A beginner's guide to your first city

29 July 2026 · Reading time about 8 minutes

You start with 2,500 drachmas, a landing flag on the shore and an empty island. This is the opening that works, and the three mistakes that end most first cities.

The first five minutes

Lay road from the landing flag inland. Settlers walk in along it, carts and vendors travel only on it, and nothing in your city works without it. Drag to lay a line rather than clicking tile by tile.

Put four or five houses along that road. They sit empty at first, then settlers arrive and fill them. A house holds 8 people as a hut, and it will climb to 60 as an estate if you feed and supply it, so do not carpet the map with them early. Housing is not your bottleneck.

Now a timber yard. It no longer has to hug the trees: its lumberjack walks over open ground to the nearest reachable forest, works there and hauls the wood home. Wood goes into almost everything you build after this point, and a city that runs out before it has a timber yard is stuck. The yard costs 55 drachmas and no wood, which is deliberate.

Then a wheat farm on the golden meadow. Meadow is the only ground that takes crops, and the farm grows faster the more meadow sits inside its footprint, so place it on the fattest patch you can find rather than on the edge of one. If your entry is coastal, a fishing wharf is the alternative: it straddles the shoreline, part on land and part over the water, and it works all year round.

Put a granary near the farms and connect it by road. Farm carts deliver there.

The building that decides whether your city lives

Build an agora.

Food in a granary does nothing. It sits there. The agora is what turns stored food into fed citizens: its vendors collect food and walk it out along the roads to houses, and a house only eats what a vendor has delivered to its pantry.

This is the single thing new players get wrong, and it produces the strangest-looking failure in the game: 1,200 food in the granaries, and citizens starving. If you see hunger bubbles over houses while your food stores are healthy, you do not have a food problem. You have a distribution problem, and the answer is another agora nearer to those houses.

The rough number to hold onto: one agora serves about 380 citizens. Not 380 citizens anywhere on the map — 380 citizens its vendors can reach and get back from. A district on the far side of the island needs its own agora and its own granary, however much food you have banked elsewhere. That figure is measured rather than guessed, and how we arrived at it is a story in itself.

The forager warning sign

If a house sits with an empty pantry for long enough, the household sends out its own runner to the nearest granary. You will see them on the roads. It keeps people alive, and it is also the game telling you something is wrong: a household living on its own foraging runs cannot grow, and after a while a homestead or better will start to decline, losing rank, capacity and the taxes it paid. Foragers are a warning light, not a solution.

How houses climb

Five levels, each with one new requirement:

1. Hut (holds 8) — needs well water to grow. Build a well.
2. Cottage (16) — needs a steady food supply from agora vendors.
3. Homestead (28) — needs olive oil delivered, and a shrine nearby.
4. Villa (44) — needs wine delivered, and a theater within earshot.
5. Estate (60).

Taxes scale with both population and house level, so the same patch of ground pays several times more once it has climbed. Growing your existing houses is almost always better than building more.

The oil chain is olive grove on meadow, then olive press. The wine chain is vineyard on meadow, then winery. The theater needs marble, which means a quarry on rock. That is your mid-game: four buildings and a shrine take you from cottages to villas, and villas are where the money starts.

Mistake one: cash crops too early

Olives and grapes are worth good money. They are also worthless if your city starves while growing them.

Workers are assigned by priority, and food comes before cash crops on purpose. But the workforce is finite, and every olive grove you build is 10 jobs that could have been staffing something else. Build the food base first and let it get comfortably ahead of your population before you plant a single olive.

You will know the food base is ready when the City Ledger shows produced-per-day well clear of needed-per-day and your granaries are climbing rather than flat.

Mistake two: forgetting summer

The year has four Mediterranean seasons, and they are upside down from the northern ones you might expect.

• Summer is the dead season. Wheat grows at a quarter rate. The fields are parched and your granaries drain.
• Autumn brings the olive and grape harvest, and wheat recovers.
• Winter is the best wheat season, but the sea closes: no caravans, no imports, no shipping, and fishing drops.
• Spring is the best growing season of all.

Averaged over a year this comes out roughly even. Within a year it does not. A city that is break-even in spring will lose people in summer, and the fix has to be applied months earlier: bank a granary surplus through autumn and winter that will carry you across the dry months.

Fishing wharves are the stabiliser. They fish through summer at full rate, which makes a coastal city considerably steadier than an inland one. If you can build wharves, build wharves.

Immigration understands the seasons even if you do not. Settlers stop arriving when your stores will not cover the sleeping season ahead, which can look like the game refusing you growth on a full granary. It is not a bug. It is refusing to let you admit people you cannot feed in August.

Mistake three: ignoring the neighbours

Six rival cities sit on the Aegean map, opened with the chart button or the M key. They ignore hamlets. Once you pass about 80 citizens the nearest ones start paying attention, and the further away a city is, the larger you have to be before it notices you at all.

What they do, in order of escalation: demand tribute, sour, then muster for war and land raiders who march overland and burn whatever is worth burning. Raiders leave rubble that blocks the ground until you clear it.

Paying tribute works. It is not a trap, and a city that pays its demands can go years without being raided. Ignoring them is what gets you burned down. If you would rather not pay, garrisoned watchtowers are your only home defence: their archers kill raiders inside a radius of about six and a half tiles, and they need a road connection and staff to work. The army you raise at a barracks is strictly for marching out, and will not defend your city while it is away.

You can also just be liked. Gifts raise a rival's attitude, and open trade routes make their caravans call at your trading post and pay 20 to 40 percent over the going rate for the goods they prize. Trade routes are usually better business than raiding.

A build order to copy

If you would rather not think about it the first time through:

1. Road inland from the landing flag.
2. Four or five houses along it.
3. Road-connected timber yard with an open walking route to forest.
4. Two wheat farms on the best meadow, or a wharf if the coast is close.
5. Granary beside them.
6. Agora, central to the houses.
7. Well among the houses.
8. More food until the ledger is comfortably positive, then a second agora as the population passes a few hundred.
9. Olive grove, olive press, shrine. Villas start appearing.
10. Quarry, theater, vineyard, winery. Estates start appearing.
11. Trading post, and open a route with the nearest rival.
12. Watchtowers before you cross 80 citizens.

After that the game is yours. The Labors list gives you objectives if you want them, and the Aegean gives you six neighbours to trade with, bribe or conquer if you do not.