I don't claim to have made every mistake in building my villages, but I have made my share. This is a how-to for version 1.10.2.15; the developers have many plans for improvements, and all details may be subject to change. Any questions or comments, please let me know below and I will help if I can. Setting up the game. Start with a coastal map. Lake, Island, Cliff, set to zero, the others at say 50%. Bridges do work, but not reliably. You want coast with a good bit of beach for fishing. Select Classic Mode; then either Relax and Play or Prestigious Burg. Note: if you choose the latter you must never build a Monastery or Castle. Just leave those research trees alone once you access them in the progression screen. Your initial territory should be next to (not on) the ocean, next to (not on) a nice piece of thick forest, and if possible near a mining outcrop, though the first two are more important. Starting play Play with the tutorial enabled, as it is now quite good. Read the prompts carefully and follow their instructions. The only thing I would really add here is to assign only 2 villagers to each task at first, as they become available; 2 builders, 2 berries, 2 woodcutters and 2 miners, the last 2 of the initial 10 are your first market tender and a forester. When you open the Common Path screen, pick up the storehouses, the fish and the fence decoration. Northbury buys planks and polished stone and this is how we will start our ascent to riches on the backs of the toiling serf masses. Northbury also sells tools, but with reasonable care you shouldn't need to buy any for a while, and there are also events early that give you more tools. For your second territory, save the game, then buy the thick forest. Acquire the hunting choice from level 2 of the common path. Check your forest for boar using the hunting option in the painting option. You are looking for around 25 boar or more in that territory and an adjacent one. If there are insufficient boar, search for a better forest, reload and choose that. Next, open the common path screen and choose the clothing option, the polished stone option, and the edict option. This should leave you with about 60 wealth. Go to the edict screen and take the tools edict option (the game later suggests you do this, but why waste tools meanwhile?) Boar Management Now, using the fence decoration you chose earlier, build a fence all around your hunting territory. This will stop the boars running away (the devs are going to fix hunting, but the fence works for now). Once that's complete, paint hunting around the perimeter of the hunting area. This will encourage the boars to migrate towards the centre of the area. You can paint in a bit more hunting later if your hunters can't find boar in the perimeter area. Hunting should stabilise fairly quickly, and be good indefinitely. Place 1 hunter in each of 2 camps and a butcher. Start selling meat to the serfs. The hunting area. If the hunters are inactive, move in the border a bit until they start working again https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3443648525 Polished Stone Build and staff 2 stone mason buildings. You won't be needing much polished stone for now, but Northbury wants it and is willing to pay 3 per stone. It's one of the best bargains (of an admittedly terrible selection) in the game; go for it. Second Trade Route The other thing you need to do is to get trade going with Myddle. This is because the early upgrades for the Northbury trade route need bread and you won't be making any for a while. Profit from your existing trade until you feel comfortable with your cash balance, then build 2 sheep farms with 1 shepherd each, 2 weavers, and a tailor (you can cheese this by just doing the tailor and buying 20 cloth from Northbury but common clothing is also a trade item you can make money from). Myddle also buys fish, so for your 3rd territory take a piece of coastline and place some fishing spots. Open trade with Myddle for, say, over 50 fish. https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3443648798 Final touches Build another food stall for fish, and add a rustic church. Last but not least, start a 'manor' with a tax office (you only need one tax guy for now, a small manor tower major will do) and tax the serfs at 3%. Of course, you will be building your real manor, the with the 3 wings and 5 stories etc. - the one you will live in - later on. Give or take a berry hut and more stone miners, this small village will be stable up to about 200 pop, will keep the serfs happy forever - just as well, because you will never be promoting a single one of them - and will always turn a profit. When everything is running smoothly, add a tiny 'great hall' to your manor. This will give you the last tutorial messages. When you want to build a proper manor, you can destroy the tiny hall, but make sure you've clicked the part, you don't want to knock down the whole manor! After adding light fortification, your village should end up looking something like this: https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3443647779 Still 5 tools left! Decorations and Prestige These matter because an oddity of Foundation is that while decorations generally add to 'beautification' and a small amount to prosperity, if attached to a monument, they add prestige to the faction