I will try my best to explain everything in the game, I will start off by basics, then features and finally the smaller stuff.

Bulletin Board for order of topics
1. Talking about what every button does in the menu, options etc.
2. Game mechanics/features
3. Smaller features
4. Achievements

This is the menu, as you can see there is a bunch of buttons.
The following buttons are:
Maps
Scenario
Load Game
Settings
Credit
and.. Quit.

I will explain all of them in their own unique sections.

You will be greeted by this screen upon clicking maps.
This section of Age of Conflict is a bit of a reference to the demo version, there was no pre-set nations.
You had to place your own.

This is what maps are, when you load in you'll place a bunch of nations, but I'm getting too far, let's keep it slow for now, when you click on a map there is two options.
> Play
> Edit

When you click play, you will be greeted by this.
Let's start off simple, Quit will put you back at the menu screen.
When you click randomize world, it will randomize the world. But you can still interfere with it:

You will get a screen saying "Number of nations" and "Number of empty cities around the map."

The more you increase the slider, the more there will be of it, If you increase the slider for Number of nations, it will put a THAT amount of nations you put on the slider randomly across the map, this same logic applies to the cities, it will generate cities around the map, depending on how many you wanted to generate.
The next option is the Create Scenario, the most complicated, when you click on it, you will get this, and it's quite complicated if you're new, so I'll start from the top.

>Spawn Nations
The more you increase the slider, the bigger the nation start size will be, if you put it on one, the nation will be a pixel small, if you put it on five, it'll be 5x bigger or whatever you get it.
To spawn a nation you gotta select the Spawn Nation and click on the map.
You can not spawn them on water.

>Edit Territory
Alright there is a lot of features to this, starting off, it allows you to edit territory, when you start it will have the blank paint of the map. Which you use paint over a nation while it's blank, it'll remove it's land, similar to the slider from Spawn nations, it'll increase the brush size, so if it's at 20 it'll remove a lot of land.
A few last features is, if you want a country's colour to adjust their borders, simply click on the nation (Make sure you do not have the painter on) and now you have it, if you want to TARGET a country so that you don't have to follow their border and fill it in, select the country you want to fill in, hold down alt and click on them, then it'll only paint their territory and nobody elses.
There is also a "only paint on empty tiles" this is pretty self-explantory.
If you're painting it'll ignore ALL nations on the map and only paint empty tiles that have no country owner.

>Spawn Cities
This one is easy, if you click on the map while the spawn cities tab is open, you'll create a city, if you want to, you can make it a core.

>Edit Terrain
Alright this is basically identical to Edit territory, but it's still very different, so with the terrain it edits terrain, WOW SHOCKING RIGHT? Anyway. There is multiple to choose from.
Basic Land, it's basic.
Forest, makes troops move slower.
Desert/Tundra, makes troops move slower, (equivalent to forest I'm pretty sure in terms of speed)
Hills, makes troops slower, but slower then Desert/Tundra and Forests.
Mountains, no troops can move through mountains.
Water, similar to mountains, no troops can move through water.
Crossings, if you want to cross water, place crossing on water, and troops (or the navy) can now move across and invade.

Also, the edit territory trick using "Alt" to target a specific a country, also works with terrain, you can press alt on a terrain piece, and you can target it only.

Maybe you can see better with this, as we move on to the final ones, I'll move from the Right to the left, got it? Good. (Also lighting round, so i'll go by everything really fast)

Save map, it's gonna save your map.
Save Scenario, it's gonna save your map but put it in the scenario tab in the menu, (it's only useable if there is two or more countries on the map)
Spawn at least 2 scenarios, this is a REQUIREMENT, not an option, you can't interact with it, you need two nations for it also to be playable
Play, you need two nations to play, but uhh play will let you play the map you just made.

In the smaller area where it says
Nation Names
and
City Names
These will simply disable text over Nations and Cities, this does not disable it for the world, just for when your editing.

Near the Toggle All buttons, with the Red, Green and white.
It confused me at first, but one better look and it makes sense.
A bit of a lesson here.
Red=Capitals
Green=Cores
White=Cities
Those two toggle all buttons, will do some stuff, lemme explain it more organized.
Green's Toggle all=Will turn all CITIES into cores.
White's Toggle All=Will turn all CORES into cities.

Oops I missed one thing!
There is a starting year, although it's obvious what it does, put what number you want into it, and when you start it'll start at that year.

