How to Play

Empires is a roguelite campaign built on an auto-battler match. In a match you buy structures at the Command (the shop), they train units that march and fight on their own, and you win by razing the enemy HQ — ~35 rounds on a 32×32 grid. A run chains those matches into one campaign. The rest of this page is the match; the run is the frame around it.

The campaign is a run

The 12 phases play as one continuous run: tech carries forward, victories grant free research, and your run score rewards clean, ambitious campaigns. The full breakdown — spoils, costs, resets and every phase — is on the Campaign page.

Your first turns

1. Click a unit — green tiles are moves, red tiles are attacks. Research ticks up on its own from turn 1 — and every collection point a Settler holds adds more.
2. Open the Command (the shop, right side) and buy a structure. It goes to your hand; build it next to a structure you already own — it trains units automatically.
3. Units march and fight on their own. There's no micro — where you build and stand is the whole decision.
4. Spend Research in the tech tree to buff your army — it's live from turn 1.
5. End your turn. The enemy plays, combat resolves, and you repeat until the phase is won — in the 8 teaching phases that means meeting the phase goal; after them, razing the enemy HQ.

Tier (raising it with gold to unlock stronger cards) isn't part of your first turns — it reveals starting Phase 4, once you've played the earlier phases and the game has walked you through the systems before it.

Autopilot plays the rest of a match for you — it unlocks for a phase only after you've beaten that phase manually at least once, and it's off in the Daily (today's run is yours to play). It's a solid baseline, not your best game — a replay tool for phases you've already cleared, not a shortcut through your first run.

Economy

Two resources: Gold (spend-or-lose every turn) and Research (persistent — powers the tech tree). Numbers below are live from the engine.

Command (the shop)

Offer odds by tier

How likely each building is to be in one offer. The draw never repeats a card, so a heavier card crowds the lighter ones out — and every card a higher Tier unlocks makes the ones you already knew rarer. A reroll costs 1g and buys a whole new draw. ★ = fuses into a golden at 3 copies; the rest never do.

The small number under each chance is the other half of the story: how many offers before the card is more likely to have appeared than not. You get one offer per turn, and a reroll buys one more for 1g — so in a teaching phase, which lasts a handful of turns, a rare building is a bet you usually lose, while across a full match (35 turns) everyone ends up seeing everything.

The power card works differently: one of 7, drawn evenly, so each is 14.3% at every Tier — a higher Tier never improves the odds of the power you want.

Research & the tech tree

Research ticks up every turn on its own — +1◈ from turn 1 — and every collection point a Settler holds adds +2◈ a turn on top. Short on one resource? Trade at the market (gold ↔ research, both ways — see the rate above). You spend Research in the tech tree: a web of nodes across three axes — Military, Economic, Civil. You can only allocate a node next to one you already own. Your allocations persist across campaign phases, so the tree is a campaign-long plan, not a per-match reset.

Combat

Units march 5 tiles/turn at the enemy HQ and fight on their own — Settlers do not join the march, they stay with their work. When you move a unit yourself, enemy zones of control cost +1 movement; the automatic march ignores them. Aerial units bypass terrain. In the 8 teaching phases the match ends the moment you meet the phase goal; from then on it ends when an HQ is destroyed or at the turn cap (35) — tiebreaker: most HQ damage dealt.

Units counter each other rock-paper-scissors style: anti-tank shreds armor, anti-air owns the skies, siege breaks structures. The full bonus matrix is on the Counters page.

Golden units

Fusion is automatic. When you end your turn — before your units march — any 3 identical units of yours that aren't golden yet merge into one golden (2★) unit: HP and attack ×2, healed to full. The other 2 bodies leave the board, which frees 2 population. A golden unit never merges again, and the hero and Settlers never merge at all.

Trainer buildings merge the same way: 3 identical ones become one golden building that frees the other 2 tiles and adds attack to every unit you order trained from it — Air Base +2, Artillery Battery +2, Missile Center +2, Armor Factory +3, Barracks +2. The free unit card it hands you each turn is a plain unit. Buildings with no training bonus (houses, walls, defenses…) never merge: losing two of them would buy you nothing.

Fusion is a rule of space more than of power: your buildings hand you copies for free, so a trio is a by-product, not something you hunt — what it gives back is population and tiles. Only units on the board count toward a trio: cards in hand don't, and the hand holds at most 10 — anything past that is discarded at the end of the turn.

Chance & information

Nothing is rolled after you decide. Combat, marching, the flight of a forced worker and the enemy's play are deterministic — the same position always resolves the same way. What the game rolls, it rolls before you decide, and it comes in two kinds.

The map — rolled once per match

HQ position, terrain, collection points and where the free people stand all come from one seed drawn at the start of the match. In the campaign a retry is a new map; in the Empires Daily everyone plays the same one.

The offers — rolled every turn

The Command draws 3 to 5 structures (more at higher Tiers) plus one of 7 powers from the pool your Tier allows — 4 buildings at Tier 1, 24 at Tier 3. Never the same card twice in one offer, and not all buildings are equally likely: the most common come up 3× as often as the rarest. A reroll buys a fresh draw. The unit cards your buildings hand you are not drawn at all — 6 buildings each hand you the same unit on a fixed clock.

Never rolled — but hidden

Fog of war hides who owns what and where enemy units stand — never that a collection point or a person exists. The spoils offered after a win come from the edge of your web so far, not from a roll. The enemy is a fixed policy: it reads the board, it does not throw dice.

The ages