Everything a new citizen needs to know about jobs, companies, production chains and skill points — before you so much as look at a rifle.
Most new players spend their first fortnight doing the wrong things entirely. They chuck skill points into military stats they can't use yet, hire workers that lose them money hand over fist, and then wonder why they're still skint at level 15. This guide is the opposite of all that. Follow it and you'll come out the other side with six companies, a steady automated income, and enough gold to kit yourself out properly when the shooting starts.
Before anything else, head to the Companies panel and hit Find a job. Wages are your first reliable income and they cost you nothing but clicks.
The list is sorted by pay, so the company at the top offers the most per production point. Two things worth a gander before you sign:
💰 Salary per production point — higher is obviously better.
🟢 The green number — that's income tax. A 10% rate means one gold in every ten goes straight to the government. A slightly lower wage with far lower tax often beats whatever's sat at the top of the list.
Once you're employed the routine is dead simple: click Work whenever you've got energy. Every click turns energy into production points, and your employer pays you for the lot.
Companies are the backbone of your economy. Wages keep the lights on; companies are what make you rich.
📌 A company turns production points into items. You flog those items on the market for gold. That's the whole loop.
Items come in two broad flavours:
⛏️ Raw materials (the grey ones): limestone, iron, wood, petroleum, grain, livestock, fish, lead and mysterious plants.
🔨 Finished products (green, blue and purple): concrete, steel, oil, paper, the various food items, bullet types, pulse and so on.
Raw materials are cheap and quick. Iron costs one production point and sells for a fraction of a gold. Finished products are slow and dear to make but sell for many times more — a single steel wants ten production points and ten iron, but goes for roughly twenty times what that iron would've fetched on its own.
That gap is where your profit lives, and it's got a name.
A production chain means one company making the raw material and a second turning it into the finished article. You keep the whole margin instead of flogging your ore to some other bloke who does the profitable half.
⛏️ IRON ➡️ 🔩 STEEL
⛏️ LIMESTONE ➡️ 🧱 CONCRETE
Whatever your starting company makes, build the matching finished-goods company second. Started with iron? Build steel. Started with limestone? Build concrete. Job's a good 'un.
You don't have to chain, mind. Some players skip the raw stage altogether, buy materials off the market and only produce finished goods. That works fine and it's less clicking. But owning both ends means you're never at the mercy of a market shortage, and personally I'd rather dig my own iron.
Companies cost concrete, and the price climbs by 50 each time — 100 for your second, then 150, 200, and up and up. You start the game with 50 concrete in your inventory, so your second company is only 50 short.
Three ways to cover it, all of which you should be doing anyway:
Produce items in your starting company and sell them.
Collect wages from your job.
Sell off any starting items you're not using.
Then buy your concrete off the market and get building.
When you build, the game offers you recommended regions. These give a production bonus — a region at +60% turns ten production points into sixteen, for the same clicks, forever.
Three things to weigh up:
📈 Bonus size. Take the biggest you can get.
⏳ The timer. A countdown next to the bonus means part of it comes from a resource deposit that's going to run dry. When it does, that chunk of your bonus has gone west. No timer means the bonus is permanent — well worth taking even for a slightly smaller number.
🟢 Income tax. The green figure only applies to workers you employ. No workers, no worries.
The only thing that'll strip a permanent bonus is the region changing hands in a war. Worth bearing in mind when you're picking a home for a company you plan on keeping.
This is the single most important upgrade in the game for a new player, and the one nearly everybody neglects.
Open a company, click the cog, scroll down to Automated engine. The engine churns out production points round the clock whether you're logged in or not. Clock off for the night and come back to a company that's been grafting the whole time. 😴➡️💰
Level 1 — 24 production/day
Level 2 — 48/day · 20 steel
Level 3 — 72/day · 40 steel
Level 4 — 96/day · 80 steel ⬅️ minimum target
Level 5 — 120/day · 160 steel
Level 6 — 144/day · 320 steel ⬅️ the goal
Level 7 — 640 steel
Yes, the steel cost doubles every level. Yes, it's worth every bit. An engine at level 6 hands you 144 free production points a day, every day, forever, off the back of a one-off payment.
⚠️ Storage caps how much production a company can hold. Base is 200. Hit the cap and the automated engine stops dead. Every hour after that is wasted.
So log in twice a day — morning and evening — and hit Produce to empty the buffer. Storage level 2 gives you enough headroom to not be doing your nut about it. Past level 2 is money better spent on engines, unless you're running workers.
Right, here's the actual plan. In order.
Build a company. Get its automated engine to level 4.
Unlock and build the next one. Get it to level 4.
Repeat until you've got six companies, all at engine level 4.
🛑 Now stop expanding. Take all six engines up to level 5, then level 6.
Only once all six are at level 6 should you even think about a seventh.
Why stop at six? Because when you eventually switch to a war build or a sustainable war build, most of your companies get switched off — realistically you'll be running five or six. Build and fully upgrade ten and four of them will sit there doing nothing, and every scrap of steel you sank into them stops paying you back. Six fully upgraded companies beat ten half-upgraded ones, in the eco phase and after it.
From level 1 to somewhere around 20–25, every single skill point goes into economic skills. No exceptions. The military tree does nothing for you yet.
The pecking order:
🥇 Production — how much work each click does. It scales both your wages at your job and the output of your own companies. This is the one that compounds.
🥈 Energy — how many times you can click Work for your employer.
🥉 Entrepreneurship — how many times you can click Work in your own companies.
🏢 Company limit — only take a point when you're genuinely ready to build and upgrade the next company. Caps out at twelve.
❌ Management — give it a miss. It raises your worker cap, and workers aren't your problem yet.
Want to see why it matters? Take two level-11 players. One's spread his points across the whole tree and manages 16 per click with four clicks of energy. The other went straight down the economic line and does 31 per click with nine clicks. Same level, same hours played, roughly four times the output. Over a month that's not even close.
Don't hire workers before level 20, and have a proper think about it even at 25. In nearly every situation a new player finds themselves in, a worker costs more in wages than they bring in. It's a mug's game. There are exceptions higher up with the right product and the right margins — ask in your country chat or Discord when you get there. Until then, an empty company you work yourself will out-earn a staffed one.
Every attack you make has a chance of dropping scraps 🔧 or a crate 📦. Both sell on the market. It's not a strategy — it's beer money 🍺 — but beer money buys concrete.
Same goes for your kit: while you're still working towards six companies, sell your gear. Anything blue or above goes on the market or gets scrapped. You're not fighting anyone seriously yet, and that gold turns straight into concrete for companies and steel for engines. The rifle can wait. The engine compounds.
Take the best-paying job with the lowest tax and click Work whenever you've got energy.
Build a raw-material company and a matching finished-goods company.
Always take the biggest permanent regional bonus — no countdown timer.
Every new company goes to automated engine level 4, up to six companies.
Then take all six engines to level 6. Storage level 2 is plenty.
Log in twice a day and empty your storage so the engines never stall.
Skills: Production, then Energy, then Entrepreneurship. Company limit as needed. Nothing else.
No workers before level 20. None. Not one. 🚫
Do all that and by the time you're ready for the front, you'll be the one everyone else is buying their steel off. 🔩💰