Troops & points

The two resources, where they come from, and the mistake almost everyone makes with them.

Troops are what you attack with and they grow back on their own. Points are what you build with and they only come from land. Both scale with how much you hold — which is why standing still is the worst thing you can do.

Troops

Your army grows every tick without you doing anything. How fast depends on three things: how much land you hold, your doctrine, and how many FOBs you have built.

Growth stops at your troop cap. This is the part people miss: once you are sitting at the cap, all your growth is thrown away. Every second at the limit is wasted income. Two ways out — spend the troops, or raise the cap with a City.

  • FOB — raises how fast troops come in.
  • City — raises the ceiling they come in up to.
  • Engineers doctrine — raises growth by a flat multiplier, see Doctrines.

They belong together. FOBs without cities fill a bucket that is already full; cities without FOBs make a bigger bucket that fills just as slowly.

Points

Points are the build currency. They come in from your territory, and you can raise the rate with Industry or by running trade routes between harbours (see Air, sea & missiles).

Points do nothing while they sit there. There is no interest, no bonus for hoarding — a pile of unspent points is a building you could have had ten minutes ago.

Why prices go up

Every building gets more expensive the more of that type you already own. The first FOB is cheap, the tenth is not. This is deliberate: it stops one runaway player from simply buying the map, and it means spreading across several building types is usually better than stacking one.

Bunkers and artillery have a second surcharge on top. Putting one inside the radius of another of the same type multiplies its price by × for each one already there, up to of them. The effect stops improving at in the same spot, and so does the price — a fifth one in the same place is pure waste. Building them side by side rather than on top of each other stays cheap.

Prices depend on the map

This trips up every table you will ever read about this game, including the one in Buildings. Absolute prices scale with map size. On the reference-size map a building costs its base price; on the full world map everything costs about × that.

Your income scales too, so it evens out — but it means a number like "FOB: 30 points" is only true on one map size. What is true everywhere is the ratio between buildings, and that is what the buildings table shows. The action bar in game always shows the real price, including every surcharge. Trust it over anything written here.

Territory percentages

The percentage next to your name is your share of the conquerable land — ocean and impassable terrain are not counted. That is why a finished round adds up to 100% and not to some small fraction of the map.