Set up your first campaign
- Choose a faction at the start, accounting for its distinct abilities, units, buildings, and the ways research and decisions can reshape it over time.
- Begin from your single city and plan expansion around your faction's strengths and limitations, while developing districts, resources, technology, and industry.
- Send an army out early to reveal the map, collect Curiosities, meet factions, and discover Narrative Quests.
Move from exploration into the first conflicts
- Use your armies to uncover the map, collect Curiosities, make contact with factions, and discover Narrative Quests as you explore.
- When you encounter Minor Factions, negotiate with them and take their quests when that helps keep them from turning against you. Explore submerged Fortresses for opportunities to obtain rare loot.
- Choose how to handle each weaker Minor Faction: cultivate friendly relations and bring it into your empire, or defeat it and pillage its resources. Incorporation can add its distinctive units and heroes to your forces.
- Claim valuable neutral territory by building camps, but protect those claims because enemies or marauding Minor Factions can burn the camps without declaring an official war.
- Build units through your cities and assemble a balanced army with roles such as warriors, archers, and cavalry. Units can be stacked into armies of roughly five or six for battles against Minor Factions or rival players.
- After a Tidefall, reassess expansion and defense. Receding oceans reveal new land, resources, anomalies, and approaches for both you and your enemies, while leaving your existing territory intact.
Confirm progress and recover from setbacks
To finish your chosen victory path, complete every objective on that path rather than treating any single objective as sufficient.
Use Save Anytime to create a retry point before a risky decision or return to an earlier state after a setback.
To convert a pacified Minor Faction into lasting progress, own its territory and spend Influence to assimilate it into a Protectorate. This unlocks its unique unit, notable and councilor trait, population, and an assimilation bonus that scales with pacified villages.