Greetings, emperors!

In my previous posts I’ve told you about the new population system, war losses, grain and province development. Today I want to introduce yet another new resource coming in the next major update: stone.

Stone is a raw material harvested daily from the land your cities control, just like iron, wood and leather. It represents the quarried rock and dressed materials needed before any serious construction work can begin. Want to build a workshop? You need stone. City walls? Stone. Founding a new settlement? Stone. From now on, every major construction project in your empire will require it.

So where does stone come from? Primarily from hills and broken ground terrain. Hills produce 4 stone per hex per day, broken ground produces 3. Mountains give a modest 2, and forests a small 1 through surface rock. Plains, lakes and oases? Nothing. No natural stone at all.

And as we wrote in the previous development blogs, the resource output of a hex also depends on the province development level.

This low output is intentional. Stone is designed to be a limiting resource, one that makes you think carefully about where you build and which territory you fight over. An empire with several hills hexes under its control will be a construction powerhouse. An empire sitting entirely on flat plains will need to pace its building carefully and prioritise expanding into rocky terrain as soon as possible.

To illustrate the difference: a plains empire with no rocky terrain at all generates around 60 stone per month from its capital bonus alone. An empire with just two hills hexes and one broken ground hex generates roughly 390 stone per month. That is six times as much, and it grows further as you claim more territory.

Every empire does receive a small capital bonus of +2 stone per day regardless of terrain, so you’ll always have something to work with from the very start. Rivers and improved hexes also add a small bonus on top.

The figures I’ve mentioned above may be adjusted during playtesting, but they should give you a good feel for how the system is designed to work.

In my next post I’ll tell you how stone is spent, and why the quarry outpost is going to become one of your most valuable construction targets.

Cheers!