For those four last options, it's hard to explain but okay.
Diplomatic View, enabled already by default, won't do anything
Alliance view, if a nation is in an alliance it'll group them together in the same colour, although whoever started it will be the colour.
Puppet view, whatever country is a puppet will be show.
Terrain view, will show your terrain.

WOO! We're done... (This took like 15 minutes for this one section)
Wait I think I'm forgetting something... Oh right.
So there is one more button back in the menu called "Edit"
and it does..
So when you load in, you'll get a ton of options.
Again.
I really like to explain things but it's getting exhausting, so I'll try and save you as much time as possible as well.
So remember targeting a specific terrain or nation? It's called masking, so when I say Mask I'm probably referring to that.

Starting off with terrain, we already covered it, let's not do that again.
Brush is when you use a nation terrain except it's for land, not terrain, land. So you can make your own land on water, brush size, explained this before, terrain mask, explained this before, bucket.
So you know the fill-in tool that many artists use?
Well same thing, it'll fill in a bunch of water OR terrain, it also does terrain as well.
Forgot to mention, whatever terrain you have selected the Brush will do that terrain.

For the save button, it will Save it, Quit will cancel everything and leave.
The place at least 2,500 land tiles is a mandatory option, because you need that many to save it.

Now I still think, I'm forgetting something. No I'm not but there is some extra features that I need to cover.
You may notice something is off there is two new options.
I'm going to cover it now.
Delete, will delete it...
and upload to steam workshop will upload it to the steam workshop.
No. I'm not gonna tell you how.

There is one last option, hopefully you learned enough to know what I'm saying so far now.
If you click on this, it will lead you to a new page like this:
Starting off with the top sliders, Width will increase WIDTH of the MAP, and vice versa with height.
The map below will show a sample map, if it show Europe, it's not actually doing the European map, it's just as a sample, the actual map will be a blank canvas. When you start painting it's the exact same of edit mode, we're finally done. For this section lol.

So this the most important tab ever I'd say, but why is it so important? Well it contains all of the default scenarios, custom scenarios and workshop scenarios.
Default Scenarios, provided by the creator himself.
Custom Scenarios, provided by YOU.
Workshop Scenarios, provided by whoever made the map on the Steam workshop.

There is a few things, starting off the default scenarios are divided into World Map, and I'll just say it all for you.

World Map, Scenarios with the World map.
>Classic (2024, but basically worse)
>2024 (Modern World)
>1938 (WW2 World)
>1914 (WW1 World)

Europe, Scenarios with only Europe as the map.
>2024 (Modern Europe)
>1938 (WW2 Europe)
>1914 (WW1 Europe)
>1792 (F. Revolutionary Europe)

>Asia, Scenarios with only Asia as the map.
>2024 (Modern Asia)
>908 ("Ancient" China)

Also there is icons for each type of Scenario, which I discussed earlier
This is the Default scenario icon, a yellow sheet of paper it seems? A map possibly?

This is the Custom scenario icon, a white sheet of paper, with a blue question mark.

This is the Workshop scenario icon, a blue sheet of paper, maybe a map? with some blue symbols on it.


Time to move on, this is the info tab, it contains some basic information on the map, I currently have the World Map classic open, which it explains it is 750 x 400 map, It has 167 capitals, no cities, that is Jan. 2024 and that it is a Default Scenario.


Also let's take a look to the left, it contains all of the maps but two buttons I haven't discussed, which they don't have much to talk about, the new simulation will bring you over to the maps tab, and the workshop button won't bring you anymore, it just tells you to do that.

This next part will likely be short, hopefully.

Starting off this is what it looks like when you load this tab.
"Wait, but why do you have some maps, and I don't?"
Well, because I have made my own, how do you make your own? Well before we do that let's do some SMALL little features of this tab and that is, in the basic information tab it says what Version it was saved in, that's all, let's move on.

To make a save.

>Go to scenarios.
>Pick a map.
>Press Escape.
(By now, it should show a pause menu.)
>Click on Save Game
>Name your game whatever.
>You're done, you now have a save!

Yeah, this was short, what did I tell you?

When you click settings, there will be a large screen for you to fidget with, let's talk about all of them!

Zoom Sensitivity, similar to Mouse Sensitivity, it'll move more, the higher you have it, so instead of 360ing your mouse to move to an enemy's head, you can do a 180 or 120, or 60 or maybe 30 I don't care. This applies to the zoom as well.

