Olden Era Town Build Order: Week 1 Economy vs Army

“What do I build first?” is the single most common question new Olden Era players ask, and it’s the right question. Your first week of construction decides whether you snowball or stall. Get the timing wrong and you waste a whole week of unit growth, which in a game where the AI builds toward thousand-strong armies is a real problem.

I’m not going to hand you fake gold costs, because they shift between factions and patches and I’d rather you understand the logic than memorize a number that breaks next update. This is for the current Early Access build. What follows is the timing system and a sound priority order you can apply to any faction.

The Weekly Growth Tick Is Everything

Here’s the rule that has to live in your brain before anything else: growth happens at the end of the week, and a dwelling only produces that week if it was built before the weekly reset.

So a dwelling you finish on the last day of the week still pays out at the reset. A dwelling you finish one day too late produces nothing until the following week. That single beat of timing is the difference between an extra stack of troops now versus seven in-game days from now.

There’s a bonus on top: building a unit dwelling gives you 1 growth stack immediately, the moment it’s done. You don’t have to wait for the reset to get that first batch. You build the dwelling, you get a stack right away, and then the dwelling produces again at the next weekly tick.

Put those two facts together and your weekly plan writes itself. Anything that produces troops, you want done before the week flips. Get it up, claim the free stack, and let the reset top you up.

Economy First, Then Army, Then Magic

With timing handled, here’s the priority order I run almost every game:

1. Income and resource buildings

Build the structures that generate gold and resources before you build anything else. I know it’s tempting to rush a unit dwelling so you have something shiny to recruit, but a strong economy compounds. Every turn your income is higher, every future building comes faster. The boring gold building you put up on day one is paying you back all game.

2. Core unit dwellings

Once your income can sustain recruiting, start putting up dwellings, and prioritize them so they land before the weekly reset. Remember you get the free growth stack on completion, so finishing a dwelling near the end of the week is doubly efficient: instant stack now, full growth at the tick. Build your reliable low-to-mid tier units first. They’re cheap to recruit, they win the early fights, and ranged units in particular dominate the opening weeks.

3. Mage Guild when you’re ready to fight with spells

The Mage Guild unlocks your hero’s spellcasting and rolls random spells when you build it. It’s strong, but it’s not a week-one emergency unless your hero is a caster who’s useless without it. For most might-leaning starts, the Guild can wait until your economy and frontline are stable.

Don’t Forget the Two-Way Upgrade System

This is a feature unique to Olden Era and it changes how you think about dwellings. Every unit has two separate upgrade paths, each unlocked by its own building. One path pushes the unit toward higher damage, the other toward higher Initiative so it acts earlier in the fight.

The clever part: once you’ve built the relevant upgrade structures, you can swap a unit between its two upgraded forms freely, just by visiting town. You’re not locked into one choice. Run the high-Initiative version when you need to strike first and control the tempo, swap to the high-damage version when you just need to delete the enemy. Building both upgrade options for your key unit gives you a flexible answer to whatever the map throws at you.

So when you’re prioritizing buildings, the upgrade structures for your best unit are worth real consideration. A flexible, upgraded core stack beats a wider but weaker roster.

Watch Your Morale Before You Recruit Wide

One build mistake bleeds straight into your army, so I’ll flag it here. Olden Era ties morale to faction unity. An army made entirely of one faction’s units gets +1 morale. Every additional faction you mix in costs you -1. Morale matters because +1 gives each unit a 4% chance to act twice, and -1 gives a 4% chance to lose its action entirely.

The build-order implication: resist the urge to recruit every cool unit you can buy from neutral dwellings on the map. A clean single-faction stack out of your own town fights noticeably better than a grab-bag of mercenaries. When you plan which dwellings to prioritize, you’re also planning to keep your core army faction-pure. That’s a real argument for going deep on your home faction’s units before you go wide.

A Sound Week 1 Template

Apply the principles, don’t memorize numbers:

1. Day 1-2: Put up your gold and resource income buildings. Get the economy breathing.
2. Mid-week: Start your first one or two core unit dwellings, prioritizing reliable early units and ranged attackers.
3. Before the weekly reset: Make sure those dwellings are finished. Claim the free growth stacks. Let the reset stack them again.
4. Following days: Add an upgrade structure for your best unit if you can afford it, then look at the Mage Guild if your hero leans magical.

The whole tradeoff between economy and army is really a tradeoff between now and later. Rushing units gets you a bigger stack this week but a weaker game in three weeks. Investing in economy first feels slow but it lets you out-build the AI before its armies balloon. Lean economy-first, respect the weekly tick, and use those two-way upgrades to stay flexible. That’s a Week 1 that snowballs.