of that monument. As you will be making more cash than you can easily store, just buy 'labour' decorations with the surplus (click the building, click Common Decorations (or freebuild, common decorations, if necessary) check the icons have the little green star); and ironically the cheapest (5 gold) options are also the best value. Shift-click and you can stack dozens of them in the same spot. In this way you can easily access higher parts of the Labour tree, notably light and heavy fortification, and the bailiff, who can start hunting for those sweet, sweet gold and marble deposits (Northbury buys gold, and Myddle buys marble). The other thing you want to get early is the stone mason upgrade (more masons=more gold). Fortifications and Density Fortification is important because it upgrades your houses to hold more people. To work, the fortification wall needs to surround an area completely, with no gaps apart from fortification gates. When you nearly complete planning the wall, blue stripes will appear to confirm that it will work, once built. The quality of a house is irrelevant to its density; all you need is light (or heavy) fortification and patrols, which can be of serf patrollers, each group of which operates from a separate 'mini-manor' - start with selecting a new 'manor' in the build menu then use a tower as a 'watchpost'. 2 or 3 patrollers in each of 2 such buildings should police a decent sized village with ease. Getting Iron By now you may be running out of tools, or having to buy them at the market price. The secret of the iron ore-smelting-blacksmith cycle is to buy in the charcoal, which Myddle sells, and sell surplus tools back to them. 2 mines, 2 smelters and a blacksmith should be sufficient. I've also found common wares a good money spinner, but only with the tier 5 upgrade. Getting Cheese Another secret of the game is not to waste time with cheese production. Your serf village doesn't need cheese, and in fact not one morsel will ever pass their lips because there is no cheese stall, but eventually when you want to build your actual town far from the sweating masses, on a nicer site, with commoners, citizens, a market hall and belfry etc. you will want to have it. Fortunately the Abbess sells cheese at a discount sometimes, so you can fill your boots with cheese on the cheap. In fact you'll probably find it doesn't matter; late game you will be making so much money that you won't be able to build treasuries fast enough to hold it all; in my last game I had coal and cheese imports set at 700 each, not even noticing the cost. Do's and don'ts Like all good city builders (does anyone remember the *?#% Herbalist from ROTK?) Foundation has many, many idiosyncrasies. Just a few to start with: If you amend a building during construction, it can sometimes get 'stuck' and not finish. Best to let it finish first, then change it. A particular problem with statues for some reason. If you want to move a building, there are rules. Generally, any single-piece building can be moved by clicking in the centre of the placement circle. However, buildings with more than one piece require care. Clicking the first time usually selects just the one part; you may need to click twice to get all of the building. If you get the 'too far' warning, it probably means you have accidentally left something behind, but when you move that part close again, it should work fine. And I haven't been able to move entire monuments, though parts of a monument e.g. a cloister, can be moved collectively. Fortifications can take ages to upgrade, even with small changes - during which time your buildings devolve. Change fortifications - even small changes - only when all your builders are free. Never, ever, open your doors to travellers or pilgrims. They will eat you out of house and home in no time. Only open these facilities when completing a quest. Make sure that 'paused' is checked on the building and also in the building outliner, to make sure no freebooters steal your stuff. A bridge built into even a gradual slope can be unusable. Don't ask me why, just build them between flat areas. Expect your people still to complain though. Ah, complaints. Your people will complain even though an alternative route is available, and they immediately use it. But don't ignore all complaints. If a person complains a couple of times in a row, check to see if they can do what they need to, i.e. get back to work. if not, check their building for problems, probably with access. Warehouses can be tricky if built too close to other buildings, so leave a bit of space around them. As a guideline you can use a small gate's width all around. An extended granary e.g. for cheese, will not fill up all 800 slots, only 400. again, don't ask me why. In general I'd rather build 2 regular granaries than 1 extended one. You only need 1 staff in each if you only have one item to deliver. Your people are not good at delivering from one warehouse to another. You can force them to do it by using the empty all command in one and the collect all command in the other. To see if it works, right click on the resource icon in the top centre box, and you can watch what happens. If it doesn't work, check for access problems. If building a 5 person wheat farm, always use the extra storage barn, or some wheat will be unharvested. If