Resolution, pretty simple you should know what it is, if you don't search up the definition.
Fullscreen, you also probably know this.
UI Size, will increase how big the UI is..
Pixel Art Font, will make all of the fonts in the game more pixelated, and by every font, I MEAN EVERY FONT, TEXT, CHARACTER, SENTENCE, EVERYTHING.

Game Sounds
UI Sounds
Music

All of these are well... self-explantory, Game sounds includes declaration of wars, UI sounds includes clicking on stuff, and music includes music, the more you turn them down the less you'll hear them.

Rich Presence (wth does this actually do, I have no idea, someone comment what it does)

This one is obvious, I guess I should mention it? But no new player needs to know about this, so... Let's just skip past this.

Really? Okay... Well.
Here are all of the languages. (I have to extend the guide so it's more complete)

It contains
Turkish, Finnish, Brazilian, Mexican?, Spanish, French, Italian, German, Polish, Ukrainian, Russian, Chinese and English.

Okay well, I mean it has some importance but like, you can just tab out, but- It's fine...

Now I will explain Gameplay & Features

So that you can actually figure out how to PLAY THE GAME.

So, I've already discussed the tools, which if you don't know what I'm talking about, it's the Spawn Nations, Edit Territory, Spawn Cities and Edit Terrain, but there is other options called the World AI Settings. Which is EXTREMELY important. Here it is:
Wars---

Looping Map, This is particulary useful if you have a map like the world map, let's say Russia is cut off in North America, WELL! with looping maps, they can now connect by moving troops through them and etc, and enemies can also use this to travel into mainland Russia more.

Start wars, allows for AI to start wars.
Winner takes it all, when a country falls they'll just collapse and every other nation can grab the free land, with this enabled whichever country won will take the whole country with it.

Combat Efficiency there is actually three modes to this
Progressive, where Combat Strength will slowly grow, the more wars waged the weaker they become ( I believe, that's what usually happens to me )
Random, where Combat Strength just can go from 6 to 1 instantly.
Static, it will stay stationary and not move in terms of Strength.

Alliances---
Join Alliances, whether AI can join alliances or not.
Create new alliances, whether AI can make their own alliances or not.
Leave Alliances, whether AI can leave alliances or not.
Max Alliance Size, the slider will dictate how many countries can be in one alliance, you can have unlimited if you manually make a nation to join the alliance.

Revolts---
Revolts, whether AI can revolt if the unstability is too high.
Allow new nations, whether AI to revolt from cities with no previous owner.
Gain cores from revolts, When a nation destroys a revolt, they will turn it's capital into a core.
Revolt Borders, once again there is three modes to this.
Manhattan: Fuzzy but straight horizontal or vertical borders.
Euclidean
Longer, straight liens but less horizontal or vertical borders.
Random, switches between Manhattan and Euclidean.
Classic, Diamond shape borders.

Puppets---
Puppets, whether an AI after a war beat the enemy so hard can make them a puppet.
Land seizing, whether an AI can slowly integrate their Puppet's land into the mainland.
Puppet revolts, whether an AI can revolt from it's puppeteer.

Gold---
Maximum Gold, whether AI can be capped on how much gold they can have.
Core Purchases, whether an AI can use their gold to make cores.
Donations, whether an AI can donate to another country.
Unifcations, whether an AI if in an alliance with another country for long enough can unify.

Razing---
Allow Razing, upon an AI reaching an enemy capital, there is a 33% chance to destroy the capital upon conquering it, they will build a new city somewhere else.

There is a lot to take in from this simple screen.
Starting off, to get here just click on a country, now let's go from top to bottom.
Starting off with the name and the crown.

The name is the name..
The crown is unique, as it displays the power the country once or has right now. There is three ranks of the crown, here they are:

I like to call the three ranks, Prince, King and Emperor. Anyway, moving down further there is this blue little time along with two sentences, the blue thing represents it's time, the number on the right will say how long it's lived for, and further on the right says when it came into the World, and when it collapsed.

Green, will represent who it revolted from, if it didn't revolt then it won't say anything.
Red, will represent who it got annexed by, there is a way to view the dead countries, I'll tell you later.
Blue, will represent what alliance they're currently in.

On to the Statistics!
The little brown thing with some blue is their land, the white text is their current land, and blue is their largest extent.
The gold is there, well.. Gold, there is a subtract and addition, which will add on for gold it will add +200 Gold or -200 Gold, for Strength +1 or -1 Strength and for Revolt +25% or -25%
Meanwhile the military looking thing represents the military combat strength, One is the weakest, where it doesn't fight, and six the strongest where it fights, HARD, and is very hard to defeat, when a nation has 1 or 6 strength it will show on the capital with an icon.
For revolt, it needs to be I believe around above 50% for a chance of revolt, 75% for some revolts and 100% for a guaranteed revolt.

