Forge of Empires Interface Guide

Forge of Empires Interface Guide by Samulis

Table of Contents
The General Interface
Moving and Selecting
Building
Editing
Production and Management

The General Interface

When you first log in, you enter into your city. The image above shows a somewhat developed city in the early Bronze Age (mine!). From this interface, you will be able to command the economic and militaristic path of your nation, order your peasants to work, and even add a flair of creative customization with regards to the layout of your great city. So, let’s begin, shall we? First off, look in the top right-hand corner of the screen.

Here you can see your Primary Resources– Gold and Supplies. These two each are used in the creation of structures and units. Gold is produced in Houses (which also provide population) whereas supplies are produced on-demand in workshops (Hunter’s, Potter’s, etc.), but I’ll get into that later. In addition, you can see how many Diamonds (premium credits) you have, as well as a button for logging out and returning to the BETA main page. Now turn your focus to the center-top of the screen.

This area displays your Age (Stone, Bronze, Iron, etc.), as well as your Forge Points, which are used to research technology. You may have a maximum of 10 forge points and you gain one every hour. Alternately, they may be purchased with gold (the price rises with each point purchased, so only do this if necessary) or diamonds. At the top right-hand side of the screen, you can find this selection.

The first part will read the name of your village. You can use this to go to your town hall and change the name if you want. In addition, it will show your free population (rolling over this will display information on the disposition of your employed population) and the contentedness of your people (rolling over this will display the current unhappiness {caused by certain structures} and happiness {caused by culture buildings such as trees and monuments}). You should keep a careful eye on your happiness- when it is high, your production will speed up, when it is low, it will slow down. Last but certainly NOT least is the main toolbar in the bottom left.

The main toolbar has a tool palate component (left) and the player rankings by economic power (right). The player rankings (called the “Social Bar“) can be used to visit or attack the cities of the top 80 players. Under the tool palate, are (left to right) Build, Edit, Research, Map, Army Management, Inventory, blank (perhaps reserved for buying diamonds or other networking/game features), and Forum menus/links. The first one you will probably have to deal with is the build menu, which you will learn about later.

Moving and Selecting
As this is a flash-based game, right-clicking is not possible (although it does open up a nice menu for links to the blog and such). Everything is done with the left mouse button. To navigate the map (both your city and the world map), click on a blank part of the map, hold, and drag, then release. Navigating through interfaces is done with single clicks. Most interfaces have ‘X’ buttons.

Building
Take note of the building menu in the main toolbar palate area.

Here you will lay down the foundations of your empire through building structures in your city. These include housing, production (make Supplies), manufacturing (making refined goods from raw goods/resources), culture buildings, cultural embellishments, training buildings, and roads. Your city will need roads to connect all of its parts back to the town hall. Without this connection, the building will not be built or produce resources until it is connected. Connections do not work on a diagonal, the road must touch a side of the structure. The only exception to this is cultural embellishments, which do not need to be connected to your capital.

In the above interface, you can look through all of the buildings possible (hover over the button of each structure to see their stats) and order one to be built, such as in the image below, by clicking on a spot on the map (the game will show an overlay of where the building will be, and the tiles it will occupy with be green or red depending on whether or not it may be built there).

Note that you cannot build outside of the territory you have for the city (grayed out area when placing a structure). You can obtain more territory through conquering certain provinces with an “Expansion” as an award or researching a technology giving such as an award.

You can always opt to cancel a building placement by pressing the button in the top center.

Once a structure is placed, scaffolding will appear and you can check on its progress by moving the mouse over it. Various structures take various amounts of time to complete. A structure must be connected by roads to your town center for it to begin construction. Construction will halt if connection ceases.

Editing
The editing menu has only four buttons, and they are quite straightforward.

The first button is for selling a structure. To sell a structure, press this button, and then click on the structure you wish to sell. A confirmation window will come up asking for you to confirm the sale and informing you of the resources that will be salvaged. You normally do not gain many resources.

The next option is to move a structure. You can move a structure to any area where there is enough room for it. Note that if you move a connected structure to a spot where it is no longer connected, it will not produce resources/gold.

The next option appears to be able to “pack” a building into your inventory, although this is neither confirmed or suggested except by the shape of the button.

Finally, the cancel button closes the editing menu.

Production and Management
If you click on your town hall, you will be able to see an overview of your city’s resources, your profile, and recent attacks on your city.

Here you can pick an image for your profile, edit your profile text (plain text only, I believe), and change your city name. The other two tabs hold information on recent attacks and a table displaying the refined goods in your city. Refined goods are made from raw goods, and like supplies and gold, are produced in their own buildings (“goods buildings”). Certain provinces contain raw goods that you can refine at a rapid rate to refined goods. However, you can produce goods at a very slow rate even if you do not have a province containing that raw resource.