Getting Started

Getting Started

Town Hall:

When you begin a new game you will be introduced to the Town Hall. This is where you can train villagers, an essential task for progressing in Social Empires.

Villagers:

Villagers cost 50 Food. They are primarily useful for collecting supplies and resources, which extends to manning certain buildings to increase their productivity. They are next-to-useless in combat and should be kept out of harm's way wherever possible. Click on the Train button and a new villager will be produced in seconds.

Collecting Resources:

With a Villager trained, you can begin collecting resources.

Below are the resources that you can use villagers to bring in. These include food, wood, gold and stone. Training villagers to collect these resources is essential to compete successfully at Social Empires. Most resources can either be found by exploring the map, or are produced in buildings that you construct as part of your empire.

Food

As soon as you start the game, you will need to begin collecting food. Train some more villagers and construct some farms. To build one, click the Build menu and select 'Farm Land'. Farms cost 60 Wood to construct. With that all done, you can select a villager and click on the farm to set them to work on the land.

You need to keep an eye on the farmland and collect food once it has been produced. This allows the villager to continue working the land without interruption.

Wood

The second resource to begin collecting is wood. Again, after you have a few villagers working on farms, train some up to start chopping the trees that surround your initial village. They will automatically move on from one tree once it has been cut down and start work on the next-closest in that particular group - make sure you send a villager to a group of trees because if you just send them to one, they will chop that down and just stand there waiting for you to give them another intstruction. If the first tree is in a group, they will keep going until the whole set of trees has been chopped down. In their wake will be left piles of wood. Click on it to add it to your stockpile.

Once you progress through the game, Wood becomes less valuable. It is only really essential for building houses, and sending out your villagers to chop down the trees (which grow back after a while) should be enough to keep you going. You can also use Lumber Mills and the Market to trade for Wood if you absolutely have to get some quickly.

Stone and Gold

Stone and gold are less important than food and wood when starting a game, but you should still send a couple of villagers to the supplies that will be littered around your village. Gold is vital as you progress for building some of the higher-status structures that will set your empire apart from newer players.

As well as thinking of the best ways to harvest resources, you also need to be frugal with your usage of the materials collected. For example, with Stone, it is easy to waste all of this on building walls. However, wooden walls work fine and it is best to use your stone to build towers as these are far more effective at deterring enemies than walls. Obviously it is good to funnel enemies to bottlenecks that are easier to defend using walls, but towers can actually deal damage, so are the best solution in a general defensive sense.

Gold is generally much more scarce than Stone, considering how much you use it. While the supplies on your starting map will regenerate, this takes a lot of time. To really get new deposits of Gold, you will need to leave your cosy starting position. Buy a boat when available at Level 7 to explore new islands. Each island will earn you heaps of Gold once you complete it. You can also attack other empires to get Gold, though there are obviously risks involved with this.

If you have a glut of one particular resource, you don't necessarily need to divert villagers away from getting that. Instead, use the Market to sell the resource in exchange for Gold. You can then either use the Gold to improve your empire, or purchase resources that you are low on with it.