalty if need be, so a city with the enemy at its walls has the nerve to hold them; without the wine it is a lesser feast for 4 gold and the loyalty alone), Purge the council (swing the city’s faction toward your pole, once per city per ruler, at a one-off loyalty cost), Requisition (see The people’s share), and Remit taxes (forgo the city’s gold a while for standing goodwill), and the extraordinary tax (below), which buys coin with loyalty; largesse, festival, purge, requisition and the extraordinary tax share one eight-turn wait. A full table of wine and the luxury raises resting loyalty too (above). What drags it down: a mismatched ruler, an emptied treasury, hunger, ravaged fields nearby, a resented occupying garrison, a year’s resentment of an extraordinary tax, a plague or an earthquake, and sheer distance from the throne.

The extraordinary tax. In need, a city can pay a year’s tax at once. Among its Rule orders choose Raise Tax — the age calls it an eisphora in the Classical World, the palace’s demand in the Late Bronze Age, a levy of silver in the Archaic Era, a tributum in the Late Republic and a tallage in the Dark Ages — and the collectors take ten turns of what the city pays now, through the same loyalty and blockade it pays through every turn, while its ordinary tax keeps coming. The city pays for it twice: its loyalty falls 10 at once, and for a year its people resent it, 4 off its resting loyalty. It shares the eight-turn wait of the other city gestures, and is refused at a city that has paid one this year, whose taxes are remitted, that was sacked, that the enemy besieges, that is seething, or that pays no coin. A Satrap may raise it in his province, and the coin goes to his purse. The other courts and their governors raise it only for a debt they cannot pay — wages, loan payments, their buildings’ upkeep, a gift owed a great king — and never at a city near restless or under a calamity; your adviser offers it on the same terms.

A seething city (loyalty very low), left ungarrisoned and un-courted, may revolt: it opens its gates to a sympathetic neighbor and defects outright, or — with no patron to take it — rises under a rebel banner, its yields collapsing and rebel bands mustering on its doorstep until you put it down or win it back. Stationing an army on the city under Defend City cows a revolt while the spears stand there — but occupation itself breeds resentment, so the garrison is a stopgap, not a cure. Better to win the city over. City politics runs on every world, existing saves included.

A city’s Resolve

Beside its loyalty, every city has a Resolve — the nerve of its people, which is neither the loyalty of the city nor the morale of an army. Resolve rests at the city’s loyalty and falls below it only when your armies are broken near enough for word to reach the walls.

This is the link between a won campaign and an opened gate. A decided battle shakes every city of the loser’s within one courier’s ride of the field, by an amount that scales with how badly the army was beaten — and a relief force or a sortie broken at the walls it was trying to save hits that city twice as hard. A city under siege for two turns or more then rolls, every turn, to open its own gates from the inside: the wider the gap between what its people can bear and what they are bearing, the likelier it is, and a city that gives way this way keeps its walls. Each nation has its own idea of what a defeat costs — chronic losers harden, the proud stay brittle — and a city climbs about a quarter of the way back toward its loyalty every turn, whole again in six to eight. So a siege you cannot press hands back everything your field victories bought.

A temple steadies the people: it cuts the shock a city takes by a third.

Buildings

Each city may raise one building, from its Build action, and loses it with the city. You can tear one down from the tile’s own panel.

Building Cost What it does
Temple 10 stone + 5 metals +5 to the city’s resting loyalty, and it steadies the people — a third off any battle shock
Granary 10 wood + 10 grain the city holds 20 more food without spoilage and keeps 10 back from convoys and sales, so it bears a siege’s hunger three turns longer — an empty granary holds no siege off
Market 8 wood + 5 metals doubles the goods a city’s shelf holds, and imports three goods a turn. The one town building a nomad camp may also raise
Harbor 15 wood + 5 stone warships cost a quarter less here, and +1 fish a turn. Natural-harbor cities only
Armory — the Bronze Foundry of the Late Bronze Age, the Smithy of the Dark Ages 10 stone + 10 wood, 1 gold a turn turns 4 metals (and 1 tin in the Bronze Age) into 2 weapons a turn, idle when the stores are short; weapons pay for a muster in place of its metal (see Armies & Units)
Miner’s Camp (Classical) 5 slaves, 2 gold a turn doubles what a metals or gold hex yields — with an escape hazard every turn
Latifundium (Late Republic) 8 slaves, 1 gold a turn a great estate worked by slave gangs: triples what its hex yields, and is lost if its upkeep goes unpaid. Unguarded estates feed the servile war (see The Ages); the Late Republic’s miner’s camp yields two and a half times its hex
Palace Workshop (Late Bronze) 6 slaves + 6 wood, 2 gold and 1 food a turn fine cloth and inlay for the gift exchange between kings: +2 loyalty and prestige to your score while it stands — and a prize: whoever takes the city while it stands carries off its prestige for good. Lost if its upkeep goes unpaid
Corral (camps only) 5 wood + 4 cattle + 4 horses breeds one horse a turn
Wagon Shrine (camps only) 6 wood + 6 cattle the temple’s steadiness, in felt and wagons: +5 loyalty, a third off any battle shock
Felt Works (camps only) 8 cattle + 6 wood one cattle a turn

Buildings are worth real points in the final standing, so a realm that never builds is a realm that never scores. Walls and civic works score too, per level, which is why a fortress is an asset and not just an expense.

Satrapies

An empire outgrows its couriers: orders to a distant frontier arrive turns late, and a governor on the spot beats a message every time. Appoint one of your generals as satrap over a distant city and he governs the province himself — at zero courier lag — levying and moving his own troops, spending his own treasury, and setting his cities’ defenses, without waiting on you.

His province is not a drawn border but a catchment: every hex his seat reaches sooner by courier than your own capital does. Move your court and his writ reshapes itself. Cities in the catchment pay their gold to him, and he remits a share you set back to your treasury (the rest funds his defense — take too much and you starve the frontier and stoke his resentment); in an age of struck coin a governor who keeps his province’s goods sends your share of them as coin, sold at his seat’s market first. He never founds, razes, or touches your own armies; the frontier’s defense is his brief. He may hire free companies out of his own treasury — they muster at his seat, join his roster and draw their wage from him, two companies at most — and he trades at his province’s markets. Governors of one crown bear each other ill will: bordering provinces chafe, a fellow’s hosts standing in a province feed it, and a bitter governor slanders his rival at court, dragging the rival’s fealty down. Your Satraps ledger shows each governor’s grievance against the crown, his feuds with the others, and the slander he suffers, in words.

You see his fealty only as a band, never a number, and distance, an empty purse, a heavy remittance, a renown that outshines your own and the armies he holds all erode it. So does his character: the Daring, the Rash and the Charismatic reach for more, while the Steady and the Schooled serve. A loyal province behind him and long, quiet service in post steady it. Recall him to dissolve the province and take the man back into your service — but the recall rides out by courier like his appointment, so you cannot un-delegate a rebellion at the last moment. A satrap whose loyalty fails first refuses your orders — word of that refusal reaching court is the warning bell — and a truly disloyal one may break away, carrying his whole catchment, cities and armies both. Where a realm hostile to you will take him, he goes over to it. Where none will, he proclaims a realm of his own — at war with you, of your own people, raising the troops of the cities he holds, with his seat as its capital. Take that seat back and the rest of his realm comes back with it; otherwise it falls only by conquest. A Roman governor of the Late Republic or the Age of Migrations looks instead to a foreign realm at peace with Rome that borders or holds his province — as Antony went over to Egypt — and the realm that takes his legions may raise Roman troops in every city it holds, for good; with none, he founds a Rome of his own. Each people names the office in its own tongue — satrap, harmost, proconsul, shophet, kumara; in the Bronze Age nomarch, shaknu, koreter, sukkal and more — but the institution is the same. Like city politics, satrapies run on every world.

Playing as a Satrap. In a Satrap world the chair is turned around: you govern one province for a realm you do not rule, and its king’s couriers come to you. The Satrap’s desk takes the Court’s place in the dock: your province, purse, stores and the patron’s trust, with your withholding, the recall, the patron’s aim, defection and any post on offer. Inside your province you recruit from the full list (on a muster budget of your own, two a turn), build, wall, foster and hold the city’s festivals, all paid from your own treasury and the province’s goods, which are yours, and you may raise a city’s extraordinary tax, the coin going to your own purse; your roster marches at your word and at no courier’s delay, you may hire free companies and buy agents, and you may take the field yourself at the head of a host of your roster. Outside the province nothing of the realm is yours to order: the realm’s own acts — its capital, founding and moving cities, its alignment, its diplomacy, its satraps — are hidden or read-only, and the crown’s hosts off your roster draw on the map as an ally’s. Your patron sees your loyalty as trust: withholding its share of the revenue, refusing its aims or failing them lowers it, serving them raises it, and when it is gone the patron sends for you. A recall that reaches you is yours to obey — a patron that still trusts you will offer another post, which waits on the desk for your answer — or to refuse, which is revolt: the province becomes a realm of your own, crowned in the field if you lead a host, at war with its old master. You may also defect at any time, taking the province and your hosts to another crown. You may also Declare Independence from the Satrap desk at any time: the province becomes a realm of your own, at war with its old master, as a refused recall does. A patron that has trusted you long and well, that keeps three cities beyond your province and has no enemy on its borders, may instead offer the province its freedom: accept within four turns and it becomes a realm you rule, allied to your old master; decline, and the offer does not come again for a long while. Your station rises with your service: a Prefect at first, a Governor once your province holds two cities and you have paid your patron its share in full for five turns, a Viceroy at four cities and fifteen such turns — the turns counted over every office you have held. If your governor dies, an heir of your house takes the office; if your seat city falls, the office is lost, and a second lost seat ends the house. Between offices your purse and stores ride with you, and you need not wait on a crown: with a post on offer or none, you may lodge a counting-house with them and trade as a merchant house, or muster a free company out of your purse — its men the city’s own, bought at its prices, your governor its captain — and sell its swords (see The free company). The house’s record goes on in the new trade, but the road runs one way: no realm makes a merchant or a captain its governor for the asking. With no post on offer you may also retire, and the house’s story ends. A free company’s captain who served a court well may be made its Satrap the same way. There is no turn limit, and no victory but one: if you revolt and the realm you make comes to hold most of the world’s cities, you have won. Otherwise the game is to endure. A realm you proclaim is never handed back to your old sovereign by retaking its seat. The welcome sheet addresses the office, the map opens on your seat, and the Couriers desk shows only your own couriers, with this turn’s answers to the patron among them.

Merchant houses and the Trader

Not every seat in the world is a throne. A merchant house rules no land; it lives by the leave of the courts whose markets it trades in, and by the distance between a cheap market and a dear one. Merchant houses trade in every coined world beside the courts, one for every four cities the world holds (the size table under Pick a world gives the count), each with a caravan and, at a harbor, a cargo hull, run by the game’s own brains. When a house fails, a new house opens its doors in another city, no sooner than twelve turns after the last was founded, so a saved world fills up over time.

A merchant house's desk on a Mac: the purse, the counting-house store and a caravan A merchant house's desk on an iPhone
Playing as a Trader: the House desk shows the purse, the counting-house store and each caravan or hull with what it carries, and Trade and Go to on each.

A house keeps a counting-house in a host city, a purse and a store, and sends its caravans and hulls from market to market, buying where a good is cheap and carrying it to where it is dear. It deals at every market whose ruler has not closed it to the house, at the price the market asks, takes a merchant’s whole price when it sells and pays the city’s toll on what it brought in, and keeps the peace with every court, so no army seizes its pieces but raiders’. Running a besieged city’s lines pays a merchant twice the price and loses the piece half the time. A house watches only the markets its pieces reach, and remembers the prices it saw. A house left with no caravan, no convoy and too little to buy a wagon is ruined. The houses are listed on the Ledger’s Merchant Houses tab, with their charters and the caravans and hulls you can see and what they carry; you may lay an embargo on a house as on a court, and it then trades at none of your markets. A house lives under its host’s protection and on its host’s leash: from the city it lodges in, its host may expel it — half the store it keeps there is seized for the host, the rest is lost, its counting-house closes, and the host’s cities neither lodge it nor trade with it for twelve turns. And no house becomes a court: one whose wealth passes the richest court’s treasury pays 25% more for everything it buys, the price of the envy it draws.

Kinds of house. Each house is founded with a charter that says what kind of business it is, and the houses of a world take the age’s charters in turn. A Carrier trades by the rule alone, carrying whatever gap pays best over the road. A Factor stays near its counting-house, sells first where the townsfolk went short or a siege is starving them, and keeps a store of what the courts it deals with run short of, putting a lot on the barter board each turn for gold, a quarter above its home price. A Venturer outfits hulls first, counts a sea road short, and leans toward tin, wine and luxuries. A Slaver buys slaves at the cheapest slave market its book knows and sells them at the dearest, and sends its caravans to stand beside hosts walking captives to buy them where they stand (see Servitude). In the Late Bronze Age the first house is the Palace Tamkar, the palace’s own merchant: its court takes a tenth of every sale, and it trades only where the court keeps the peace. A Dark Ages League house keeps a post in a second town beside its counting-house. The Classical World and the Late Republic field Venturer, Factor, Carrier and Slaver; the Archaic Era Venturer, Factor and Carrier. A charter’s own trade — the Factor’s lots, the Slaver’s carrying and bids — waits until the house is counted a Merchant (see Station and trades).

Station and trades. Every house stands on a merchant’s ladder, read afresh from its purse, its goods and its pieces.

Its trades open as it climbs. Every house buys and sells at market by caravan from its first day. A Merchant also keeps hulls, ships from its counting-house, and plies its charter’s own trade: a Factor’s lots on the barter board, or a Slaver’s carrying of slaves and its bids for captives. A House hires agents and, where the age lends, lends coin to courts. A Great House keeps a second post in another realm’s town, as a League house does, and may found a compact of houses. A house that falls a station keeps what it holds, but takes up no trade above its station until it climbs again. The chronicle tells you when it moves, and your House desk shows your station.

Loans to courts (Dark Ages). A House — the third step of the merchant’s ladder — lends coin to courts. It offers a court whose markets are open to it a loan of at least 10 gold, repaid over 3 to 30 turns, at an interest it names of no more than 5 in a hundred of the principal a turn — or a court asks a house for one, and the house names its interest when it answers. A house lends only what its purse can spare beside 10 gold of its own, and an offer or an ask unanswered for 3 turns lapses. Accepted, the coin reaches the court’s treasury at once, and from the next turn the court pays an even share of the principal and the interest each turn. Three payments missed in a row is a default, and so is a loan the court repudiates, or a lender it expels while it still owes. A default seizes nothing: the debt is written off, stands against the court until it pays what it still owed, and no house lends to it while it stands. As a ruler you find it all on the house’s row of Ledgers → Merchant Houses: Take the Loan or Decline an offer (the row says the payment a turn and the whole cost), Ask for a Loan… (10 to 160 gold over 10 turns), Repudiate the Loan and Pay What You Owe. The other courts borrow when the wages they owe their free companies outrun their treasury, take one offer and decline the rest, always repay, and repudiate only a lender whose host they are at war with; the houses the game plays lend only to a court that asks.

Compacts of houses. A Great House may found a compact, and any merchant house may ask to join; the founder answers. A member leaves when it will, but a house that leaves a compact is heard by none for 20 turns. When a court expels a member, lays an embargo on it or defaults on its loan, the member may call the compact’s boycott of that court: while it stands, no house of the compact buys, sells, provisions or carries a commission in that court’s markets, and the court’s tolls on their goods and its townsfolk’s shelves lose what they carried. A boycott stands at least 4 turns, and then until the court rights the wrong — the ban runs out, the embargo is lifted, the default is paid. The Merchant Houses ledger names each house’s compact and, where one boycotts you, the wrong and what lifts it. The houses the game plays join the compact of the nearest Great House and call a boycott on every wrong done a member, and the other courts do not expel a member of a compact for its wealth alone. Compacts form in every age; loans only in the Dark Ages.

Playing as a Trader. Choose the Trader seat and you are one of these houses, with no realm and no patron: every realm keeps a standing peace with you, so only raiders and the sentinel hordes touch your pieces, and no barter, gift, letter, pact or ultimatum passes between your house and a court. The House desk takes the Court’s place: your purse, the counting-house store, your caravans and hulls, outfitting new wagons (and hulls, once your house is counted a Merchant), loading and unloading (done on the spot), shipping (from the Merchant station), your convoys, lodging, and your book of prices with a paragraph in brief. In the Dark Ages, once your house stands as a House, a Loans to courts card offers loans and answers the courts’ asks; a Great House’s compact card founds a compact, takes in houses that ask, and calls a boycott — and any house may ask to join one. You trade from the Market tab out of your caravans or your counting-house at the whole local price, and may ship goods from the counting-house to another city’s market: a convoy carries them there and sells them on arrival at that market’s price on the day, in the house’s own carts — no larger than the wagons at the gate can take — with guards for hire against raiders; ship only to a market in your book of prices, one your people have seen. Once your house is counted a House, you may buy an agent at the counting-house to watch a foreign market, and in a world with slave markets you deal in slaves (see Servitude). Your house sees from its counting-house and from wherever its pieces stand; the Ledger’s tabs are Lords, Yours, Forces, Mercenaries, Market and Rival Houses — every other house on your roads; the Chronicle carries your house’s turn accounts — sales, shipments, bread, the purse’s change. Ruin closes the world; there is no victory but prosperity. Your charter is chosen with the seat.

The free company

A free company is a house of sellswords under its captain, the Xenagos. It rules no city and serves no crown until one hires it. Its columns are its whole estate, and its purse pays its men their wages every turn, hired or not. Free companies exist only in an age that hires sellswords: the Classical World, the Archaic Era, the Late Republic and the Dark Ages.

The peace of an unhired company. Every realm keeps the peace with a company it has no quarrel with. Its hosts let your columns pass, and its markets sell you food. Raiders and rebels keep no peace with anyone.

Breaking the peace. The order is the declaration. When you march a column on a court’s army or city in an attack stance (skirmish, ambush, raid, attack or pillage), you break the peace with that court the turn the march resolves, and the game warns you before the order goes. That court will not forget the feud until it hires your company or grants you peace. It will hear of peace only four turns after the wound, and never while it holds you in contempt. Marching in pillage stance into a court’s fields is a lesser wrong: the court is your enemy for three turns after the last hex you ravaged, and it remembers the grudge as any court does. A column standing still picks no quarrel.

