Olden Era Beginner's Guide: Your First Two Hours, Explained

If you’ve never touched a Heroes of Might & Magic game, Olden Era can look like a wall of icons and turns and numbers. It isn’t. Underneath all of it sits a simple loop you’ll have internalized within an hour. This guide walks you through what the game actually is, how a turn flows, and the handful of things that quietly decide whether your first few maps go well or fall apart. By the end you’ll have a clear plan for your opening two hours.

Quick context first: Olden Era is the new entry in the long-running Heroes series, made by Unfrozen and published by Hooded Horse. It dropped into Early Access on April 30, 2026, sold a million copies in its first month, and is still being patched. So treat anything I say about which faction is “strong” as a snapshot of the current Early Access build, not gospel.

What Kind of Game Is This

Olden Era is a turn-based strategy game with two layers stacked on top of each other.

The first layer is the adventure map. You move a hero around an overworld, picking up resources, grabbing artifacts, taking control of mines, and bumping into enemy stacks. Movement is limited per day, days roll into weeks, and weeks matter (more on that later).

The second layer is combat. When your hero runs into a fight, the game drops you onto a hex grid where your stacks of creatures trade blows turn by turn until one side is wiped or flees. Think tactical chess with dice attached.

You’re juggling both layers at once. Good map play sets up good fights, and winning fights opens up more map. That back-and-forth is the whole game.

The Core Loop

Every map, regardless of mode, runs on the same rhythm:

1. Explore the map with your hero to grab resources and reveal what’s around you.
2. Fight neutral stacks (the wandering monsters guarding loot and mines) to grow your foothold.
3. Develop your town by constructing buildings that unlock new creatures and let you recruit more of them.
4. Fight the AI (or another player) once you’re strong enough, and take their stuff.

Round and round. The player who explores efficiently, picks fights they can win, and keeps their town building without wasted weeks usually comes out ahead.

The Three Pillars

Almost everything in Olden Era is one of three things.

Heroes

Your hero is the unit you steer around the map. They lead an army, cast spells, and carry stats. Four of those stats matter most: Attack and Defense add directly to every creature in your army, while Spell Power and Knowledge govern your magic (Knowledge is your mana pool). When a hero levels up, you get one random stat bump plus a choice of three skill options. You’ll be making those picks constantly, so it pays to know what your faction wants.

Armies

Your hero leads up to seven stacks of creatures. Each faction has a roster of seven creature types, ranked tier 1 through tier 7 from cheap fodder up to expensive heavy hitters. Your hero’s Attack and Defense pile on top of each creature’s own stats, which is why a strong hero makes a mediocre army punch well above its weight.

Towns

Your town is the engine. You spend resources to construct buildings, each building unlocks a dwelling that produces a creature type, and creatures replenish on a weekly tick. A well-built town feeds you a steady stream of soldiers; a neglected one leaves you fielding skeleton crews against a fully-stocked AI.

The Six Factions in One Sentence Each

You’ll pick a faction to play, and each plays differently:

• Temple — balanced Sun Church humans who lean on buffs and get stronger the longer a fight drags on.
• Necropolis — undead and vampires who grind enemies down with curses, lifesteal, and the ability to resurrect their own dead after a win.
• Grove — autumn-forest elementals and ranger-druids with powerful, expensive ranged units.
• Hive — fast, aggressive insect swarms that heal off corpses and spawn free bodies mid-fight.
• Schism — strange abyssal monsters built around control, magic denial, and snowballing.
• Dungeon — dark elves, beasts, and dragons whose units each have two attack modes, making them very flexible.

If you just want a clean place to start, Temple and Dungeon are the friendliest. I’ve written separate full guides on both, plus a dedicated piece on the best faction for beginners if you want to go deeper.

The Five Things to Understand First

These are the lessons that take new players the longest to learn the hard way. Learn them now instead.

1. Don’t Mix Factions or Your Army Falls Apart

Morale is real and it bites. An army made entirely of one faction’s creatures gets +1 Morale. Every additional faction you mix in drops it by 1. Low morale means stacks occasionally skip their turn at the worst possible moment. Early on, just keep your army single-faction. The free morale is worth more than a shiny off-faction unit.

2. Weeks Decide When You Build

Creature dwellings refill their stock on the weekly tick, which lands at week’s end. Here’s the catch: a dwelling you build before the week rolls over produces creatures that same week. Build it a day too late and you’ve wasted seven days. So when you’re close to the weekend, push to finish that dwelling rather than starting something that won’t pay off until next week.

3. Watch the Focus Bar in Combat

Focus is a battle resource that charges up as the fight goes on and powers special unit abilities. New players ignore it and leave value on the table. Keep half an eye on the Focus bar and spend charges when they matter. Some factions, like Grove, even start each fight with a charge already banked.

4. Units Upgrade Two Ways, and You Choose

Most creatures have two upgrade paths, not one. One branch usually leans into raw damage, the other into speed or initiative. You can swap freely between the two when you’re in town, so there’s no permanent lock-in. Pick based on what that battle needs.

5. Don’t Stall, or the AI Snowballs

Olden Era rewards momentum. Sit in your corner turtling and the AI will out-build you, out-army you, and roll over your map. You don’t have to be reckless, but you do need to keep expanding, keep clearing neutral stacks, and keep your hero earning. Idle weeks are lost weeks.

A Plan for Your First Two Hours

Here’s a clean route through your opening map:

1. Pick a starting mode. Classic mode (a random map where each town gets one hero) is the standard sandbox. Single-Hero mode is a leaner challenge if you want to focus on one army.
2. Choose Temple or Dungeon for your first run. Forgiving rosters, no fiddly gimmicks.
3. Day one, scout and clear the easy stacks near your town to grab early resources.
4. Build toward your dwellings, and time the important ones to land before the weekend tick.
5. Keep your army single-faction so you ride that +1 Morale.
6. In fights, lead with ranged units and watch your Focus bar.
7. Don’t camp. Once you can win the fights around you, push outward and start pressuring the AI.

That’s the loop. Explore, fight, build, repeat, and don’t let a week go by doing nothing. Everything else in Olden Era is detail layered on top of that, and you’ll pick it up naturally as you play. Welcome in.