The game runs on two clocks. Actions happen the moment you take them. Your economy updates once every tick.
Real time
Attacks, and every other action, resolve the instant you send them. You see the result straight away.
Things you start finish at their own moment, to the second, not at the next tick:
- Explored land arrives 12 ticks after you explore.
- Troops in training don't all finish at once. Most finish around 9 ticks after you start; the rest spread up to 2 ticks earlier or later (see Training).
- Armies come home 12 ticks after an attack (some races and personalities are faster; see return time).
The tick
Every 1 hour, the whole world updates at once, in this order.
Each house:
- Income: peasants and buildings pay gold, and the state's tax goes to its treasury.
- Stables add horses, up to what they hold. Buildings that make renown add it.
- Food: farms grow food and everyone eats.
- Population: peasants grow toward what your land can hold.
- Science: scientists write books, using paper if you have it, and new scientists arrive.
- Shrines slowly draw adepts from your peasants and gather aether.
Then, house by house:
- Wages are paid, after income. A house that can't pay in full loses some troops to desertion.
- The draft: houses below their draft rate draft peasants into soldiers.
- Races that promote troops on a schedule do so, and afflictions that have run out end.
- Explorable acres grow, up to the bank, and aid balances fade.
Then the world:
- Each realm's material is shared out to its states, houses and treasuries.
- Votes are counted, and leaders elected or removed.
- War: tributes, recoveries, blockades and ceasefires that have run out end, and a war may start on its own. Every 24 ticks, the hostility meters also fall.
- Nerve recovers and Vigilance fades.
- Rites and hexes that have run out end; Spell Resilience and Countercast Vengeance fade.
- Courting, unrest, poisoned wells and vigils that have run out end; wavering characters go to auction.
- On the age's last tick, the age ends here. On other ticks, a snapshot of the standings is kept for the recap when one is due (240 across the age).
- Colloquium projects decay.
- Academics beyond what your universities hold leave.
- Spoilage: materials beyond what a house or treasury can keep spoil. This is the tick's last step.
Building, training, exploring and returning armies are not part of the tick. Each finishes at its own moment (above). Market orders aren't either: they fill the moment they meet a waiting order.
The age
Each age has a start time. Before it, the world is open for founding houses (and bringing back heirs), but ticks haven't begun and nothing else can be done. This lets everyone settle in before the first tick.
An age lasts 1,680 ticks (about 10 weeks). Then the world stops, the states are scored, and houses keep their heirs; see The End of an Age.
A world can open before its age starts, so players can found their houses early. Until the start, founding a house and bringing back an heir are the only things you can do.
Order and fairness
Everything happens in one order: every action, finishing timer and tick. Two attacks sent in the same second still resolve one after the other. The game keeps a record of that order, so any result can be replayed exactly.
If the server stops
Technical detail. The world is saved after every action, so stopping the server loses nothing. Game time keeps running while it's stopped: on restart, the server catches up every tick it missed at once, in order, as if it had never stopped. For example, three hours down at one-hour ticks means three ticks of income, wages, growth and drafting the moment it comes back, and anything due meanwhile (land arriving, troops trained, armies home) happens at its proper time in that catch-up.
For planned maintenance the server can instead be restarted paused: game time stops while it's down. The next tick, and everything under way (land arriving, troops training, armies away, auctions and offers), moves later by exactly the time it was down, so the world carries on where it stopped and nothing happens at once. After a crash the server catches up, so nobody loses time they were owed.