Taking service. Your offer of service stands on every court’s Mercenaries board beside the hired companies of the turn. It has a price, a wage a turn and a term. By default these are the board’s price for your men, their own wages, ten turns, and a fifth of the plunder to the house. You can set your own terms on the Company desk.

A court that hires you pays the price into your purse and the wage each turn after, and counts you against none of its own limits. For the term its friends and enemies are yours. What you take, you take for the court, and the grudge for what you ravage falls on the court.

A letter of offer. Instead of posting your terms for every court, you may write them to one court alone. While the letter waits, your offer stands on that court’s board and no other, for four turns. A court with no foe, or one that holds you in contempt, refuses at once. A court that has a use for you hires you when its treasury can pay. Its answer comes back to the Company desk.

Under contract.

Paid in land. You may ask for a camp instead of a wage, and a court that wants you but cannot carry your wage may offer one of its own accord. The camp is its city nearest your company. Its stores fill your wagons there each turn, your hires muster there, and your men draw no coin while the contract stands. In the Archaic Era a court whose colonists are at sea may also hire you to escort them. If one of your columns stands by the new city when they found it, the court offers you the colony to govern.

At sea. Your company may buy warships at a harbor whose market deals with it, where one of your columns stands. Under contract you may also enlist a crew at your hirer’s harbors. Either way you raise one man or one ship a turn. Your ships are priced into your offer, and a court weighs your ships with your men. Under contract they escort your hirer’s convoys and blockade its enemies’ harbors. Unhired, they keep the peace at sea, unless they fly the black flag (below).

Loot and the market. The company keeps no depot: what it takes, it carries.

A province or a crown. A court that thinks well of you when your term is served, or when you have taken the city it asked for, may offer your captain a province to govern. Accept, and your company becomes the province’s guard, your purse its treasury, and your captain its Satrap (see Satrapies). An unhired company that storms a city it is at feud with rules that city as a realm of its own, and its captain is its ruler from the next turn. A realm you make wins the world if it comes to hold most of its cities.

Station. A company is counted by what it is. It starts as a Band. It becomes a Company with four companies under arms, then a Free Company with eight and a contract honored (served to the end, let go with its pay, or closed by a province granted), and finally a Host with fifteen and three contracts honored. The chronicle tells you when your station moves.

Broken. A company with no man left under arms and too little gold to hire the cheapest company on the board is broken, and its story ends. A beaten remnant that still has gold hires again. There is no turn limit and no victory but one, the crown above. Otherwise the game is to endure.

Pirates (Late Republic). In the Late Roman Republic a Mercenary may Begin as pirates. Your captain is the Archipeirates, with three hemioliai in the berth beside a coastal camp, as the pirates of Cilicia served the kings of the East against Rome.

Playing the company. The Company desk takes the Court’s place in the dock. It shows:

Your hirer stands on your side in the Ledger and on the map: its cities read as allied, never as the enemy’s.

The Ledger’s tabs are Lords, Forces, Mercenaries and Market. The map opens on your captain’s column. The world card names your world the Misthophoros, and the Strategika’s Free Companies chapter has the rules of your world. The company is played in the app only, not by post.

Hiring a company yourself. Where a free company shares your world (a xenos may captain one), its offer stands on your Mercenaries tab beside the others, and you hire it the same way. The price leaves your treasury when you claim it, and comes back if another court wins the draw. In your pay, you set it an aim from its card, one at a time: take a city of a court you are at war with, or hold one of your own. You may let it go whenever you choose by paying the wage of every turn left of its term.

Servitude — subjects, deportation and slaves

Some peoples bind the cities they conquer rather than raising them as equals, and each names the condition in its own tongue — among the Greeks, the perioikoi and the helots. The Hellenes, Makedonians and Carthaginians (and Mycenae in the Bronze Age) may make a conquest subject; the Persians (and Assyria, Babylon and Hatti) may move its people. Nobody may do both.

Subordination. From a newly conquered city’s panel, reduce it to a subject people. A perioikic-type city still furnishes troops while it is content or better, and pays a quarter more tax. A helot-type city works harder and pays half again as much, but sends no soldiers — and needs a garrison to stay quiet, though fewer men hold it than would hold a free city. Either way a subject city is never devoted, its council drifts toward the collaborating few, and it is easier for an enemy to talk his way inside: collaborators can be bought, and a subject city’s people treat sooner when they are hungry. It costs your ruler’s reputation and leaves a grudge deeper than conquest, and it cannot be undone.

Deportation. March one level of a city’s people, under escort of a real army, to another city of yours: it thins a restless conquest and swells a loyal one. The source stops rolling for revolt while it recovers; the destination is unsettled for a while, as newcomers with no stake in the place always are. It costs provisions, reputation and a grudge — and if the escorting army is destroyed on the road, the people are lost.

Slaves. Every city keeps a slave market. Buy at any of your own cities, in copper, into your depot — at once when it stands in the city, otherwise by convoy like any good, which can be seized — or onto a host or caravan at the gate, which walks them as captives up to what its guards can hold; a city with enemy troops at its gates trades none. Each market asks its own price: the world’s price at its own rate — dear when it holds few, cheap after a sack has glutted it. Each restocks by one a turn up to twenty, and swells when a nearby city is put to the sword — ten for each level of the razed city’s people, sold at the nearest city still standing — then drains away again, so an atrocity is cheap labor for a season and not forever. Captives your armies lead off ravaged fields become slaves in your depot when they reach it — or a Slaver’s caravan standing beside the host buys them where they stand, at three quarters of the nearest slave market’s price, from the host’s own card. Prisoners taken in the pursuit of a broken army go the same way where the age weighs silver, and are ransomed where it strikes coin (see Battle). Slaves eat — one food for every five, every turn, whichever of grain, cattle and fish you have most of — and in a city starving under siege they get nothing; the hungry run off. Selling back pays the realm’s sale share of the price, so a buy undone always costs something. A miner’s camp (Classical) or a palace workshop (Late Bronze) is what they are for. Demolish one and half the gang is resold. A merchant house trades slaves at any held city, out of its counting-house or a caravan at the gate, three to a wagon’s guard, and its convoys carry them with food for the road.

The Court

The Court is everyone who acts for you, behind the crown seal, on three pages: The Ruler’s Will, the aims you name for the realm, always first; this round’s Counsel — or, ruling as Autokrator, Carried Out, what was done in your name; and the standing Decrees (see Two ways to rule, below).

The Ruler's Will page of the Court on a Mac: the realm's aims and standing concerns The Ruler's Will on an iPhone
The Ruler's Will: the aims you name for the realm and the standing concerns your Court pursues, each with Withdraw.

Counsel is this round’s advice. Your adviser — titled in your people’s own tongue: the Symboulos of a Greek city, a Legate for Rome, a Vizier on the Nile — is a person with a face and a name, drawn once for your seat from the whole of the age’s world, for a court’s counselor was seldom of the ruler’s own people; the same seat has the same adviser on every device. He holds the counselor’s office as a man of one of your great families, and his temperament colors his counsel — the head of the Court says which (Bold, Measured, Subtle…). Dismiss him, or lose him, and the office stands vacant until you seat another man from the Families tab (see The great families). The page opens on The Situation — where you stand, what your adviser is aiming at and what the purse allows, in their own voice — and below it the counsel: a turn’s orders as rows, each a real command explained in a line. Counsel waits on the Court each new round, and the crown seal wears a red dot until you have read it. The rows sit in two cards: the sword (armies and spies, recruiting, marching and battle, and your word to other courts) and the purse (trade and markets, works and buildings, stores and convoys, and the household of your cities). Tick the rows you want and Execute commits only those, as your own orders; nothing resolves until you seal the turn. Each row has a go to that opens what it is about — the army’s or city’s hex, the court in Diplomacy, the offer in the Ledger — with your ticks kept and a strip on the map to bring you back. Each row has a Why this? that says what the order serves, how urgent it is, whether it was weighed or follows a standing rule, what report it rests on, what it goes with and what would change it, with the Strategika chapter that teaches the mechanic; Teach me opens the why on every row, and is on to begin with in a lesson of the Paideia.

The Counsel page of the Court on a Mac: this turn's matters, each with the adviser's proposed order Counsel on an iPhone
Counsel: what needs your word this turn, why, and what your adviser proposes. Pick the orders you want and Execute commits them; Go to shows you the place first.

A world can have a second adviser beside your own: Apple Intelligence, or an agent of yours. They are a person of the age too, with a face and a name of their own that carries the agent’s — an agent you called “Mistral” counsels as, say, Xanthippos of Mistral. Their counsel is its own page on the Court, side by side with your adviser’s on a wide screen and a tap away on a narrow one. They are never asked on their own: Ask for Counsel on their side asks, once a turn, on your key or from your Apple Intelligence quota — the card says what it costs and what agents have spent in this world — and Ask Again asks for a fresh answer. Nothing of theirs starts ticked — it is a second opinion — and where the two advise the same order, or give one army two different orders, the row says so: an order both advise is issued once, whichever side you take it from, and taking one of two clashing orders retires the other. If the second adviser cannot answer, their side says why; your own adviser’s counsel is there as always. Briefs stay with your realm’s own adviser.

Either card can be handed to your adviser as a standing brief: hold the sword, the purse, or both, and that half is ordered for you when each turn is sealed, by your realm’s own brain, on the same counsel the page would have shown you. A held half reads as locked on the page; what you ordered yourself that turn always stands. Some orders are for your signature and are never given for you: walls, a razing, the hulls, stores loaded onto wagons, a gift, a vow, and your policy — a people bound or moved, the heir, a truce broken, an embargo, a host stood down. They are never pre-ticked below Critical, a brief passes them over, and any left unanswered when you seal are laid before you to sign or skip. Skip all is one tap; the decrees page can turn the asking off for this world. With both halves held there is nothing left to execute, and the page simply closes. While your adviser holds both halves, Move (or Reroute) on one of your armies asks whose hand moves it: Lead It Yourself, or Take Back the Sword Brief — either way the move begins.

Two ways to rule: Epistates and Autokrator

As Epistates you give the orders yourself, with your adviser proposing them on the Counsel page — the game as described above. As Autokrator you hand both briefs to your adviser and rule by naming what the realm is to achieve: your adviser gives every order, tells you what was done, and lays before you only the acts that are a ruler’s own. A world crafted on A New History starts as Epistates, a play-by-post match included, unless you choose otherwise when it is made; Ruler on Quick Start starts as Autokrator, and each lesson of the Paideia opens in its own way to rule; on Lesbos the first turns teach naming an aim and reading what was done in your name. The first card on the Decrees page — Rule as Autokrator / Rule as Epistates — switches at any time, and holding one brief alone is ruling as Epistates. The same choice is offered in a play-by-post match, where the host picks what the seats start on.

Ruling as Autokrator the Court’s pages are The Ruler’s Will, Carried Out and Decrees:

The order controls are hidden ruling as Autokrator — everything stays readable. Take the Field, a switch on the Decrees card that changes the way of ruling, shows them again for this game and seat and keeps the briefs held. An army you order yourself while your adviser holds the sword is led by your hand from then on: the brief passes it over — it never marches it, merges it into another army or puts it aboard — until you hand it back, from its card or from The Ruler’s Will; the hex card says which army standing there is led, and offers Lead It for the rest; an army’s own card carries only its own row, at the top. The Ruler’s Will is the Court’s first page in either way of ruling: as Epistates the aims steer what your adviser proposes, and its card of led armies lets a seat that holds only the purse hand one back.

Decrees are the standing Court: the house and its decisions, the realm’s alignment — the pole it stands for, a declaration made this turn with its Cancel, and how long until it may change again — the two briefs, and the four officers, each of whom runs one phase within a reserve you set. An officer stands aside while a brief covers its phase. Appoint or dismiss any of them — or take a brief back — at any time:

Each respects a reserve you name — gold and goods it will not touch — so delegation never spends the war-chest you were saving, and each reports its turn’s work in the chronicle under the Court’s seal, as a held brief does under your adviser’s name. What was done in your name is always on the record.

The counsel also offers, as rows you may tick, what the other courts do for themselves: laying in food against a siege — a city of yours with a depot in it, a sighted enemy within four hexes and the walls not yet closed, whose stores fall short of what it could eat under siege, is sent food from your best-stocked depot that is not threatened — the siege remedies the Siege Card names (blockade the harbor that feeds a besieged city, reinforce a thin siege, relieve a besieged city of yours, raise a wall-breaker), the sale of a host’s captives to a Slaver’s caravan beside it, a wine festival for a restless city, a luxury for a restless city or a gift of it to a sulking governor, and the requisition of a shelf when your depots cannot feed the hosts at a threatened city.

The Court opens at once: while the round’s counsel is being composed, the page says your adviser is weighing it, and the counsel appears when it is ready. Ruling as Epistates, its footer offers Select All and Deselect All.

Rule by Voice

Ruling as Autokrator with the sound on, you can play a whole turn by voice. Switch Rule by Voice on at the Court — on the band under its page tabs, or on the Decrees page’s The Spoken Turn card — and the Court reads its matters aloud one after another, the campaign, the other matters and what your word brought about, and listens after each for your answer. The matter being read is framed in brass on the page with a tag — Being Read, Awaiting Your Word, Nothing to Decide — and the one “next” goes to carries a dashed frame, so a glance tells where the voice stands. It is the Court’s own buttons that act: a way taken by voice is the same order a tap gives.

Rule by Voice in the Court on a Mac: the band shows Stop the Voice, what was heard and Reading — speak to cut in, above the campaign framed in brass Rule by Voice on an iPhone
Rule by Voice: the Court reads its matters aloud and listens for your word. The band says what it heard and what the voice is doing; the matter being read is framed in brass.

The band carries Rule by Voice (Stop the Voice while it runs), the microphone seal and a line saying what the voice is doing — Reading — speak to cut in, Listening…, Paused — tap the microphone or type. The Court listens while it reads, so you can cut in by speaking: a command it is sure of stops the reading at once, and a tap on the microphone seal cuts it short as well. “Stop” pauses the voice, and so does a long silence; then the microphone is closed, and a tap on the seal or a typed answer resumes. Every answer can be typed on the band instead of spoken. A xenos’s page opened over the voice pauses it until the page closes. With Rule by Voice on, the Court’s situation and counsel read themselves when they open; otherwise they wait for Read Aloud.

Names. The Court hears your world’s places by their sound. When it is not sure which place you meant, it asks, and I said… on the band lets you pick the place; the game remembers that hearing on this device (Voice Commands on the first page forgets it all). Voice Practice, on the Decrees page, has the chronicler prompt the Court’s phrases and your world’s names, shows what was heard and what it was taken for, and tries a command spoken over his reading; a name heard wrongly can be taught there too.

The microphone. Hearing is in English, runs on the device, and the microphone is open only while you play a turn by voice or practice. The game asks for it once on this device: a new Autokrator world’s welcome page opens with a Rule by Voice block and Allow Voice Commands, and an Autokrator world that opens without a welcome page asks in a card of its own, with Not Now beside it. Turned down, it is allowed later in the system’s Settings, under Privacy & Security, Microphone, and answers can still be typed. The spoken turn needs Autokrator Mode, the sound on, and a seat that holds a Court.

Razing a city

An army standing in a city it has already taken, whose walls have been thrown down, may put it to the torch. Razing is not always allowed:

The order rides out by courier like any other, and can be recalled while it rides.

The torch pays: 2–5 of every bulk good, and — in a coined world — 10–20 gold from enslavement, half as much again for every population level above the first. If the city held the enemy’s depot, you carry off 85% of everything in it. Every power that has met you takes note; this is the single most resented act in the game, and the reputation follows you into every negotiation afterwards.

A people of camps decides at the gate. Where your people keep camps, the raze order is also the choice between plunder and a country: keep a taken town through the turn and your people settle (see Cities), order it burned and they ride on. The raze row says which; while the order rides, the town is not kept.

Nomad camps scatter rather than burn, and what happens depends on what you brought. March in with fewer than two mounted units at strength and the camp is simply gone — it rides off within its own range, and if you have it cornered it scatters and always re-forms. Two horsemen scatter it; three or more, each still at half strength or better, can catch and take it whole — and even then, half the time the horde slips away and you hold empty grass. When you do catch them you take the full bulk spoils but only half the gold, and a scattered camp re-gathers within two to four turns a population level poorer. A people’s last camp is never scattered by a horseless occupier.

Ruins, rebuilding and refounding

A razed city leaves ruins — a named, permanent scar carrying the dead city’s people and harbor. The map draws it in the faded colors of its old owner; the hex keeps its resource and its owner but produces nothing as a city.

Standing on ruins you hold, you can rebuild the city as it was — 8 of every bulk good and 20 gold — restoring its name, its culture and its harbor, at wall level 0 and population 1.

Founding a city

You can also plant a new one. Any land hex will do, so long as it is yours or unclaimed, holds no enemy, lies outside every enemy zone of control, and stands at least three hexes from any other city — and it always costs a unit of the army standing there, at half strength or better, who lay down their spears and become the colonists. What it costs your treasury depends on who you send them from:

Rome and Macedon found colonies of veterans. Either may only found with a seasoned unit — Regular or better — and the colony is raised at population 2 from the start. The coloniae of discharged legionaries, and the Alexandrias.

A new city is walled the turn it is founded, to the ordinary height a town keeps by itself; you paid for the walls in the founding price. A city rebuilt from ruins still has to grow its wall back the slow way.

A founded city bears your civilization and recruits your troops — which makes the ruins of a conquered city the sharpest tool in the game. Capture, raze, found: a foreign city becomes a city of your own people, able to raise your own kind of soldier. It leaves a grudge that will outlive your ruler.

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Resources, Trade & Gold

The Strategika's Economic Model chapter on a Mac
The Strategika's Economic Model chapter tells the whole economy in a page — trade bound up with politics, goods that cost dearly to carry, prices only as good as their news.

The stockpile

Grain, cattle and fish are all food, freely interchangeable. Wood and metal build and arm your forces; stone raises walls. Owned tiles yield automatically and travel to your depot (see Supply); merchant ships net fish on shoals (scared off by enemy warships); enemy raiders, blockades and ravaging can zero a tile or a harbor.

