How the world plays
Ten cultures, four epochs, six ways to win.
Age of Light and Ruin is a persistent strategy world. You found a city, raise a culture from a hut on a hill to a continental power, and pursue one of six victory paths — economic, military, religious, technological, peaceful, or a coalition Wonder — while ten neighbors play their own. The map is alive: weather rolls daily, NPCs hunt the unprepared, and every system you ignore becomes the one that ruins you.
The arc
Four epochs from a hut on a hill to a continental power.
Every world advances on the same calendar. Your job is to make sure your culture is recognisable in each epoch — not just bigger, but doing the thing it does well.
Epoch I — Settlement
Found one city. Survive the first storm. Stake out the resource mix that defines your culture.
Site selection, food security, scout coverage, first wall.
Epoch II — City-State
A second city, the first hero, NPC pressure, the first market posts.
Roads, alliances, trade fee math, picking a charter.
Epoch III — Kingdom
Multiple cities, formations, full alliances, weather and disasters bite.
Doctrine choice, treasury management, formal diplomacy, religion branches.
Epoch IV — Empire
Capstones, patron Wonders, victory-path commits, and the end-game timers.
Hold timers, alliance escalation, Wonder construction, victory hold conditions.
Six ways to win
Pick a path early — every system tilts toward it.
Each victory has its own hold timer and earliest fire day. You don't stumble into a win; you commit, build the prerequisites, and survive the alert window the world fires when you start the timer.
Hold capitals.
Conquest
Raise a doctrine, mass formations, and force surrenders. The STR/AGI/INT triad governs unit attributes; the Strategy Builder lets you script behavioural triggers. Tunnel warfare, six-subtype naval combat, and veterancy XP turn battles into long-running campaigns.
Own the trade.
Economic
Saturate the open market and the Global Trading Platform: spot orders, futures, speculation, manipulation detection. Hit the GTP threshold and hold trade maturity through the alert window.
Convert the world.
Religious
Patron Wonders, divine manifestations, and the cumulative belief threshold across rival capitals. Three religion branches — Syncretic Cults, State Orthodoxy, Militant Cult — open up Schism, Apostasy, and mid-game state-god switching.
Reach the capstone tree.
Technological
Tier-IV research, two culture capstones per civilisation, and a sustained science differential. The Mythbound belief threshold gates the highest-tier patron Wonders.
Hold the table.
Peace
Long-running concordances, treaties, and reputation. Diplomatic Capacity (per-player + alliance-shared envoy pool), embassies, and counter-influence make this a cold war you have to actually win — and the only path that protects you while you finish it.
Coalition victory.
Wonder (alliance)
An allied coalition co-builds a World Wonder; on completion the alliance must hold it for 20 real hours under the Wonder Defense Coalition framework against sabotage and assault.
Economy
Seven resources, two markets.
Every culture works the same seven resources: Food, Timber, Stone, Metal, Gold, Luxury, Faith. What changes is which two you make cheaply and which two you'll always have to import.
FOOD
Food
Feeds population, troop upkeep, siege endurance.
TIMBER
Timber
Buildings, ships, siege engines.
STONE
Stone
Walls, wonders, infrastructure.
METAL
Metal
Weapons, armor, advanced units.
GOLD
Gold
Market trade, alliance treasury, tribute, mercenaries.
LUXURY
Luxury
Class needs, prestige, diplomatic gifts.
FAITH
Faith
Patron Wonders, divine manifestations, religious victory.
The open market
Player-to-player BUY and SELL orders. The matcher pairs them at the resting (older) order's price; the platform fee is skimmed from the seller's proceeds.
- Platform fee
- 5% of fill value, taken from seller proceeds.
- Order time-to-live
- 7 in-game days. Expired orders auto-purge before each match.
- Open-order cap
- 10 per player per world.
- Anti-self-trade cooldown
- 1 day after cancel before flipping to the opposite side on the same resource.
- Price bounds
- 1 to 1000 gold per unit.
- Culture discount
- Cultures with affinity for a resource list it 5% cheaper on the SELL side — Ironpeak metal, Cairnveil food, Sun-Dune luxury, and so on.
- Alliance trade bonus
- When buyer and seller share an alliance, the platform fee is reduced by 5%.
Futures, auctions, and the Global Trading Platform
On top of spot orders, players write forward contracts on resources to hedge or speculate. Emergency auctions fire when a city's stockpile crashes, exposing distressed sellers to opportunistic buyers. The Global Trading Platform consolidates a world-spanning order book with futures clearing, speculation, and manipulation detection — volume-spike thresholds, account-correlation rules, and a frozen-account procedure protect the market from pump-and-dump.
Alliances
Eight seats, five charters, one shared treasury.
Alliances pick a charter at founding — Trade League, War Pact, Sacred Union, Research Compact, or Grand Coalition — that biases their bonuses. Members share a treasury, lend each other gold and resources, and second troops to a Sponsored Army. Cultural Alliance escalation kicks in when allied cultures share enough belief, climate, or prestige.
- Founding cost
- 5000 gold, paid by the founder.
- Member cap
- 8 (12 for Tier-IV alliances).
- Charters
- Trade League / War Pact / Sacred Union / Research Compact / Grand Coalition.
- Trade bonus
- 5% market-fee reduction when both sides of a fill belong to the same alliance.
- Treasury
- Shared resource pool. Roles in the 7-permission matrix gate deposits, withdrawals, and spending.
- Loans
- Members borrow against the treasury under a canonical interest band, named collateral types, and a default cascade.
