CASTLES

Castles are the source of power and place of refuge for your hero. Within castles lie many different structures that you can build to aid you on your quest: mage guilds, mines, mills, magic producing nodes, moats, turrets, city halls, and, perhaps most importantly, troop-generating buildings.

Castles must be won in battle from one of your enemies or from neutral players. Once you have conquered a Castle, you can begin upgrading the various buildings and recruiting additional Heroes from its tavern, provided you don’t already have four Heroes serving your kingdom.

There are three sizes of castles, depending on the ability to build income-generating structures. Large castles have the ability to build a City Hall, which increases revenue from the base of 500 to 2,000. Medium castles have to ability to build a Town hall, which increase revenues from 500 to 1,000. Small castles only generate 500 and have no option of upgrading. Large and Medium can build all creature dwellings, while Small can construct only 5 levels of units.

Though all castles have Mage Guilds up to level 3, Large castles often (though not always) contain level 5 guilds. Similarly, though all castles have some sort of resource mine, the type and number of these mines dependent on castle class.

Structures that generate creatures are specific to the class of castles and comprise six levels of increasingly powerful creatures. Typically only Large castles (and occasionally Medium) contain the highest level of creature.

Inside the Castle

When you enter any castle, you will see a standard screen that includes the castle name and menu of structures that you can build within your castle: creature generating buildings, resource generating buildings, mage guilds, and castle protection structures.

The icons on the bottom of the screen, from left to right:

  1. Town selector to switch to other controlled castles

  2. Main screen to build new structures.

  3. Creature recruiting and management screen.

  4. Mage guild screen to view spells.

  5. Marketplace to trade resources.

  6. Tavern to recruit new Heroes.

  7. Exit the castle

If you have more castles you can change them using the arrows from the upper part of the screen

Building and Upgrading Structures

All structures require at least a fixed amount of gold to build or upgrade; most require additional resources, such as ore and wood, to build. Thus, it is necessary for the player to carefully manage resources so that he can build the proper structures to ensure success for his Heroes.

When highlighted, each structure gives a brief description and the benefit it may provide for the Heroes and troops. There is another note for any requirements (e.g., you must build Mage guild 1 before you build Mage guild 2) that must be completed. Finally, there are the required resources necessary for building.

Each of these specific buildings will either be written in yellow font followed by a check mark (you have already built the structure), green font (you can build the structure right now), orange font (all the pre-requisites have been met, but you lack the resources to build the structure), or red font (you have not met the prerequisites to build the structure).

When you are ready to build a structure, simply click the “Build” button. Note that you can only build one structure per castle per turn. If you choose to build a troopgenerating structure, those troops will be available for hire immediately – you need not wait until the next turn.

Troop Recruiting and Management

The Troop Recruiting and Management screen shows troops available for hire and, if

Castles will only display those troops whose creature-generating structures have been built. For each creature type, you will see the number available for hire, the growth rate (how many are spawned each week), and the resource cost for each creature. If you wish to hire any troops, simply click on the creature type and select the number you wish to hire. Those creatures will be placed in the squares adjacent to the town icon. If you wish to add the troops to your Hero’s inventory, you must drag the troops into a square adjacent to the Hero icon. Any troops that are hired but not transferred to a Hero’s inventory will stay and defend the castle against invasion.

Mage Guild

As you upgrade your Mage Guild, new spells become available for your Heroes to learn. With each level, a decreasing number of spells become available, as shown in the Mage Guild Review screen.

Knights and Barbarians have a maximum of level 3 Mage Guild, the others have access to all the 5 mage guild levels

Level 1 contains five random spells when built, Level 2 contains four, and so on. Though there are five levels of mage guilds, not all castles will have all levels available for building. Clicking on any of the spell icons will give a brief description of that spell’s properties and effects.

Marketplace

This is simply a place that allows you to trade one type of resource for another. When you select one of your Kingdom Resources, the exchange rate for “Available for Trade” resources is shown, as well as a slider-bar to initiate the trade. As you build more Marketplaces, your Kingdom-wide exchange rates increase.

Tavern

In each Castle there is a Tavern that contains Heroes available for hire. If all four Heroes of a Castle’s class are already employed, that Castle will not have any Heroes for hire. Similarly, if a Hero has already been recruited from a Castle in a given week, no other Heroes will be available for hire from that Castle until the following week.

There are 6 heroes per faction, and the limit is 4 hired heroes.