How to play

Getting started

Download the game for your platform from the home page, unpack it and run societies (macOS and Windows warn the first time because the builds aren't signed yet; the home page says how to get past that).

New to the game? Choose Tutorial on the main menu (or run societies --tutorial): a small map against one easy rival, with a guide that walks you through founding your capital, choosing research and production, exploring and ending your turn. Each step moves on once you've done it.

Launch the game without arguments to reach the main menu. Choose New game and set:

• Civilizations (2–8) and how many of them are human players. Humans share the screen in turn (hotseat); with 0 humans you watch the AIs play.
• AI difficulty: Easy, Normal, Hard, Brutal. Harder AIs get bonuses to yields, costs and combat; they never see more than you would.
• Each computer civilization gets a personality, shown on the diplomacy screen: Builder, Conqueror, Expansionist, Diplomat. It changes how readily they start wars, how many cities they aim for, how much they love wonders, and how generous they are to city-states.
• Game speed: Standard (350 turns, 100% yields), Quick (235 turns, 150% yields), Epic (525 turns, 67% yields). Faster games scale every city's yields up and end sooner.
• Map size and map type (continent, pangaea, two continents, archipelago, fractal), the number of city-states, barbarians on or off, and the map seed.

You begin with settler, warrior, scout. Found your first city with the settler on good land (grassland and plains, hills and resources nearby), explore with the scout, and press Enter to end the turn.

Command line options skip the menu: --seed, --players, --ai, --difficulty, --width/--height, --map-type, --city-states, --no-barbarians, --load, --host/--join.

Controls

The game speaks English and Italian: Language on the main menu switches. Every key except Escape and the arrows can be changed: pause menu → Keys. The pause menu also sets the interface size (80–150%) and colour-blind colours, a palette for the civilizations that stays distinct with the common kinds of colour blindness.

The top bar shows the turn and your gold, science, culture, faith and happiness with their income per turn. The left panel holds details on the selected unit and tile; selecting one of your cities opens its panel on the right. Important events (war declared on you, a city lost, offers, wonders, the congress) appear as notification cards at the top right; click one to dismiss it. A small tip box suggests what to do next; dismiss each tip with Got it or turn them off.

The map

The world is a grid of hexes. You only see what your units and cities can see; tiles you have explored stay on your map as you last saw them.

Rivers run from the highlands to the sea; a worked river tile adds +1 gold, and units on a river tile defend +25% against melee attacks.

Units and movement

Each unit has movement points; entering a tile costs its terrain's move cost (a unit with any points left can always enter). Order a distant destination and the unit keeps walking on later turns. Land units can embark onto water once you know Optics, but are weak at sea.

• Stacking: 1 military and 1 civilian unit per tile.
• Zone of control: moving from one tile next to an enemy soldier to another costs all your movement.
• Closed borders: at peace you may not enter another civilization's land unless they open their borders by deal; traders and missionaries are always welcome.

Upgrades: once you know the newer unit's technology, an older unit standing inside your borders can be upgraded for gold before it moves (2 gold per point of production difference, at least 20). Siege engines fight cities at double strength.

Cities

A settler founds a city at least 3 tiles from any other. Each citizen works one tile within 2 tiles (the best ones are chosen automatically); the city center always yields +1 food, +2 production, +2 science, +1 culture.

• Growth: each citizen eats 2 food; surplus food fills the granary, and size N needs 15 + 8×(N−1) food to grow. Starving cities shrink.
• Focus (in the city panel): Balanced, Food, Production, Gold, Science or Culture steers which tiles the citizens work; rings on the map show the worked tiles while the city is selected.
• Production goes into the city's queue: units, buildings, wonders and projects. One item completes per turn; leftovers carry over.
• Borders grow one tile at a time with the city's culture, up to 3 tiles out.

Yields

• Food grows cities. Production builds things. Gold fills the treasury (gifts, deals). Science drives research. Culture grows borders and buys social policies. Faith buys pantheons and missionaries and brings Great Prophets.

Research

Pick any technology as your goal in the tech tree (T); its missing prerequisites are researched on the way. Science from all your cities goes into the current tech each turn. There are 52 techs across these eras: Ancient, Classical, Medieval, Renaissance, Industrial, Modern, Atomic & Information.

Workers and improvements

Workers build improvements on tiles inside your borders; each takes a few turns of work.

Resources

A resource counts once it is inside your borders, you can see it, and it carries the improvement that connects it. Bonus resources add yields. Each distinct luxury gives +4 happiness. Strategic resources come in amounts that limit how many of certain units you can field.

Combat

• Melee units attack adjacent tiles and take damage back; ranged units strike from a distance without retaliation.
• Strength is scaled by health (50% at almost no hit points), terrain defense, flanking (+10% per other friendly soldier next to the target), great generals (+aura nearby) and difficulty.
• Damage is about 30 × attack/defense, ±20%. Units have 100 HP and heal 10/15/20 per turn in the field, in your land or in a city, if they rested.
• Cities defend with 8 + 2 per citizen plus a share of their garrison. A melee unit that brings a city to 0 HP captures it.
• Undefended civilians are captured by a melee attacker.

Happiness and golden ages

Your empire starts with 9 happiness. Every city costs 2, and every 3 citizens cost 1. Buildings, luxuries, wonders and policies add happiness.

• Below 0, cities stop growing. At -10 or below, production drops to 75%.
• Surplus happiness accumulates; at 150 (+100 for each later one) a golden age begins: 10 turns of +20% production, +20% gold, +20% culture.

