People & Orders

Half of Empires is an army. The other half is people — who works, who obeys, who is allowed to leave — and it runs on one idea: you do not receive people, you negotiate with people who have somewhere else to go. Where that idea comes from, and where it is argued about, is on Foundations.

One kind of piece

Everything on the board is a person. What differs is the bond: bound to a post, a person is a Settler and produces gold; bound to a weapon, a soldier who fights; bound to an oath, your hero who leads; bound to nobody, a free person who produces nothing — until you reach them.

Posts — where gold comes from

A Settler earns 1 gold a turn only while holding a post. Off-post, a Settler eats 1 population and earns nothing. Posts are finite:

• Your HQ holds 3, for anyone within 2 tiles of it.
• A worker building (Community Center, Recruitment Center) or a collection point holds 2, for anyone standing next to it. A held collection point also pays +2 Research a turn on top of the +1 you get for free.

When more people can reach a post than there are posts, the game fills the slots in a fixed order and someone stands idle. The Work Post card is how you overrule it: your HQ hands you 1 every turn (it expires unused); play it from a person onto a place and that person holds the job, even when someone else is closer. It is the only card in the game played on two things instead of a tile — and it matters most for a forced worker, who earns double at a post and nothing without one.

People who belong to nobody

6 free people stand on the map at the start of a match, between 6 and 10 tiles from the nearest HQ — never inside your own build ring, never on the far side of the world. Fog hides who owns things, never that they exist: you see them from turn one. Walk a unit up to one and choose:

• Welcome — they join as an equal. An ordinary Settler.
• Employ — they join bound to a site. Today this plays the same as welcoming: an ordinary Settler. The verb is recorded; what it will unlock is not built yet.
• Force — they join without consenting. A forced worker earns ×2 at a post and nothing without one — and walks 1 tile toward the edge of the map every turn. Reach the edge and they are gone. The only thing that stops them is having nowhere to go: your units, your walls, the terrain. In the phase that teaches this, a forced person only counts as brought in after you have held them for 2 turns — the game refuses to reward the verb before you have paid its price.

That rule — coercion needs enclosure — is the one lesson the civil layer insists on. It is borrowed from a contested argument (see Foundations: Carneiro, Scott); the game uses the intuition, not the historical claim.

The oath — your hero swears once

Your hero belongs to one of three orders. During a match you may swear to it once; it holds until the end and cannot be undone. The third order appears greyed out until you hold a charter, with the reason — so you can see the third road and what it costs before you take one of the other two.

In numbers: the Warriors give away 1 work post for a soldier now; the Prayers raise your population cap by +2, stop your forced workers from running, and cost a tithe of 1 gold every turn — and the verb force leaves your menu for good; the Townsmen keep your whole surplus across the turn.

A caveat the game owes you. “Those who fight, those who pray, those who work” is not a description of any society. It is an eleventh-century scheme written by one of the orders to justify itself. Empires presents each order as what it claims in order to rule — not as three kinds of people. (Foundations: Duby.)

The charter — gold that survives the turn

Your gold vanishes at the end of every turn. It still does; that is the point — nothing anyone can hoard, until you decide otherwise. A Charter is how: the card reaches your hand as soon as you own a worker building, and you play it on one of them (never the HQ). The building leaves your command — its people are its own now, its posts no longer yours — and from then on 3 gold per chartered site survives into the next turn. It cannot be undone. Chartering once is what unlocks the Townsmen. A game where you never charter anything plays exactly as it always did.

Regimes — six default answers to the same question

Picking a civilization is picking how your people are governed by default. Each is a documented labour regime, with the century it refers to, one rule of its own and one cost of its own. Picking none plays the game above, unchanged.

What fits with what

Regimes and orders combine — some add up, one is impossible by construction. Read these as plans, not promises:

• Steppe — Mongols + the Warriors: the Warriors take a post and the Mongols need none, so the cost disappears. Price: the Mongols never bank gold.
• Latifundium — Rome + forcing: double output and nobody runs. Price: extra population per forced worker, and the Prayers become redundant.
• Registry — China + Work Posts: more people reach a post, so each Work Post decides more. Price: no charters, so no Townsmen.
• Mit'a — the Inca + forcing in turns: coercion without the flight, rotating. Price: a few turns and they are free.
• Timar — Ottomans + the Warriors: a soldier for free at the oath. Price: the obligation remains.
• Granary + Townsmen — Egypt + the Townsmen: impossible. The Townsmen need a charter, and Egypt cannot charter. The road is shown, and shown closed.