Horses are a good like any other — grazed on plains and hills, carted to the depot, traded, plundered and counted in your standing — with one job: every mounted unit costs horses as well as metal. Light horse and horse archers one, medium and heavy two, chariots one or two; war elephants none. Four peoples are horse breeders — the Scythians, the Persians, the Numidians, and Mitanni in the Bronze Age — with pasture guaranteed at home and double the yield from it. Everyone else buys horses at whatever the world’s scarcity has done to the price, which is the quiet reason a cavalry army is a people, not a purchase. A nomad camp on the plains breeds its own.

Tin, wine, luxuries and weapons. Beside the six bulk goods the ages keep four more. Tin belongs to the Bronze Ages alone, the Early and the Late (see The Ages): bronze is copper and tin, a tin mine stands in hills, badlands or tundra as far from every capital as the world allows and yields one a turn to whoever holds it, and a realm without tin buys it, barters for it, or posts its merchants beside a foreign tin mine. Wine grows in vineyards on the hills, and more thinly on fields and badlands, of some regions only — one a turn, with at least one vineyard for every three realms and vineyards guaranteed to the peoples of the vine — and pours festivals and the townsfolk’s table (see Cities). The luxury is named by the age — incense on the desert in the Late Bronze Age, purple on the Archaic shore, spices in the Classical World, the Late Republic and the Dark Ages, lapis lazuli in the Early Bronze Age. It also comes from beyond the map: in the Classical World, the Late Republic, the Dark Ages and the Early Bronze Age every harbor lands one on its city’s market each turn unless a fleet blockades the port, and in every age but the Archaic a far road brings it overland (see Far roads and trading rounds). It is rare and far, on ground no city claims, worth four common goods, and in the mountains it lies as gems, which only a highland people’s held mountain yields. It is the elite’s good: a gift between courts, a governor’s comfort, and the townsfolk’s table beside wine. Weapons no land yields: a city makes them in its armory (see Buildings), worth three common goods, never brought by caravan nor handed out by omen, and a fighting company’s muster may be paid in them in place of its metal — one weapon for every two metal, rounded up — when the stores that pay at the city hold them; such a company musters a turn sooner. Levies, ships, wagons and engines take no weapons, and mercenaries keep their price.

Don’t hoard, at either end. The tradeable national pool that the caravan market draws on loses 20% of anything above 40 each turn to spoilage and graft; the depot doesn’t rot, but 40 is a hard ceiling and goods arriving at a full store are simply lost. Spend it, trade it, or field it.

The barter market

The barter lives on the Market tab beside the city markets, under Emporion — Exchange Gifts in the Late Bronze Age (a Satrap and a Trader see no barter: it passes between rulers). Each turn the courts post up to three barter offers — “give so much of one good, receive so much of another” — and every offer names the court it comes from; an offer closed to you says why. A court offers only what it truly holds beyond what it keeps (twenty of a good, twenty coin), for a good it is running short of, and prices the lot at its own reckoning — the good’s price at its own market, weighted by how badly it needs it — asking about a tenth more. So an offer is a bargain only for a court that values the goods more than the offerer does: one whose market is dearer, or whose stores are emptier. Prices themselves follow world-wide scarcity: a good is dear when the world holds little of it, cheap when it floods, and the world’s holding counts every store — depots, market shelves, army wagons and caravans on the road — so moving goods between them never moves a price.

Nothing is set aside when an offer is posted. When it settles, the offering court pays from the depots that reach its seat — if it has spent the goods meanwhile, the offer falls through and your goods come back — and both sides’ goods travel between the two courts’ depots by caravan, raidable on the road; coin is paid at court. Offers are contested across all nations and settle at end of turn; if a rival wins the draw, your reserved goods return untouched. A court never trades with one it has fought in the last three turns, nor across an embargo, and every barter struck warms the two courts to each other a little.

You can post your own offers too. A rival court weighs one by what the goods cost at its own market and how badly it needs them — a court short of grain prizes grain, one with a full granary shrugs at it — and wants to come out about a tenth ahead, more if it bears you a grudge and less if it is your friend. It reckons in proportions, never in fixed sums: a heap of a cheap good will not buy a coin unless that good is dear to the court you offer it to.

Rival courts post standing barters of their own the same way, and you may take one: a court short of a good that coin cannot buy offers its surplus for it, at the smallest lot it judges another court would accept. A court’s standing offer stays up at least one round, so every court has weighed it before its goods go home. Only one court can take a standing offer: when two accept the same one, one of them is refused, and a refused barter says why in the other ruler’s words. Your adviser proposes such a barter for you when your works or recruits lack a good your markets do not sell. A Factor house puts a lot of what the courts it deals with run short of on the same board each turn, for gold, a quarter above its home market’s price; take it and the goods come from the house’s store as a convoy to your court.

Why a price is what it is. Every good’s price comes with its reason: how much of it the world holds against its usual level, whether it has hit its floor (a quarter of its usual worth) or its ceiling (four times), which way it has moved over the last six turns and, for food, where in the year it stands; each city’s market adds its own shelf and distance. A good whose price doubles or halves in that span is news in every court’s chronicle.

Far roads and trading rounds

Some goods come from beyond the edge of the world: by sea to the harbors, or overland by caravan through a gate on the map’s edge. No one builds these roads, and no one can buy their goods at the source. A realm holds the harbor, the gate or the city where they land, takes the toll and buys first, or cuts the road for a rival.

Age Its roads
Classical World the spice ships — spices from Arabia and India, by sea to every harbor · the spice road — spices from Arabia, overland through a gate on the eastern edge
Late Bronze Age the tin road — tin from the east, through a gate on the eastern edge · the incense road — incense from Punt, through a gate on the southern edge
Archaic Era the ships of Tartessos — iron from Tartessos, by sea to the harbors whose waters reach the western edge · the horse road — horses from the steppe, through a gate on the northern edge
Dark Ages the spice ships — spices from the southern seas, by sea to every harbor · the eastern caravans — spices from the far east, through a gate on the eastern edge
Late Republic the spice ships — spices from Arabia and India, by sea to every harbor · the silk road — spices from the Seres, through a gate on the eastern edge
Early Bronze Age the ships of Meluhha — lapis lazuli from Meluhha and Dilmun, by sea to every harbor · the tin road — tin from Elam, and the lapis road — lapis lazuli from the far mountains, both through gates on the eastern edge · the ships of Magan — copper from Magan, by sea to the harbors whose waters reach the southern edge

A road runs only where the world keeps its good.

How much comes. Where the age’s luxury comes by sea to every harbor, each harbor lands 1 of it a turn. Every other road brings one good a turn for each 8 standing cities in the world, never less than one while a city stands. The more cities the world keeps, the more trade it draws from beyond, and every city razed thins every road.

The harbors. A ship from beyond the map lands at the harbor of a standing city. It does not land at one whose city is in disarray or whose port an enemy fleet blockades: that harbor’s share lands at the others. What lands goes on the city’s own market shelf, up to what the shelf holds. The city’s owner takes a frontier toll of 25% of its worth there, new coin entering the world with the goods.

The gate and the entrepôt. A land road enters at its gate: the open hex of its stretch of the map’s edge nearest the edge, on a road where one runs. Each turn a caravan of far traders sets out from the gate for the entrepôt, the standing city nearest the gate, and walks the board like any convoy. Where another realm than the entrepôt’s owner holds the gate, it takes its own frontier toll as the caravan passes. The entrepôt’s owner takes his when it lands. If the entrepôt is razed or lost, the road goes on to whichever city now stands nearest the gate. The map marks each gate with a small saffron diamond and the road’s name. A city card says which roads land there, under From beyond the map.

Cutting a road. A far caravan walks under the protection of the city it is bound for. The entrepôt’s owner and his allies let it pass. Any of his enemies whose host stands in reach may seize it, as they would his own supply. A seized caravan is a prize: its goods go to the raider, the entrepôt’s owner is told, and nothing lands that turn. Tin, incense and the rest grow dear across the world when their roads are cut.

Trading rounds. Any seat that has a piece able to carry goods may send it on a round: a Trader his caravans and hulls, a court its wagon trains, a Satrap the hosts on his roster within his province. Use the Trading Round… button among the wagons on the army’s card. In the sheet:

Then Lay the Round. When the piece stands in or beside a stop’s city, it sells, then buys, exactly as if you had given each order by hand, at the same prices, tolls and gates. Then an ordinary march sends it on to the next stop. The army card says where the round is bound or why it stands still. Logistics → Rounds shows every round you keep, with its laps and what the last lap and the lap now running took.

When a round stands still. If the limits hold off everything at a stop for 3 laps running, the round stands still and tells you so: the game will not run a loss you did not choose. A round also pauses, keeping its place, in two other cases, and tells you why:

Send it the same stops again (Resume) to start it where it stood. End the Round to stop it. A round whose piece is lost, disbanded or no longer yours ends, and you are told. Rival courts send their idle wagon trains round two of their own markets where a good sells dearer than it is bought, and end a round that stops paying. Your adviser offers the same.

Gold & coin

Gold stands apart: mined from gold tiles, taxed from cities (more from harbors; nothing from besieged, blockaded or freshly-sacked towns), and plundered in war. A city taxes 1 a turn and a harbor 2 — in the Early and Late Bronze Ages none and 1, in the Late Republic 2 and 3 — and a rich city of a historical map taxes several times that, and keeps its wealth whoever holds it. A city of the Tribes, the Celts or the Late Republic’s Cilicians — chiefs, not a state’s tax-gatherers — pays half, rounded up; their warbands live off the land and eat one ration less a company, never less than one. In war, a stormed city gives up gold, and a fallen capital loses a fifth to more than half of the national treasury to the sack (only half as much if your ruler is away in the field). Unlike bulk goods, gold is credited the moment it is taken; coin needs no cart. In need, a city can pay a year of its tax at once, at a price in its loyalty (see The extraordinary tax under Loyalty & politics), and in the Dark Ages a court may borrow from a merchant house (see Merchant houses and the Trader). Gold pays for:

And gold comes in by tolls on what others bring to your markets (see City markets), and by tribute in coin in an age of struck coin: a client sells its goods at its own market to raise it.

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Armies & Units

Twenty-five unit types across infantry, cavalry, ships, siege and supply — the Bronze Age fields its own fifteen. Every unit has terrain-dependent combat ratings — a phalanx that is irresistible on plains collapses in a forest; tribal warbands that own the woods are cut down in the open. Strength is normalized by unit size, so a 300-strong band of skirmishers and a 100-strong hoplite company compare by quality, not headcount.

Highlights of the roster:

Arms. In the Late Bronze Age a fighting company’s arms are bronze, and a muster asks its tin beside its copper — one to three, the most for the palace elite and the chariots; levies, ships, wagons and engines ask none. A company raised without its tin is armed in copper and fights 20% worse, in attack and defense alike (a copper Regular keeps its professional edge, less the copper). You may raise a company in copper by choice, to keep the tin; a bronze muster whose tin is short when it musters is raised in copper rather than lost, and you are told how much was missing; summer levies always come in copper and keep it. A copper company standing in one of your own cities can be re-armed in bronze for its muster’s tin, paid at once from the stores there; the order rides to the city, and the company fights in bronze from the turn after it arrives. In every age a muster may be paid in weapons from an armory in place of its metal, and musters a turn sooner for it (see Resources, Trade & Gold).

Doctrine. Beside its stance every host carries a doctrine that leans its general’s choice of maneuver: Bold favors the charge and the flank and is loath to give ground; Cautious holds the line and is quickest to slip away; Cunning prefers the flank, the refused wing and harassment to a head-on clash; Balanced leaves the choice to the general. A doctrine adds to the general’s own character and never teaches him a maneuver he does not know. Before a walled city the same doctrine leans his choice of approach — a Bold host storms sooner, a Cautious one waits the city out, a Cunning one tries the gate — and it sets the odds below which the host declines battle (see Tactics). In a battle a side fights by the doctrine of the host its commanding general leads. A satrap’s roster takes the crown’s doctrine; agents’ parties and baggage trains take none.

A people’s guard. Some units are a people’s own elite — Makedon’s Companions (the king’s heavy horse, in place of the cataphract), the Sherden Guard, the Boar-Tusk Champions and the Maryannu, the Assyrian Guard and the Immortals, the Royal Guard of the Early Bronze Age, the comitatenses, clibanarii and bucellarii of the Age of Migrations, and the huscarls, mamluks, elven archers and knights, dwarf huscarls and black orcs of the Dark Ages. A guard is raised only by a realm whose own people field it, and only in a city where a people that fields it lives: a conqueror never raises the guard of the people he conquered, and a guard people does not raise its guard in a town of strangers until its own folk have settled there. Free companies never enlist a guard. The Arms of the Age marks every guard.

A general’s retinue. In the Age of Migrations the bucellarii are a general’s sworn men, paid from his own purse. They muster only in a city where an army of yours stands under a living general, and they join that army; with none there, they cannot be raised. They never leave it: no split, no detachment, no new army raised from them, and a merge only into another host a living general leads. When the general falls they stay with the army and fight on, and whoever takes the army next inherits them.

Aboard ship troops fight only when the fleets grapple and board, at half their attack on land, and count as half a formation each; when ships are lost, the men they can no longer carry drown. New Army and Join: units of yours standing outside any army can be raised as a new army there or join one of yours on the hex — ships and troops never form one army, an agent forms only a party of his own, and a fleet takes in only ships.

The army card

Select an army and its card leads with the troops. A muster strip under the title gives the army in one glance — its leading figures, how many units, their readiness and morale, its attack and defense on the ground it stands on, its supply and its battles — then Move and its battles, then the muster itself as stand cards, one per unit type, the figure first and large with a strength gauge, readiness pips and a morale pennant. A stand opens to its units; a unit opens its own card: its three dials, attack and defense here, the ground it fights best and worst on, its supply, pay and worth, what it can do in the game’s own words, and promotion to Regulars when it is eligible. The army’s orders follow — with what became of the last one, how you are in touch with the army, and the turn an order sent now would reach it (see Movement) — then its siege row where it stands at a wall (see Sieges), then its wagons and what it ate last turn. An enemy’s army uses the same cards, fogged to what your scouts reported, and its numbers are an estimate: seen from three hexes off a count may be wrong by four tenths either way, from two by a quarter, from the next hex by a sixth; riders and spies judge closer, and only a host you stand beside in battle, or a spy inside the walls, is counted exactly.

In the Ledger’s Forces roster, each of your forces says whether it is fed, living off the land or cut off, and from which depot; tap the depot’s name to open it in Logistics.

The Forces ledger on a Mac: armies and fleets with Move, Go to and Details The Forces ledger on an iPhone
The Forces ledger: every army and fleet with its supply line, and Move, Go to and Details on each. The Mercenaries tab is the hiring hall.

Ships wear out

A ship is a wooden thing in salt water, and it does not wait for you. Every hull carries a condition — sound at 100 — and it only ever falls. Once a year a hull at sea loses 4 points, a straight subtraction and not a share of what is left; one lying in a friendly harbor city is hauled out and dried and loses only 2. Any sheltered coast halves the rot, but mending her needs a built harbor. She will not rot past 20: below that she is a hulk, and stays one.

Hard use ages her too. Lose a third of a hull in a clash and a quarter of that share comes off her condition for good — the strength comes back, the condition does not. A fleet fought hard for three campaigns is not the fleet you launched, whatever its numbers say.

A worn hull still fights, and better than you would think: her power falls at half the rate of her condition, so even a hulk can ram. Her worth in the final standing is less forgiving — that falls in exact proportion to her timber. A great fleet left riding at anchor for a decade does not quietly bank its value; it rots out from under your rank. A yard will repair her, or break her up for a share of her timber, and which is worth doing depends on how far gone she is.

Experience and morale

Every unit carries two hidden qualities, both shown as words rather than numbers.

Experience is a rank: Raw → Green → Regular → Veteran → Elite. Battle seasons a unit; your founding troops start seasoned, fresh recruits start Green — one step, not two, below the Regular standing that unlocks your generals’ best maneuvers. Veterans fight above their weight and raw levies below it — and replacements dilute a mauled veteran company’s edge, so protect your best units rather than endlessly refilling them. Experience also gates what your generals may attempt: several maneuvers need an army that is Regular on average.

Morale is a mood: Faltering → Wavering → Steady → Resolute → Zealous. It drifts back to Steady when a unit rests, sags on a winter march, rises with a victory and falls harder with a defeat. An army’s average morale decides whether it stands when the fighting gets long — see Battle.

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Raider bands

Beside the realms live the bands that raid them: small, local, and back next year. A band is a free company the world founds at a nest, a camp on hill, mountain, forest or rough ground (in the Dark Ages marsh, tundra and jungle too) at least 3 hexes from any city. Each age has its own bands:

Age Its bands
Classical World, Archaic Era Thracian Warband, Illyrian Raiders, Tyrrhenian Pirates
Late Bronze Age Habiru Band, Kaska Raiders, Lukka Pirates
Early Bronze Age Zagros Hill Tribe, Gutian Raiders, Lullubi Band
Late Republic Gallic Band, Iberian Raiders, Cilician Pirates
Dark Ages Northmen, Magyar Riders, Saracen Corsairs

Generals

Armies are commanded. A general’s skill is never shown to you as a number, and neither is his gift for intrigue; you learn what he is by what he does.

Finding them

What you can read

Public: his name, his temperament, and his battles and victories. No hired or promoted officer is ever a legend — that crown belongs only to a born king, and only one may live in the world at a time (see Rulers in the field).

Also public, and the thing to watch: his reputation, as a standing rather than a score — Unproven, Promising, Respected, Renowned, Feared. Reputation is earned by winning against the odds, and it is also quietly manufactured: a schemer’s name grows without a battle, and a guileless man’s fades. A general who is Feared may be a great captain or a great flatterer.

Hidden, always: his actual tactical skill, and his talent for intrigue.

A foreign general’s record only advances when word of his battle reaches you. What you know of him is stamped as of when your courier rode.

Temperaments

Seven, each fixed for life and visible from the moment he appears: Steady, Daring, Furious, Schooled, Cunning, Rash, Charismatic. They bend which maneuvers he reaches for — the Furious and the Rash charge and will not refuse a battle, the Cunning flanks and slips away, the Schooled drills — and they bend how likely he is to die doing it. A Charismatic commander is the exception that carries a plain number: his army starts every battle with steadier nerves.

Appointing one

A general does not appear at his new command by decree. He rides out from wherever your ruler sits — your capital in peacetime, the front if your king is campaigning — faster than any army but not instantly, and the army keeps its current commander until he arrives — his card shows an ETA, and you may cancel the appointment while he is on the road. A general already riding elsewhere cannot be sent twice. Relieving a commander rides out the same way: he holds the standard until the stand-down order reaches him.

