Construction

Constructing buildings in your castle and upgrading them to their maximum potential is paramount to winning the game. The buildings themselves have various prerequisites and needs. But overall, if you look at how these buildings are set up, patterns will emerge that I will be covering in my advanced strategy posts.

In the meantime, simply familiarize yourself with the construction screen.

The Construction HUD

Whenever you are inside your castle, you can access the construction window by clicking on the little hammer icon. When you do so, you'll be shown the Wheel of Quarters, the building level buttons, and a grid showing what combination of buildings you are currently looking at and icons representing buildings that can be built and some which cannot.

There are also other buttons here for sorting the list. For instance, one of the buttons will remove all of the buildings that are not available at the moment. I'll leave it to you to experiment with the buttons to figure out what they do.

The Queue

You are only permitted to build one building per turn.

However, you can set up the next four turns worth of buildings by clicking on the queue icons above each building to add them to the queue.

The Wheel of Quarters

In the bottom left-hand corner of the construction HUD, you'll see a wheel of buttons that allows you to access various types of building. They are as follows:

• Military (generate units)
• Craftsmen (generate equipment)
• Magic (generate knowledge)
• Temples (reduce hero costs; add courage)
• Entertainment (improves mood of populace)
• Trade (generates tax revenue)

As you click on each section, you'll see buildings pop up that are either immediately available or have some prerequisite that you haven't accomplished yet. Most buildings require other buildings to be built in advance. So you'll have to plan ahead a little to maximize your efficiency.

Shard Specificity

Each shard has a different set of resources than it's neighbors. Each building in your construction window requires certain resources to complete. As a result, you may not have full reign over every building in your castle build until you conquer enough shards to supply all the resources you need to plop the structure you want.

Building Levels

Most buildings begin at level one and then climb as you upgrade them -- granting you bonuses to their properties and produced units. Of course, upgraded buildings also require more gold to maintain, so you'll have to balance how quickly you construct with how quickly you expand your reach.

The level one buildings are in the screen designated with the "I" button. The buttons labeled "II", "III", and "IV" will grant you access to higher level options for only those buildings currently constructed.

Limits

Some buildings have a limit on the number you can produce. As a result, there are certain units that will never be on the battlefield at the same time because both unit production buildings are level four and there is only one available slot -- so you must choose between them.

Some buildings require an alliance with a race that can produce the building in order for it to function. Since only one alliance can be formed at a time, it's important to plan for that.