Choose your class

Each class is a different campaign. You pick one per world, and it sets the perks you play with for the rest of it. Every class fields the same units and the same emplacements, so what separates them is how they earn, build and fight, not what they can raise.

Every class can take any map. The choice is how you want to fight: lean on the economy, swing the heaviest hammer, or dig in and stretch the front line. The units and emplacements are shared, so a unit hits as hard whoever raised it; a class changes what it costs you and how long it takes.

Warlord

Strike first, strike hard.

The Warlord wins on tempo and pays for it in patience. Field an army before the dust of founding has settled, pick a neighbour, and take the gold and materials your own ground was never going to grow. You will never go hungry, so the limit on your army is what you can pay for rather than what you can feed. The longer a war lasts the worse your position gets, because a thin treasury loses a long game to a fat one.

Strengths

  • Soldiers muster faster and cost less to raise than under any rival banner.
  • You hold more fronts open at once, before spending a single point of research on it.
  • Your Marshals grind down a rival's Core faster than anyone else's can.
  • Raiders carry more home, which is how you pay for a realm that does not grow its own.
  • Your farms feed an army no rival could keep in the field.

Trade-offs

  • Your mines and quarries run thin. Every rival out-earns you, turn after turn.
  • Your masons are slow, and no amount of gold hurries them.

Industrialist

Wealth outlasts steel.

The Industrialist wins by out-earning the field and buying its way out of trouble early, because it cannot buy its way out late. Fortify before you need to, not when you need to: an attack that arrives while your emplacements are still going up is an attack that finds nothing waiting.

Strengths

  • Mines and quarries out-produce every rival's, turn after turn.
  • Your stores hold more, so you can bank toward a purchase nobody else can reach.
  • Everything you build costs less and rises sooner.
  • Each colony claims one more Holding than a rival's would, once its Surveyor's Office stands.

Trade-offs

  • Emplacements cost you more than they cost anybody.
  • And they take you longer, which is the half your treasury cannot fix.

Expansionist

Take the ground, then never give it back.

The Expansionist wins by making its ground not worth taking. Spread wider than a rival can punish, dig in behind emplacements that cost you least, and let an attacker spend three turns on a Core they expected to take in one. What you must not do is meet them in the open, where your soldiers are the worst on the map.

Strengths

  • Emplacements cost you less and go up faster than anyone else can manage.
  • Your Cores hold more Integrity, so a siege against you takes more won turns to land.
  • Once Colonisation is researched you charter one more colony than any rival at the same level.
  • Spying costs you less, so you read an army before it arrives rather than after.

Trade-offs

  • Your soldiers cost more than anyone's.
  • And train slower, so you cannot answer a raid by simply raising another army.