Ascension, Magic, Artifacts and Rituals: MergeCiv Endgame Guide
Resettlement teaches you to let go of your grid. Ascension asks for everything else — your Gold, your Gold upgrades, even your unspent Culture Points — and pays you back with the Magic system: Mana, three spells, 24 collectible artifacts, and nine Resonance Rituals that permanently change how every future run plays. This article assumes you know the basics from the beginner's guide and have a few Resettlements behind you. If Culture is still new to you, read the prestige guide first, because Ascension sits on top of that loop, not beside it.
The Road to Ascension
The path starts in the Legacy tree. Plans for Mage Tower costs just 200 Culture and unlocks the Mage Tower research itself. The Magic Book is separate — it opens up once you have unlocked Resettlement, and the Mage Tower requires it, so you will normally have Magic Book levels before the Plans are worth buying. The Tower then takes ten construction levels at 50,000 Ore plus 100 Mana each. Level 10 reads "Ascension Unlocked," and from then on you can ascend whenever you choose.
Read the reset list before you do, because it is harsher than Resettlement. Ascending wipes the grid and all tiles; your Mana, Wood, Ore, Food and Gold; all T1–T3 upgrades; your Gold upgrades; and your Culture Points. You keep Magic Crystals, Ritual Assignments, Artifacts and Ascended Upgrades (T4+), and Knowledge persists as well. Two practical consequences. First, unspent Culture is on the reset list, so spend it down before you commit. Second, your Tier 1–3 Gold upgrades go with them, so the early economy is rebuilt from scratch each cycle — though it rebuilds faster every time. Reinvestment is the happy exception: it is a Tier 4 upgrade, so it rides through Ascension with the rest of your Ascended tier. The Mana Monolith is the notable exception on the magic side: it persists through Ascension.
Mana: Generation, Caps and the MANA Test
Mana comes from the Apprentice. By default it only generates while the Apprentice is resting, which puts auto-merging and Mana income in direct competition. The MANA Test upgrade (5,000 Gold + 100 Mana) fixes that permanently: the Apprentice generates Mana while working and the Rest button disappears. It is the single best quality-of-life purchase in the magic layer — buy it before anything else here.
Your Mana cap is your Magic Book level (1,000 Gold per level, up to 100) plus 100 per Magic Crystal, plus 100 per level of the Glistening Gem artifact once appraised. Generation scales through Charge Up (×1.3 per level compounding, ten levels — nearly ×14 at the cap), Capacitative Efficiency (×1.01 per level, a hundred levels of slow compounding) and the Mana Monolith (×2 per level across ten levels, starting at 100,000 Ore and multiplying ×10 each level). The Monolith is brutally expensive and worth every nugget precisely because it survives Ascension. Two artifacts feed the pool too: Cracked Orb adds +1 Mana per second per level, and Stone of Worship adds Mana scaled by your population.
Three Spells, Three Jobs
Magical Upheaval (100 Mana to cast; unlocked for 6,000 Gold + 100 Mana) destroys any tile. It is your deadlock breaker when the board fills with unmergeable leftovers. Pick up Conservation of Magic alongside it: refunding 1 Mana per theoretical merge inside the destroyed tile makes clearing a high-tier mistake nearly free.
Infused Harvest (100 Mana; unlock 20,000 Gold + 500 Mana) harvests a tile with a tier-based multiplier — the tool for converting a tall tile into an instant resource spike when you are a few thousand short of an upgrade. The Infused Jerky artifact raises both its yield and its cost ×1.3 per level, so it changes the spell's scale, not its efficiency.
Fission (2,000 Mana; unlock 100,000 Gold + 2,000 Mana) takes one tile of tier 2 or higher, drops it a tier in place, and puts a second tile of the same type and tier into a free cell. Be clear about what that is and isn't: two tiles one tier down are worth exactly what the original was, so Fission never creates value — splitting a tile and merging it straight back leaves you 2,000 Mana poorer and nothing else. What it buys is shape. It turns one tall tile into a matched pair at the tier below, which is the only way to produce a partner on demand when you need two of something and the board will not give you the second. It needs an empty cell to put the copy in. Note that the unlock costs the same 2,000 Mana as a cast, so if you can afford to unlock it, your cap already covers casting it.
Magic Crystals: The Currency That Matters
Crystals are the point of the whole layer. Each one persists through Resettlement and Ascension, adds +100 to your Mana cap, and is the only currency Resonance Rituals accept.