- Army sponsorship
- Members second troops into a Sponsored Army that any alliance member can field.
- Wonder coalition
- Co-build a World Wonder; on completion the alliance defends it for the 20-hour Wonder Defense hold.
Weather
Fourteen events. The map weather has consequences.
Each in-game day rolls weather per island from the full 14-event catalog. Severity scales with calendar season, the climate template a region sits in, and the world's collapse phase. Bad chains turn into the disaster cascade — long droughts deplete fields, repeated floods salt soil, storm belts tear coasts apart.
Clear
Baseline
No penalties. Optimal for set-piece battles, archer volleys, and long marches.
Light Rain
Precipitation
+10% march-time tax. Mild farm boost.
Heavy Rain
Precipitation
+20% march-time, -10% farm yield. Floodable terrain at risk.
Fog
Visibility
Sight range collapses. Ambush window for skirmishers and spies.
Storm
Storm
-30% march-time, -10% morale, +5% sabotage chance. Ships at sea suffer +20% damage.
Gale
Wind
Coastal landings suspended; ranged accuracy collapses; navigation dangerous.
Snow
Cold
March penalty + cold attrition unless a culture has cold tolerance.
Blizzard
Cold disaster
Severe attrition; extends siege food math; breaks logistics chains.
Heat Wave
Heat
Crop stress and morale tax in dry climates; water-tile cultures less affected.
Drought
Heat disaster
Persistent farm-yield collapse; triggers depletion if it repeats.
Flood
Water disaster
River-adjacent buildings damaged; salts soil if it cycles.
Sandstorm
Visibility + heat
Sight collapses + morale tax in deserts and sand maps.
Ash Fall
Volcanic / corruption
Crop poisoning + corruption pressure near collapse-phase regions.
Monsoon Burst
Seasonal event
Heavy precip cluster on monsoon maps; floodable terrain at acute risk.
Combat
Formations, doctrine, scripting, and the resolver.
Each army is shaped into Front Line, Left Flank, Right Flank, and Rear Guard. Different unit types weight the slots differently; the resolver applies wounds with that weighting. The STR/AGI/INT triad governs unit attributes, recruit variance distinguishes individual soldiers, and the Strategy Builder lets you script behavioural triggers across your formations.
Front Line
Heavy infantry holds here. Takes the brunt of damage; absorbs charges.
Left Flank
Skirmishers and cavalry — pressures the enemy's right.
Right Flank
Mirror of Left. Spreading damage across both flanks beats stacking.
Rear Guard
Archers and siege engines. Vulnerable if the line breaks; devastating if it holds.
The doctrine dropdown picks an army-wide stance — Aggressive / Balanced / Defensive — that biases formation weights and morale checks. Above doctrine, the Strategy Builder offers triggers ("if enemy in flank, switch to Aggressive") gated by the commanding general's INT. Training tiers (Basic / Veteran / Elite / Hero) and veterancy XP let armies improve through use; tunnel warfare and six-subtype naval combat (galley, longship, cog, dromon, fire-ship, transport) extend the same resolver into siege and sea.
Society
Five classes, fifty residentials, mobility events.
Every population is a five-class society: Peasants, Laborers, Merchants, Nobles, Priests. Each class needs a tier-specific mix of resources, goods, and buildings. Fifty culture-flavored residential buildings — five per culture — house the population. Mobility events move citizens between classes (training and wealth promote, bankruptcy and dishonor demote) and the News Feed surfaces them as world events you can react to.
Diplomacy
Capacity, embassies, religion as politics.
Diplomatic Capacity is a per-player + alliance-shared envoy pool. You spend it on stationed envoys, contracts, concordances, and peace treaties. Counter-influence and envoy immunity make sabotage and protection real mechanics. On top of that, three religion branches become first-class political actors: Schism splits a faith, Apostasy lets a player switch state god mid-game with Faith-debt consequences, and diplomatic actions cross-pollinate with religious ones.
NPCs
Three tiers of pressure. The map is never empty.
Bandits, beasts, and corrupted creatures share the world with players. They scale with weather and pressure, and they will hunt your scout-blind borders. At the high end, five named titans rewrite regions when they wake.
Bandits & merchants
Bandit camps grow under storm + night; raid loot funds your early treasury — or theirs. Merchant caravans run roads between your cities and the open map; escort them or watch your luxury imports walk off.
Tier-1 beasts
Lairs near rough terrain. Patrol coverage suppresses spawning; a bandit-quiet border becomes a beast-loud one.
Tier-2 corrupted creatures
Four corrupted variants emerge from depleted regions and corrupted Sacred Sites. Reclaiming the ground means clearing them first.
Tier-3 titans
Five named titans — Leviathan, Drake, Titan Bone, Venom Sac, Spirit Coral, Blight Heart — with state bands (Calm / Agitated / Rampage), bespoke combat phases, and drop tables. Killing one is an event; failing one rewrites a region.
Tempo
How real time maps to the game world.
One in-game day passes every two real minutes by default. Most cooldowns and TTLs are quoted in in-game days — the market, alliance, and tech systems all read the same clock. Victory hold timers are quoted in real hours so they're robust against tick-rate changes.
- Tick rate
- ~120 real seconds per in-game day.
- Market order TTL
- 7 in-game days.
- Alliance leave cooldown
- 1 in-game day.
- Anti-self-trade cooldown
- 1 in-game day.
- Weather event minimum
- 4 hours; varies by event.
- Wonder hold timer
- 20 real hours.
Ready to play?
Join the waitlist or read the per-culture dossiers to pick a starting realm.