Beginner
Nova Roma Beginner's Guide
Getting started with Nova Roma — basic town setup, crop farming, citizen tiers, and the production chains that power your Roman settlement.
Beginner
Getting started with Nova Roma — basic town setup, crop farming, citizen tiers, and the production chains that power your Roman settlement.
New to Nova Roma? This guide covers the fundamentals: setting up your first town, farming basics, citizen management, and the production chains that keep everything running. Nova Roma is a Roman city builder from Lion Shield Studios, and your goal is to grow a small settlement into a thriving city-state by balancing production, trade routes, laws, and expansion.
The first hour matters more than it looks. Nova Roma will happily let you place buildings anywhere, in any order, and it will not warn you when a decision quietly caps your growth two hours later. The four systems below — placement freedom, citizen tiers, crop chains, and multi-town specialisation — are the ones worth understanding before you start expanding.
You freely place houses, shops, farms, and decorations anywhere on the map. Buildings can be rotated, offset, and arranged organically, and the voxel art style is built to support that level of detailed placement and customization. The upside is genuine creative control; the downside is that nothing stops you from producing a city that looks charming and functions terribly.
Citizens progress from Workers, who provide basic labor, to Artisans, who are skilled craftsmen, to Bourgeoisie, the elite wealthy class. Each tier unlocks new buildings, has different needs, and pays different taxes. You enable tier upgrades by satisfying citizen needs — so growth in Nova Roma is less about adding population and more about servicing the population you already have.
Farms grow 13 different crop types across 4 tiers of farm upgrades, and crops feed production buildings. The Bakery, for example, needs Corn and Wheat to produce Bread. Plan your crop ratios based on which buildings you actually want to operate rather than growing a little of everything.
You can develop multiple towns connected by trade routes and specialise each for a different purpose — farming towns such as Fontebrac, tourism towns such as Rocemarée, and your main administrative hub at Belvau. Specialisation is not cosmetic; it decides which production chains are worth building where.
| Step | Action | Why It Comes Here |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Place your Town Hall | It is your administrative center — it unlocks basic services and acts as the hub for citizen registration. Place it centrally in your intended main town area. |
| 2 | Build Worker Houses | Your starting families need basic housing, and Workers staff your farms and basic production. Place houses where market stalls, food stalls and other services can eventually reach them. |
| 3 | Start farming | Place Farms and grow Corn, Wheat and Grapes first. These feed your initial production buildings — the Bakery and the Winery. |
| 4 | Build Market Stalls and Food Stalls | Citizens need access to food and goods. Stalls distribute what your farms and production buildings create, so place them within walking distance of residential areas. |
| Tier | Role | Staffs |
|---|---|---|
| Worker | Foundation workforce | Farms, basic production, warehouses |
| Artisan | Skilled labor | Bakeries, Wineries, Hatteries, Pubs |
| Bourgeoisie | Elite class | Advanced buildings, highest tax income |
Housing upgrades: Houses upgrade through the same three tiers alongside your citizens — Worker Houses, Artisan Houses, and Bourgeoisie Houses. Each upgrade requires meeting the specific needs of the current tier first.
Labor priority: Nova Roma runs a labor priority system where different tiers are needed for different jobs. Be careful when upgrading — an upgraded Artisan may leave a Worker job slot empty. Balance your tier ratios so essential services stay staffed.
Farming is the economic foundation of your town. Crops are grown on farms and consumed by production buildings, and each farm tier unlocks new crop types.
| Farm Tier | Crops | What It Powers |
|---|---|---|
| Tier 1 | Grapes, Corn, Wheat | Bakery (Corn + Wheat) and Winery (Grapes) |
| Tier 2 | Beeswax, Cotton, Rose | Hattery — your first apparel building |
| Tier 3 | Hops, Potatoes, Tomatoes, Lettuce | Pub, a leisure building. Farm surface area doubles at this tier |
| Tier 4 | Pumpkin, Lavender, Medicinal Herbs | City-rank buildings: Apothecary, Perfumer, Cathedral, Restaurant |
Key resource: Hops have the highest demand of any crop. Plan for significantly more Hops fields once you unlock Tier 3, or the Pub and Apothecary will stall waiting on supply.
Use warehouses for supply chains. Warehouses have a transport range, and production buildings within range automatically access stored crops and goods. Place them between farms and processing buildings.
Give each town a job. The default map has Belvau as the main hub, Fontebrac for agriculture, and Rocemarée for tourism. Trade routes connect them, so duplicate economies are wasted effort.
Research unlocks progress. The Research Center unlocks new buildings, decorations and technologies. Assign Research Workers to advance through tiers — higher-tier buildings and citizen upgrades depend on it.
Beauty matters. Tourism income scales with your town's appeal. Hotels, scenic routes and attractions such as the Lighthouse, Art Atelier, Monumental Ruins and Obelisk draw visitors for late-game income.
Plan crop ratios. Buildings consume crops at different rates. The Pub requires 75 Hops against 25 of each other crop — grow roughly three times more Hops than anything else feeding it.
Keep stalls near homes. Market Stalls and Food Stalls only help citizens who can reach them, so service placement is a housing decision as much as an economic one.
The full Nova Roma wiki covers every building's production role, district layout rules, crop and farming input requirements, citizen management, research order and trade scaling.
This is the main-site summary of the Nova Roma beginner's guide: core concepts, opening build order, citizen tiers, farming tiers, and the tips new players most often need in their first town.
For per-building input requirements and district planning rules, open the sub-site. If it saves your first city, you can support the project on UniFans — link in the footer.
Updated: July 2026
Developer: Lion Shield Studios
Covers: town setup, citizens, crops, warehouses
Sub-site: novaroma.gguidehub.com/beginners
Last updated: July 2026