Ranking
What the development score measures, what it does not, and what the military bands tell you.
Where
The Ranking tab in the top bar lists the players of your world by the measure you choose; you pick one of twelve from the Ranked by list above the table. Your own standing sits at the top: your rank on that measure, and what your score is made of.
Press a player's name in the table and their player page opens. It shows the same line from the ranking; it never shows their cities.
What counts
Everything you have built to keep: the building levels you hold, the research you have completed, the armory levels you have paid for, and the administrative price of the colonies you have founded.
A building at level N counts every level up to N, because the only way to get there is to pay for each of them. Research belongs to the player and is counted once, however many cities you hold. Your first city is free and adds nothing to the Colonies line; every city after it does.
What does not count
| What | Why |
|---|---|
| Stored resources | Hoarding is not development |
| Gold in the treasury | The same reason |
| Plunder | What you built counts, not where you got it |
| Load carts and transport ships | Civilian carriage |
| Soldiers | A separate figure — see below |
| Unfinished construction | It counts when it is done |
Equal scores
Players with the same score share a rank, and the next player's rank counts everyone ahead of them: 1, 2, 2, 4. Which of the tied rows is printed first is only tidiness, not an advantage.
Military investment
Your army and fleet are not development; they sit in two columns of their own, land and sea. What those columns measure is investment — what the units you own cost. They do not say who would win a battle. Real fighting depends on composition, frontage, morale, supply, ammunition and walls, and none of that is in this figure.
Where your army is standing does not change the figure: marching, sending reinforcements and holding a city move nothing. Losing soldiers lowers it; soldiers still in training count only once they are ready.
Your exact military investment is public only on the Generals ranking; on every other ranking and on your player page others see only the band. The Generals ranking shows it on purpose: how large an army each player keeps is what that ranking is about.
Ranking measures
| Measure | What it counts |
|---|---|
| Total score | The whole development score |
| Master builders | The value of the building levels standing |
| Building levels | The sum of building levels in all your cities |
| Scientists | The value of the research completed |
| Research count | The number of researches completed |
| Generals | The cost of your army and navy, as an exact figure |
| Gold | The Gold in your treasury |
| Offence points | The value of the enemy destroyed while attacking |
| Defence points | The value of the enemy destroyed while defending |
| Traders | The Gold that changed hands on the market and with the travelling merchant |
| Plunderers | The goods you carried off from cities and pirate coves |
| Donors | The goods you donated to the island's resource sites |
War and career points
Offence and defence points are the value of the units the enemy lost in battle, priced as the Generals ranking prices an army. When several players fought on the same side, the enemy's losses are shared among them in proportion to the value of the units each brought. Offence, defence, plunder and trade count the account's whole history; they are not reset after a week.
On every measure equal scores share a rank, and the ranking is calculated every fifteen minutes for all measures together.
The bands
| Land | Sea |
|---|---|
| None | None |
| Watch | Boats |
| Company | Flotilla |
| Regiment | Squadron |
| Army | Fleet |
| Great Army | Great Fleet |
| Host | Armada |
What a band tells you
A band is a size of investment, not a number of soldiers or a formal formation size. The same band can mean different numbers of troops depending on the army's composition and on current prices. The band limits are the same in every world; a world's speed does not change them. When your investment rises above a limit or falls below one, your band changes and everybody can see it.
Alliance ranking
Above the table you switch between Players and Alliances. An alliance's score is the sum of its members' development scores, and equal scores are ranked just as they are for players. The alliance ranking is by development only; an alliance row has no military column. An alliance with no members left is not listed. Press an alliance's name to open its page.
How often it is calculated
The ranking is calculated every fifteen minutes, for a whole world at once. The time beside the table says when the calculation you are looking at was made; anything that has changed since appears in the next one. If you joined after the last calculation, you enter the list at the next one.
In a new world, until the first calculation is made, a sentence saying so stands where the table would be — you never see an empty table. If the ranking is refreshed while you are paging through it, you are told, and Back to the top starts the list again: a list that is half old and half new is never shown.
The figures come from the game's own content. Balance updates can move some numbers; the rules themselves are as written here.