building a monastery, always go ape with apiaries, and don't whine about wine - the Bishop will sell you the barrels for manuscripts. But never buy the stained-glass window - your people won't use it. Never make iron swords for sale. Shortbows and spears sell for the same. Statistics Finally, some statistics from my last game (common/labour items only) to give a sense of the relative proportions of each building required. If you find you are are using much more of some building then there is likely a problem with some of that type of building: Pop 450 (net) Wealth 18k Tax 3% 2k Selling (quantity): Berries 270 Common Clothes 38 Fish 240 Hops 260 (a reliable cash crop) Polished Stone 71 (with heavy use as well) No longer selling (no room in treasury) Gold ore Marble Planks Bread etc. Buying (quantity): Boar 58 Cheese 550 Coal 268 Buildings Bakery 2 Berry Brewery 1 (4 workers) Blacksmith 2 Brewer 3 Builders 3 (with attachments) Butchery 3 City Food Stall 6 City Goods Stall 3 City Luxury Stall 3 Common Wares (upgraded) 2 Fishing Huts 10 Food Stall 3 Forester Camp 3 Gathering Hut 5 Gold Quarry 2 Goods Stall 1 Granary 7 (some single purpose e.g cheese) Hop Farm 2 Hunters Hut 4 Iron Quarry 6 iron Smelter 5 Lumber Camp 4 Marble Quarry 2 Market Hall 2 (3 transporter each) Market Storehouse 2 (3 transporter each) Paviour 3 Rustic Church 1 (also a large church for the city, 6 priests) Sawmill 4 Service Counter 3 (1 Taverner each) Sheep Farm 2 (2 workers each) Stone Quarry 3 Stone Mason Hut 2 (upgraded) Tax Office 2 Tavern Kitchen 1 (1 cook) Warehouse 10 (some single purpose e.g. coal) Weaver Hut 2 Wheat Farm 7 (all upgraded to 5 workers) Windmill 3

I failed a ton at this game before figuring out some basics. Here is a collection of tips to hopefully help other folks similar to myself. Included is a step by step guide for if you're just starting out and can't get a handle on why things are broken, and later I go over common beginner issues in each section so you can look them up if you basically get it but are struggling in one area. INTRODUCTION I struggled a bunch when I first started playing, having to restart the game several times due to massive failures understanding basic mechanics. So, I decided to write down some of my horrible mistakes and turn them into tips for others who might have had trouble starting and didn't want to watch a YouTube tutorial. These tips will help you get through early game, allowing you to survive long enough that you at least understand how things work on a basic level. ARE YOU BLIND I'm vision impaired, so yeah, the default settings for this game are really, really hard to use. Here's how to make it a bit better! First, open the Menu by clicking that tiny white box thing in the top right corner of your screen. Click on the third icon down, which looks like a TV or computer screen, to open the Settings. On the very first tab, you have Scaling! Go ahead and make everything bigger. I selected 2.00, which makes it 1.80 but hey, much better than the default. This does cause some issues with some windows, particularly the Market window, which gets rather long and even though a scrollbar shows up, you still can't see the bottom. You also can't drag it higher up, because you can only drag from the top of the window. But, a minor frustration compared to not being able to play at all. Under the Graphics tab, you can also mess with your resolution and various other settings if you're having framerate issues. WHAT TO DO FIRST 1. Build a village center. 2. Assign Builders-- I usually start with three and then give them new jobs after I've done the initial building. 3. Build a stonecutter camp. You should, like all resources, place this camp as close to the rocks as possible. Basically on top of them is fine! This reduces travel time and generally makes everything more efficient. 4. Assign a villager to the stonecutter camp once completed. Just one for now. You won't get any stone until you assign someone. You need to use the paintbrush over the stone, as well as any trees or berries nearby, or else your people will ignore them. 5. Build a well, your people need this for water so it's always important to do it first. 6. Build a lumber camp, again right along the trees, and assign one Woodcutter. You need wood to build everything else, so this is an important next step. Make sure you used the paintbrush to assign the trees-- I like to just use the fir trees because you can reforest them later on, but the other kind can't grow back. I use them for decoration, though you don't get any Splendor for it. 7. Now that you have wood, build a gathering hut right on top of those berry bushes. Now you've got food and ideally your people will not starve. 8. However! Your people can't just eat berries from your inventory. Therefore, you need to set up a market and sell berries for them to eat. Or else they will starve and abandon you. One might think a minimalist approach is good for the market, but that will actually cause you some problems later on when you want to build a church. So put in a food stall, but add a few decorations-- at least four, that way you have 2 Labor Splendor (Splendor is separate for each group) to unlock fisher's huts. (You cannot upgrade to Serfs without fish or bread and fish is generally easier as long as you have water nearby, if not trade for bread.) When the food stall is done, you need to click on it and assign berries as the item you are selling. You may also choose to assign a shopkeeper to man the stall-- I think people will buy anyway, but they help refill the shop's stock when it goes low so it's important. 