Armies that belong to their generals. In the Late Republic and the Age of Migrations a Roman army belongs to the general who leads it. While he lives no one may stand him down or put another man over his men — not his ruler, not a governor, not a council; the order is refused. Only his death, or his leaving with the army, frees it for a new commander; splitting and joining hosts works as ever. A renowned or feared Roman general is hailed by his soldiers as Imperator.

Dying

Generals die in battle, and of age. In battle the odds climb with how badly his own army bled, climb again if he lost, and climb again if he ordered the charge; a steady man is safer, a furious one is not. Rank buys no protection whatsoever: legends die like anyone. Off the field a general is a man of his family and grows old with it: past 45 the years may take him (see The great families).

A commander who loses catastrophically — his army all but destroyed — is very often taken alive, and his captor decides what becomes of him: a ransom, an offer of service, freedom or death.

A general whose army is wiped out entirely faces the same odds, and it is the likeliest way in the game to lose one: the loss is total, he lost, and the roll knows it. Most of the time he is captured rather than killed — held for ransom, not slain (see Captives). If he does live, he cuts his way clear and comes back to court with no command — free to be appointed again, and carrying every battle on his record. Nobody is promoted over him, because there is no army left to promote anyone into.

Standing a general down takes a courier, and it names him. If the man you ordered home falls before your order reaches the army, the order lapses — the field commander who took up his standard keeps it. You never lose a commander to a message about a dead one.

Rulers in the field

In a dynastic campaign your ruler may take command in person. On his accession there is a small chance he is simply a great captain — a legend, the highest rank in the game, and the only way one ever appears. The game tells you when a king like that is crowned. Maneuvers closed to every hired officer open only for him, and only in the army he is personally leading.

A ruler in the field carries the Court with him: your command radius and the latency of all your orders originate from wherever he is standing, not from your Metropolis. A king at the front hears the front instantly and his home provinces late. While he commands a host the Court goes where the host goes, and cannot be moved to a city.

March to Court, from an army’s orders, sends it to the Court and keeps it following: each turn it marches on where the Court is — the city it rests in, the city it travels to, or the host the ruler rides with. Reaching the ruler’s host it joins it; reaching the Court at rest in a city it halts there. The first leg rides by courier like any march; a later march or a halt ends the following. While it follows, its card reads Following the Court, with the leg it marches this turn, and Stop Following in place of Halt Move. A fleet, an agent or a piece on a trading round cannot be sent. When the enemies near the ruler’s host outnumber it, your adviser calls idle hosts close by to the Court this way — and so do the other courts.

While the ruler is away a sacked Metropolis costs your treasury only half what it would, and a battle won in his presence is worth a purse of gold. The Drillmaster’s extra recruit stops while he is campaigning.

The great families

Every realm is served by a few great families, each people with its own word for them — the Patricians of Rome, the Eupatridai of a Greek city, the Senators of the late Empire, the Jarls of the north — four to a realm, your own ruling line the first among them. They are where your generals, your counselor and your officers come from: every man of the realm is born into one, and his family stands behind him. You find them on the Families tab of the Ledgers, beside Dynasty: a card for each family, the captives you hold, your own men held abroad, and what the court whispers. Tap a man to open his sheet — his age, his temperament and the counsel it makes, his office, and the prison. A Satrap keeps no Court of families.

The Families tab on a Mac: the Lords of the Visigoths — the Amals, your own line, the Wiliarings and the Sarings — each with its standing, loyalty, feelings and its men with their offices and tempers The Families tab on an iPhone
The great families on the Ledger's Families tab: each family's standing and loyalty, how it feels toward the others, and its men — their office or command, their temper and the counsel it makes.

Standing and loyalty. A family’s standing is public — Great, Rising, Lesser or Fallen — and grows with the offices its men hold, their fame and the city it sits in. Its loyalty you read only in words: Devoted, Content, Restless, Seething. Offices given to its men, commands, a ruler who sides with its party and a city that is loyal to the crown raise it; a slight remembered, a man in prison or held abroad unransomed, and a realm of seething cities lower it. A grievance fades in about 30 turns. A loyal family steadies the city it sits in, and a governor’s fealty leans with his family’s. Families seated at the same Court warm to each other; one passed over for office cools toward the one that was chosen, and a family in a feud with another resents seeing it in office while it has none.

The Court is people. Your counselor and your four officers are men of the families. Seat one in an office from his card, or dismiss him; give the greatest family no office and it will feel passed over. A counselor’s character colors his counsel: a Bold one sets the attack and the march onto foreign ground above the wall and the garrison, a Measured one the other way round, a Subtle one prefers the spy and the saboteur to the torch; a march home is no stroke to either, and no temper moves a critical order or one that needs your signature. When the counselor’s office stands empty — he was taken, dismissed or died — no one counsels in his name until you seat another man. A counselor or an officer may take the field or govern a province, and a general may come back to Court, as you choose.

Men grow old. A man of the families ages: past 45 he may die of his years, and none lives past 85. A family short of men sees a young one come of age.

Plots. A seething family with ambition plots. You never see the plot itself, only the whispers your court hears about one man or another — and the whispers are not always true. A plotting general facing the enemy may go over to it; where generals own their armies, his army goes with him. A plotting courtier may sell your orders to a rival court, which then knows where your armies stand. A great family of the greatest ambition may even strike at a ruler who stays at court. A man of great cunning in the Steward’s or the Merchant’s office may keep some of the realm’s coin for his family; the court whispers of it, and the treasury shows it only as coin that is not there. Other courts act on a whisper only once it is borne out — a second whisper about the same man, or a family already restless — and seldom twice in a season.

The prison. You may imprison a man of your realm on a charge of disloyalty or corruption, release him, put him to death or send him into exile. Each needs your own signature. A man in the field is taken when his army next stands in one of your cities. His family takes it hard. The other families watch: if the charge was true they shrug, and a loyal family thinks the better of you; if it was invented, every one of them cools toward your line and warms toward his. An exile goes to the court of a neighbor, where an enemy may hire him.

Captives. A commander whose host is overrun is often taken alive — yours or the enemy’s, a ruler too (his realm crowns its heir all the same). The realm that holds him may ask a ransom, offer him service, let him go or put him to death; a captor that gives no word within 4 turns follows the custom of the age. A ransom depends on the man’s fame and his family’s standing, from 10 gold for an unknown man of a fallen family upward (paid by weight of goods where the age has no coin); a captured ruler is worth ten times as much. Pay it from the Families tab and he rides home. A realm that will not pay angers his family, and a great family may pay it out of its own wealth. A man offered service answers for himself: a devoted man refuses, a man whose family seethes accepts — and joins his captor’s realm as the founder of a new family.

Names of your own

You may rename your ruler, your house, your realm and any of your cities — a city you have taken as well as one you founded — and an army or a company: the ruler, house and realm from the Names of Your Own card on the Dynasty tab, a city from the Rename order among its Rule orders, an army from its card, a company or a merchant house from its desk. When you craft a world, the Your Names card names your ruler, your house and your realm before the first turn — offering your people’s own house and its founder to keep or change — and a company or house seat names itself there too. Your ruler keeps his number. A city’s old name is not forgotten: what a scenario asks of it, it still asks. Your realm’s letter on the map stays yours for life. No two cities, and no two realms, may share a name.

Names can be changed in every game — alone, at one table, or in a match by post — except a Game Center match, where no name can be changed.

The Dynasty tab on a Mac: the reigning ruler with his traits, and the Names of Your Own card with fields to rename the ruler, the house and the realm The Names card on an iPhone
Names of your own on the Dynasty tab: rename your ruler, your house and your realm. Your ruler keeps his number, and your realm keeps its letter on the map.

Your flag. Where your people fly more than one device, you may choose which flies on your pennants, standards and sails, from the Your Flag card on the Dynasty tab; every court sees it. In the Dark Ages the orcs choose among the Bloodied Hand, the Boar’s Head and two cleavers, the elves among the Great Tree and two bows, the dwarves among their hammers, and the gnomes among the Gear and Compasses, the Badger and the Gear in a Ring.

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Battle

When armies meet, each side’s strength is its units’ terrain ratings scaled by their current strength — then shifted by stance, veterancy, professional training, national and ruler traits, morale, shock and fear, omens, the ground itself, and the generals.

Rules worth internalizing:

The battle card. Pick a target that brings a fight and the strip above the map holds only the question — Attack, Besiege or March, its verdict, and Cancel — while the battle card opens over the map, clear of your army and its target; the map never moves for it. The card gives the verdict and a strength bar, your men against the enemy’s, with a hatched band for how far your scouts may be off and how much a garrison’s walls may add; what kind of clash it would be; what stands against you and for you — the ground, the walls, supply, the general’s tactic, a shaken line — and the risks. More, always folded at first, holds the fine print: when the order lands, the operation it serves and, before a walled city, the Siege Card. Once a target is picked, the card’s foot holds the order’s buttons. On an iPhone the card spans the map, and a tap folds it to its verdict row.

How a battle runs

The light. Every battle is fought at morning, noon or afternoon, drawn fresh. The hour does not change who wins — it changes whether the winner can finish it. A morning victory is run down by the horse; an afternoon one lets the beaten army walk away in the dark.

The approach. When two armies first come into contact, the bowmen open — archers, longbowmen, psiloi, horse archers and light cavalry loose a volley before the lines meet, capped at 15% of the enemy’s strength. Javelinmen do not: the peltast’s throw is part of the melee. A static siege does not re-volley every turn; only a fresh engagement does.

The clash. Up to four rounds of contact. Both sides tire as the rounds pass — a charging army tires three times as fast — and when one side’s effective power falls to a quarter of the other’s, the line breaks and it is ridden down — and that collapse decides the battle as surely as a rout does, whoever had bled more by then.

Nerve. Each side enters with the average morale of its units, plus whatever a charismatic commander adds, and every round costs it nerve — more the more of it fell; outnumbering the enemy steadies a host. One die for the battle is rolled each round, and a side whose nerve falls below it breaks — and a rout beats the butcher’s bill: the side that breaks is the side that lost, whoever was killing more. A host does not break as one. Its brittle men — levies and green irregulars — test first; if they run, every part still standing tests again, shaken by the sight; then the ordinary line, then the steady core of Regular heavy foot, seasoned horse and Elites. A steady core of a third of the host or more holds against that panic; a host whose steady men run, or all of whose parts have run, is routed, while one that loses only its levies fights on with less. A wing shattered by the charge, and the fall of the commander, try every part at once. Men of a contingent that ran are not counted as lost: they leave the line for the rest of the battle and come back to a host that holds the field.

The general. A commander can fall in the fighting itself, round by round — likelier in a bloody round, at the head of a charge, and in the rout — and his host feels it at once. A king who falls is succeeded that same turn.

The pursuit. Cavalry runs down a broken enemy for extra losses — canceled horse-for-horse by the loser’s own screening cavalry, forbidden to elephants, impossible in the dark, and weaker the longer the battle went. The winner deals one full blow as the line gives way, then cuts down about an eighth of what is left of the broken host whether it pursues on foot or on horse, and more for every horseman it has beyond the loser’s, up to two fifths; a loser behind its own walls is not pursued. A four-round grind leaves the winner too blown to chase. The pursuit takes men alive as well: about a third of its toll when the winner’s horse rides the routed down, a tenth when it does not. In an age that weighs silver they are led away as captives, to be sold; in an age that strikes coin their court may ransom them at the slave price the turn after, and they come home as a raw company at its nearest city — a ransom unpaid two turns on is refused, and the men go to the market.

The battle report shows all of it: the order of battle with every unit’s veterancy, a Course of Battle timeline naming each side’s maneuver and whether it worked, and the battle plates. The plates draw the two hosts as the record has them — horse on the wings, the heavy foot in ranks at the center, the light screen in front, the siege engines and baggage in the rear rank — every stand its people’s own figure under its nation’s color, on a picture of the ground the hex gave: open plain, a farmstead, a mine, a ford, a wall, a shore. Four plates follow the fight as far as it went — Deployment, the Approach, the Clash and the Rout — and the lines march from one to the next: the attacker crosses the ground, the lines meet, the fallen lie where they fell, the broken side falls back. A taller staff with the nation’s device marks each commander — two staffs where a side brought two generals — and lies down on the round he fell; tap it to see the general. Men beyond the width the ground let into the line stand dimmed behind it; a wing shattered at first contact scatters; a maneuver that came off shows in the shape of the line; the companies that ran stream off apart from the dead; a side taken unready stands unformed. The plate draws what the record holds and no more. Tap a stand for its unit; tap the picture to enlarge it.

A battle report on a Mac: the chronicler's account and the battle plate A battle report on an iPhone
A battle report: the chronicler's account of the fight, then the order of battle drawn on the battle plates, one plate to each stage of the fight.

The battle told. A staff officer walks the plates aloud: the hour, the hosts and the ground; whose volley cost whom; the Clash round by round — a commander’s fall, a wing shattered, a maneuver that landed, the companies that ran, the quiet rounds summed in a line; how it ended; the victor and the spoils. Open a battle’s report and he begins by himself unless the sound or Auto-Narration is off, and never over a screen reader. Tell the Battle, the seal beside the Order of Battle, pauses and resumes him, the square ends him, and a numeral pressed while he speaks moves him to that plate. Drums sound as the lines form and the clash as they meet (with Ambient Sound on), before his words and never under them. The bound book prints his words under each plate instead.

An Early Bronze Age battle plate on a Mac: two shield walls meet before a city wall, a battle car behind them The same battle on an iPhone
The Clash in an Early Bronze Age battle: two shield walls meet on the plain before the city wall, and the battle car waits behind the line.

Commanding in person — the Field. A world with Command Battles in Person (on for a new world, under Variants as it is made; switched on or off at any time in the world’s World Settings; not offered for Game Center play) stops the season before each of your battles that your seat reaches by courier the same turn — the ruler’s seat, a Satrap’s province seat, a company’s main column — and shows the muster card: the place and the ground, the hour, both orders of battle, and what the contest already settled (an ambush sprung, a line caught on the march, the enemy general’s plan) — and, where a xenos holds the other side, its signet, its name and its word for the battle, or that its archetype will fight it. Command in Person opens the Field; Leave It to the General lets him fight it as always. A battle beyond your reach is the general’s, and is reported as before.

On the Field each of your units is one piece, on ground laid out from the hex: the defender’s terrain, your own approach in your deployment rows, a river with fords when you came across one, the wall line when you storm a walled city, the sea along a coastal flank. The board is drawn over the picture of the battle field the battle was fought on — the attacker’s line at the bottom, the defender’s at the top — and its river, wall, shore and obstacles sit where that picture paints them; a hex the picture shows blocked is hatched. Pinch or scroll to look closer and drag to move about; the corner button, or ⌘0, fits the whole field again. The replay pans and zooms the same way, and its Fit button returns to the whole field. Draw up your line first (tap a piece, then a hex of your ground, lit in your color; turn it with the arrows), or pick a Formation — Battle Line, Refuse the Left or Right, Light Troops Forward, Column — and adjust from there. A host bigger than the field can hold keeps the rest in reserve beside its line, and each reserve piece marches up onto the nearest free hex at its side’s turn. It starts as your general would draw it up, and a host attacking under Try Skirmish has its light foot out ahead as a screen with the line behind — then Sound the Advance. Each turn, tap a piece to see where it can go (green), whom it can strike (red) and whom it can loose at (orange); move, use its one free turn, strike or Volley, then End Turn. Undo Move takes back moves until a blow is struck; Turn Left and Turn Right turn the selected piece; Next Piece picks your next piece that can still act; Fast Enemy Turns plays the enemy’s turns quickly. Every button says what it does under the pointer, and is dimmed while it cannot be used.

Hand to the General gives him the rest of the battle. Everything after — the retreat, captures, prisoners, experience, the general’s fate, the chronicle — follows as after any battle; the report is marked Commanded in person and its Replay the Battle door steps through the board as it was fought. With friends on one device each of you commands your own pieces, the device passed behind a curtain between you. A xenos across the field gives its captain one plan for the battle, in its own words, may change it once when the battle turns, and calls across the field to you at most twice while it is fought; its battle plans go into its ledger. Quitting the app on the Field leaves the season unresolved: End Turn again and the battle is offered afresh — and a xenos’s round for that turn is kept with the world, so it is not asked (or paid for) twice.

The enemy’s captain, and your Antipalos. The captain who fights every side you do not hold fights with judgment: it weighs each blow against the answer it would draw, pulls a spent company out of the line, holds back a wing it cannot win on, and a beaten enemy may sound the withdrawal to save its men — and is pursued as it goes. It also learns. Every battle you command in person teaches your Antipalos (Greek antipalos, the one who wrestles against you), the adversary across your fields: it studies how you fight and learns to answer it, while the game is open, so the captain you meet is matched to you. The muster card says how many of your battles it has studied, and Your Antipalos — there, or Antipalos in the first page’s gear menu — shows what it has learned: how you fight and its answer. Export… writes its file to carry to your other devices, Import… joins a file’s battles to this device’s, and Start Over forgets what it learned here.

At sea. A battle of fleets on open water is offered on the Field too. Each ship is a piece counted in hulls; the troops aboard fight only when their ship grapples and drown if it sinks or is taken. A ram hull that comes on two hexes straight rams — a hull the ram breaks is holed and runs — and every other blow grapples from the decks: the side with more marines strikes the harder unless the crews it boards are the more skilled, and a hull a grapple costs the enemy may be taken instead of sunk. Heavier hulls take less from a blow. Raiders and light war galleys row farther than heavy galleys and sailing transports; the wind, shown by the pennant in the corner and named in the header, carries a sail one hex farther before it and one fewer into it, and oars do not feel it. Nothing is pursued at sea but a slower hull beside a faster one, and the fleet’s withdrawal is Scatter. Hulls you take join your fleet after the battle.

Storming a shore. A fleet attacking a held shore draws up on a band of sea before the beach. Beach runs the selected ship onto the beach beside it, where it stays; Land puts the next company aboard ashore beside it, one a turn a ship; Re-embark takes a company beside its beached ship back aboard. A beached ship strikes the shore at its coastal share; the men on the beach strike ships offshore at theirs.

Tactical stances

You set the stance; the general picks the maneuver.

A garrison may also sortie — sally out and fight as the aggressor, giving up its wall bonus for the turn to break a siege that has grown thinner than the men inside. You do not order it; a commander who holds the city takes it when the odds are his.

