The 1-Minute Build Order

These are the results of running candidate openings through a 60-second simulator built from the game’s own formulas. Run it yourself.

🕐 Want to drill it instead of read it — open the opening timer alongside the game. It shows what to do at each moment and beats out the 2-second click rhythm.

Three things to know first

You start with zero gold. Public games begin at 0 with passive income only. A first city costs 125,000, which passive income alone takes about two minutes to reach. You cannot build anything in the first minute on passive income.

But tribes carry gold. Tribes accumulate gold and hand over all of it when you take them. Two or three tribes is roughly half your first city.

Your starting position is 49 tiles, 25,000 troops, a cap of about 120,700 — 20.7% of cap. Left alone you cross the 42.2% growth peak in about ten seconds and flatten out against the cap by twenty-five.

What the simulator says

Opening	Tiles at 60s	Relative	Troops left
Hold 20–30% of cap	23,000	100%	25–30%
Hold 42.2% (textbook)	14,500	63%	42%
Hoard, dump at 30s	6,300	27%	50%
All-in at 0s	1,600	7%	92%

The first minute runs hotter than the 42.2% rule. That rule maximizes the troop growth rate, but early on expansion raises your cap and the bigger cap compounds into more growth. 42.2% is the rule for when you have run out of land to take.

All-in is the worst opener tested. Emptying your pool collapses the troops^0.73 term in the growth formula and recovery crawls. It finished last under every condition we swept.

Translated to your hands

Input	Tiles at 60s	Troops left	Verdict
10% slider, click every 2s	21,900	25%	Best balance
5% slider, every 1s	22,200	25%	Same equilibrium
20% slider, every 1s	9,200	2%	Overspent, cannot defend
3% slider, every 1s	17,100	40%	Underspent

One number to remember: total commitment of about 5% of your troops per second. Clicking several directions at once multiplies that — attacks on the same target merge, so three clicks is three times the commitment.

Timeline

−0:30 · Spawn phase

• Press Space for the terrain view. Not optional
• Favour a spot opening onto plains — 16 troops per tile versus 24 on mountain
• Prefer edges and corners. Fewer sides to defend means more troops on expansion
• A small isolated tribe nearby is the strongest signal there is

0:00 · First three seconds

• Drop the slider to 10% (tap T)
• One click in every direction. The goal is not land, it is border length — advance rate scales with it
• You are still invulnerable, so nothing counterattacks

0:03 – 0:25 · Zero idle time

• Click wilderness every 2 seconds
• Always toward plains. Leave mountains as your wall
• Troops bouncing between 20–30% of cap is correct. Over 40% means your hands are too slow
• Orange growth rate means you are already late
• Under 10% means overspending — skip a cycle or two

0:25 – 0:50 · Hunt tribes

• Human and Nation attackers take 30% fewer losses against tribes
• First choice is an encircleable tribe — full encirclement costs zero troops and transfers their gold
• If you cannot encircle, nudge the slider to 15–20%
• Target: two or three tribes in this window

0:50 – 1:30 · First city

• Passive income plus tribe loot reaches 125,000 between 1:00 and 1:30
• The moment you have it, press 1. Deep inland
• One city = +250,000 troop cap

One-minute checkpoint

Metric	On track	If it is off
Territory	10× your start or more	Slow clicks, or you went into mountains
Troops (of cap)	20–35%	Over 40% = slow hands / under 10% = overspending
Gold	Passive plus tribe loot	No tribes means your city is a minute late
Growth colour	Mostly green	Time spent orange is growth you threw away

Situational branches

A human neighbour is right next to you → Do not strike first. Attacking suspends trade between you for five minutes and auto-rejects their alliance request. You cannot kill a human in the first minute, so all you gain is another front. Press K and ally instead.

You are surrounded by tribes → Best possible start. Cut wilderness expansion short around 0:20 and switch to hunting. Your first city arrives inside a minute.

You are on an island or boxed into a peninsula → Land runs out in 20–30 seconds. Exceptionally, spend gold on a port first and hold troops near 42.2%. Use boats (B) to reach tribes across the water.

You got hit early → If you cannot hold it, abandon that direction and keep expanding the other way. The win condition is territory share, not survival.

Anti-build — how to lose

1. Slider at 100% — dead last in simulation, 7% of the standard opening
2. Hoarding troops — your starting cap is only ~120k, so you saturate in 25 seconds
3. Attacking a human first — five minutes of no trade plus an auto-rejected alliance
4. Expanding into mountains — 50% more troops per tile and 50% slower
5. Saving gold — at one minute there is nothing to buy but a city. Buy it at 125,000
6. Expanding in one direction — advance rate scales with border length

The simulation assumes unlimited wilderness, so absolute tile counts are unrealistic. What holds is the ranking and the ratios between strategies, and those survived sweeping the conditions by a factor of four.