You earn them through crystal charge. The charge goal for crystal n in a run is 100 × n²: 100 for the first, 400 for the second, 900 for the third (the Crystal Infuser artifact trims the goal ×0.9 per level). There are two ways to add charge, and they convert at exactly the same rate: manual infusion for crystal n costs 100 × n Mana and grants 10 × n charge, while the Mana Syphon upgrade turns overflow Mana into charge at one-tenth value. Either way, ten Mana becomes one charge, and the permanent Crystals feather upgrade multiplies the charge from both sources by +5% per level.
Worked Example: Crystal Number Three
Your third crystal needs 900 charge — 9,000 Mana however you deliver it. Manual infusions at this stage cost 300 Mana for 30 charge apiece, so that's thirty deliberate casts. Or buy Mana Syphon, keep your Mana pinned at cap, and let every point of overflow drip into the crystal while you play. Same math, zero clicks. Syphon first; infuse only when you're impatient. Ascending claims whatever crystals you've finished charging.
Artifacts Worth Your Gold
Artifacts cost Gold: 1,000,000 for the first purchase this ascension, ×1.3 for each one after. The counter resets when you ascend, so every cycle starts with another million-Gold artifact on the shelf — budget for a few pulls per cycle once Tribute income matures. Drop rates run Common 60.4%, Uncommon 27.5%, Rare 10%, Epic 2%, Legendary 0.1%, across a pool of 24 artifacts. Duplicates aren't wasted: they grant XP, and level costs follow 1, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21.
One thing to get straight, because the two appraisal upgrades are easy to confuse. Buying artifacts at all requires the Department of Magical Appraisals (100M Wood + 100M Ore), and owning it appraises everything you pull — so once you can buy artifacts, their effects are live immediately. Detect Magic (300 Knowledge, ×10 per level, max 6) is the other route to reading an artifact, level by rarity rank; it matters for artifacts you hold without the Department, not for the ones you are buying with Gold. You do not need to raise Detect Magic before spending on pulls.
My priorities: Golem (×1.2 Food, Wood and Ore generation per level) is the best general pull in the pool. Mana Multiplier (×1.2 Mana per level) and Crystal Infuser accelerate crystal income, which compounds into rituals. Golden Compass adds +1 scout quality per level, raising the tier ceiling on everything the Scout brings in. For the prestige loop, Historic Compendium (×1.2 Culture per level) and Golden Crown (×1.3 Tribute per level) are the long-game picks.
Choosing Your Resonance Rituals
There are exactly nine rituals, presented as tarot-style flip cards. Crystals can be unassigned and rituals apply instantly, so nothing here is a permanent mistake — but crystal income is slow, so order still matters.
Ritual of Space (1 crystal, +1 grid size, max one assignment) is the undisputed first pick; an extra row and column is value in literally every other system. After that, buy back your automation: Assistance Ritual (3 crystals, then 6) keeps the Apprentice and Apprentice Control through Ascension, Scouting Ritual (5) keeps Auto-Scout, and Ritual of Intellect (2/5/10) keeps the Smart, Genius and Space Conscious Apprentice tiers. Without these, every ascension starts with you hand-merging a 3×3 like it's day one.
From there it depends on your loop. Ritual of Quality (1/5/25/125…, max 10) makes the Scout spawn tiers 1 through level+1, which quietly speeds up everything; Ritual of Culture (1/2/4/8…, ×1.5 Culture per level) is the pick if you resettle often. Bureaucratic Ritual (2/25/50) auto-buys T1–T3 upgrades, Ancient Grimoire (2) starts runs at Magic Book level 100, and Ritual of Capacity (40/200/1000, ×10 Food/Wood/Ore storage) is a deep-endgame sink for when crystals arrive in dozens.
Ascension and Resettlement: One Loop, Two Gears
Post-ascension you're on a near-empty grid, but Resettlement itself is unchanged: 5,000 each of Food, Wood and Ore plus the 6×6 expansion, then resettle whenever growth stalls. Culture still scales quadratically with population, and your Ritual of Culture levels and Historic Compendium now multiply every payout. The two layers form one loop: resettle for Culture and Tribute, convert Gold into artifacts, charge crystals, ascend, assign rituals, repeat — faster every cycle.
Two interactions deserve respect. Reinvestment, the Gold upgrade that multiplies all resource yields ×1.1 per level (up to 20 levels, roughly 6.7× at cap), only unlocks after Ascension — and being Tier 4, it then persists through both Resettlement and Ascension. Levels bought into it are kept, so it is one of the few Gold purchases that is never wasted late in a cycle. And Knowledge survives both layers, which makes Citadel research the most permanent investment in the game; the underground and Citadel guide covers where that road leads. For day-to-day pacing across all of this, the tips page has the routine.
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