9. At this point, you can build a sawmill and stonemason hut. I always do a sawmill first, since stone comes a bit later. But you do need lots of stone for a church and you can't get Commoners without a church, so both is good. I assign one person to each at start, then add another one or two people to each of the camps to make sure I'm getting enough materials. 10. Next you will want to build a warehouse! You can unlock trading once you have 20 planks, but I recommend building a warehouse first. DO NOT build a forester camp before you have one completed warehouse. I don't know why, but this breaks things and your Carpenters will stop producing planks forever. Do the warehouse first, then use planks to unlock your first trade gig. 11. It's time to give your people houses. Use the paintbrush to designate some residential areas for them to build. I recommend getting basic building out of the way early because housing takes up a lot of your builders' time. OF NOTE, individual houses can be upgraded to fit more people-- there is a checkbox that controls this. For now, leave it on, but later, you will want to remember to turn this off for old areas so people actually move into new territory. 12. Build a forester camp, as you are probably running out of trees at this point. Make sure you paint areas that you want reforested, and assign a worker to plant trees. 13. If you have enough stone, I recommend building a church! This will allow your Serfs to level up to Commoners, and that gives you some new territory to work with. You will want to have at least 2 Clergy Splendor through fancy building, but hey, go for more if you can. Church is very important in keeping people happy, and you can build up Clergy Splendor for later on. I usually make this high priority if I have nothing else going on. 14. Now that have free territory from completing quests. Go ahead and select some land! It will increase your taxes, but you'll have more space to expand and hopefully more resources too. You should make sure your people have their basic needs covered before you start using these resources, however. If they have food, water, and housing before you start using the resources, things will go a lot faster because they don't have to run back to your old town center for every little thing. 14. To that end, the first thing you want to set up is a well, followed by a market. Decorate the market! Then use the paintbrush to assign housing. Once the houses are done, you can start exploiting those resources! You should also have a fisher's hut unlocked, since you made a church, and that can help bring in more food. Add a second food stall to your first market and all markets after. You should have about one market per hex, with housing close to the market and well. Make sure to assign fish to the second food stall. Alright, that is the very basics of starting a new game. By following this advice, you should be able to survive long enough to start figuring other things out for yourself. If you don't want a whole list, and are having beginner problems with just one specific thing, feel free to skip down to the appropriate section below. RESOURCES The very first resource you want to get is stone, so you can build a well. After that, you won't need tons of stone until you build your first church, so concentrate on lumber instead. You will want to place your camps right next to the resource in question-- this makes everything much more efficient and is more important the longer you play. In the beginning, each camp can employ up to three people-- if you want to stock up more than that you can build multiple camps. So that you have room, make sure NOT to build your houses right on top of your resources-- give them a little breathing room. Early in the game, you will get the option to reforest and grow back trees. This will be important as you will run out of wood. However, reforestation only applies to fir trees, so if you like the look of the broadleaf forests, don't chop them down. If the firs are right on the boarder of your broadleafs, you can use Q and E to rotate the camera and make sure you're painting right at the border. Also useful if you want to reforest an area and avoid your houses. MARKETS So, I didn't realize this in the beginning, but markets are just like building a multi-part building, like a church or keep. Each shop is actually a piece of the whole market-- not an individual building, the way a sawmill or stonemason hut is. You do not go to the build menu each time you want to add a new stall-- doing so will accidentally create multiple markets, and none of them but the first will be used. Instead, click on an existing stall and select Edit, then add whatever you want! Now, if you're like me, you may think "Okay, I'll just put down a food stall so my people don't starve, I'm not producing goods yet and resources are slim, so why bother with decoration." And that is a mistake. For you see, you cannot unlock new buildings, such as a fishing hut (gives fish) or a manor (increases money cap) without Splendor. And