Everybody Wants To Rule The World: The Beginner's Guide

A beginner's guide to Feudums, to help you find your footing.

Tools of the Trade: Interface Navigation

Alt. Title: Get'cha Head In The Game!

Welcome to feudums!

This guide will start you on your path to greatness, but before we can talk of grand aspirations we need to understand the basics. Feudums is in very active development, and aspects of this UI may change over time. I'll try my best to ensure this part of the guide is kept up to date with any major changes.

Let's start as simply as we can.
Upon launching the game you'll be greeted by the main menu. Upon finishing your house creation (which I won't cover in detail at this time) you'll be left with the great hall, and your royal personage. To start a game from here you'll need to navigate to the Worlds button in the top left.


From there you will be given a list of worlds currently running. Be sure to pay close attention to the population of the world, if a given world is full, you won't be able to join. The nature of running a living demo so far before an official release like this is that the number of worlds is rather limited but the good news is that if you reach out on the official discord[discord.gg] it's very easy to get notified when a new world launches.




So now that you've found a world you can join and hovered over the various details to understand what they mean, click on it and hit join in the top left corner.




You will now be face to face with a new screen where you can design your monarch. Feel free to ponder what to name your starting feudum/settlement, change its visual style, and edit your coat of arms for this specific game.




Once you've customised to your liking, hit The Throne Awaits to start your game.

Congratulations! You're now the proud owner of a small collection of huts in the middle of nowhere.
So how do you go from that to God-Emperor Of All You Survey?


Interfaces. While hovering over things to see tooltips is very helpful, at this stage in the game the interface can be tricky to navigate without prior experience with grand strategy games. So lets go over it all together, shall we?

Click on your settlement.
At the center bottom of your screen, you'll find the following bar:


This is your new best friend, it contains buttons that represent the four scopes of the game.
From left to right:
1. Military Scope (Only selectable on a tile with troops as denoted by a banner with a number on the tile)
2. Feudum Scope (Shows details related to the feudum the tile is a part of if any)
[bar that shows selected tile's coordinates here]
3. Tile Scope (Tells you specifically about just that selected tile)
4. Dominion Scope

We'll go over each scope in greater detail in a little bit.


Here we see your resource stockpiles, and to the right of that the seasonal tick tracker.
Stockpiles are pretty self explanatory, hover over them for more details on where the numbers are coming from. The seasonal tick tracker lets you know where in the year you are, which should inform a lot of what you do and plan to do.


On your left you'll see your crest, vassalage (not implemented), feudums overview, military overview, and your virtue (A valuable resource we'll cover later)


Finally you'll have your counter at the center of the top of your screen, it's just a useful tool for seeing how long until the next tick.

Now, let's get to the good stuff in the next section!

Look Upon My Works Ye Mortals: Construction and Economics

So, you kinda get the interface now, but how do you do things?

Welcome to construction and economics!
So you've got your lovely little patch of land, go ahead and click on a tile you'd like to build on within it. You want to see the feudums tab open on the right hand side of your screen, then click the highlighted button to open the construct improvements screen:


In this case we're going to upgrade our starting settlement. It automatically chooses the next tier up, but you could use the scroll bar to the right of "Upgrade to: Village" to see what else you could upgrade to if you wanted to skip a tier or something.

It's worth noting this screen will also show you the upkeep and cost of the new upgrade. The basic cost numbers just above the confirm button. This is the price just to start the upgrade. The smaller numbers on the improvement tile card itself are its cumulative upkeep and inherent virtue production, if any. Try to keep that in mind when improving or you may find yourself with an unexpected shortage.

So we hit confirm on our upgrade.


Your production queue now looks like this. All done, right? Wrong.
That glaring icon in the top left tells you that you haven't confirmed the actions with the game server.
To do this you'll click the dove in the bottom right, which will send your orders out. Helpfully the dove will also prompt you to confirm orders if you've got some outstanding.


After you confirm your queue will look normal again.