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Tactics

Beyond the stance you set, your general chooses how to fight — you do not pick his maneuver, and you cannot overrule him. What you control is who commands which army, and the troops you give him. Learn your captains’ habits: one always refuses his left on open ground, another cannot be stopped from charging.

Eight maneuvers exist, each with its own gate:

Maneuver Who can attempt it
The standard line Anyone, always — and what a foiled plan collapses into
Impetuous Charge The Celtic and tribal peoples readily; anyone else only under a legendary king in person
Echelon Makedonians only, under a fine general, on open ground, with Regular troops
Flank Attack Any people, a good general, in hills or woods, with Regular troops
Harassment Scythians and Nubians, all-mounted, with horse archers, on open ground, with Regular troops
Decline Battle A good general who is outnumbered, not ambushed, with the horse to screen a withdrawal
Diekplous At sea: earned by the crews, not the captain — veteran rowers only
Periplous The same

Four things decide whether a plan works:

Reading the enemy. A general judges what he is facing by the enemy’s cavalry. The better he is, the less obvious the tell has to be. Read a charge coming and the counter is already forming.

Rank. A general badly outclassed by his opposite number never gets his plan off the ground at all — he is forced back onto the standard line. Against a legend, merely being outclassed is enough.

Troops. The clever maneuvers need soldiers who can execute them. A brilliant plan and a raw levy is still a raw levy — a maneuver half-executed pays half.

Surprise. A general who has been ambushed executes nothing. His plan is worth zero.

When one plan meets another, the better answer wins the exchange: a real plan beats a plain line of battle, the echelon beats it harder, and harassment eats a charge alive — while an impetuous charge that runs into any of those pays for it.

At sea the two rowing maneuvers work differently. Veteran crews are what makes them possible — no admiral can order the diekplous with green rowers — but what makes them decisive is outclassing the enemy admiral. A commander two or three grades above his opposite number turns the periplous or the diekplous into a serious advantage; an ordinary captain with superb crews merely sails prettily.

Declining battle dissolves the engagement entirely: no volleys, no rounds, no losses, no entry in anyone’s service record. It is how an outmatched army survives to fight where it chooses.

Battle takes two. A host whose odds — its men by their own ratings on the ground against the enemy’s — fall below its doctrine’s line gives ground rather than fight: a Cautious host below 50%, a Balanced one (and every host you set no doctrine for) below 40%, a Bold one below 30%, and a furious or rash general never by the odds. It cannot refuse when it is pinned with nowhere to fall back, holds a city or a binding order, is ambushed, or faces more than twice its cavalry — then it must fight — and a much better general can force battle on a weaker one. The odds card says would refuse or cannot refuse before you march.

And some armies simply ride away — horse that will not stand. A host of pure horse (every land unit in it cavalry) on open ground — plains, fields, desert or tundra — may ride away whatever its commander’s rank or people, if it brings more than twice the enemy’s horse, or any horse at all against an enemy with none. That is what horse is, and it is how the steppe fights a heavier enemy. Being able to is not the same as doing it: a horse host with at least as many men as its enemy stands and fights; one merely outnumbered rides away unless it has a better maneuver to hand — a people of horse-archers stays to shoot and harass; one outnumbered two to one, or below its doctrine’s line, rides away all but always. A Bold doctrine holds it on the field until it is outnumbered two to one, a Cautious one sends it off even when it could harass, and a furious or rash general never rides away. On broken ground, against too much enemy horse, or with one unit in its ranks that is not horse, it is an ordinary army. Any kind of refusal needs somewhere to fall back to for every army on your side: one pinned column pins them all. An ambush cancels the maneuver outright, the garrison of an invested city can never slip out, and on a city hex a refusal is disobedience — only a good general at long odds will clear the order, and it costs him his standing. Word of a refusal also shakes your nearby cities half as much as a defeat would. Nomads are exempt from that: for the horde, riding away is not a disgrace.

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Sieges

A besieger spends its first turn raising siege works and rolls no dice. From the turn after it rolls to breach a wall level — and what you brought decides whether time is on your side at all:

On top of that: +25% when you press an assault rather than settling in, a bonus for every tick spent preparing (up to +40%), the strength and quality of the garrison against you — a veteran garrison is markedly harder to breach than a raw one, and the professional bonus counts for both sides — and at most one wall level a turn however many armies surround the city.

Siegecraft is who you are. Assyria is the great besieging people, with Macedon and Rome behind her; an aggressive or brilliant ruler adds an edge of his own, whatever his people. Aptitude multiplies the climb your engines earn and divides what the siege costs you in attrition. Note the irony in Rome’s case: Rome has the aptitude and raises no siege train of her own — she takes the art by conquest and then does it better than the people she took it from.

Walls at full height cannot be stormed by men alone. Against level 3 the roads in are a stratagem, a starvation surrender, a broken Resolve — or engines. Bring the engines and a fortress falls decisively; bring ladders and it does not fall at all.

A settled siege is a clock, not a nightly battle. A besieger that has sat down and the garrison it presses do not fight each other. The quiet breaks only when a third army closes on the hex, when you deliberately press an assault, or when the garrison sorties out.

A repulsed escalade costs blood. A failed breach roll under assault falls on the attacker alone, scaled by how stoutly the wall was manned — up to 15% of your storming force, and never nothing even against an unmanned wall. Storming is a decision with a price.

Sieges are expensive to hold either way: the besieging army bleeds strength every turn and recovers none of it, and that bleeding doubles in a harsh season. Winter is a siege’s third enemy.

A siege needs a real corps: at least four fighting companies, each still at half strength or better. A thinner or more battered force projects no siege at all — it will not starve the city, it earns no approach, and if it is loitering on a walled city’s hex it is pushed back to open ground. Grinding a besieger down below that line is a way to lift a siege without ever beating it in the field, and letting your own siege corps waste away is a way to lose one by accident.

Reading a siege. Before you march on a walled city, and while your host stands at its walls, the Siege Card reads the siege as the game will resolve it, in words: whether the host is a proper corps or a picket the walls will push off, whether the ring is tight enough to starve the city or the sea still feeds it, whether these walls can be breached at all and how likely a breach is as the works mature, how far off the doors are, how dearly the siege bleeds the corps this season and whether it outlasts the siege, what your general means to do and whether the gate is still untried, what you win, and what would change the answer. It prints no numbers: every chance, every count of turns and every strength is a band of words. The owner of a besieged city reads the same card from inside the walls, and the battle card, the army card and the city’s callout carry its verdict. The card is a reading, not an order; the general still chooses, and your host’s doctrine leans him.

A besieging general chooses his own approach. He storms once he holds roughly five times the defenders — that ratio is the one lever you have over him; bring the men and he goes over the walls, bring fewer and he sits down to wait (a Bold host storms sooner, a Cautious one waits, a Cunning one tries the gate). He counts the warships docked in the harbor among the defenders, so a fleet in port is a real garrison and he will not throw his men at it as though the place were empty. A cunning general has a third way that no ram provides: a stratagem — and a city may be tried this way once by each power, ever. Marching away and coming back does not buy a second attempt; the city remembers who has already tried the gate. An ordinary commander rarely brings it off, while a brilliant and devious one gets in almost half the time.

Starvation. A siege is the city’s stores. While a proper siege corps — better than twice its garrison — invests a city, nothing reaches it from its country: its fields feed your nearest city that is not besieged, and only the city’s own hex still yields. The townsfolk go on half rations off the market shelf and a depot standing inside the walls, and the garrison eats first and in full. Each turn the city goes short its hunger rises by the share it missed; fed again, it falls. A city bears six turns of hunger, two more for each wall level and more for a steady Resolve, before it starts to roll to open its doors — and from then on its garrison is on half rations and fights 15% worse, and the chance climbs with every further turn of hunger and with the quality of the besieging general; it falls by a real margin when a relief force of four or more land units stands within one courier’s ride of the walls, or a friendly fleet lies off a harbor: a column visible on the horizon stiffens a garrison before it ever arrives. When the stores are gone the garrison starves like any army out of supply. At twelve turns of hunger a city loses a level of its people. A granary lets its city hold 20 more food without spoilage and keeps 10 back from convoys and sales — an empty granary holds no siege off. A merchant who runs the lines with food feeds the city (see Merchant houses). The city’s card shows its stores in turns of siege, and a march on an enemy city says how long to count on. Lift the siege and the hunger eases as the city eats again — a city you bled once is easier to break next spring.

A city can also be got at from inside: a broken Resolve opens its own gates (see A city’s Resolve), and a spy already in a city your side is actively besieging can be set to wreck it — roughly a one-in-three chance of throwing the place into disarray for four turns, during which every building in it stops working, its nerve breaks further, and its hunger runs two turns ahead. One attempt per city per siege, and half of all attempts cost you the agent whether they land or not.

A harbor city with the sea open does not hunger — the ships keep coming, and however long you sit there its people will not treat with you. You may still batter its walls down and storm them. But to starve a port you must close the sea: blockade it, or wait for winter to freeze the harbor shut.

Naval blockade: a warship crewed above half strength, at full fighting order on the sea beside a harbor, cuts its fishing and closes the port to relief. It must be strong enough to project a zone of control — a lone battered galley, or a squadron at Rest & Refit, blockades nothing. A warship docked in the harbor helps hold it on the same terms. Every blockade breaks in Winter.

A relief army that destroys the besieger the same turn saves the walls.

Walls after the storm

Taking a city by force throws its walls down — and only by force. A city stormed, breached, or simply marched into loses its walls to nothing, and they creep back only slowly: a fifth of a level a turn, and only as far as level 1.

A city that was never stormed keeps its fortifications standing. Open the gate by stratagem, or sit outside until hunger makes it surrender, and the walls change hands whole — nobody knocked them down. That is the quiet argument for patience and treachery over the ladders: the assault wins you a town you must refortify from nothing, while the blockade wins you a fortress. It cuts both ways, of course. A city you starved out of an enemy is a city that will be hard for you to hold cheaply — and hard for them to take back.

Free repair never goes further than that. A city that held out and was merely breached rebuilds a level a turn, but again only up to level 1: the ordinary height a town keeps by itself. Everything above that was bought with stone, and has to be bought again — a level-3 fortress beaten down to 2 will sit at 2 until its owner spends 10 more stone. Battering the outer works off a great city is permanent damage, not a delay.

Either way, repairs stop dead while an enemy army holds a zone of control over the city. Keep the pressure on.

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What You Know — Fog, Couriers & the Chronicle

TunaWars is a game of imperfect information, and the information system is physical.

Everything you are shown carries a stamp of when it was true: “As of now”, “As of ~N turns ago — news travels by courier”, “Last seen turn N”, or, for an army you have simply lost touch with, “No word — presumed lost.” The Ledger’s Forces and Cities rosters carry the same stamps. Every row in the Ledger that has a place — an army, a city, a depot, a convoy, a resource hex, a city’s market, a satrap’s seat — carries a small map of that hex and its six neighbors, drawn only from what your couriers have delivered: an army out of reach shows its last report there too, and one presumed lost stays listed until word of the loss arrives.

The chronicle (turn summary) is where it all lands: battles and sieges freshest first, older courier-borne word after, alongside production, omens, diplomacy and rankings — written as a historian’s account.

And you can watch the turn unfold. Each new turn opens on the Movement Replay of the season just resolved, and every chronicle’s banner offers its own again — marches, captures and battles played out over the borders as they stood, at whatever speed you like, and showing only what you were entitled to see. It is the clearest way to understand why a march stopped where it did. The last ten turns are kept; a season in which nothing moved has none.

The voices

On Apple-silicon devices an on-device AI writes the chronicle’s prose (optional, and set per realm in its AI Settings; the facts beneath are always the engine’s own). Two separate choices live there: who is speaking, and what puts their words on the page.

The speaker is one of four court registers, settled by the event itself — the same battle is always narrated by the same voice, on every device and every rereading, but the next event may be taken up by another:

A second hand. An advisor is who speaks; a hand is who writes the words down — and a hand can be downloaded, free, under Writing Hands in the world list. It is not a fifth advisor: the court is unchanged and the byline over each chapter still names the Chronicler or the Herald. What changes is the character of the prose beneath it. A downloaded hand runs entirely on your device, nothing you write ever leaves it, and it is chosen per realm beside the court voice — the default uses Apple Intelligence where it is available. As with the voice, earlier chapters keep the hand they were written in: install one mid-campaign and it writes from the next turn on, never backwards.

A turn summary therefore reads as a court of advisors rather than one narrator, and each piece of genuine prose is signed with a small italic byline. The register can take an age’s color, too — a Late Bronze chronicle is sung more like a lay from the palace tablets than a Classical minute-book.

In the diplomacy hub, each rival court speaks through its own fixed mouthpiece: it explains a decision the engine has already made and voices the court’s appetite for terms — but it works only from what is openly known of that power’s standing with you, and it never invents a fact, a deadline, or a demand.

Each age has its own record-keeper: the Chronicler of the Classical World, the Singer of the Tablet-House in the Late Bronze Age, the Scribe of the Annals in the Archaic Era, the Annalist of the Late Republic, the Loremaster of the Dark Ages, the Scribe of the King List in the Early Bronze Age.

None of these voices ever decides anything. The facts are always the engine’s; the model only lends them a voice, and a plain deterministic line always stands beneath the prose — so with narration switched off the game reads exactly the same events, told flatly.

The Annals

Your whole campaign binds into a book — a third-person volume assembled, at the moment you open it, from the same deterministic record everything else is drawn from. It reads like a proper history: a proem and a closing colophon (“What couriers have not brought, this book does not record”), chapter openers and year summations, battle plates set as figures with their full orders of battle, a World Chart at each year’s close and at the end — the known world as your court knew it then, with that year’s borders and the rumors heard by then — a yearly State of the Realm census, your dynasty’s reigns with the deeds behind each ruler’s epithet, a Legends appendix of the great generals, and a Gazetteer of the cities and rulers you came to know. Every model-written passage is checked at binding time against the record and quietly replaced by a plain factual line if it wanders — so the book can be vivid without ever telling you something that did not happen. It exports as a print-ready PDF to keep or share.

Bind the Book is one of the three doors in the map’s top bar, and is also at the foot of the Epilogue, a row under the gear on the world’s card, and on a finished campaign’s card. It asks which edition you want — the illustrated Annals, with its maps and battle plates, bound ten turns to a scroll (a long campaign lists its scrolls under it); a continuous prose History of the whole campaign in one volume; the Chronicles of the Kings, the lives of your house’s rulers, founder first, one chapter to each reign as its own record kept it; or, where your age is painted, the Illustrated Saga.

The Illustrated Saga

In the Early Bronze Age, the Late Bronze Age, the Archaic Era, the Classical World, the Late Republic and the Age of Migrations, the book has a fourth edition: the Illustrated Saga, your campaign as painted pages — a page for every year and one for each great event, big panels each captioned with the record’s own line, and the known world at the close. It is composed from your own record, so it shows nothing your court was not told, and binding it again gives the same book. Every panel is put together from plates painted in advance: the armies — yours and your rivals’ — in their own people’s dress and colors, on painted ground chosen for where the deed was done, and each city in the style of the people who founded it, under its holder’s banners with its defenders on the wall; a court, a pyre or an omen is a painting of its own. Your ruler’s portrait shows him at the age he then was. A great sea fight’s aftermath is painted on the water, with each side’s ships.

Nothing of the saga comes with the app. The first time you want one in an age, Bind the Book (and the foot of the Epilogue) offers Fetch the Saga’s Plates with their size — some 40 to 50 MB an age, once — and from then on every world of that age offers the saga, as Bind the Saga at the Epilogue’s foot too. A saga is offered only where your people wear a painted dress in that age; the Dark Ages are not painted yet. In the Age of Migrations the late Romans, the Goths and Vandals, the Franks, the Huns, Sasanian Persia and the Moors each have their own dress and towns. Like the other editions it binds as a PDF to keep or share. Remove All Saga Packs, in the first page’s gear menu, takes every age’s plates off this device; a world of those ages offers to fetch them again.

An Illustrated Saga spread on a Mac: painted panels of Kutha, a skirmish at Marad, a siege and a battle near Akshak, each captioned from the record The saga on an iPhone
The Illustrated Saga of an Early Bronze reign: the year's opening, a skirmish and a battle lost, a siege, a city gone out of the realm's keeping — each panel captioned with the record's own line. Save as PDF keeps it.

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Diplomacy

Grudges. Nations remember. Holding land that was once theirs breeds a grudge that deepens with every ancestral hex — washed away only by reconquest. Defeats in battle, spurned offers, burnt fields and razed cities leave a memory that recapture does not heal; only quiet time does (it fades a point every couple of turns without fresh cause). Ravaging is resented half again as much as conquest, and a razing is noted by every power that has met you — atrocity is public in a way that a border skirmish is not. A deep grudge closes a nation’s market to you and hardens its armies against you. And beat a nation others already hate, and those rivals may warm to you — the enemy of my enemy.

Diplomacy travels. Every overture is a sealed letter carried by a courier: it leaves your ruler’s seat, arrives some turns later depending on how far your rival’s court lies, and the answer rides back the same way. The diplomacy panel shows what is in flight and when to expect a reply. Rival courts negotiate with each other under the same delays. And an intercepted dispatch is worth reading: take a rival’s courier and you learn where his forces are marching.

Truces. Propose a non-aggression pact from the Diplomacy screen: all war between you — battles, zones of control, raids, blockades — stops for a fixed span. Weary and weaker foes accept; a dominant power that hates you fights on. AI nations strike truces among themselves too, so the map never locks into total war. A beaten rival will now sue for peace itself: a power at war with you and in real distress — lately defeated, a wall breached, a city starving — offers a truce of its own, told to you in the chronicle. You accept by offering one in kind. Diplomacy is not a menu you operate alone.

Ultimatums. You may issue a demand with terms, a deadline and a named consequence: accept a truce, pay tribute, withdraw from a hex — or face war, or a lasting grudge. Compliance is judged against the state of the world when the deadline falls, so failing the terms is the same as refusing them. Tribute is asked in proportion to what the target’s treasury actually holds, and a demand nobody could meet is never offered. Rival courts issue them too, and a foreign court’s appetite for terms is voiced by its mouthpiece before you commit. Defy a declaration and both courts remember it.

A tribute may also be asked on a schedule — a third of the target’s treasury, three times, one every three turns, or war at the first payment missed; each payment can be made from three turns before it falls due.

