Nobody talks about your town level, and that's a mistake

About five weeks in, I finally bothered to look at the little number next to my town's name. It had been climbing the whole time without me paying it the slightest attention. That is your town level, and once I understood how it works I rather wished I had noticed it on day one. Here is the mechanism, plainly. Every proper town action earns you exactly one point of experience. Not gold, not energy - one point. By "action" the game means the hands-on running of your town: starting a production run and collecting it, recruiting a citizen, hiring a worker or training a specialist, buying a plot or clearing it, and building, upgrading, renovating or demolishing. Each one nudges the counter up by a single tick. Reading the handbook and answering the quizzes does not count toward this, by the way. That path pays you in gold instead. The level measures what your town does, not what you read - which, when you think about it, is exactly right. The bit worth committing to memory is the cost curve. You start at level 1. Reaching level 2 needs 100 actions. Level 3 needs another 200 on top of that. Level 4, another 300. The price goes up by a hundred at every step. So the rule in one line is: to climb to the next level you need your current level times one hundred actions. The early levels arrive quickly and feel encouraging; the later ones become a genuine long-haul project. I will be honest about why this took me so long to appreciate. It looks like a vanity number. There is no flashing reward when you tick over, nothing gets unlocked, no gate swings open. For a while I assumed it was pure decoration. But that is rather the point of it. A level cannot be bought, cannot be rushed, and cannot be farmed by some clever trick. It is simply an honest record of how many times you have turned the wheel. That makes it the one stat on your profile that cannot lie. Anyone can buy gold. Anyone can have a tidy-looking town on a good day. But a high level only ever comes from showing up, day after day, and doing the ordinary work. When I scout another player now, the level is the first thing I look at, because it tells me whether I am looking at someone who actually runs their place or someone who turned up yesterday. My only real advice is to stop chasing it and let it accrue. Play the loop - land, build, people, produce, collect, reinvest - and the level takes care of itself. If anything, knowing that every single action banks a point makes the grind feel less like a grind. That collect you almost could not be bothered with? One point. The little upgrade you keep putting off? One point. It all counts, and it all adds up quietly in the background while you get on with the actual game. So do not manage it and do not fret over it, but do glance at it now and then. It is the closest thing this game has to a record of your patience.