Next there is three smaller little options, let me zoom in for you.
This, despite being so small, is VERY important. The first thing represents how much gold it gains, but also how much it loses, it's complicated... So I'll explain it.

It's affected by three things, Combat power, Land and cities.
Let's say you have strength six, you're a decently small country and have quite a bit of cores and cities, you'd be losing at least like 10 gold, but if you have combat power
ONE, and
YOUR COUNTRY IS HUGE!
and.... well.. uhhh what else... and you have barely any CITIES or CORES, you'll lose maybe like 80 gold, which is heavy even if you have a lot of money.

(note: yeah uh, as of v4.0 this outdated, but basically, it's the exact same except you have to click on the little circles to see what they've done, okay bye)

ANYWAY, the last few options is in the Diplomacy tab, which is more like "life achievements" tab. The blue shield shows how many allies it CURRENTLY has.
The sword shows how many wars the country has fought, and it will show the country it fought along with it's crown, if you click on the defeated country you can also see it's stats.
(Which is how you view any dead country's statistics)
The skull, will show how many nations it has annexed, so how many countrie it has defeated.
The green flag, will show many revolts there has been in the country, pretty simple.

Time for actions, also extremely important to this game.
So let's go over every action.

Attack, will forcefully make the nation attack another nation you selected to fight, ALTHOUGH both AI Nation's can peace out at any time.

Fight to death, same thing as attack but no peace deals.

Peace, if the nation you have selected is fighting right now, and you want them to stop, you can use peace to stop them and their enemy from fighting each other.

Annex, With your nation if you click on another nation with the annex, the nation you had originally selected will completely take it.

Ally, you can forcefully make two nations ally with each other.

Leave, you can forcefully make two nations leave an alliance with each other.

Donate, you can forcefully make a nation donate a specific amount to another nation.

Control, you can make a nation a puppet of the nation you originally selected.

Release, you can release a puppet.

Rename, you can rename your nation.

Recolour, you can recolour your nation.

Revolt, you can force a revolt in your nation.

Die, you can force collapse of the country, WARNING: It doesn't give it too anyone, they'll just be wiped off the map, up for grabs by everyone else.

Disable Nation AI, If turned on, the AI of the nation can not do any action, only you can control it.

This one is apart of the newest update, as of writing this of course.

So now if you go into the Nation Menu, at the top there will be a Flag of the country, we can't do much with this, so why bother?

Well, it all gets more complicated when you decide to click on it, and THIS will show up.

So clearly there is a lot to learn, let's figure it out together from top to bottom.

Starting off at the top right, there is this colo(U)r pallete, it's pretty simple the slider will control what colour it is, and the little dot will represent how light, dark or vibrant the colour will be, simple!

Next there is a brush size slider, it's simple, we'll be able to discuss this more sometime later, but you need to know is that, it makes your brush bigger.

The four options at the bottom might bring you back to the first few chapters of this guide, there is brush: Allows you to paint your flag. Erase: which will let you erase any colour to white (or 255, 255, 255) Bucket: A bit more complicated then the others, if you click on a colour it will fill in that colour with a colour you picked on the colour palette, and it isn't affected by the brush size. Colo(U)r picker: This one is also a little bit complicated, but it can be summed down to one thing, if you click on a colour you can now copy that colour, so if you need to fill in something but you don't know what the col(U)r is, then you can just copy it down, fill in that little mistake, and you're done!

There is three more options, if you look back up onto the Flag maker, there is a grid, why is it there? Well I think it's meant as a reference thing, if you look at the flag of Germany, the grids fit perfectly, so I think it's meant for making straight lines easier, or just blocks.

Clear flag is a bit cool, if you clear it and set the flag (which I'll get to soon) it'll just have a question mark, I don't know I thought it was cool. Anyway, it just clears the grid, not to white, to just nothing.

Struggling making a flag of your favourite country? Do they have a DIFFICULT flag? Well, you can just use... the Pre-made flags button! Upon clicking it a variety of countries will appear in a alphabetical order!

Yeah there isn't much too it after that, oh well!

Before we start! I know someone has already done a guide like this, so I'll put a link right... HERE!
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3365111009
(By Burmins)

Also before you leave, I have some useful information.

