All eighteen playable races, judged on how well each can run the one loop that
wins the Ruler & Alliance Supremacy victory conditions — grow bigger, take more land — rated for a competent solo ruler.
Win condition · Ruler & Alliance Supremacy (bigger is better)Baseline · solo kingdom; ally swings notedGrounding · the live AbstractRace + turn/combat code
The six load-bearing mechanics
Every grade below is one of these six coded facts applied to a race. Read them
first — they are why the tiers fall where they do.
1Score is quadratic in land.Score is floored at ≈ land²⁄250 — ~100k at 5k land, ~2.5M at 25k. Land dwarfs troops, gear and economy at scale. "Bigger is better" is literally in the formula.
2Search decays cubically with size.Land found ∝ ranger power ⁄ (land⁄5)³. A fine early engine, a dead one late — so past mid-game the only growing land source is conquest.
3Food is the population/army ceiling.Farm food caps at population × 3; consumption = people × mod. But a mana-rich race skips farms entirely with Create Food (1.5 food/mana, cap 3×pop) + Magical Harvest — so casters are not food-starved. Food style (farm / hunt / cannibalise / conjure) is the widest racial spread on the board.
4Mutiny is reach, not frequency.Hitting below 0.9× rolls base^mutinyMod; if it triggers you lose chance^1.6 of your army — so players generally accept some manageable risk. This sets how far down you can safely farm land: peaceful casters reach down less than warmongers, and Vampires/Werewolves can hit the whole band to 0.5× at zero risk. Bigger pool below you = more land throughput.
5Magic = study + mana — and it can feed you.Spells gate on realm study level + mana. Beyond barriers/prep, high-mana races convert mana → food → a gold-making population (Create Food / Magical Harvest / Fasting), with mana to spare. A martial race (Ogre mana 0.01) can't self-cast a barrier or conjure food — ally or do without.
6Equipment usage is race-scaled.Weapon/armor mods scale how much gear helps in battle and score. Vampires, Werewolves, Sprites and Leprechauns barely benefit — they fight with bodies, magic and regen. Dwarves and Minotaurs are the gear specialists.
Also shaping the grades:Morale is recovery speed, not a tax level — natural morale is building/wins/alliance-driven and race-neutral, so warmongers aren't inherently low-tax, just fragile-morale under sustained fire. The anti-undead package — Purgatory destroys 100% of Vampires/Werewolves (no regen; Humans reach it cheaply via Fire+Bless) and Orc Animate Dead strips the Werewolf/Troll regen buffer (harmless on Vampires) — so the regen S-tier has hard counters. The Open Market softens troop quality: buy mid-level troops when hiring under level 3, sell high-level ones for profit.
Tier summary
The argument the playtesters keep having is real, and it lives in the late game:
when search dies and score is quadratic in land, the races that take land safely and
sustainably pull away.
Read this with the team lens. The list reflects the current, solo-leaning meta. Historically High Elves, Dark Elves, Dwarves and Humans topped just as often — through better team play. Several "low solo" races are high team value (casters, prep, Create-Food logistics, and the anti-undead Purgatory that keeps the S-tier honest). Reviving team play — a goal of the remaster — lifts them most. Each card carries a Team value tag.
The eighteen
Each card carries five axis grades (relative to the field), an Early / Mid / Late
verdict, and a one-line playbook. Early ≤500 turns · Mid ~500–2000 · Late 2000+.
The argument, adjudicated
A rebalancing lever to consider, if the goal is to rebalance rather than just rate
(an observation for discussion, not a change made): mutiny is the master reach dial. The gap
between mod 0 (undead, reaching to 0.5×) and 1.1 (peaceful casters, ~0.79×) is enormous in a conquest
meta — nudging one toward the other, or giving the peaceful races a different land engine (they can't
search or conquer), is the most direct lever on the S-tier's dominance.