Ymir Beginner Guide
What is this Game?
This game is at its basic level a civilization game. It starts as a city builder. Then as you advance from stone age to copper and then iron and steel ages. The world becomes less and less about the city as more as the whole civilization.
More likely your starting city don’t have all the resources. it will have food for start and water. Other than that it’s up to chance. So you need to leave the safety of your home to expand, conquer or trade for the resources your civilization needs to grow.
The games economy also changes as game goes on. First there is no “gold” Then you discover bartering, merchants, trade between your cities, other players and lastly the World.
Also players can join together. To form Nations. This can happen as equals with some democracy or by subjugation with power.
So this game can have room for all types of players.
You can play as the duke who controls the Empires bread basket. Or you can be the Borders Great General who controls the Empires protectorate to subjugate the barbarian hordes. Also If your ambitions don’t stop here just become the Emperor and rule the way you want.
How to Play Ymir?
First play the tutorial. Then start a single player game.
Most online games have a respawn timer to avoid players abandoning their “bad” spawn start and get one they like. It can be from 1 hour to 24 hours or more. So I would suggest trying the ropes.
But after that you can join online.
So there are 3 choices. Persistent games, Real-time games and Custom games
Persistent games are longer games that you log in few times a day. You could play every 2 days. Of course you need to see the server setting for inactive time. Everything takes longer. Servers Usually are open 24/7 with some time time for restarts and other. So you should be able to get the 1-2 hours of gaming time for the server when you have time.
Real-time games are much faster than normal. These games are usually played in sessions. We will playe every Sat on this time for 6 hours. Some some servers are open for 4 hours every day. Depends on the host. I think this is the best mode to play with small group of friends. As one can host the server and play it when you can have the whole group together. Server only advances when its online.
Have not played on custom. But in future there could be some. Here everything is up to server host. They could kick you or do anything they want. Make custom rules. Break normal game rules. So caution if you join and don’t know the server host. Would be sad to lose 100+ hour civ just because the host got salty as they lost. Well this could happen in other servers too. So think where you invest your time in. Go to discords and ask about server or the host.
For now there is a bug that some people don’t see all the game serves. This is where the Direct Ip comes in. Join discord and get the address from there
This the address for Official server 2.
First Game / Start Screen
Here is the first screen you see when joining a server.
Here you can see the important serves “rules”
Max characters: How many characters you can have one the server same time. Usually it’s only 1.
Spawn cool off: When you spawn how long it takes so you can respans in the server. Usually quite long to avoid players from choosing a “good” starting point.
Max offline time.
So how long can your character go before it goes inactive. Usually quite long but could cause issues if going on longer holidays. You could always try and ask from the server host to “protect you” if you cant log in. But even few minutes of play time reset this.
Also the disconnect button is here. Btw you can hover over most stuff in this games.
Here you can select leader avatar , name, Name of the nation/faction and the color scheme and the icon.
Here is the truly important stuff. Always start as primitive tribe if you can. Also temperate climate can be easier starting area. But other have benefits too. It’s not so important. Changes the different plants you can grow.
But the other choices
Succession: You become the inactive player and take their nation. This can be good and bad. Why did the quit? How is the position. It can be a good not to pick this on new servers. Or ones you don’t know. The person who’s nation you take could try to log tomorrow and could be so not happy as you have takes their hard work. And they could have friends nearby that could be not so friendly.
Colonies: So you take over a colony of other nation. You will be under them. So it can depend lot on your overlord. But message and see the situation. Some will take opportunity and could make you their colonial governor and others see you as a rebellion that needs to be put down. But it usually comes to “No taxes without representation”
New leader: So anarchy start. This can be good. But most likely its bad. It’s a city that rebelled. Most likely it doesn’t have any value so no one bothered to conquer it. It could be a bad tile. No food or resources. But would suggest this if there is no primitives tribes left. As you could salvage the situation. But most likely you will need to depend on some other player at start.
