County of Fortune how to level up region: a settlement is levelled up by satisfying it — fill every food and equipment need, and the "Level Up" button left of the mayor's portrait becomes available. There is no monument to build and no resource to spend on the level itself.

County of Fortune how to level up region: the settlement side

  1. Open the settlement panel and read the needs counter, for example "Needs fulfilled: 20/23". The button stays greyed out until the counter is complete.
  2. Work through the food needs in the Needs tab. A meal only counts as available when every one of its ingredients is present in the settlement, so a single missing input keeps the whole meal locked.
  3. Work through the equipment needs. Chests and tunics are the equipment of the first social class, the Peasants.
  4. When the counter is complete, press the "Level Up" button next to the mayor's portrait.

The concrete requirement for the first step is that a hamlet must have all of the Peasant food and equipment slots filled before it becomes a village. In practice that means three different foods plus wooden chests and wool tunics. Chests come from a Wooden Chest Workshop fed by logs from a Logging Camp; tunics come from a Wool Tunic Workshop fed by wool from a Sheep Farm. Building slots covers how the equipment itself gets into the settlement.

The tier order is Hamlet, Village, Town, City, with level 4 the maximum. A settlement's own Location properties show the maximal level its buildable area allows, so a site picked for its clay is a site that may never grow past a village.

The region side: caps, range and decrees

Regions grow by their own rules. A level-2 region can hold at most two level-2 settlements, which is six buildings, and for more you have to build another region. This is deliberate design: a player should not be able to cover a whole social class in a single region, or the other regions would be nothing but supply stations for the main one.

The region panel is where you watch it: the region's own level (Village, Town and so on), its capital, how many settlements it holds against its cap and how many more the next level would add, plus its range and how much that grows.

Two levers widen a region when it gets too tight.

  • Decrees raise the maximum number of settlements in a region and extend its range.
  • New regions open up as your population of the newer classes grows, so attracting Commoners is what widens the map.

A region can also reach for what it cannot make itself: trading covers the routes that bring another region's goods in.

A settlement can also be levelled back down, which is how you free up a level slot for another settlement. At maximum level a settlement holds three building slots for each of the four social classes, twelve buildings in total.

The whole demo map seen from above, with rivers splitting the land into regions that each hold a cluster of settlements.
The whole map from above: the rivers split the land into separate regions, and each region carries its own cluster of settlements.

Why the next tier needs more than a level

Levelling up opens the tier, but a region can only hold so many tier-2 buildings, and each new population class has more complex needs than the last. Unlocking higher tier buildings covers what opens up once a settlement has levelled, and trading covers how a region gets goods it cannot make.