Government Levels
Government Levels measure how far an empire's government has developed — advancing from a modest Level 1 up to a maximum of Level 5 purely through the empire's own technological progress. See Government Types for what each level of each government actually grants and costs.
How Levels Are Earned
Every empire starts at government level 1. Progress toward the next level comes entirely from researching technology — each level gained in any technology generates a number of government points, with some technologies contributing far more than others:
| Government Points | Technologies |
|---|---|
| 150 | Government |
| 125 | Guilds, Military Academy, Manufacturing |
| 100 | Agriculture, Construction, Diplomacy, Libraries, Logistics, Stone Working |
| 70 | Archery, Field Manoeuvres, Leather Working, Marching |
The Government technology itself is deliberately the single richest source of points, followed by a tier of broadly useful administrative and military technologies, with more specialised technologies like Archery and Marching contributing the least. Averaged across the whole tree, a single technology level generates roughly 100 government points.
Thresholds
| Level Change | Points Required |
|---|---|
| Level 1 → Level 2 | 500 |
| Level 2 → Level 3 | 1,250 |
| Level 3 → Level 4 | 1,750 |
| Level 4 → Level 5 | 2,250 |
The threshold rises at every step — reaching the maximum government level is a genuine long-term investment, not something that happens by mid-game accident. The full climb from Level 1 to Level 5 requires 5,750 accumulated government points in total, which the design intends to represent roughly 10–15 years of a campaign's timeline, assuming steady, ongoing research across a typical technology mix.
What Happens at Each New Level
Reaching a new government level isn't simply a quiet numbers update. Every empire receives a flat +10 loyalty bonus the moment a new level is reached, and an Imperial Court event fires to mark the occasion — with the option to pause the game and properly review what's changed before continuing.
It's worth remembering, from Government Types, that advancing a level is a genuine trade-off, not a pure upgrade: both a government's strengths and its weaknesses grow more pronounced at every step. A Feudal Monarchy at Level 5 defends its cities far better than at Level 1, but its Imperial Influence generation and productivity penalties are proportionally worse too. Reaching Level 5 makes an empire a considerably more extreme, specialised version of whatever government it started as — not simply a stronger one.