Overall primitive tribe is the best start as you will have decent city spot.
Then there is this spawn close to character. If you want to spawn “next” to a friend. You need their name and I think you need their code too.
First Game
So you are in the game. In upper corner you can see the invite code I think you need to spawn next to someone. So you need to ask your friend for it.
But first things first. Settle on place.You should be able to. There could be some bugs that could forbid but those should be fixed sooner then later.
When you enter a tile where you have not gone there is chance for exploration event. It could kill half your units. Or all your sows. So settle on place you can move your capital in future. This is not Civ where your starting city is somehow a holy place.
You tile will have food and water. Would recommend only single water collection as start. Because then you have the best chance to trigger wells idea.
Do the tutorial missions. Don’t over do them at start. Only the minimum to complete the mission as in the end you get bonus families then you can do what you want.
Food is the most important thing in the start. Farming idea is usually triggered by having food deficit of gathered goods. So your pigs realise they can’t gather enough from the nature that they should grow their own plants. We don’t know the numbers for the ideas or the triggers. But if you hunt a lot you seem to get farming slower. So its bit. Hunt or starve and get farming faster. Or hunt get better population and then get farming slower. You could trade for the idea from other players too if you have something other people want.
Then the next important thing is to build a fort. What use is growing food if some one just going to steal it?
In top right corner next to minimap there are 2 buttons The Eye button and flatten button.
Eye got different map modes, meaby more in future. Now choose the fortification mode.
My map did not have good natural fort so I used the cliffside to reduce amount of wall I need. If the area lights green then it closed. So you don’t have a sneaky one tile wide cap somewhere in your fort.
So you put your stockpiles on a hill and the make walls to block and one gate to access it. Then your rocktrowers behind the walls. You can defend most attacks against barbarians.Especially when you upgrade your stone throwers to javelineers. But with units with armor you will need archer at some point.
In strategic tool you can change the position and stance of your units when someone attacks this city.You cannot do this in battle so do this always before. As soon as you have units in the city.
Easiest way is to get a single unit. Then you can change the stance to stand ground. The unit will not move ever until its given a new command. So just position it behind you gate. And you got simple defences set.
Always click done. And close and open the strategic tool to check That your units are in right place.
So this will defend you against the smaller raids. You should be able to defend 1 to 3 with this set up Sometimes more sometimes less. If raiding force is pure range and could kill some of your archer faster than you then also you could lose. Or if its pure melee and they all get to the gate at same time you could lose. Ai is still bit wonky, You or your opponent can’t command units in battle.
After the game advances barbarians or players can launch sackings of your city(players can do this at start of the game). They will burn down your farms and buildings. So you should have your capital to become from fort to a fortified city.
Well of course protect your more expensive building. Stockpile food and resources so you can sustain the economy a while before the rebuilding is done. So you will have tiers of defences. They can kill your peasant but you will bleed them dry each step they take.Then you can recover faster as your core stayed safe and your enemy used their core units to attack you.
It’s not about defending the whole city but making it so expensive that its not worth it.
Menus
Here 2 important buttons. Territory and Government menus.
So here is the overall screen of the city/territory.You can hover over stats to give more information.
Growth rate and loyalty are maybe the most important stats. Also here you can easily see amount of jobs and employed people
If you have too many jobs open meaby you have expanded too fast and should fortify your foundation first. Remember stone and bronze civilizations almost all of the people were required to produce food for the few percent at top.With advance you don’t really produce more food but with less people. So hunter lvl 1 needs 4 people. Hunter lvl 2 need 3 people.
You almost always want to grow your population. If the city can’t support more time to expand?
Loyalty is not so important in capital(if you have state power) but in your other cities it decides if city rebels or not. So these are important stats to follow closely.
In the growth tab you can see generation length. So it’s easy to measure servers time with others.
Also here you can see the growth. As you grow larger you can see that sickness is the number one killer of growth. So health tech and buildings are really important for growth.
