Expansion of the Empire | Cities AoW III Guide
Last update: 11 May 2016
Founding of a city
Since cities offer a lot of opportunities, both when it comes to buildings and recruiting of units, they are the driving unit of your Empire. Without the appropriate amount of gold, you cannot wage a war and it is cities that ensure you with the ability to manufacture new units and generate the necessary resources, mainly gold. While starting the game, you should remember that you need to found the city in such a place, where you will have access to abundant deposits of resources, which will ensure you with the ability to develop. The faster your city is expanding, the better for you, because the time necessary to erect buildings and to manufacture units will be shorter. Remember not to build cities side-by-side, because they expand with time and the fact that they are adjacent to each other slows down their growth.
To found a city, you need the Settler unit, which you may have from the very beginning of the game, or manufacture in another city, after you build the Builder's Hall. Remember to found cities in resource-rich areas and that these bonuses start being calculated only after you have cleared the area of the enemy units. Restoration of the cities that were destroyed earlier, results in regaining 50% of the original population and of some of the upgrades that were erected.
The status of the city depends on the population. With each successive level, the limits of the city grow. These are the possibilities:
Outpost: 100
Village: 3000
Town: 6000
City: 10000
Metropolis: 18000
Options available after a city is captured
Of course, founding a city is not the only way to expand your influences. One of the ways is seizing a city, by force, from another player. After the successful attack, you can do several things with the city. These are:
Absorb: the city is joined to your Empire. This process takes a specific number of turns, which depends on the differences between your alignment and that city's. This is considered an act of good will, for which you are rewarded with 100 points of alignment.
Plunder: the city gets plundered and you receive a specific amount of gold and mana. After several rounds have passed, the city is razed to the ground. This is considered an act of ill will, (200 points).
Raze: the city is razed to the ground, along with all of its amenities. Takes shorter than plundering and is also considered an act of ill will.
Migrate: alters the city type (e.g. from Goblin to Humans) and is also considered an act of ill will (100 pts.). The number of turns necessary to migrate depends on how far away the closest city of the migrating race is. You can change the population only to the type that you already have in your Empire.
Production
each city generates a specific amount of gold, mana production points, research points and population per turn. Production of a given city can be looked up by rolling the mouse over the resource in question, thanks to which you will learn what influences the generation of that resource. What influences its increase is the size of the city and the areas that it encompasses. An extra bonus is also the contentment of the citizens. The production of each of the resources can be increased by means of erecting appropriate buildings. Additionally, to increase the income of a given resource by 50%, you can switch the city into the mode, in which it will generate only what you have chosen for it to generate.
And so, the city can:
Increase gold income
Increase population
Increase the number of research points (after the Laboratory is built)
Generate mana (after the Shrine is built)
Speeding up of production
For appropriate payment in gold, and at the cost of temporary decrease in contentment, there ids a possibility to speed up production of a building or a unit. The result is that the recruitment, or building, will be finished in the following turn. The cost of this enterprise is 50 gold pieces per each turn by which the production is speeded up.
Forging of items
After you have built the Arcane Item Forge in the city, you gain access to item forging. You can select the attributes and attributes that you want the item to have but, the number of these is limited. After you have selected the upgrades that you are interested in, you will learn about the cost and the number of turns that this is going to take. Then, it will appear in the center of the city, in the form of a pouch, which the leader will be able to pick up.
Fortresses and watchtowers
Another way to expand your domain is to build fortresses. Fortresses can generate gold, mana and research points income, if you have placed corresponding structures on their premises. Additionally, fortresses can be upgraded from wooden to stone, which increases their range and durability. Fortresses are excellent for defense, where you are expecting an attack (e.g. narrow passages between mountains). Watchtowers, on the other hand, increase your range of vision, and do not require any unit to be stationed near it. The watchtower belongs to the person that was the last one to visit it. It can also be built with builder units (e.g. Orc Builder).