New player · Map tab
World map and scouting
Your city, the regions your story opens one chapter at a time, and the fog that hides everything else.
Updated ·patch v2.0.5
What this is, and what to do first
The Map tab is where your city lives and where new regions appear as your story advances. It stays in look-only mode until you have completed 5 quests, so finish those first. Then tap your home region’s capital hex to open your city and start building.
Your city
Do this: tap the capital hex of your home region (where your HQ stands). It opens your city with the tabs Overview, Districts, NPCs, Explore, Economy and Saga. New buildings go in through Districts. Your home region comes from your champion’s profession. For what to build first, see Set up your base.
What unlocks when
Quest counts are completed quests of any kind, counted over your whole save.
Before 5 completed quests
Peek mode. You can pan and zoom the map, but tapping a hex, including your own city, only shows how many quests are left.
5 completed quests
The map unlocks. Hexes open when tapped, the Locations list opens, and Sage Alaric gives a short map tour the first time.
10 completed quests and faction level 8
Scouting the open wilderness near your regions, the first step toward founding a frontier city. You need both: below 10 quests a wilderness tap tells you how many are left, below level 8 it tells you the level you need.
Story reaches Chapter 4
The Powers, Holdings and Economy tabs appear next to Map. The game announces them when you clear Chapter 3.
Faction level here is your faction’s reputation level. Scouting a wilderness hex costs 500 gold and 20 food and takes about an hour.
How regions unlock
What this means for you: new regions come from your story, not from grinding. Regions unlock in a fixed order that starts with your home region: region 1 is home, and region n unlocks the moment your story reaches Chapter n. After home the order is Forest, Plains, Mountains, Swamp, Desert, Coast and onward, skipping your home. So your second region arrives when you clear Chapter 1 and your story enters Chapter 2. There is no reputation requirement.
The map’s first-time hint says to complete quests in a region to unlock its neighbours. In practice, it is the story chapter that unlocks them. Quests elsewhere can reveal a region early (see below), but not unlock it.
An unlocked region still needs an Outpost on its capital hex before you can explore it or build there. The cost depends on the region, for example free for Forest, 500 gold for Plains, 1,000 for Mountains and 2,000 for Swamp.
Fog of war
Regions you have not found are drawn as grey silhouettes captioned ???. A road between two regions is only drawn once both ends have at least been peeked, so the road network cannot give away where the next region is. Your own frontier cities are never fogged.
| State | On the map | What you can do |
|---|---|---|
| Undiscovered | A fogged silhouette captioned ???. Roads to it are not drawn. | You know nothing about it yet. |
| Discovered (peeked) | Named and visible. | You can look, but tapping it says Complete Chapter n to claim this region. You cannot settle it yet. |
| Unlocked | Named, open to quests. | Your story has reached its chapter. Build an Outpost at its capital hex to settle it and open exploration there. |
| Settled | Has your HQ or an Outpost. | Fully yours: buildings, districts, location activities. |
Ways a region gets peeked before its chapter: exploring a location near the edge of a region (at least two hexes from its capital) has a 10% chance to reveal the next region in your order, and Cartographer skills on a quest party can reveal a neighbouring region. Peeking gives you a look and a discovery reward, not the region itself.
Locations and danger
Do this: once the map is unlocked, open the Locations button (top right of the map) to see every location in your regions as a list you can filter by activity and threat. Each location takes timed activities from your members: Explore (can discover the location next to it), Battle, Gather, Defend and Hunt.
Locations build up danger over time. At 50 the game warns you; at 76 the location is Overrun: gathering there stops and building production in the region drops. Battle and Defend push danger down, and Defend does the most (-20).
Later on the map
- Trade routes (Chapter 2). When your story reaches Chapter 2, a short comic introduces trade routes: caravans with a guard and crew that return gold, resources and trade tokens.
- Powers, Holdings, Economy (Chapter 4). Powers tracks rival factions and your regional influence, Holdings shows what you own region by region, and Economy shows each region’s resource yields. Until then the map has no tab strip at all, only Map and the Locations button.
Where to go next
Gates on this page are the shipped 2.0.7 defaults. The chapter 4 map panels sit behind a remote-configured gate, so a live build can move them.