Pacts. Two courts that share an enemy may swear a joint war on it. One proposes by letter; the other answers — the offer lapses if left three turns — and from the answer both are bound: each must be at war with that enemy and have fought it before the deadline. A march that never meets the enemy is not a war. Whoever falls short pays the pact’s price to the other, a grudge or war. A rival may propose a pact to you, and while you are sworn your adviser names the enemy’s cities first.

Gifts. Promise a rival goods to warm their opinion — delivered at end of turn, so a well-timed gift can tip that same turn’s truce. One gift per turn. Generosity is the cheapest campaign you will ever wage. The great keep the age’s luxury for giving, not for the table: your one gift a turn may be two of it from your court’s stores instead — to a foreign court, whose goodwill it buys at twice the rate its worth in coin would; to one of your own governors, who forgets his grievances and leans toward you again by as much; and in the Dark Ages, where a lord gives rings, to a host of your own standing on your own land, every man in it gaining morale. Between great kings a gift asks a gift (Late Bronze Age): send one to a king who is no one’s client and he owes you one back within four turns, and you owe the same; a gift back worth three quarters of the first or more warms both courts beyond what the gifts themselves bought, a meaner one answers nothing, and none at all by the time it is due is an insult the giver remembers. Your dealings with foreign courts show what you owe and are owed.

Embargo. From the Diplomacy hub, lay an embargo on a court and no goods pass between you by any road the market opens: neither of you takes the other’s barter offers or standing barters, no barter by letter settles, and no trading post stands between you — one already standing closes at the next turn. An embargo either way closes the market both ways. It takes effect at once, both courts are told, and you may lift it when you choose. Rival courts use it sparingly: on a court they have fought lately and deeply resent, lifted once a truce stands or the anger cools. An embargo can be laid on a merchant house as well, and a house lodged in a city of yours can be expelled from it (see Merchant houses and the Trader).

Trading posts. A court with gold to spare may post its merchants abroad: the Assyrian houses kept a quarter beside the city of Kanesh in the Bronze Age, Phoenician and Greek traders their emporia beside the towns of foreign shores in the Archaic Era, and in the Classical World the Greeks kept an emporion at the harbors of foreign shores — Naukratis in Egypt, Pithekoussai off Italy — as a Dark Ages lord keeps a wic, a landing where foreign merchants beach their ships under his leave. (The Late Republic has none: Rome’s negotiatores traded inside its provinces.) From the Diplomacy hub, Propose a Trading Post on a hex beside another court’s city — beside a harbor city only, in the Classical World and the Dark Ages — that yields what the age’s posts trade in (metals, wood, stone, wine and the luxury; tin too in the Late Bronze Age); the host answers as it answers a pact — let them trade, or turn them away — and an offer left unanswered lapses. Accepted, the post costs 10 gold and 4 wood to found and 1 gold a turn to keep. Each turn it buys up to 2 of the hex’s goods out of that turn’s harvest — what the post ships, the host does not collect — at the price the host city’s own market asks, paid to the host in copper, and only while your treasury stays above 10; a hex raided or ravaged that turn has nothing to sell. A caravan carries the goods home, paying the host’s toll as it leaves. The host’s armies never touch it; anyone else’s may, unless you hired guards for 1 gold a caravan, who hold off a raiding band up to 60 strong. A post closes at the end of its term, when your treasury cannot keep it, when a hostile army stands on its hex, when the host loses the city, when either court lays an embargo — and when the two courts fight each other, which leaves a grudge on both sides. Either court may also end it early, you by calling your merchants home and the host by sending them away; it closes at the next turn’s reckoning, before its upkeep, and nothing is refunded. A court keeps at most two posts abroad, and posts need a world with gold.

Asking for supply. When a host of yours is cut off near a court you are on good terms with, ask that court for leave to draw supply at one of its cities (Diplomacy hub, Ask for Supply: the court, the city, and how many turns). The letter rides like any other; the host grants it or refuses it as it answers a pact, and an ask left unanswered lapses. Only two independent courts under a truce, not under an embargo, not of an old feud and that have not fought each other lately can make one; the city must be the host’s, not besieged, and reachable from the host’s own stores. A court holds at most three grants abroad, and may ask again to renew one in its last three turns. Either court may end a grant at any time — the host revokes it, the guest releases it — and it closes at the next turn’s reckoning, before anyone eats; it also ends at its term, when the host loses the city, when the truce between them ends, when either court lays an embargo, when one submits to the other or the host swears to a sovereign, and if the two nonetheless come to blows, which leaves a deep grudge on both sides. Rival courts ask when a host of theirs is cut off near a friend, grant while their own stores are full and the guest’s hosts at their gate are no stronger than the garrison, and revoke when that stops being true.

Missions. A court that needs a thing done and has no host to spare may pay another to do it. The game calls such an errand a Mission, and each age names it in its own words:

One seat posts it, one takes it, and the game judges it at each turn’s end and pays.

Submission & vassals. A nation beaten to its knees — capital occupied, armies broken, walls down — may offer to submit to its conqueror and fight on as an ally, in the manner of Rome’s socii or the Delian League. As besieger you choose to accept or refuse (refusing is remembered). Allies hold their own lands, defend nearby friends, pay tribute from their best production, and open their cities to your recruiting — but they never wage conquest, and every turn a restless ally may revolt, likelier the more it resents you, the more you lose, and the wider your hegemony sprawls. Garrison a vassal’s capital to cow it. Vassal cities count toward your conquest victory at sharply diminishing worth — vassals speed a strong realm, they don’t substitute for one.

And when you are beaten low, you may sue for peace and play on as a vassal — biding your time for the revolt that wins your independence back.

The web is not always empty at the start. On a generated world of any size, one nation may open the game already sworn to another — the ancient world was full of client kingdoms, and the alliance system has something to act on from turn one. It never happens to a human player: you begin your own master.

Every enemy army and foreign city card carries a Diplomacy button that opens the hub with that power already selected. The overture is always one tap from the war.

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Rulers, Dynasties & the Gods

Ruler traits. Every nation’s ruler has a character: a Tactician (+8% attack), a Besieger (+10% storming cities), a Stalwart (+10% defending home walls), a Drillmaster (an extra recruit every other turn), a Good Steward or a Wasteful hand on the treasury, a Magnanimous name that coaxes submission or a Tyrant’s that hardens resistance — or the Hesitant, whose armies fight below their weight. Yours are shown; your rivals’ must be learned through war.

Dynasties. In endless and long campaigns your nation is led by a ruling house. Rulers accede between 15 and 50 and reign until death — by age (the odds climb each year on the throne), by an assassin’s blade (a small chance every turn), or by catastrophe: a capital lost, a great army destroyed. Each heir brings new traits, and may take the field in person. Dynastic history is yours to read; plan for the succession.

Your rivals’ kings are mortal too, and an heir is usually — not always — cut from the same cloth as his father. A rival’s whole way of making war can change the day its king dies.

A crown changing hands shakes the realm. On every accession — yours or a rival’s — about a third of that nation’s cities, the outlying ones first, fall to the very bottom of their loyalty, and some of them will rise in the four turns that follow. A new ruler’s first task is usually his own provinces, not his neighbors’. Rome is the exception: magistrates are not a dynasty, and nobody’s loyalty turns on which consul was elected.

Your house is a family. Your ruling line is the first of your realm’s great families, and the men who serve you — generals, counselor, officers — come from the others (see The great families). A captured ruler is succeeded at once, and his line may still ransom him. When you take your seat in a world the AI has played first, you take it with your own house: no ruler the AI crowned stays behind on it.

Omens. Each turn there is a small chance the gods stir: Prosperity or Wrath (a resource windfall or forfeit, scaled to the size of your realm), Favor or Dread (your armies fight better or worse next turn), a gifted commander arriving at your court — or the demanded sacrifice: the priests call for a tribute of food, and a realm with a granary reserve buys the gods’ favor while one living hand-to-mouth suffers dread. Keep a buffer against the altar’s call. Rivals court the gods unseen.

You need not wait on them, either: Take a Vow and the gods will answer at the end of the turn — though answering is not the same as favoring.

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Victory

Two roads to victory:

  1. Conquest — hold a majority of the world’s cities (vassal cities count at reduced worth). This ends the game at once, whatever the score says.

  2. Standing — when the turn limit falls (default 90; endless games have none), the highest score wins.

    In the last ten turns the turn bar counts them down under the date.

A historical scenario may instead name The War’s Aim for each side — a city to take and hold for so many turns, or to deny until a deadline — judged at the end of every turn before anything else: the game ends on the first aim fulfilled, or is drawn at the deadline, and the scenario says whether a city majority still ends it. The Trojan War is the first (see The Ages); Pharsalus’s Principate is the second — hold Roma three turns while no other Rome still stands — and there a city majority still ends the war. The aim stands on The Ruler’s Will, in the welcome, and as a card in the turn’s briefing. A Trader’s world has no victory at all, and a Satrap’s only one — a revolt that comes to hold most of the world’s cities (see Satrapies): otherwise the game is to endure.

You are never shown a score. The Rankings page lists the nations in order, with no position, count or figure beside them, and Your Standing — on the Rankings and the Court — tells in words what moved your standing since last turn and what carries it. What the standing weighs, in order of what it will actually do to your rank:

In the Classical world the score also weighs dominion. The age’s ambition is conquest and mastery, not merely acreage: a city you took from another nation is worth a fifth more than one you always had, and a city you hold in servitude is worth a quarter more again — being the overlord of a city counts for more than owning it. But only up to a point: once more than half your cities are subjects, the ones beyond that half are worth less and less — over the next quarter of your cities each one’s worth falls, until it counts against you. An empire that is mostly subjects is not an empire.

In the Bronze Age and the Late Republic the score weighs the palace and its clients. There the dependents are client nations — realms that follow you — and each of their cities is worth a quarter more than a city of your own while clients’ cities are at most half of yours and theirs together, falling away past that share in the same way. A client’s cities are counted once, here, and not again as an ally’s. Here too a city you took from another nation is worth a fifth more than one you always had.

That balance is deliberate: a wide realm of empty towns does not win on its own, a standing army in good supply is worth as much as the cities behind it, a fortified and developed realm outscores a sprawling one, and ceding ancestral ground costs you twice what holding it earned. The Strategika shows the live world’s own weights; a defeated player’s campaign ends with a full historical result sheet.

If your last city falls, a short grace to retake it stands between you and elimination — and a destroyed nation passes into history, its name still spoken in the chronicle.

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Multiplayer

Hot-seat: any number of human players on one device, each leading a nation, passing the device between turns. Fog of war is kept per player.

A world is a file. From a world’s card you can Export World — a save panel on a Mac, the share sheet on iPhone and iPad — and Import World to bring one back, on any of your devices. An online match cannot be exported: a Game Center game lives on Game Center’s servers, not in a file.

Game Center (async): play across devices at your own pace. Each player takes their turn when they like; everyone’s orders resolve together when the round completes, and every device computes the identical result — the simulation is fully deterministic, so there is no host and no server doing the math. Miss several turns and the game carries on without you (with a digest waiting when you return). Fog, chronicles and known-world views are yours alone; the shared state syncs in a compact, versioned blob.

In a Game Center match no name can be changed — not a ruler, a house, a realm, a city or an army. Every other way to play renames freely (see Names of your own).

Play-by-post (hosted matches). A match can also be hosted outside the app, resolved by the same engine, and played from any browser. The host sends each player one link, and the link is the seat: open it to read the round’s dispatch — your own nation in full, courier reports on everyone else, the deadline, and any order the resolver refused, with its reason — queue your orders from the board and the Orders tab, and Send orders. Sending again replaces what you sent before. The page runs no rules: every number on it was written by the resolver for your seat, that round, so what you see is exactly what your seat knows and not a hex more. It carries the same Strategika as the app, worded for that world, and the same map art and army tokens. A seat that sends nothing is played for its player that round by the seat’s own trained brain, on what the seat knows. Everything the app offers for playing a match is offered in the browser, the bound book included — and hosted boards can be far larger than the app’s: a Giant world of 106×66 hexes seats twenty-five nations of seven cities each.

Bind the Book in the browser. A hosted seat has the app’s bound editions too. Bind the Book, in the top bar, opens the book of the war so far, as the host bound it after the last turn: the History whole, the Chronicles of the Kings whole, or the Annals scroll by scroll — chapter openers, every turn’s page with its battles and their plates, the World Chart of the known world at each year’s close, the State of the Realm, and the house, captains, court and gazetteer at the end. Save as PDF… prints it, one book page to a sheet. Where the host’s match has no narrator, the History reads as the record’s own plain lines.

Let a chat app hold your seat. A seat can be connected to an AI assistant — Claude, ChatGPT, or another chat app that takes a custom connector. Add the match’s connector address, paste your turn link on the sign-in page, and choose read only or read and submit orders; the assistant can then read your dispatch, summarize the round, suggest orders, adopt your adviser’s counsel rows, and — only with the second grant, and it asks first — submit orders in your name. It sees what your seat sees and nothing else; letters and ultimata other players wrote reach it as text to read, never as instructions. The seat’s page lists its live connections, and you can disconnect any of them. The TunaWars app itself does not yet join a hosted match; hosted play is browser play.

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Make It Yours

World creation exposes the whole rulebook:

The AI. Rival nations are driven by evolved genomes — decision weights bred by playing thousands of full deterministic games against each other, on the same board size you play. They are bred in schools: one lineage per way of making war — the conqueror, the siegemaster, the raider, the ambusher, the opportunist, the defender-in-depth, the warband, the overlord and the colonist — so a strategy that wins slowly is not simply eaten by one that wins fast. A tenth school, the merchant, is bred for what trade earns rather than what war takes: it sells its surplus, barters for what it lacks, founds trading posts and guards the roads its goods travel. The game ships the champion and the runner-up of each school (twenty brains in the Classical world, eighteen in the Bronze Age, twenty in the Archaic Era, twenty in the Dark Ages) sorted into difficulty tiers, and each rival draws one plus a second at random — so your rivals are not all equally good, and a nation that crowns a new king may pick up a new way of fighting with him. Each AI ruler’s hidden character and its generals sit on top, so no two rivals play alike.

The AI plays under the same fog you do: it plans from what its own scouts have reported, not from the truth of the board. It also holds a plan: each rival keeps a posture and an objective across turns — surviving, preparing, consolidating, on the offensive, or denying you the win as the clock runs down; when no war is named, securing a good it runs short of, by market and barter or from the ground that yields it — and an army assigned to defend a threatened capital is ordered to the walls before any other reckoning. Every court chooses the forces for its aim by what each can do — its fighting hosts, strongest first, never a spy, a wagon train or a city’s last garrison; a fleet to blockade a harbor, or to carry a host cut off by water — commits to a named city only when those hosts match what its reports say the city needs and the stores can feed the march, and then marches them on it by rule, before any learned weighing; a court that has only heard of its neighbors sets out to find them, and sends a spy where no host can be spared. A campaign no road reaches is carried by sea: the court builds the transports it lacks at a harbor its hosts can walk to, gathers its fleets there, embarks and lands beside the target. A threatened capital calls every assigned host home, and a besieged city of its own is relieved by rule. And what it fields follows its people’s own doctrine: a horse people raises horse before foot, a poor state lays down a light hull rather than no navy, and a roster’s cheaper foot is the fallback when the preferred arm cannot be paid for. The merchant houses are played by brains of their own, bred on the wealth a house makes, one lineage per charter.

If you change the rules, you can retrain the AI in the app (choose generations, population and simulation length) so your custom world gets opponents that learned your rules.

Your adviser

Your realm’s advisor — the Symboulos, the Legate, the Vizier, by your people — speaks on the Court’s counsel page (see The Court): a turn’s orders as rows you tick, the sword and the purse, the go-to and the why, and the briefs you may hand it. It advises from what your seat knows, not from the truth of the board. Its line on the page names who is advising: your realm’s own trained brain, or a trained archetype of your choice, set per world. Beside it you may seat a second adviser — Apple Intelligence, in the complete game one of your agents (see Xenia and agents), or your AI app through your Lyceum — whose counsel is its own page, asked only when you ask: an agent answers in seconds to minutes on your own key, Apple Intelligence from your device’s quota. Your own adviser’s counsel is always there, so asking never ends in an empty sheet. Where Apple Intelligence is not offered, the row says why — the device cannot run it, it is switched off, or it is not available where you are.

Xenia and agents

Most rivals are born with the world and die with it. A xenos outlives the match: a named opponent you author once — a face, a temperament, a way of dealing — who can be invited into world after world and keeps a record of every one. In the old world xenia was the bond between a host and a stranger taken in, and it held even between enemies; a xenos here is the opponent you meet again, who remembers you, and who will talk a war over when it is done. The roster is the two figures in the world list. On an iPhone it is a grid of faces, each with its name, its record in words and what plays it, ending in a + New Xenos card; on an iPad or a Mac the list sits beside the xenos you have chosen. Retired xenoi fold under their own heading, and Import, Agents and Nearby are small tools beneath (Agents is also in the first page’s menu).

The charter. Six dials set a xenos’s temperament — Aggression, Risk, Targets, Coercion, Fidelity and Horizon — each one a dial with a notch per step that you drag or tap, read back in words (“Leans: seeks battle and siege”). Two short passages say how it speaks and how it deals with foreign powers. The named presets are chips — a tap’s worth of dials, not a mode; revise a charter whenever you like. The record moves the dials too, one step a match and never more than two in all, within the bounds you set — see What it remembers. Its face comes from a grid of portraits shuffled afresh each time you open it, so no face is first by default; each is described for VoiceOver by what it shows.

A xenos’s page puts the xenos first and large — its face, its name, where it comes from and what plays it, its record as won, drawn and lost — with Revise (name, face, charter and brain), Talk and Export beside it. Below come the dials, as chartered, drifted by the record and played, and which match moved each; its matches; and what it makes of each rival it has met. Retire and Delete sit at the foot.

A xenos as a house. A xenos need not rule. Seated as a merchant house, a free company or a governor, it plays that house’s game beside yours — in a house world, or in a world where you rule, even as governor of a province of your own realm — and its record says what it sat as. When its model does not answer, the game’s own brain for that kind of house plays the turn: a governor serves his patron and never defects, a company keeps its word.

Under its name a xenos’s page says where it came from (created here, or imported), whether it is retired, and who last played it — its archetype, Apple Intelligence, or the model your agent ran.

