The first 15 minutes: build for the next unlock, not for perfect ratios

Your first reign begins with a small worker cap and a few basic resources. The useful habit is to look one step ahead: if the next building needs wood, stop over-producing wheat just because wheat is easy. Early footage repeatedly shows the economy changing bottlenecks as new buildings appear, so a fixed “10 farmers, 10 miners” recipe goes stale fast.

A good early loop is:

  1. Keep every unlocked basic resource moving.
  2. Add workers to the resource blocking the next building or upgrade.
  3. Add houses before the worker cap becomes the reason production is slow.
  4. Build or upgrade storage before a required amount exceeds your current cap.
  5. Spend surplus resources through trading quests when the reward advances a current goal.

The game lets you click moving workers for a small speed push, but that is a momentary nudge, not an economy plan. Worker count, production upgrades and later automation matter more.

Unlock trading quests early

Trading routes open repeatable requests that exchange resources for quest progress and other rewards. They are especially useful when one resource is sitting near its storage cap while another system is waiting for a reward or unlock.

Do not fire every request simply because it is off cooldown. Check what it consumes first. An early run can stall when a quest spends the exact iron, coal or tools you were saving for a crafting building.

Shortcut worth learning: hover a resource-requiring button and press F to bookmark it. Later, the game also introduces prioritized bookmarks. This turns a growing menu tree into a short “what am I saving for?” list.

Treat iron bars and tools as a production chain

The first real production bottleneck is a good lesson for the rest of the game. Ore and coal feed smelting, bars feed tools, and tools unlock or accelerate several other branches. If tools feel impossibly slow, the answer is usually not “click harder”; inspect the upstream chain.

Before buying another expensive tool upgrade, ask:

  • Is ore actually arriving fast enough?
  • Is coal the limiting input?
  • Is the smelter idle because the queue is empty?
  • Would another crafting building increase throughput?
  • Are quests consuming a material you need for production?

You can support an active recipe by holding the left mouse button over its work area. Useful early, yes; a replacement for production upgrades, no.

Build storage before it becomes a hard stop

Storage was heavily rebalanced in v1.0.2 and v1.0.3. Current v1.0.6 play is much less punishing than launch-day footage, so old advice telling you to prestige mainly because of tiny warehouse caps is outdated.

Warehouses and warehouse upgrades are cheaper earlier than they were at release, and the developer changed how storage carries into later reigns. See the current storage guide before following a launch-day video literally.

Start combat for progression, not just rewards

Combat starts simply, then grows into formations and specialized units. Early fights can provide combat currency and progression milestones, so ignoring the army completely can delay other systems.

Your first low-danger encounters are also where you learn an important rule: survivability and damage change which encounter is efficient. Repeating a safe fight can be better than throwing a weak formation into a harder fight that spends time recovering.

Once formations unlock, place ranged units behind the front line rather than treating every slot as equivalent. The game’s store description explicitly frames combat around formations, specialized units and synergies.

When should you do the first Prestige?

Prestige points are earned from progression milestones, including resource collection milestones shown in the prestige preview. The tutorial suggests prestiging once you have a modest first bundle of points; current footage shows players pushing a little farther when another point is close.

Use this rule instead of a magic number:

Prestige when the next permanent upgrades will shorten the next reign more than the extra time needed to squeeze out one more point now.

If three milestones are nearly complete, finish them. If the next meaningful point requires a long grind through a weak production chain, reset and buy permanent speed, starting-resource, storage or automation improvements that make that grind cheaper next time.

Early mistakes that cost the most time

MistakeWhy it hurtsBetter move
Overproducing one basic resourceStorage fills while the real bottleneck stays emptyFollow the next unlock cost
Spending tools on every available upgradeTools gate several early systemsBookmark the next important purchase first
Ignoring warehousesA resource cap can make an upgrade mathematically unreachableExpand storage before the cap
Running every quest on cooldownRequests can eat bottleneck inputsPrioritize rewards tied to your current goal
Delaying Prestige foreverPermanent upgrades are the game’s acceleration layerReset when the next reign will clearly be faster

Version note

This route is written for v1.0.6 (September 7, 2026). Storage and midgame gold changed substantially during the first three days after release, so screenshots or videos recorded before v1.0.2/v1.0.6 may show harsher costs.

Sources