The AP Economy

Think in AP-per-income

Every economic act has an AP price and an income payoff. The metric that matters is permanent income per action point spent:

• A basic structure (Granary/Quarry/Lumber Camp): 3 inner-ring tends (3 AP) + 1 AP build = 4 AP for +1/turn.
• A top-tier structure (Well/Deep Shaft/Tapping Line): same three tiles + 3 AP build = 6 AP for +3/turn — if the rare subtype cooperates.

Top tier is better when available, but never stall waiting for it. Income now compounds: the resource you bank this turn is a soldier you can buy the turn trouble comes.

Tend cheap, tend with intent

Tend costs scale hard with distance: 1 AP inner ring, 2 AP next, 3 AP beyond (and 3 AP to chain-tend past that, one hex at a time off your worked frontier). Three inner-ring tends per turn versus one far tend per turn is a 3× development speed difference. Consequences:

• Exhaust the inner ring before reaching. A 2-AP tend needs to be doing something specific — completing a recipe shape, grabbing a special, reaching a fragment.
• Chain-tending is a tool, not a habit. Its use is surgical: creeping the worked frontier to a star fragment, a special resource, or the last cell of a recipe that geometry put just out of ring range.
• Every tend should serve a recipe. Population is just tended-tile count; it wins nothing by itself. The question before every tend is "which structure is this a piece of?"

Settler math

A settler is 3 AP — a full turn — plus the founding, plus the young city's slow ramp to its first structure. It pays for itself because each city is its own ring of cheap tends and its own recipe engine. Found when:

• your current cities' inner rings are mostly worked (your AP is about to get expensive), and
• the site opens a new terrain family (second resource, second recipe line, more of the unit roster), or
• the site reaches toward a fragment or special you can't otherwise touch.

A settler walking more than a few turns is dead AP; shorter is almost always better.

The war chest is capped

Storage caps at 5 per player at the table (30 in a 6-player game) per resource. A full stockpile means every further turn of income is wasted — the signal that you're rich enough to spend. Either buy the army now (see Raising Armies) or accept that you're deliberately idling income while your AP does the work.

Multi-family or die rich and helpless

Each resource buys only its own soldiers: food buys militia and cavalry, wood buys archers and catapults, ore buys the sentry–spearman–swordsman line. A mono-food empire can be enormous and still unable to field a single high-DEF unit. By midgame you want two families minimum — that's usually the strongest argument for your second and third city sites.