even though they all use the same image, Splendor is separate for Labor, Kingdom, and Clergy. So if you think building a wooden keep will unlock these buildings by adding Splendor, that is not the case. You must make your markets fancy. I personally started with fences, because they're nice and help break up different sections visually. If you want your fence pieces to match up, there's a trick to it. Match up the top circle of the new fence post with the top circle of the old post. If you try to do it another way, such as the green outline, that won't work. Because a bunch of the fence, like when placing other buildings, is underground and thus you won't see it at all. Similarly, if you're placing shop stalls, the bottom of the stall you will see needs to be your guide instead of the green outline. QUESTS / WAREHOUSES Warehouses store goods. You also need to use them if you want to buy things via trade. A warehouse can store up to 50 of one item, with four types of items. You can store all four of the same type if you want. You cannot complete any quests without a warehouse! If you get a quest to provide, say, berries, and you have like 200 berries, so you think "Eh, I'll be fine!" No, you will not be fine. You must put the berries in the warehouse. Now, let's say you set one of the four slots to berries, and then click either Accept or Stock Maximum, but for some reason... Your people aren't putting anything in there? Well, if you are only using the warehouse to trade, then yeah, you don't need to assign a worker there. In fact, you shouldn't as it's a bit of a waste. However, if you need to actually get a stock of items in there for, say, a quest, then you gotta assign Transporters. However, even if you have Transporters and all your settings are correct, you might not be able to save up any stock! Why is this? Well, various workers may be using up your supplies, or storing them in their camps instead of in the warehouse. You can force them to put stuff in the warehouse by using the Stockpile feature. First, open the Resource Tab (the white box next to Happiness at the top). Honestly, it's a good idea to always keep this open in the bottom right corner of your screen, or just the right side as it will eventually get pretty tall. Then, click the Stockpile button next to your berries. BE WARNED however, that for food items this should only be a temporary thing! If you're Stockpiling, no food is going to the market, so your people will starve. It's best to use this for the quest, click the green checkbox to turn it in early, and then stop Stockpiling immediately. Non-food goods which are being stockpiled will also be unavailable for building. So it's good if you want to save up one resource for a big project, like saving stone for a church, but you have to stop Stockpiling before they can use it for said project. SPLENDOR / UNLOCKING BUILDINGS You may have noticed at the start of your game you do not have many buildings. And if, like me, you started playing without watching a YouTube tutorial or watched one but didn't pay attention, you may have gotten pretty far wondering why your Novices have not become Serfs or similar such questions. As it turns out, Foundation has a stat called Splendor-- and actually this is three different stats all with the same name. You have Labor Splendor, Kingdom Splendor, and Clergy Splendor. Even though they have the same name and icon, they are in fact different. You will want to make sure you get at least 2 of each Splendor as early as possible as this unlocks many of the basic buildings that you need to survives. In particular, fishing huts, which give fish allowing you to not be solely reliant on berries in early game (as long as you have a water source) and a manor, which is very useful as it raises the gold cap. I played quite far, and did many military missions, wasting a lot of gold, because I had not unlocked manors yet. Very unfortunate, may you avoid my mistakes. Labor Splendor: Gain this by making your markets fancy. Getting 2 Labor Splendor will help you unlock fisher's huts and manors, which you need to upgrade your peeps from Novices to Serfs. If you don't have room for the tents, which latch onto your stalls, you can add fences. They don't take up much space at all, and form a pleasing natural barrier for your market. If you want your fences to line up, the trick is to align them NOT by the green outline, which extends underground and is generally confusing, but by matching the circular top of the old fence to the circular top of the existing fence. It won't be exact, but it will look quite nice! Similarly, when placing your stalls, don't base their position off the green outline, instead the real position will be the non-green posts while the rest will be underground. Kingdom Splendor: Early game, I believe you just get this from completing quests to help the king. I kept 10 Bread in my storehouse and 50 Berries, which allowed me to complete most of the quests that popped up. Later on, you can build fancy military installments and train soldiers. This is a great way to make money! And a good use of spare people without jobs. A basic Wooden Keep will hold up to 10 soldiers, and the King usually asks for only 5 at a time. The reward is 1000 gold and 1 free territory! But if you haven't built a manor, you can only hold 500 gold at once, so the rest is wasted. So get on that! Clergy Splendor: Early game, you can only get this from completing quests and choosing to help the church. After you get 2, you can unlock a new building-- the Rustic Church. You need this to upgrade your peeps from Serfs to Commoners.

