The Stratagems Rookie Guide

Hi! I’m Leanthil, the player with the highest reputation on server one (but it doesn’t mean that I am the best
player). In this walkthrough I try to teach new (or maybe old) players how to play with the best game on the net
and I try to give you useful advices.– ROOKIE PROTECTION & HOW TO MAKE THE MOST OF IT
When you start the game you get a city somewhere on the map. The coordinates are picked randomly but you can choose the continent you want to start on. If you know someone who already has an account try to pick the continent where he already is, it can be useful later. For one week you are under rookie protection that means you cannot attack other players and nobody can attack you, too. Use this time to build up your city and defenses and build up an army for attacking or defending yourself. If you want you can end this protection earlier: when you want to attack someone the system will offer you to end the protection. In some cases this can be useful to get extra resources and advantage while other players still under the protection (of course you can only attack other players who aren’t under that). I suggest you to do this only on a new server. Be careful because after this step you are on
your own!
So you have one week while you have to maximize your advantage. I strongly suggest you to prefer production
facilities rather than military buildings. Build as many resource plants as you can (use up your construction
mobilization), but of course you have to build city hall, civilian houses and wall too. In the first few days build
mainly these and if you have enough resources you can build other buildings. Have a military institute then a staff
headquarters and purchase an officer with high politics attribute. Appoint it to mayor so your resource production
rate gets higher. Build a research center and start researching production techniques and military techniques like
armor, ballistics and firepower. On the 5th to 7th days start to build your army but don’t waste resources to coty
defences. Of course you can do this other ways, there isn’t a best method. For example you can build army sooner
and plunder or seize resource fields. Always try to calculate the benefits and do what seems to be the best.

– PRODUCTION BASICS
In this game there are four basic resources (food, steel, oil and rare metal) and two others (gold and idle
workers). You will need them for everything, to crate buildings, units, city defenses, to research technologies and
so on. After that you need food to upkeep your units and oil to move them on the map.
Production fields can be built under the ‘Production zone’ tab. The higher level of City Hall you have the more
slots you can use for that. On every level of a field its output is higher and can store more resources of its own.
Every field can be upgraded freely to level 9, then you have to get a Master architecture’s blueprints to upgrade
it to level 10, after that you can go forward again till level 12. You can adjust production rate if you click on
the gear icon under the name on your city on the right side of the screen (default is 90%). In your first city or
first few cities you have to build all four resource factories but later in the game you must build cities with
almost only farms or others with almost only oil fields. You will ‘feel’ when the time had come.

– CONSTRUCTION BASIC
You can build a new building by clicking on a free slot in your military or production zone. Now you get a list of
the buildable buildings. If you hoover over the green CONSTRUCT tab of a building you will see how many resources
it costs and what other advantages have to be done to build that. If it isn’t green then you will see what is the
problem (with red letters) you have to solve first. Many of the buildings have pre-requisitons like already
constructed other buildings. For example you can construct level 3 civilian house only if you already have a level
2 city hall. The production buildings are detailed above but the other buildings (military sector) do other things.
I won’t detail them all now because you will learn to use them soon, but I show you some examples.
Civilian houses give you the population (see below) for the work and for other things, in the army plants you can
build your units, the heavy manufacturing plant, light manufacturing plant, airport (and in coastal cities the
naval academy) are needed to build better units and trade centers are for moving resources between players.
If you use up all of the building fields and you want to change something, you can downgrade buildings too. This
will be useful later in the game when you need one of the resources more than an other. If a building is downgraded
after level 1 it will vanish and you can use its place for another building.

– POPULATION AND LABOR
As mentioned above there are two other resurces above the four basic, the gold and the (idle) population. All two
can be gathered by building civilian houses. For running the resource buildings you need workers. Click on an
already constructed building, hoover over it’s picture and you will see how many. If you don’t have enough workers
the production buildings will produce less resources (click on the gear icon to adjust the output if you want
different quantity per hour). The idle workers produce the gold too, that is needed for researching, recruiting
officers, rebuilding your destroyed units and for other things, AND you need idle workers for building units too.
Click on the TRAINING tab or one of your army plants, hoover over a unit’s picture and you will see how many for
one piece of that unit. So build many civilian houses but be careful because the places aren’t endless.
Don’t panic if you use up all your idle workers because you get them back after a while (except the working ones).
If you want to change the maximum of your idle workers you can adjust the tax rate. If you lower the taxes you will
get less gold but the population and the morale of your city will grow and if you increase the taxes it’s opposite
will happen. If you are afraid of an incoming attack, don’t use high tax rates because your city will be taken
sooner because the low morale!

– REPUTATION AND RANKING UP
When you construct buildings, win battles and by missons you get reputation points, but you can loose them too when you loose battles. When you get enough (and with some other things) you can rank up by missions. When your rank and position gets higher you can establis or occupy more cities, and that’s when the REAL GAME starts. By clicking on the RANKING icon you can see your position.