Keep in mind, your queue is limited by the size of your manor, a feudum's capital. It can be a castle, a settlement or a church, and can be set to another tile by a button in the same array as we set construction (but only if you've selected your manor).

The Invisible Hand

So, you've built your town, maybe made a farm. How do you manage your deficit? The Market!
Clicking on one of these resource tallys will open the market screen.


In the market screen we can see the resources that can be traded.


Demand: The amount you can sell at one time.
Market fees: taxes applied to selling
Sell Price: Current sell price (Fluctuates)
Buy Price: Current buy price (Fluctuates)
Market fees: taxes applied to buying
Supply: The amount you can buy at one time.
The bottom rows let you know the minimum and maximum prices of resources for buying and selling.

You can also set rules for the buying and selling of resources automatically, just click the button in the top right. You'll then see the auto-trade screen. In the top left you'll note the buying and selling toggle, so set the rules accordingly.

Be sure to double check all your rules on occasion to make certain they remain relevant.

Buildings and Terrain

So lets talk strategy:
Each type of terrain has its own inherent resources and costs. I won't give you exact numbers as they're likely to change over time. Instead I'll just give you the broad strokes highlights. Here are the pros and cons of various tiles when unimproved.

Grassland: Generic best land tile for natural food production.
Woods: Best source of wood, you can also set production to make virtue instead.
Hills: A good source of stone, can build mines and quarries on it.
Plains: Grassland but trading a little natural food production for a little stone production
Mountains: Impassable tiles that produces iron and stone without any improvements. Can only build mines and quarries on it.
Wetlands: Produces wood and gold, costs virtue.
Desert: Produces stone and gold, can build mines and quarries on it. Costs food.
Lakes: Produces food year round.
Ocean: Produces lower amounts of food, but also makes gold.

And now for a building line overview:
Fortifications: Produces advanced military units. Minor virtue production. Minor Housing.
Villages: Major housing, moderate virtue production, produces gold via taxes. Keep a close eye on public health and morale if you're trying to grow them.
Churches: Major virtue production. Minor housing.
Farms: Major food production, but only seasonally. Better than coastal for overall food production but more vulnerable to disruption by raiding.
Quarry: Major stone production. Only supported on specific tiles.
Mines: Major iron production. Only supported on specific tiles.

Hopefully this gives you a better idea of the various places you'll settle and what you should hope to build there.

On the Care and Tending of Settlements

While you now know the general value of buildings and terrain features, there's a worker assignment screen you can use to customize where your worker are assigned each season. I'm not overly confident with this feature and it's an advanced feature, so I encourage you to explore it yourself and consult other guides if you're trying to learn the ropes of the system.

Carry A Big Stick: Military Matters

Now for the military. It's far from a complete feature, but here's a brief.

Military units come in two types: professional troops and levies.
Professional troops are more expensive for both upkeep and recruitment, but don't cost you population from your settlements, they'll remain for as long as you can pay their upkeep.

Levies are taken from your population, reducing the number of workers you have. They last a set period of time, then disperse, returning workers to your settlements. If you lose them in combat, the population is lost.

High level units require high level buildings to recruit them. Check them out on the recruitment screen to plan accordingly.


Military units can be set to various stances, each will give them a different movement speed, combat effectiveness, and zone of control (the distance from them at which they will attack hostiles.) Hover over stances for the tooltips

Raiding with troops (setting them to a raiding stance and putting them inside will get you resources proportional to the development of the feudum you raid. Note that whatever tile your men are standing on in the feudum won't produce anything. Don't stand on a resource you want! That said you can use that very same quirk of raiding to deny enemy feudums food production and start a shortage that spirals the feudum.

Closing

You've now got a basic overview of the fundamentals of Feudums, I encourage you to explore with the tool tips, drop by the feudums discord, and throw the game on your wishlist so you can keep an eye on it as develops.

This guide will be updated as major features ship, so keep an eye out.
Have a good reign!

Cheers,
Anvil

[Aggamemnon]

Great Guide. Game constantly being updated using feedback from the community