A guide to provide some useful tips and tricks I picked up along the way to help build a village that hopefully won't collapse out of nowhere :P Introduction In this guide I will share some basic tips to succeed in creating a village that is not too much maintenance and easy to grow bigger throughout the game. I picked these tips and tricks up along the way and decided to share my findings, so if there are more useful tips or tricks be sure to let me know! Quick tip: try to leave some open areas in the beginning to ensure you have enough room to expand or grow later on. Markets Food Markets should be build near residential areas with a well also nearby, a best practice is to create a market in the center and the residential areas around it while leaving enough room for further expansion. Always put a granary near a market with the food you want to sell to make it easier for market tenders to serve food. Goods Goods can also be placed with a food market, in this case it should be near where commoners or citizens live. Instead of a granary, put a warehouse near to make it easier for market tenders to get the goods. Housing Housing should be near the place villagers work. A good practice is to either place "polluting" work places (the ones with the brown circle around them when you place them) on the outside of your residential area, while "non-polluting" can be placed inside cities/villages closer to the residential areas. Residential areas won't be build in the brown circle. There are 2 kinds of leveling concerning housing. Citizen status and Size leveling/the amount of villagers in one house. Citizen Leveling the citizen status housing makes sure commoners or citizens can live in that house. To upgrade your housing to the next citizenship status beautification (trees, bushes, lanterns etc.) and a commoner resident is needed. The next status requires paved roads and a citizen. Size To upgrade the size of the house which determines how many villagers it can contain at once, you need light fortification and guard patrol. Easiest way to get this is to build walls around your residential area and a watchpost from the manor progression and set a villager to patrol.You can then mark the area where a patrolling villager should walk which ideally should be the houses near the tower so the guard has less walking distance and thus can patrol more houses. You can ignore the little light fortification towers as it requires unnecessary use of a villager. For the next house size the light fortification wall build previously should be upgraded to heavy fortification walls. Food Rustic food You only need a few berry bushes to provide a big supply. make sure you restrict some areas around bushes to avoid despawning them by villagers walking over them. Fish is even easier to provide and can also be sold. Make sure the fish is actually in your territory, it tends to be on the border where your villagers can't get them. Refined food The easiest way to get refined food throughout most of the game without needing to much territory is meat. When you have a butcher and hunter per 50 villagers you will have a huge surplus of food. just make sure to have a dense forest marked nearby which restricts villagers from walking through on all sides except the one where the hunters are placed. Bread seems to be a hassle to maintain, needing a lot of territory, so I use it mostly for upgrading trade routes and selling it. Also don't start selling refined food until you're sure you have enough to satisfy your villagers as it tends to make them less happy then when they didn't know you had any. The same goes for goods. Goods As mentioned before, only start selling goods when you are sure you can provide a steady supply. Try to have your iron mine setup before moving on to goods, I try to provide tools for building first which need an iron supply anyway. When you got that up and running focus on common wares, you can get an additional building for this production which multiplies the output of common wares. The surplus of common wares can be traded. I try to avoid shirts as common goods as they use a lot of cloth and wool which also need a large area to function while not producing that much. Cloth can then be used to build nice decorations around markets or other buildings, or you can ofcourse sell it. Logistics Some best practices to make logistics easier. 1. As said before, build warehouses near goods markets and granaries near food markets. 