Here you can see the effect of life quality of farmers intelligence. This is the reason it good to have houses for all your people. As the overall level of your populations intelligence helps alot with research and new ideas.
Government Window
This is where your decided nations and factions policies from food to privileges to how are goods divided. Everyone get the same share on start of the game. Are some people more valuable than others? Should some people dress in fine clothes and drink wine while other only have potatoes and water?
State power is one of the most important resources you have in the early to mid game. It effects How loyal your other cities are. It’s very hard to come by in the early game so use it very sparingly. Also each tile cost 5 state power(And more) and it cost honor to abandon a claimed tile. Also early game nations are capped by state power. Usually it’s hard to have nations more than 2 players at early game. Meaby it’s possible to have few 1 tile players in nation at start? Don’t go negative if you don’t know what you are doing. Follow your loyalty of your cities.
Here is also where you can find the nation tab. So players are really “factions” Then factions can come together to form nations. You are Nation of 1 faction at start of the game. It’s quite straightforward. There is some kind of order of importance between the factions.Usually someone leads. Nations can form by diplomacy or force. Some are more diplomatic then others.
There is the Knowledges tab too. The research tab. Nothing too special. You can hover over most stuff.
Moving From Gift Economy
At some points you will get bartering. The research itself does not do anything. But it allows you to go bartering economy from gift economy. I would wait a bit before switching. As your gold balance will matter. And the price of the goods will start to fluctuate between supply and demand. So would stockpile goods as when you switch to bartering you need to pay “gold” for workers producing them or merchants selling them.
You most likely can’t maintain too large fort or too large army anymore. So you could need to make it more compact. Each wood palisade cost 0.15 gold and gate 0.5 gold. So if you have huge fort it can be very large drain. This is where you should meaby think of upgrading to some store houses and granaries to have larger amount in smaller area. You can still survive even if you don’t protect all your storages. Just move the important stuff to inside the fort.
People get paid by the price of the product they are selling. So clothing makers can get rich. Or if you have only little amount of meat then your hunters can get rich.
You cannot set the price.You can increase production or make the raw material more abundant so they will drop in price. But now your economy starts to fluctuate. You can make some important stuff state goods so you will buy all of them. Like weapons. But this can lead to rising prices as people notice that you will pay anything for them. So they will start to rise prices for the productor or the price of the raw materials for the product.
Would recommend that you have about 900ish GDP before switching. Could do later or earlier. But do think before.
Tips
Settle on place. Do no move your starting group! If you can’t it’s a bug and will be fixed at some point.
Tick rate is difference between realtime and persistent. Real time its 1min. ticks and in persistent its 60 minutes.
Food is the most important thing at start. You should micro your starting workers. Disable building that are not needed. Maintenance doesn’t really matter before you move from gift economy.
Stockpiles are important. You will get more advanced one as game progresses that can store larger amount in the same tile.
Click on any resource and you get the goods storage page. There you can set maintain stock. If you get any goods that you don’t produce. Put a stock. You research some stuff you can get 10 pottery for free. Set the stock to 10 so your people don’t start to consume them. You can use it later for some other stuff.And usually it will take quite long to get same kind of stockpile so don’t waste them.
Gather seed stock when you can start farming. Each field will take 1 “vegetable” and 1 hoe. So it would be good to stock some as you can only take 25% of the production to stockpile if you don’t produce enough for your people.
Early game growth will be capped by health issues. Try to give houses for all your people as it gives some rudimentary stats. Better then slums. But the Herbalism is one of the hardest to research. It will take 4 to 10 or tries. Could be less or more. It will unlock doctors that can greatly help your growth.
If you got good 2 city site with quite few food sources It could be a good idea try to settle a second city. It will be always juggling loyalty. Militia makes the city more autonomies and Army makes it less. So if you have loyalty problems tweak the militia /army rate. But beware that state power is going to take while to get more. And it will be very bad if you get rebellion as it hurts the city. Or you could even lose it what can become early game death spiral.