You see that trophy in the corner?
If that isn't in the corner, then you CANNOT get that specific achievement, depends though, I'm not too sure, that's what the trophy told me if you hover over it.

WOW!

Did you read that much?
You probably didn't, did you?
But if you did, thank you, may God bless you.

Anyway, here is some extra stuff you don't need to know but whatever.
(Might need to zoom in, hopefully you can see.)

So the cog, if you press it, will display a bunch of options
Those options are as follow:

Nation Names
City Names
Crossings
Terrain
Icons
Gold
Map Animations
Puppet Colours
Hide Bottom Row

and Text popups, you know that stuff in the bottom that shows Wars, Peaces, Annexations and more? We can wipe that off if you disable wars, in the feed it'll disable showing when people declare wars.

Anyway
If you disable City Names, it'll disable the showing of City names.
If you disable Nation names, it'll disable nations names.
Crossings, you won't see crossings anymore (it doesn't even show battles on the sea)
Terrain, makes everything just a solid colour, so you don't have to see terrain anymore.
Icons, actually quite useful to know what this is, the icons is those little combat things above the cities if it is terrible or useful right now.
Map Animations, you know when a country declares war and it sends a sword over to the enemy's capital, well it just won't show that anymore.
Puppet Colours, if this is enabled and there is a puppet, it will have a similar colour to it's puppeteers nation.
Hide bottom rows, well, it hides the bottom row.

After learning all of those stuff with the cogs, maybe you want some presets? Maybe you're a realistic larper, or a timelapser, I got you!

Next we have some of the most important options on this page.
It's right beside the cog, there is a diplomatic view which is the default view everyone has when you load up a game, it just displays all the nations.

Alliance mode will display an alliance of nations as a single colour from whoever started the alliance.

Puppet mode will display who is puppet of which nations.

Wars mode, the newest mode, basically every country will be grey on the map, but when a war starts, whoever declared war on a country, the country they're invading will be their colour, and they will also be highlighted, it's confusing so you should just test it yourself in game.
TO SUM IT UP: If there is any colour on the map that isn't grey, there is likely a war going on, so if Russia is grey there is no war, if they turn into their own country's colour they are at war.

Income mode, it just shows the income of a country, the more red, the worse, the more green, the better, however if a country is at war, even if they have the strongest economy, it will instantly switch to red.

Terrain mode, it shows terrain on the map, simple. (useful if you wanna remove some terrain manually)

Now for some presets! If I say ON/OFF, It means you can do either if you want.

Timelapser Player Preset
Nation Names: ON
City Names: ON/OFF
Crossings: ON
Terrain: ON
Icons: OFF
Gold: OFF
Map Animations: OFF
Puppet Colours: ON

Realism Players Preset
Nation Names: OFF
City Names: OFF
Crossings: OFF
Terrain: ON
Icons: OFF
Gold: OFF
Map Animations; OFF
Puppet Colours ON/OFF

Normal Players Preset
Nation Names: ON/OFF
City Names: OFF
Crossings: ON
Terrain: ON/OFF
Icons: ON/OFF
Gold: ON
Map Animations: ON
Puppet Colours: OFF

The final section of this, and you'll be a PRO at this game.

This is the menu, when you're in the middle of a game and you press 'Esc'

It contains
Resume
Save Game
Settings
Controls
Restart
and Quit

Resume will resume the game as it says.
Save Game will save the game as I've explained before, and will put it in the load game tab.
Settings will bring you to the normal settings in the menu.
Controls will tell you the controls, such as WASD, Zoom and Focus nation.
Restart will completely restart the match to when it began.
Quit will make you leave to the menu.

Extra option:
Save history log, after a game you can choose to save the history log in the menu, it'll only save IF you save the game to the load game tab, otherwise there is no point of saving a history log if well, it's not going to be-re accessed.

Here's some extra stuff if you want some useless info.

If you select a nation and press F on it, it'll focus on the nation. "focus" Not really focusing, just zooms into the capital.

If you want the rags to riches you can use this link/map from the steam workshop.
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=3364783728&searchtext=from+rags+to+riches

If you want jokepuller or whatever, let's just call him Joke, get an autoclicker and spam new nations on an empty canvas intill you get Joke.

PLEASE!

I do not know everything about this game, please correct me on anything, or tell me about something I missed.

It'd be heavily appreciated!

Hello!
I am will be working on how to make a flag outside of the game, but I need to first learn how to do it myself to understand it.

V2 - Changed the guide to fit with the new update (Version 4)