Somewhere to work. A company is a building you own, standing in one region, producing one thing.
You will find yours under Account, in the Companies tab, which is also where a day gets spent.
| founding one, of any kind | 100 gold |
| upgrading to q2 | 150 gold |
| q3 | 200 gold |
| q4 | 250 gold |
| q5 | 300 gold |
Gold, not a country's currency. The two are not interchangeable and the difference is explained in work.
A new player is given 250 gold, once. Not once per character: once. It is enough for the two companies you need to feed yourself, with fifty over, which is deliberately less than a third company. When that character dies, everything they own passes to your next one, the companies included, but the 250 is not given again: it belongs to the player, once. See your character.
| kind | makes | out of |
|---|---|---|
| Farm | raw food | the ground, at whatever the weather allows |
| Mill | food, q1 to q5 | raw food |
| Mine | raw weapon material | the ground |
| Forge | weapons, q1 to q5 | raw weapon material |
A farm and a mine produce from nothing. A mill and a forge consume what a farm or a mine made, which means you need both halves of a chain before anything useful comes out of it.
Mills and forges are founded at q1 and climb one tier at a time. A farm and a mine have no quality and cannot be upgraded.
Where you were standing when you founded it, and it never moves.
Its country is whoever holds that ground today. If the region is conquered, the company is still yours and still standing, but it now pays the conqueror's tax and earns the conqueror's resource bonus. Nothing about the company changes; the map changes underneath it.
You do not have one price for labour. You have a ladder: a company can hold up to three offers at once, each at its own wage, and each for up to five days. Post a wage and how many days you want done at it, and that offer appears on the job market of whichever country holds the ground your company stands on.
Thornmill 100 a day 2 days I need this done
60 a day 5 days and I would like this done
25 a day 5 days and this only if labour is cheap
The wage is the offer's name. Posting a wage you already offer changes the days on that offer and nothing else, so you can re-price without losing the days you had. Posting a wage you do not already offer adds a rung. A fourth different wage is refused until you withdraw one or change one you already have.
Each offer is withdrawn on its own, and each is worked down on its own. Four days offered at 60 becomes three the first time somebody works there, and that offer leaves the market when its last day goes. Your other offers are untouched.
Your cheap offers are worked last. Everybody takes the best paid day going, so a ladder drains from the top: 25 a day is only reached once every dearer day in the country has been taken. That is what makes the low rung worth posting. It is a hedge, not a trick: you are buying two days for certain and three more only if labour turns out to be plentiful.
Three offers of five days is fifteen days, and it is fifteen different days. The one-day limit is on the person, so two days at 100 means two people, not one person twice. Nobody can work your whole ladder alone.
Your own offers never appear on your own job market: working your own company is free and spends none of the days you are offering, so there would be nothing to take. You work it on this tab.
Nobody is employed by anybody. Somebody reads the market, picks one of your offers, and works one day there and then. That offer's count goes down by one, they are paid, and it is over. There is no hiring, no notice, nobody to dismiss and nothing to resign from. If you want five more days done, offer five more.
That is a deliberate departure from 2018, which hired people into five numbered positions and kept them there. A spot market clears; a payroll does not.
An offer dies with the ground it was posted on. If your region changes hands, every offer you were holding comes off the market and the days sit there waiting. They are not lost, but they are not on offer either: you are now hiring into a different country, paying in different money and funding a different treasury, and that should be your decision to make again rather than one made for you. Post one again and it is live under the new flag; the others stay off until you decide about them too.
You do not have to offer anything. You can work your own company yourself, which costs nothing and consumes no offer. A wage is paid in the currency of the country the company stands in, so to have your ladder worked you must hold some: see the money for how a country's currency is come by.
Dissolving a company takes every offer it was holding off the market with it and refunds nothing. The gold is gone. Nobody is stranded, because nobody was employed.
What a company makes goes into your store, and from there it has two ways out. Food is eaten (food) and a weapon is spent, one per swing, on a front (war). Both, and the raw goods a mill or a forge consumes, are sold and bought on the goods market, so a farm can feed more than its owner and a forge can arm somebody else's war.
There are four kinds of company and no others. The 2018 game had eleven; this world has the four in the table above.