Beginner's Guide

*Hegemony III: Clash of the Ancients* takes place in the Apennine Peninsula (location of the modern day nation of Italy) in Europe. Players may expand their realm over the Apennine Peninsula and unite the different cultures in the area. This page contains a **beginner's guide** with first steps and some references to video providing more advanced tips. Also check out the beginner's guides on steam, currently available in Brasilian, Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai and Turkish.

## Before Starting the Game

* Set the difficulty to "novice" if you are new to the game and just want to learn the mechanics to avoid frustration while learning.

* For your first campaign carefully consider your Starting Position. You want to pick an easy faction. Tip: Rome is not an easy faction.

* Turn on the Tutorial for extra tips how to navigate the interface and play game mechanics.

* There is an in-game help function in the menu where you can look things up. With F1 you can (always) get context-sensitive help.

* Pay attention to the Loading Screen Tips. They tend to be helpful, especially if you are new to the game.

* Save often (you can use F5) - the unforseen will happen, decimate your armies and leave you watching in horror as unseen enemies descend upon your unprotected borders stealing away your prized cities.

* The pause button is your friend, wars on many fronts are common in this game and pausing lets you issue the orders you want in battles you can't watch.

## Playing the Game

* You have a starting city, and maybe some starting units as well. There are also bridges and camps: Bridges allow you to cross rivers, while Camps allow you to establish a forward place for your units to stay and provide you with more vision. There are various building upgrades for your cities, forts and bridges, such as Walls, Watchtower and Market.

* Your 4 primary resources are Food, Gold, Wood and Recruits. There are various assets which you can capture using your units, in order to gain more of these resources. Wood is very important in the early game because you need to upgrade your buildings. Food, however, is the most important resource throughout the game: Without food your units will do badly, without food your cities will riot.

* You select units/cities/etc. using the left mouse button. Clicking on a target object using the right mouse button then will bring up a control wheel from which you can choose the appropriate action (if there are more than one possible). This way you can e.g. connect a city to a ressource building or order a unit to capture a brigdehead.

* Little by little while creating new units and by capturing assets and other cities, you try to expand your empire in order to establish your hegemony. You can get an overview of your assets in the asset list.

* In sandbox mode as well as in campaigns, there are various random or scripted objectives which reward you well, when you complete them.

## A Quicky on Battles & Warfare

* Keep your troops well stocked with food - otherwise their morale will suffer. Morale is the key to winning fights, one unit can take on five if their morale is better.

* Watch those flanks, your units morale will plummet if they are succesfully flanked for an extended period of time.

* Intel is the key to victory, always scout out your target cities before considering invasion to be sure that you have ample forces to win the battle.

* Retreat is a very valid tactic, if you can't win the battle don't be afraid to fall back. Nothing will be gained if your troops are slaughtered, you might also possibly pull your enemies into a trap if they chase you into your territory.

## A Quicky on Diplomacy and AI Aggressiveness

* AI Agressiveness and amount of troops sent into the field against you depends on game difficulty setting. If you have the impression that AI is pushing too much or that too many neighbours are at war with you at the same time, then consider a lower difficulty setting.

* Depending on intimidation (which you can influence) AI will demand gold for a truce or give gold to you, if it feels intimidated. It is worth scouting the map for AIs that are willing to pay tribute, so you can finance paying tribute to your bigger neighbours, if you want to keep them from attacking you.

* Fortify your borders, but also chose your borders wisely to start with. It is much easier to defend a river crossing or a narrow mountain pass than it is to defend an open field. Prioitize your conquests accordingly. Otherwise you might find your border too porous to defend properly.

## 10 Beginner Mistakes & How to Avoid them

* Keep you units properly fed: Units will resupply themselves automatically when they leave a supply area (coloured area on the map around the player's cities etc. Player can force units to resupply themselves by a button in the unit control panel.

* Never send civilian units to ressource nodes etc. without proper protection by a military unit lest they fall victim to raiders. Civilian units cannot fight.

* Expand cities as they are ready. Cities ready for expansion will have a special icon above the city icon on the strategy map. Not expanding cities will result in the city not growing anymore. This is especially true for cities of one's own faction. Expansion of other faction cities may be delayed on purpose to control rebellion levels.

* Do not undertake big campaigns during winter. During winter food is scarce: production is limited and units outside one's territory will consume more food than normal. Units leaving for a campaign will take food with them, leaving your cities with less food. Having not enough food in your cities might lead to rebellion. It's better to just do some raids during winters.

* Shorten the distance between a units area of operations and its home city. Each unit has a home city from which it draws recruits and to which it returns if it loses a battle. The home city can be changed to one that is nearer to the area of operations so that it takes less time to send the unit back to the front. This can be done by clicking on the unit then on the new home city and chose the action in the decision wheel. This can only be done if the new city has the required upgrades for the unit (such as a stable for a horse archer unit). Unit faction and city faction must be the same.

* Do not rely too much on your capital city. On the one hand, this makes sense, since it will be in the center of one's empire. However, the resources of the capital city are limited. Try to spread recruitment of units among all cities of your native faction.

* Do not overextend yourself. If you do not have the resources, then wait and let resources accrue until ready for a campaign.

* Do not just defend your cities, but keep an overview of the map and look out for river-crossings and mountain-passes. Garrison these with troops so that enemies do not have a chance to intrude into your territory and raid your ressource nodes.

* Use camps and bridges to your advantage: they deny enemies territory, they supply your troops and they can be fortified by walls. They also allow to store ressources.

* Do not leave rebel camps alone too long. Better take them over so they cannot annoy you later and raid your buildings and cities. They will also not be able to re-spawn as long as there's no fog of war. Camps and bridges will limit fog of war.

Based on the Tutorial video by **Horath Drak**: