Raw materials

• Steel works go on iron ore (grey rocks), oil wells on oil fields (black pools), chemical plants on salt flats (white crystals).
• Electronics works (after research) turn steel and chemicals into electronics.

Factories

• A factory builds one kind of weapon; its icon shows on the map. The product list shows what each weapon needs and sells for.
• Upgrade a factory (up to size 3) for much more output. Assembly lines and Automation speed every factory up.
• An orange blink means a building is stuck: out of materials, storage full, or on strike. The BUILD tab lists them under NEEDS ATTENTION.

Research labs

Your HQ researches slowly; labs earn research points much faster.

Supply routes

• Click a building, then Ship to… and click where it goes: another of your buildings (materials to a factory, chemicals to a farm) or a faction's city (weapons and food).
• A route keeps running until you remove it. Convoys wait a few seconds to fill up.
• Warehouses store more and make good hubs.

Raids

• Crossing land owned by a faction that dislikes you, or a battlefield, risks a raid. A faction never raids a convoy that's bringing it goods.
• Railways carry 3x and move faster, Armed escorts halve raids, Air cargo flies straight and is rarely raided.

Farms

• A farm is a farmhouse with fields on the 8 tiles around it. Nothing else can be built on its fields.
• The land matters: grassland grows best, hills about half, forest a third, desert barely; sea and mountains not at all. The preview shows how fertile a spot is before you build.
• Fields are coloured by how well they grow: lush green and gold when healthy, straw, then dry brown.

Soil

• The soil wears out over a few minutes and the farm grows less and less (down to a fifth).
• Ship chemicals to the farm: it spreads them on the fields as needed, each load restoring a tenth of the soil. Irrigation slows the wear; Fertilizer chemistry doubles what each load restores.

Selling food

• Ship food straight to any faction city. Armies eat; their home farms only grow about half of what they need.
• The emptier a faction's granaries, the more it pays. Hungry troops recover more slowly and fight worse, so feeding a faction helps it win.
• Feeding an army pleases it, and its enemies mind much less than when you sell it guns.

Pick your customers

• Selling to a faction makes it like you, its allies a little too, and its enemies hate you.
• Wary factions won't let you build on their land. Hostile ones raid your convoys, and seize your buildings if they capture the province.
• To win a faction back, keep shipping to its cities: wary factions pay 60%, hostile ones 25%, but trust comes back faster.
• You can't build within a few tiles of a border where a battle is going on.

How the war is decided

• Weapons you sell really go to the front. A faction's strength depends on how much it has, how good it is (a stockpile of tanks and jets beats a mountain of rifles) and whether its troops are fed.
• Prices rise where more of a faction's provinces are on the front, and fall when its depots are full of that weapon. War fever adds 35%.
• Factions post contracts with bonus pay. Fail one and they'll be angry.
• Research Military intelligence to see each faction's stockpile, food, equipment quality and a breakdown of its prices (FACTIONS tab).

What to research

• Weapons: small arms, artillery, armor and aircraft lines, three tiers each. Better weapons sell for far more.
• Industry: electronics, assembly lines and automation.
• Extraction: deep drills, pressure pumps and catalysts (+40% each for steel, oil and chemicals), then heavy machinery (+30% for every mine, well, plant and farm).
• Farming: tractors, irrigation, fertilizer chemistry.
• Logistics: railways, armed escorts, air cargo, silos (double storage everywhere).
• Intelligence: see the factions' stockpiles and why prices move.

The black market

• Politics (public): incite a war (war fever: higher prices and fatter contracts for 3 minutes), broker a ceasefire, lobby a faction, or smear a rival with one.
• Dirty work (anonymous): blow up a rival's building in an "industrial accident", stir up a strike, or hijack every convoy they have on the road.
• Bandit outpost (anonymous): pick a spot on a rival's supply route. For 75 seconds every other rival convoy passing within 2 tiles is robbed, and the cargo goes to your HQ. Everyone sees the camp; nobody knows whose it is. Air cargo flies over it and armed escorts fight off half the robberies.
• Hire security to guard a building: it foils the next accident or strike and stops one seizure.
• Every job makes that job dearer for everyone, rivals included; prices cool off over time.

Rebellions

• When one faction swallows too much of the map, unrest builds (see RIVALS) and its far-flung or freshly conquered provinces rise up as a Liberation Front. An alliance that conquers everything early faces one last great uprising.
• You can also incite a rebellion from the black market. The rebels start out trusting whoever paid for it.
• Rebels make almost no weapons or food of their own and pay a premium. Keep them supplied and they grow; starve them and they're crushed. Their old masters will hate you for it.

Hotkeys

Click a key, then press the new one. Taking a key from another action swaps them. Saved in this browser.