New player late start

The server started a month or more ago and I don't know what to do! Should I even play this? Can I be useful? Are other players going to help me?

The answer to all these questions is: YES!

Aether Kingdoms offers great catchup mechanics to new players starting late and that make the whole experience a lot more enjoyable even if there's not a fresh server. Above all, the game has systems in place that benefit a lot when you already tried the game and know what late game looks like, so your next server will also be improved if you actively play the current active server.

Catch-up mechanics

This is a list of the elements that allow for a late start to quickly catch up with long term players:

• Aether increase: every 7 days Aether usage becomes more profitable. This means the Aether you get from tasks will be worth more than if you started on day 0.
• Science reduction: at some point during the server life, researches will become cheaper on the lower tiers, which means you can quickly obtain then and use its benefits.
• Culture bank: late players will get an additional amount of starting culture and a settler, which means you will be able to quickly settle your second village and get more resources.
• Outer spawn: players increasingly spawn farther from the center, making it safer from attacks and enemies
• Field levels: new villages spawn with warehouse, granary and resource fields of higher level (based on the server total time), which will make it easier for you to claim the tiles around your new villages to get more resources

See also Catch-up mechanics

Basic checklist

These are the things you should do to start your experience with the right foot:

1. Check the Getting Started guide. This has useful information for all stages of the game
2. Find an empire. You have 7 days of protection, but those are not enough to protect yourself on a late game. What you do instead is go to the map, find other players with a red border and check their empire. Join the biggest empire around you and get into the Discord. This is the most important step.
3. Once in the Discord (or the empire chat if you don't use Discord) you can ask for tips on where to settle your second village, what to build and mainly ask for resources: 10.000 wood makes a big difference to you, but is a rounding error for other players.
4. Use your Aether to exclusively buy resources. Do not buy troops, it is less profitable. Do not buy builders for now, check the tasks and get the builders from them.
5. Start building up your production: theater, library, town hall, resource fields. Once you get most of your fields to level 8 you can transition to troops, especially with support from your empire.
6. Whenever you see trade events on the map that give aether, try to complete them. They are a net profit of resources when converting the aether back to resources (and it's an easy way to get rid of excess food or rebalance resources for a profit)
7. Once you're happy with your production and have reached 2 or 3 villages, it is time to build an army for events. Each event has a stage, and a number of troops displayed in the tooltip. You want to look for events at high stage (above 4) and that reward aether. Red background events are offensive events, green background events are defensive events (for more info consult the Events page). Aim at getting 500 horsemen, which can be used for offensive events. You want to send at least 2x the amount of enemies displayed in the tooltip of the event.
8. Once you have 3 or 4 villages, you can upgrade a village into a town. It is good to choose a culture district for your first town to quickly expand. You should also push the archery range to level 10 to train longbows. At this point aim at training 1000 spearmen and 1000 longbows, which you can use for defensive events ( you want to roughly send 4x spearmint + 4x longbows the amount of enemies of the event)
9. At this point you're on a good path for a quick catch-up. Remember to often ask your empire or the general Discord for help, you will find a good environment full of people that want to help you have fun!