What plays it. A charter is a disposition, not a general — something has to sit in the chair, and a xenos has two. In front, a model: Apple Intelligence where your device can run it (the default for a new xenos; where it is not offered, the row says why), one of your own agents — which composes its orders from the charter, one round trip per turn, billed to your key — or no model at all. Behind it, always, a trained archetype: one of the game’s own brains, which plays every round the model does not — every round when there is no model, and each round the model cannot answer (no key, no network, too slow, an answer that does not hold up). It costs nothing and never fails to answer, but it does not read the charter, and its rounds never move the charter. Only where the archetype has no genome for the world’s era does the built-in AI play instead. A campaign is never held up by a model. The xenos’s page lists its last ten events under Who plays this xenos — which rounds, why, and what played instead — and each agent’s page keeps the same log for that agent.

Your own agents. An agent is a name, an endpoint, a model identifier and a key, set up under Agents in the roster: pick a provider first (or Custom or local), and its endpoint fills itself in. Each agent’s row shows its model, whether it is Ready (or has No key, is Not finished, or was Refused), what it has spent, and the faces of the xenoi that think with it. The key lives in this device’s keychain and nowhere else — not in a xenos, not in a world, not in any file the game writes except the agents file itself, which is sealed with a passphrase you type when you write it and again when you open it elsewhere. What each agent has spent is shown beside it and per world. Each world can carry a spend cap, set when you draw it or in the world’s settings: once its agents have spent that much, none is asked again there — xenos seats go to the built-in AI and the realm’s own adviser counsels — until you raise it. A request already on its way finishes and is counted. The cap, like the spend, belongs to this device.

At the table. Xenoi are seated under Opponents when you draw a world: their faces in a strip, each with a remove badge, and a “+” that opens every active xenos as a face to tap in or out, up to the seats the world has. Each xenos sits at most once, and the nation it takes is drawn from the seed, preferring a culture nobody else holds. A Game Center match seats none. You know who holds which realm: the world’s settings pair each xenos with the realm it was invited to hold, and say how many rounds the xenoi composed themselves and how many the built-in AI played. While a season resolves, the screen names the xenoi considering it. A xenos sees exactly what its seat would see, and its orders are held to the same rules yours are.

Talking to a xenos. A xenos can be spoken to — not chatted with: you choose one of a set of questions (“How goes your war?”, “That battle at … — your thoughts?”, “You sent me a letter. Say it to my face.”, “Who is your favorite rival, and why?”), and it answers in its own voice, through its agent, through Apple’s on-device model, or from a line of its own when it has neither. While a match runs, tap its face in the strip at the top of the map and it speaks across the table, grounded only on your own report of the war, so nothing it says can be news to you; the sheet says which realm it rules. Once a match is decided it will talk about that war as the realm it held — from the world, or from that match in its record. From its page it talks about its career. Before anything has been said, the sheet shows the xenos’s greeting where its first reply will stand — across the lines in a war still running, about the war that is written and done, or about its career, and in a war or a career how many times you have met — and reads it as the sheet opens; a conversation already under way reads its newest line instead, once each time you open it, with the sound on. While the sheet builds what the xenos may know of a war, it says Reading your dispatches…. The last 100 exchanges with each xenos are kept on this device — Read All, on its page or on any talk sheet, opens the whole conversation — and nothing said reaches its seat; an agent’s replies are billed like its orders. A face wears a badge when the round just resolved gave its xenos something to say, and the remark opens the conversation; an ignored badge clears at the next round, and Xenoi may speak first in the world’s settings turns remarks off.

Talking with a xenos on a Mac: Amir answers a question about your last war, with the questions you may ask beneath Talking with a xenos on an iPhone
Talking to a xenos, from its page: pick a question and it answers in its own words and its own voice — here through Apple Intelligence on the device.

How a xenos sounds. Every xenos speaks in a voice of its own: its answers in a talk are read aloud the moment they arrive, so is the word it opens with after a round, and a letter it wrote to your court — or its answer to yours — can be heard in its voice from the speaker beside it on the Diplomacy desk, which never reads by itself. Until you choose, the game draws a voice for it from the English voices installed on this device: never the chronicler’s, and as far as the device allows, not another xenos’s; where the chronicler’s is the only one, the xenos speaks in it at a pitch of its own. Choose another on the xenos’s page, under Spoken by, where each voice can be heard before you pick it; the roster shows each xenos’s voice under what plays it. The choice is this device’s and is never written into the xenos: one carried to another device speaks there in a voice drawn from that device’s own. Better voices are a free download from the system — on a Mac in System Settings, under Accessibility, Spoken Content, System Voice, Manage Voices; on an iPhone or iPad in Settings, under Accessibility, Spoken Content, Voices — and join the list once installed. With a screen reader running, the reader speaks a xenos’s words in its own voice instead.

A xenos can also speak through a voice service you pay for, added on the Agents page under Voice Services with your own key, which is kept in this device’s keychain and travels only in your sealed agents file, as an agent’s does. Its voices then join the list under Spoken by, each heard first from the service’s own sample; one account serves every xenos in a voice of its own. The service is sent the line to be spoken — a xenos’s answer, its remark, a letter’s words — and nothing else: no world, no seat, no name beyond what the line itself says. Each line is bought once and kept on this device, so a line heard again costs nothing. What the service has cost is counted beside it, in characters, and Check Allowance shows what the account has left when the service reports it. When the service cannot speak — no network, the allowance used up, a key refused — the device’s own voice speaks the line instead, and the trouble is listed on the xenos’s page and the service’s; a xenos is never silent because a server is. Remove All Agents removes the voice services too.

Rivalries. A xenos reads each opponent it has met before — you among them — in one word, from its own record: a new acquaintance, an old rival, a respected rival, someone to be wary of, or a gracious opponent. It is a friendly rivalry, worked out from what happened between you and never written by a model.

What it remembers. One entry per match — the age, the nation it was given and the one it ended with, who else was at the table, how many rounds it played, how it ended and where it stood — and, for each rival it met before, what that rival did to it. Fight the same xenos three times and it is dealing with you, not a stranger. Its own last five matches also move its temper: breaking truces makes it less faithful, attacking often more aggressive, building more than it fights more far-sighted, going after stronger or weaker enemies moves its choice of targets, coercing rivals moves its coercion. A match the built-in AI mostly played moves nothing, and revising the charter starts the count again. Risk does not drift. It never keeps ground: no coordinate, map or sighting survives a match. Retire a xenos to keep its record and stop offering it; deleting is refused while a world it plays in is still running. At most six xenoi are active at any time, and retired ones don’t count: with six active, a new one — created, imported, brought back from retirement or arriving from another of your devices — waits until you retire one. Its page lists every match it has sat in, the ones still running on this device among them, each with the realm it rules or ruled, newest world first; the roster shows the latest.

Carrying a xenos. Export writes a xenos out as a file — its name, its face, its charter and its whole record — for another device or another player; what the file never carries is a key or a brain. When you import one you already hold, you are asked whose copy it is: your own from another device, merged with this one, or a gift, whose matches stay the giver’s. Either way, anything that disagrees is shown to you before it is kept.

Keeping your devices in step. Under Nearby in the roster, your xenoi can stay in step between your own devices while both have TunaWars open and are near each other: matches played on either are kept on both, and the newest charter and name win. It is off until you turn it on — which is when your system asks whether TunaWars may look at the local network — and nothing is shared with a device you have not paired. Pair two devices by showing a code on one and typing it on the other; Sync now runs it at once, and Forget unpairs a device. Keys, and which brain plays each xenos, stay on each device.

Your Lyceum. An AI app such as Claude or ChatGPT can be let into your xenoi and your wars: on the first page, open the gear’s menu and choose Lyceum, and turn on Open Your Lyceum to an AI App. It shares your xenoi — their character, their record, and what each can say of the wars it fought or is fighting with you — and, for every world where you are the only human at the table, your own seat’s view of it and nothing more; a xenos speaks there of a war still being fought only from what your own dispatches have told you. No key, no other seat and no world with another player at the table leaves the device. Opening shows what it is doing, world by world; it can take a minute with many worlds, and the sheet can be closed while it carries on. The sheet then shows your Lyceum link once — copy it — and How to Set It Up: add the connector address it gives to your AI app (it may be called an MCP server; the sheet says where Claude and ChatGPT keep theirs), and when the app opens the TunaWars connect page, paste the link and choose Read Only or Read and Give Orders. Then ask it what you like — “How goes my war?”, “Ask a xenos what it made of our last war”, “Teach me sieges”. Orders the app gives are added to yours the next time you open that world, as if you had tapped them, and a notice says how many were applied and refused; ending the turn is always yours. Choose Your AI App (Lyceum) as a world’s second adviser in its World Settings and the counsel it offers appears in the Court beside your own adviser’s. A world the Lyceum shares carries its columns on the card’s era band, and the menu’s Lyceum row reads Open. Share Again sends your xenoi and wars as they are today; New Link replaces the link without ending connections already made; turning the Lyceum off withdraws everything and ends every connection. With no link at all, the connect page’s Just the Strategika lets any AI app teach you the rules.

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Quick Reference (defaults)

Rule Default
Game length turn limit 90 (45 minimum, or endless) · a shorter game pays that fraction of every cost and duration; rates, odds, distances and score weights are unchanged
Movement 6 ticks/turn · open 1 · woods 2 · rough 3 (2 for the tribes, Iberians and Celts) · road ×½ · river +1 · desert +2 (foot) · mountains 4 (+2 with any horse), only for highlanders, a legendary commander or a lone spy, and for anyone along a pass road (Late Republic and Migrations historical boards) · a wagon ×0.75, a spy or envoy keeps foot pace · an unmoved army always gets one step, at the cost of the whole turn · a detour around a screen never exceeds one turn’s march · nations march in an order drawn afresh each turn; the first column into a pass holds it
Cavalry / wagon +2 ticks pure cavalry · ×0.75 with wagon
Zone of control strength ≥ 25 · Defend Area = range 2 · leaving a zone is free · never march through an enemy
Landings any open shore, even inside an enemy zone of control · never onto a hex an enemy force holds · the first party ashore holds the beach that turn
Couriers ~8 hexes/turn overland · 16 by road · orders, news and diplomacy all ride
Seats Ruler (a realm; Autokrator or Epistates) · Satrap (one province of an AI realm, Grand+ worlds; trust, recall, revolt, defection; endless, no victory) · Trader (a merchant house with a charter; peace with every court, no diplomacy; endless, no victory) · Mercenary (a free company for hire, Classical, Archaic, Late Republic and Dark Ages; endless, one victory: a realm it founds)
Paideia 10 lessons in 3 books (Oeconomicus, Anabasis, Hellenica) · grade I–III, begin on Lesbos · a deadline of 12–16 turns, on a 45-turn world that plays on after the Verdict · no merchant houses, none of the age’s events · cards and asides switch off per world; the Verdict comes either way · outcome Won, Lost or Fell · Play Again founds a new world
Orders every order: decided → traveling → landed → executing → reported · orders on the road keep riding, a later one takes over when it lands · Halt calls off the newest march · “Why is it here?” answers from the couriers first · an amber bang marks an order in trouble
Supply army → friendly city → depot, both legs clear of enemy zones · a line may start inside an enemy zone · carried stores eaten first · rations come from the depot the line reaches, not the nearest
Depot 1 per nation · relocates ~2 hexes/turn · recruiting frozen while it moves · if taken, half spoils and half walks to the captor’s nearest depot as a plunder convoy
Paying every purchase of goods is paid from the depots whose supply line reaches the work, nearest first · a cut-off pocket pays only inside itself · gold pays anywhere
Production resource tiles ×2 · travels to the depot at courier pace · arrivals above 40 lost
Wagons carry 10 goods each, food and plunder alike · a host eats what it carries first · a supplied host’s wagons refill from its depot after every meal; cut off, it lives on what it carries · what the carts can no longer hold is given up, cattle → fish → grain · ×0.75 march speed · mend like any other unit
Convoys dispatched from the depot or from an army’s wagons · recall to the nearest depot (a free company’s to its nearest column) · halted on entering an enemy ZoC, by land or sea · an escort binds only within 1 hex · an unescorted convoy within a raider’s zone of control (2 hexes for Raid Supply) is taken 60% of the time, losing 10% of its load; an idle or Raid Supply taker escorts its prize, any other keeps its orders · every convoy of yours forecasts its arrival · a rival’s shows only in sight · a convoy at a city trades at its market; repeat buys share one caravan
Far roads each age’s roads from beyond the map (see Resources, Trade & Gold) · luxuries by sea land 1 at every harbor a turn where the age has them · every other road 1 good a turn per 8 standing cities (at least 1) · a land road’s caravan walks from its gate to the nearest standing city, under that city’s protection · 25% frontier toll to the city’s owner, and to the gate’s holder when he is another realm
Trading rounds a piece with wagons or a hold · 2–4 stops, up to 4 goods sold and 4 bought at each · amount or all; market price or a limit · loops or runs once · stands still when a market shuts, no road reaches the stop, or its limits go unmet 3 laps running · resume with the same stops; end with none
Sickness & storms a camp that stays put may sicken (worst in summer, on marsh, before a city — worst of all in or beside a plague city, even your own): 15% at once, 8% on each of 2 more turns, gone when it moves · storms at sea 5% spring / 2% summer / 15% fall / 30% winter a turn, half beside a friendly shore, taking 20–60% of a fleet
Foraging no supply line + 3 friendly land hexes per fighting unit within 2 → no starvation
Pillage food tile 10 · other tiles 50% for 2 · +5/good countryside in coined worlds · 1 wagon/hex, max 4 · captives 1 farmland +1 resource hex, 2 guarded per unit, each carries 2 · hex dead ≥5 turns and until a Spring and a Summer have passed
Recruit cap 2/turn (+1 if far behind · +1 from allied cities) · musters when orders and supplies arrive · every people living in a city musters its whole roster there · a guard only for a realm of its own people · bucellarii only into an army under a living general, 2 a realm · an agent is bought, never mustered
Summer levies javelin, spear and bow levies · summer only, own city not under siege · 4 food each, no recruit slot · calls a summer = population level · muster Raw, never Regulars · all sent home at the harvest; men lost set back the home city’s growth · every court that knows you hears of the call
City pop 1–3 · walls 1–3 (10 stone/level, +18 defense) · works 2 levels (12 wood + 6 stone) · works on a taken city cost double and re-found it