Social policies

Culture buys policies (P). The next one costs (25 + 42 per policy adopted), plus 15% for every city beyond the first. Open a branch first, then adopt its other policies. Completing 5 branches wins a culture victory.

Wonders and projects

World wonders can be built once in the whole world: if someone finishes first, your city keeps its production. National wonders are one per civilization. Projects include the space race.

Great people

Each kind of great person accumulates points every turn from a share of one of your empire's yields (generals: from kills). At 300 points (+300 for each one already born of that kind) one appears in your capital.

Trade routes

Caravans remember the city that built them. Walk one next to another city and order a trade route. Each city can run 1 route(s); routes last 30 turns.

• Domestic routes give the home city +2 food, +2 production.
• Foreign routes give the home city +3 gold (+1 gold per 4 tiles of distance), and the destination +2 gold.
• War, or either city changing hands, ends a route.

Religion

At 25 faith adopt a pantheon (R). A Great Prophet founds a religion in one of your cities, its holy city, with a founder belief and a follower belief.

• Each turn, cities following a religion press it on every city within 8 tiles (1 per city, 4 from a holy city). A religion converts a city once it reaches 30 pressure and leads.
• Missionaries (bought with faith in a city that follows a religion) add 60 pressure; prophets convert a city outright.

City-states

City-states are one-city minor civilizations. Gift them gold (10 gold per influence) or finish their quests (open a trade route to them, clear a barbarian camp near them, +40) to win influence. Influence drifts back toward 0 by 2 per turn, and war sets it to -60.

• At 30 you are a friend; the civilization with the most influence past 60 is their ally. Friends and allies get the city-state's bonus in their capital, and allies count in the World Congress.

Barbarians

Barbarian camps appear in unseen wilds and, from turn 8, send out raiders every 7 turns — ever stronger units as the game goes on. Barbarians are always at war with everyone; they sack cities but never take them, and they kill civilians. Step any unit onto a camp to destroy it for 30 gold.

Diplomacy and deals

Everyone starts at peace. Declaring war ends any deals with that civilization; after peace is signed, neither side may declare war again for 10 turns. Peace is proposed and accepted on the other side's turn.

The diplomacy screen also shows each computer civilization's attitude toward you (Friendly, Neutral, Wary, Hostile; hover for the reasons). It comes only from public facts: war and recent wars, deals and trade routes between you, their personality, and whether you are pulling ahead on score. A computer player never starts a war against a civilization it is friendly with.

From the diplomacy screen (I) you can open a trade with any civilization at peace: gold now, gold per turn, luxury and strategic resources, and open borders. Everything except lump-sum gold lasts 30 turns.

The World Congress

Once any civilization discovers Philosophy, the congress convenes; the first to get there hosts. Every 15 turns a session opens with resolutions to vote on (C). You vote with your delegates: 2 each, +2 per allied city-state, +1 for the host. Passed resolutions apply to every civilization.

From Computers on, every session also elects a World Leader: a candidate with 67% of all delegates wins a diplomatic victory, as long as at least one other civilization voted for them: city-state alliances alone aren't enough. Computer players back a civilization they have a deal with when they can't win the vote themselves.

Winning

• Conquest: be the last civilization standing (city-states and barbarians don't count).
• Science: complete the space projects, launch; the ship arrives 10 turns later.
• Culture: complete 5 policy branches.
• Diplomatic: be elected World Leader.
• Time: highest score at turn 350. Score: 10 per city, 3 per citizen, 4 per tech, 25 per wonder, 5 per policy, 1 per 50 culture earned.

Hotseat and online play

Hotseat: several humans share one screen; between turns a curtain hides the map until the next player is ready, and each player's camera is remembered.

Online: on the new-game screen choose Host online (you take the first human seat; the others are open on port 7777), and friends pick Join online game on the main menu and enter your address. From the command line: --host PORT and --join HOST:PORT. The host runs the game and sends each player only what they may see, so nobody can peek through the fog.

Behind a home router? Without port forwarding, players can't reach your machine. Host through a relay server instead: set Relay server on the new-game screen (or use --relay HOST:PORT), then Host online. The Online panel shows an address with a room code, like relay.example.com:7700/K7QX2M; players enter it in Join online game. The relay only passes the traffic along. Anyone can run one (societies-relay, included in the Linux downloads).

Dropping out: if your connection breaks, the game reconnects by itself and you get your seat back; meanwhile the seat is kept for you (only your game holds its secret rejoin key). If you closed the game, Join online game offers Rejoin for the last online game you played.

Saves and replays

Saves and settings live in a saves folder in your user data folder: ~/Library/Application Support/Societies on macOS, %APPDATA%\Societies on Windows, ~/.local/share/societies on Linux (the side panel shows the exact path). The game autosaves at the start of every round (autosave.ron); Continue on the main menu picks it up. F5 quick-saves and F9 loads (quicksave.ron). Every save is read back and checked. Because the game is deterministic, a replay (the starting state plus every command) reproduces a whole game exactly; --verify-replay FILE checks one.

Modding

All content lives in assets/content/*.ron: terrain, units, improvements, buildings, techs, wonders, projects, policies, resources, great people, religion, and the rules in game.ron (happiness, combat, city-states, barbarians, congress, victory…). Edit and restart; no recompile needed. The game checks the files and explains anything it can't use.