2. Warehouses and granaries should ideally be at the destination and not the source. For example: I have hunters which provide boar, I put a granary for boar near a butcher so he can make meat while only walking a short distance to get the boar. Then at the market I have a granary with meat for the market tenders to use. This all results in the villagers having to walk less of a distance to get what they need while having all the transporters doing the work for them. The same also applies to building projects, having a warehouse with stone and planks near the build site can speed up the building process. However, when you got multiple hunters you actually should place a granary near them to store all the boars as the new granary will collect them from all the hunters while the granary at the butcher only needs to transport them to their granary. In short, less walking means more supply and more work done! 3. Try to have as little different types of items in a warehouse or granary as possible. The more items means the transporters have to walk a lot of different routes which results in a low supply of products. Money Taxes In the beginning the easiest way to earn money is by taxing you're citizens, you can eventually get an edict (in your royal book) to lower the unhappiness percentage from taxes. Put the tax office in the center of the residential areas to provide the most coverage as the taxation is collected from the homes. Trade Trade is the next best income, in the Trade tab of the royal book you can open trade routes. Then in the resource tab you can set the resource to sell with the downwards arrow, setting a value for the resource makes sure you keep at least the set amount of resources in your warehouses before it is actually sold. So if I have some planks to sell and set the value to 100, any planks above 100 get sold. Tavern The tavern is also a good source of income. The tavern is best used for Inn Lodging in the beginning, when using it as an inn you should treat it as a residential area as the people that stay at your tavern tend to have the same needs as serfs or commoners so they also need a well and a market for food. When having a surplus of berries the tavern can also be used to provide entertainment by serving berry brew to commoners. Progression (WIP) There are, simply put, 4 progression trees: 1. The main progression, which can be bought using money. Each new tier the amount needed for the new "slots/technologies" slightly increases. This is also the main progression you will be working with as it provides all the basics for your villagers. 2. The Manor, to unlock this tree the first slot needs to be purchased (25 coins). To further unlock you will need labour points/coins and splendor (which is manor specific splendor). 3. The Kingdom/Castle, just like the manor the first unlock requires some coins but instead of labour points/coins you will need kingdom points/coins and kingdom splendor. 4. The Monastery, also a few coins for the first unlock, and clergy points/coins with clergy splendor. You will also generally need some wealth status which is influenced by multiple factors... (WIP) Wealth WIP Splendor WIP Coins WIP Select your aspiration When starting a save game you get the option to either start on your own, focus on building a manor/prestigious burg, focus on building a castle/mighty stronghold or focus on building a monastery/prosperous priory. This influences your goal throughout the game as follows: 1. Starting on your own gives you no specific goal to achieve which gives you the choice to explore as you will. 2. Building a prestigious burg gives you the requirement to: Build a City Belfry (the last tower building in the manor progression), Increase 30 houses to high density, Host the Seneschal at your tavern (unsure as to what that is yet), Raise the happiness of you village above 75, Have your labour splendor above 500. Besides these requirements you have the restriction of not building a castle or a monastery. 3. Building a mighty stronghold gives you the requirement to: Reach a population of 50 combatants, Have 100 or more meters of fortified walls, Complete a military campaign, Host the king at your castle, Have your kingdom splendor above 500. In this case the only restriction is to never build a monastery, so the manor can still be used. 4. Building a prosperous priory gives you the requirement to: Build an Abbatial church, Reach a population of 150 monastics, Host the abbess at your monastery Have your clergy splendor above 500. In this case the restrictions are to not build a castle, have a population below 75 and to never promote a villager. Manor (WIP) The manor is the progression tree you will probably use no matter which direction your village will go. Manor Contents The manor includes the following: 1. The Tax Office, this is crucial in the beginning to earn some money. Here you can select a villager who will collect the taxes. The bigger the village the more tax collectors you need to keep up. This is why it is necessary to build multiple tax office building near different residential areas. 2. The Bailiff Office, only 1 bailiff can be active per playthrough. The bailiff can switch/revise edicts and privileges for you, upgrade trade routes, earn labour coins/points and prospect for nearby resources. Another noteworthy feature is that the bailiff comes with an additional bonus when selecting a villager. This bonus can be increased by building more splendor around it's office. 3. The Guardpost. Here you can select villagers to go on patrol or guard a watchpost. Patrol was mentioned earlier as it is necessary for increasing the amount of villagers in a house. 4. The Treasury Manor Tips Manor buildings can serve as light fortification to the residential areas around it and, especially when you have a guardpost, it is recommended to build this near residential areas. The Castle (WIP) The Monastery (WIP)