Greetings, emperors!
Last time I introduced stone as a new resource and explained where it comes from. Today I want to talk about how you spend it, and the new strategic choices it creates.
Every construction project in Imperium Sine Fine will now have an upfront stone cost paid from your Global Equipment Stock before work can begin. Light outposts like farms and stables cost 20 to 30 stone. A barracks costs 100. Building a workshop costs 80, and each level of city walls costs 200. Founding an entirely new settlement costs 40 stone. If you don’t have enough in your reserves, the project simply cannot start.
Province development also scales with stone. Developing a city from PDL 1 to PDL 2 costs just 60 stone. By the time you are pushing towards PDL 9 to 10 you’ll need 1200 stone upfront. This makes a high-output stone economy genuinely important for ambitious empires, not just a nice bonus.
This is where the quarry comes in. A quarry is a new outpost that can be built on hills or broken ground hexes, and it triples the stone output of that hex. A hills hex producing 4 stone per day becomes 12 per day with a quarry. A hills hex on a river goes from 6 to 18 per day. A single well-placed quarry can transform your construction capacity entirely.
The strategic consequences are interesting. Hills hexes already produce iron through mines, making them doubly valuable now that they also produce stone. Expect competition for rocky terrain to become fiercer. Capturing even one hills hex with a quarry from a rival empire is a meaningful gain, and losing one to your enemies will sting.
Stone is stored in your GES like all other resources, but the base storage capacity is tighter than other resources by design, starting at just 250. Warehouses add 100 storage each, so investing in warehouse outposts becomes more important if you plan to run major construction campaigns.
To put it all together with a concrete example: a plains empire saving up for its first city walls, at 200 stone, needs nearly four months of saving at 60 stone per month just for that one project. A hills empire with a quarry generating 390 stone per month barely notices the cost. That gap is the intended reward for expanding into rocky terrain and investing in quarrying.
Please note that this update will break all old save games. It is a significant change to the game’s foundations, but the new systems it enables are well worth it!
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.
The series continues! In future posts I’ll be covering more of the changes and new mechanics coming in this major update. Stay tuned!
Cheers!