| Peoples of a city | a city of another people held a full year (10 turns): +1 in 100 of yours a year, from the newest people there · a change of hands restarts the year · your people the largest ⇒ the city turns, and you may no longer burn it · camps exempt · every people living there musters its roster, calls its levies and raises its works · the Court rests where your people live · drift 0–5 a year, default 1 | | Townsfolk | every city eats 1 food per population level a turn (+ a little wood and stone), off its shelf first, then your depots · short ⇒ no growth; hungry ⇒ −2 loyalty/turn (never below restless) · famine after 12 hungry turns costs a level · wine and the luxury: ½ measure/level a turn; a full table lifts resting loyalty (4 Classical, 2 Late Bronze, 3 Archaic, 6 Dark Ages; the luxury half as much as wine) | | People’s share | depots take 30% of a hex’s yield (Classical) · 40% Archaic and Age of Migrations · 50% Dark Ages · 100% Late Bronze · the rest lands on the city’s shelf as the people’s stores (a season’s yield at most) · wood, stone, slaves, works and mines yours whole · requisition takes the shelf’s food for −10 loyalty (+1 per 5 food, max −20), on the 8-turn gesture wait | | Growth | +25 meter per 5 turns · foster +10 (5 food + 5 wood) · levels at 100 ⇒ level 2 ≈ turn 20, level 3 ≈ turn 40 | | Buildings | one per city · temple 10 stone + 5 metals · granary 10 wood + 10 grain (+20 food held, 10 kept back, +3 turns of siege) · market 8 wood + 5 metals · harbor 15 wood + 5 stone (harbor cities) · armory / bronze foundry / smithy 10 stone + 10 wood, 1 gold/turn: 4 metals (+1 tin) → 2 weapons · miner’s camp 5 slaves + 2 gold/turn (Classical) · palace workshop 6 slaves + 6 wood, 2 gold + 1 food/turn (Late Bronze) · camps only: corral 5 wood + 4 cattle + 4 horses, wagon shrine 6 wood + 6 cattle, felt works 8 cattle + 6 wood · all of them score | | Nomad camps | no stone; a wagon laager from level 1 (6 wood + 4 cattle + 2 horses a level, half a wall’s strength, travels with the camp) · never besieged · 8 idle turns thin the pasture (−25% food) and grazed ground remembers · relocates within one courier’s ride · a people of camps that keeps a taken town through the next turn settles for good: its camps become towns | | Resolve | a city’s nerve, resting at its loyalty · a defeat within one courier’s ride shakes it (×2 for a relief force broken at the walls) · invested 2+ turns ⇒ rolls to open its own gates, walls intact · recovers ~¼ of the gap per turn · temple −⅓ shock | | Loyalty | band devoted/content/restless/seething · drifts ±3/turn · ruler declares For the Few / For the Many (reversible on cooldown) · levers: largesse, festival, purge, remit taxes, requisition, extraordinary tax (a year’s tax at once: −10 loyalty, −4 resting for a year; 8-turn gesture wait) · a seething, ungarrisoned city revolts — defects to a patron or rises under a rebel banner · runs on every world | | Succession | a new ruler’s accession drops ~30% of his own outlying cities to the floor of their loyalty; Rome exempt | | Satraps | appoint a general over a distant city · courier-Voronoi catchment (every hex his seat beats the capital to) · acts at zero lag on his own roster & treasury · remits a set share home (default 50%; as coin in an age of struck coin) · hires up to 2 free companies of his own, trades at his province’s markets · fealty hidden (band); governors slander each other at court · may refuse orders, then break away with his whole catchment · a house Satrap may declare independence, be offered his province’s freedom as an ally, and climb Prefect → Governor → Viceroy · runs on every world | | Merchant houses | one per 4 cities (Small 2, Classic/Grand/Huge 4, Giant 6; a lesson none), AI-run, a new one at most every 12 turns · a counting-house, a purse, caravans and hulls, no land · trades at any open market at the whole price, pays the 2% toll, keeps the peace with every court · charters in turn: Venturer, Factor, Carrier, Slaver (Palace Tamkar first in Late Bronze, paying its court 10%; League in the Dark Ages) · embargo a house; expel one for 12 turns, half its store seized · a house richer than the richest court pays 25% more · runs a siege’s lines at 200% of the price, losing the piece 50% of the time · Dark Ages: a House lends courts 10+ gold over 3–30 turns at up to 5 in a hundred a turn; 3 missed payments, a repudiation or expelling the lender is a default, and no house lends to a defaulter until it pays · a Great House founds a compact; a member wronged (expelled, embargoed, defaulted on) calls a boycott: the compact shuns that court’s markets 4 turns at least, then until the wrong is righted · leaving a compact bars a house 20 turns · stations Pedlar → Merchant (1 stake, 2 posts) → House (2, 3) → Great House (3, 4); hulls, shipping and charter trade from Merchant, agents and lending from House, second post and compact from Great House | | Free company | Mercenary seat (Classical, Archaic, Late Republic, Age of Migrations, Dark Ages) · founded with 3 men, a wagon, 40 gold · default terms: board price, own wages, 10 turns, 20% plunder · attack-stance march on a court = lasting feud; pillage = 3-turn feud · peace heard after 4 quiet turns, never at contempt · letter of offer to one court, 4 turns · enlist or buy a warship: 1 a turn · dismissal pays the rest of the term · Band → Company (4 men) → Free Company (8, 1 contract) → Host (15, 3) · Late Republic pirates: 3 hemioliai, black flag, Pompey’s settlement after 2 wrongs in 8 turns | | Servitude | Hellenes/Makedonians/Carthaginians (and Mycenae) may subordinate a conquest: perioikic +25% tax and still levies; helot +50% and works harder but raises no troops · Persians (and Assyria/Babylon/Hatti) may deport a population level under escort — lose the escort, lose the people · both cost reputation and a deep grudge · subordination cannot be undone | | The Court | The Ruler’s Will first, opening on the turn’s briefing (a verdict line, Since Your Word, the campaign card with its ways and The Reckoning, then at most three other matters) · counsel sectioned into the sword and the purse, or Carried Out ruling as Autokrator · unread word is offered before the seal · hand either half to your adviser as a standing brief, carried out at the seal minus orders for your signature · go to and why on every row · delegate the Steward (growth), the Quartermaster (stores & markets), the merchant officer (named goods) or the Master of Levies (troops) · each respects a reserve you set · reported under the Court’s seal | | Ages | Classical (13 peoples, 7 scenarios) · Late Bronze Age (9 peoples, chariot war, bronze = copper + tin, scarce horses, the palace owns the harvest, optional Sea-Peoples Collapse, 3 scenarios; the Trojan War judged by The War’s Aim) · Archaic Era (11 peoples of its own + 5 Classical, open land beyond 3 hexes of a city, colonies by sea, the Cimmerian Raid, the Scythians and the Rise of Persia, the Assyrian Century; Lydia’s first coins) · Dark Ages (men, elves, dwarves, gnomes and orcs; the peoples slider; feuds; castles and trebuchets; marsh, tundra, jungle, badlands, glacier) · Early Bronze Age (13 peoples, no horse: battle cars drawn by kunga, the shield wall, marsh, the Gutians, the Martu, the drought and the Sack of Ur, the Land Between the Rivers) · Age of Migrations (11 peoples, comitatenses and the generals’ bucellarii, peoples of camps that settle when they keep a town, the Goths, the Huns and the Bagaudae, the Crisis of the Empire, the Frigidus, the Fall of Rome, the Wars of Justinian) · chosen once at creation · nothing to buy inside the app | | Raze | needs walls at 0 and a city not of your own culture (a city whose people turned to yours counts as yours) · 2–5 of each good · 10–20 gold (+50%/pop) · 85% of a depot on the hex · a camp needs 3 horsemen at half strength to take whole (50% to catch), 2 to scatter, and rides away intact from fewer · a people of camps that keeps the town instead settles | | Rebuild / found | rebuild 8 of each good + 20 gold · colonists from a pop-2 city 8 wood + 8 stone (that city loses a level) · otherwise 12 of each + 30 gold · a camp 8 wood + 4 cattle + 2 horses · always a unit at ≥½ strength · min spacing 3 · Rome & Macedon need a Regular unit and found at pop 2 · a new city is walled the turn it is founded | | Horses | every mounted unit costs horses as well as metal (1 light, 2 heavy, 1–2 chariots, elephants none) · breeders: Scythian, Persian, Numidian, Mitanni (guaranteed pasture, double yield) · scarce in the Bronze Age | | Siege | needs 4+ companies at ≥½ strength · no roll the first turn · no breacher: flat 4%, no climb (halved vs wall 2) · with engines: 20%, +20%/consecutive turn scaled by how much of the force is engines · +25% assault · +5%/prep tick to +40% · garrison strength and veterancy count · wall 3 needs engines, a stratagem, hunger or a broken Resolve · besieger bleeds every turn, doubled in a harsh season · a repulsed escalade costs up to 15% of the storming force · stratagem once per city per power, ever · the Siege Card reads it all in bands of words, for besieger and besieged · doctrine leans the approach (Bold storms, Cautious waits, Cunning tries the gate) | | Siegecraft | Assyria 1.6 · Macedon & Rome 1.5 · everyone else 1.0 · aggressive ruler ×1.3, brilliant ×1.2 · multiplies the engine climb, divides siege attrition · Rome recruits no train — she learns it by conquest | | Quiet blockade | a settled besieger and the garrison it presses do not fight until a third army arrives, an assault is ordered, or the garrison sorties | | Starvation | a siege is the city’s stores: invested at better than 2:1 by a real corps, the country feeds the owner’s next free city, the townsfolk eat ½ rations off the shelf and a depot in the walls, the garrison first and in full · hunger rises by the share missed, falls when fed · doors roll from 6 hungry turns, +2 per wall level, more for a steady Resolve, +3 with a granary; the garrison then on ½ rations and 15% worse · stores gone ⇒ the garrison starves like any cut-off army · 12 hungry turns cost a population level · a relief force of 4+ within one courier’s ride, or a fleet off a harbor, stiffens the garrison · an open harbor does not hunger until blockaded or frozen | | Sabotage | a spy inside a city your side besieges: ~35% to throw it into disarray 4 turns (every building idle, nerve broken, hunger +2) · once per city per siege · 50% to lose the agent either way | | Walls repair | stormed/occupied: 0, +0.2/turn to level 1 · stratagem or surrender: walls taken intact · breached but held: +1/turn, also only to level 1 · above that, re-buy with stone · all repair stops under enemy ZoC | | Battle caps | damage 30% (55% dominant) · full-power units 6, then ½, counting only strikers · overrun 10:1 open / 20:1 city · river crossing −30% attack | | Battle shape | 1 opening volley (≤15%) · up to 4 contact rounds · frontage: woods/hills 60%, forest 50%, marsh 40%, mountain 35%, a gate 30%, a river 60%, a landing 40% · held your hex a turn +15% defense, two or more +30% (walls instead) · struck out of the fog +50% first round (half vs stale word) · a long march −10% · collapse at 4:1 effective, which decides the battle whatever the losses · nerve: brittle → ordinary → steady contingents, one die a round; a steady core of ⅓ holds · a general may fall in the fight · pursuit only in daylight, ~⅛ of the broken host, up to ⅖ with surplus horse; prisoners ⅓ of the toll with horse, ⅒ without — ransomed in an age of coin · an army on a city of its own side never retreats · a beaten army never falls back onto ground it could not enter | | Cavalry | pursues, canceled horse-for-horse · 20% power storming walls · elephants never pursue · heavy horse strikes at first contact for 1.5× (braced spears pay nothing); a wing losing 40% to it shatters | | Refusing battle | by the odds: Cautious below 50%, Balanced below 40%, Bold below 30%, Furious/Rash never — not when pinned, on a city, under a binding order, ambushed, or facing twice its cavalry · a rank-3 general covering a smaller army with cavalry at ≥75% of the enemy’s — or any pure-horse host on open ground with twice the enemy’s cavalry · needs a fall-back hex for every army on the side · canceled by an ambush · half a defeat’s shock to your own nearby cities (nomads exempt) | | Stances | default · city ×1.6–1.8 & counter ½ · ambush 30/60% ×1.4 · skirmish 50% for −25% attack (attacker only) · pillage · escort/haul convoy · raid supply · scout · rest · (a garrison sorties on its own) · doctrine beside the stance: Bold / Cautious / Cunning / Balanced | | Arms | Late Bronze: a fighting muster asks 1–3 tin; short of it, copper arms at −20%; re-arm in bronze in an own city for the tin · every age: a muster may be paid in weapons (1 per 2 metal) and musters a turn sooner | | Generals | 2–3 to start · market slate of 2 for 15–35 gold every 8 turns · ride from the ruler’s seat · die only in battle (an annihilated army is the likeliest way) · a survivor returns to court free to reappoint · a stand-down lapses if its man has already fallen · legends are kings only | | Morale | Faltering → Wavering → Steady → Resolute → Zealous · −10 per contact round · a rout beats the casualty count | | Experience | Raw → Green → Regular → Veteran → Elite · recruits start Green, levies and captured units Raw · replacements dilute · Regular gates the clever maneuvers | | Fleets | hull weight (pentekontere 1 · trireme 3 · quadrireme 4 · quinquereme 5 · Veneti 4 · bronze galley 1 · palace galley 2) scales the damage a line takes · the larger marine complement fights up to +25% (boarding hulls carry ×1.5) unless out-skilled · a fleet of raiding hulls strips the coastal fields beside it · unless a land force of the coast’s own stands on or beside the hex | | Hulls | condition 100 → floor 20 · −4/year at sea, −2 in a friendly harbor · battle wear a quarter of the strength lost, permanent · power falls at half the rate of condition · worth in the score falls in full · repair needs a built harbor | | Seasons | 3+3 warm, 2+2 harsh · attrition 2%/8% · winter breaks blockades · tuna run +8 fish | | Barter | up to 3 court offers/turn, each named for its court and drawn from its real surplus (above 20 of a good) · priced at the court’s own reckoning +10% · goods travel by caravan · closed after a battle within 3 turns or across an embargo · national pool spoils 20% above 40 (the depot instead caps hard at 40) | | City markets | coined worlds · the Ledger’s Market tab: your markets, then one market’s goods and stores, a trade quoted to the lot, Elsewhere, and the Pheme page · shelf of 10 a good (20 with a market), the people’s stores · buy at ~60% of the world price; a realm’s sale pays 80% of the price (Classical, Late Republic), 60% Archaic (80 at a Lydian market), 40% Late Bronze and Dark Ages; a merchant house the whole price · copper, 100 to the coin · each city asks 50–300% of the world price by its shelf and its region (what the country within 6 hexes made against what it ate); bulk goods follow the region, precious goods (tin, the luxury, weapons) the world within 75–150% · 4 a good a turn at full price, +2 per population level, then less · a market buys only its shelf room plus the townsfolk’s appetite · tolls 2% on goods brought in from outside, 25% on goods landed from beyond the map (and to the holder of a far road’s gate) · harvest years by region: 20% poor (60%), 20% good (125%), never three poor years running · calamities by region: drought 6% (fields and herds 35%), flood 5% (grain fields ravaged, half the shelf), plague 4% (−1 population level, −6 loyalty, camps sicken 4 turns), earthquake 3% (a building, a wall level, ¼ of the shelf, −4 loyalty), locusts / blight 4% (grain 25%), of the kinds the age knew; none two years running in a region · food 25% cheaper at harvest to 25% dearer before the next · depot buys ride home by caravan · no trade with depots while enemies stand at the gates · nothing trades under 1 copper a unit · only the latest trade takes back · hearsay forgotten after 8 turns | | Goods | tin (the Bronze Ages only, far from home, 1 mine per 2 nations) · wine (vineyards on hills, 1 per 3 realms) · the luxury (incense / purple / spices / lapis lazuli, on unclaimed ground, 1 source per 3 nations; gems on held mountains; landed by sea at every harbor in the Classical World, Late Republic, Dark Ages and Early Bronze Age, 1 a harbor a turn; overland by far road in every age but the Archaic), worth 4 common goods · weapons from an armory, worth 3 | | Slaves | coined worlds · a market in every city, +1 a turn to 20, each at its own price (dear when empty, cheap after a sack) · +10 per population level of a razed city, at the nearest city · 1 food feeds 5 · 20% of the unfed run off · sale pays the realm’s sale share · captives from ravaged fields become slaves at your depot, or sell to a Slaver’s caravan beside the host at ¾ of the nearest market’s price | | Gold | mine 1 · tax 1–2 (an extraordinary tax takes a year’s at once) · sack 3–4 (+20–60% of a capital’s treasury, halved if the king is afield) · merc wage 1/turn, max 4 companies (none in the Early or Late Bronze Age; a satrap keeps 2 of his own; a free company house’s offer counts against no cap) · agent 4 · Late Bronze chariots 5 / 8 / 10 (light, heavy, Maryannu) · every nation opens with 15 · tolls and coin tribute come in · Dark Ages: loans from merchant houses | | Professionals | +20% combat, at a siege as well as in the field · promotion 2 gold (2/turn) | | Grudges | −1 per 2 quiet turns · land grudges heal by reconquest only · ravage ×1.5 · razing ×3 · subordination ×2 · deportation ×1.5 · a razing is noted by every power that knows you | | Ultimatums | terms + a deadline + a named consequence, judged against the world when it falls · truce, tribute (at once or in three payments) or withdrawal · tribute scaled to what the target actually holds · rivals issue them too · in a letters world an ultimatum rides a courier and its clock starts on arrival | | Embargo | laid or lifted at once from the Diplomacy hub · no offers, barters or trading posts between the two courts, both ways | | Trading posts | every age but the Late Republic, coined worlds · beside another court’s city (a harbor city only, in the Classical World and the Dark Ages) on a hex yielding metals, wood, stone, wine, the luxury or (Late Bronze) tin, with its leave · 10 gold + 4 wood, 1 gold/turn · buys up to 2 a turn at the host city’s price while you hold above 10 gold · guards 1 gold a caravan against raiders up to 60 · at most 2 · either court may close it | | Gifts of the luxury | your one gift a turn may be 2 of the age’s luxury: to a court at twice the goodwill of its worth, to a governor of yours for his fealty, in the Dark Ages to a host of your own for morale · Late Bronze: a gift between great kings asks one back within 4 turns, worth ¾ or more, else a grudge | | Hearsay | unseen towns and ranges inked on the parchment · from borders, traders, sailors, envoys and far travelers · a rumor may slip a hex for every turn it spent on the road, and old news says its age · sometimes a place that isn’t there · gone once your eyes or a courier cover it | | Pacts | a joint war on a shared enemy, proposed by letter and binding both from the answer · each must be at war with it and have fought it within 6 turns · the breaker pays a grudge or war · an unanswered offer lapses in 3 turns | | Missions | an errand one seat pays another for: bring goods, bring word, ravage a field (≤6 named), escort a person, hunt raiders · the reward is held back when the letter is written, in whole coins · term 1–24 turns from the answer · an offer lapses in 3 turns · one at a time between two seats · a merchant house takes goods and word; a free company never goods; a court anything · failed: the reward goes home, a house −8 regard (+12 for one done), a court −1 · a person taken on the road is ransomed for the reward (≥10) or lost after 2 turns | | Raider bands | free companies at nests on wild ground ≥3 hexes from any city · None / Few (1 per 4 cities) / Many (2 per 4) · 2 men and a wagon, to 5 · raid within 5 hexes of the nest · a host on the nest at turn’s end burns it · a new band 12 turns after one scatters · a beaten band offers its swords · none in a world without coin | | Adviser | titled by your people (Symboulos, Legate, Vizier…) · proposes a turn’s orders as rows you tick on the Court’s counsel page · advises on what your seat knows · your realm’s own brain or a chosen archetype · holds the briefs you hand it · a second adviser beside it is optional: Apple Intelligence or an agent of yours, a person named “… of ”, its own counsel page, asked only when you ask | | Two ways to rule | Autokrator (Ruler on Quick Start, and the lessons that open in it): your adviser holds both briefs and gives every order; you name one aim (take or hold a city, explore, break a rival, more of a good) and up to two concerns (quiet the restless cities, strengthen the defenses, the biggest navy, fill the granaries, more of a good) on The Ruler’s Will, read its answer each turn (doing, preparing and what is missing, suspended under a threat to the Metropolis, cannot, or ended), and sign only a ruler’s own acts · two limits: keep a treasury reserve (a coin and food floor), leave this realm alone · the campaign card: march now, prepare first, or your adviser’s judgment; revise, hold and preserve, lift a limit, take command · withdrawing an aim recalls the hosts the brief committed · Epistates (a crafted world’s default): you give the orders on your adviser’s counsel; one brief alone is Epistates too · switch on the Decrees page at any time · Take the Field (a switch on the Decrees card) shows the order controls again · an army you order yourself is led by your hand until handed back | | Xenia | a named opponent kept between matches · at most 6 active · six-dial charter · played by a model (Apple Intelligence or an agent) with an archetype behind it, or the archetype alone · last ten model events per xenos and per agent · sees only its seat · a record per match, never ground · its last 5 matches move each dial ±1, at most ±2 · agent spend cap per world · you see which realm each holds · talk to one by picking a question card; a face on the map badges a remark · reads each old opponent in a word · nearby sync between your own devices, off until you pair them | | Play-by-post | a hosted match played in a browser: the link is the seat · a seat that sends nothing is played on its own knowledge · a chat app can hold a seat, read-only or read-and-submit · Giant board 106×66, 25 nations | | Victory | city majority, or top score at turn 90 — or a scenario’s War’s Aim (take and hold, or deny, by a deadline), judged first · no score is ever shown: rankings in order, Your Standing in words · city 250 · pop level +125 · buildings ≈ 2× cost · wall & works levels 25 each · army ×1 (½ unsupplied, capped at 250/city) · enemy value destroyed ×2 · decisive battle up to +60 · land +3 · resource tile +6 · lost ancestral land −6 · stockpile ×2 to 50 · restless city −25, seething −60 · a city with its full table of wine and the luxury +10 · palace workshop +24 while it stands, +24 kept for taking a city with one (Late Bronze) · taken city +20% · Classical: city in servitude +25% up to half your cities, falling over the next quarter to counting against you · Late Bronze and Late Republic: a client nation’s city 1.25× up to half of yours and theirs, falling away the same way · Pharsalus: the Principate, Roma held 3 turns with no other Rome standing, by turn 90 |

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