Resettlement and Culture: The Complete MergeCiv Prestige Guide
Resettlement is where MergeCiv stops being a farm and starts being a strategy game. Your first reset feels like losing everything; by your fifth, every run is a deliberate Culture harvest. This guide covers when to pull the trigger, exactly what you keep, how the Culture math works under the hood, and what to buy after each reset. Still pre-prestige? The beginner's guide covers the fundamentals first.
Unlocking Resettlement
Resettlement is a Standard upgrade costing 5,000 Food, 5,000 Wood, and 5,000 Ore, and it requires the 6x6 grid expansion (Claim Surrounding Land) first. Buying it opens the Empire panel, where a button reads "Resettle for X Culture" — the X is exactly what cashing out is worth, and it grows with your civilization.
Do not press it the moment it lights up. The entire economy of prestige is built around the fact that Culture scales superlinearly with population. A run that ends too early is a run that mostly wasted its setup time.
What resets, what persists
Know this list cold before your first reset, because it dictates what's worth investing in late in a run.
Resets
- Your grid, back to 3x3 (plus any Ritual of Space bonus you've assigned).
- All resources — including your Gold balance.
- Standard upgrades and Scalable upgrades (with the exception of the Citadel and T5 research).
Persists
- Culture Points and every Legacy upgrade you've bought with them.
- Gold upgrades — Taxes, Grain Silos, Secure Vaults and friends survive even though your Gold itself doesn't.
- Knowledge, past societies, artifacts, and Magic Crystals (crystals persist through Resettlement and Ascension).
The sleeper mechanic here is Tribute. Every Resettlement records a "past society" that generates passive Gold forever, equal to 0.001 × (your highest tile tier at reset)³ per second. Cubic scaling means one more merge on your best tile before resetting is a permanent raise: a tier 8 tile pays roughly 50% more Tribute than a tier 7. Always squeeze that last merge in before you push the button.
How Culture Points actually scale
Base Culture on a Resettlement is max(2×P, P + P²/5), rounded down, where P is your Villager population. Population is the sum of 2^(tier−1) across the Villager chain: a Tier 1 Villager counts 1, a House 2, a Village 4, a Castle 8.
The max() matters early: at very low population the flat 2-per-pop side wins, which is why tiny runs feel underwhelming. Past roughly five population, the quadratic term takes over and every additional point pays more than the last.
Worked example
End a run at population 10 and you bank max(20, 10 + 100/5) = 30 Culture. Grind that same run to population 20 — twice the people — and you get max(40, 20 + 400/5) = 100 Culture, more than triple. Push to 30 and it's 210. Doubling your patience roughly triples your payout. That is the single most important number in this article.
Growing P is the real game, and it isn't free. Each new Villager costs 100 × 2^population Food — the price doubles with every population point — and every point of population eats 1 Food per second. Merging up the chain (two Villagers into a House, and so on) doesn't change your population total, but it frees grid space and higher tiers work more land: a Castle works all 8 neighbors at a flat 4× yield, which is what funds the food bill in the first place. For when to merge Villagers versus letting them keep working, see the merge strategy guide.
Multipliers stack on the base: Cultural Renown adds +50% per level across four levels, the Ritual of Culture multiplies by 1.5 per level, and the Historic Compendium artifact adds ×1.2 per level. The Accelerating Timepiece artifact grows with hours played this run, quietly rewarding marathon runs even more.
Timing your first Resettlement
The published advice is "wait until growth stalls," and it's correct but vague. Here's a concrete target: your first reset should fund the full early Legacy kit — Fellow Pilgrims (3 Culture), Craftsmanship (5), Animal Husbandry (10), Chief's Order (15), and Divine Mandate (25). That's 58 Culture total, which means roughly population 15 (60 Culture base). Reset at population 8 instead and you walk away with about 20 — not even half the kit, for most of the same setup work.
Practically, that first run means unlocking Houses (1,000 Wood + 500 Ore) and Village (2,500 Wood + 250 Ore) to compress your Villagers, because raw spawning gets brutally expensive fast. Don't sweat the Castle on run one — at 100,000 Food + 20,000 Ore it's a goal for later loops. And remember Tribute: before resetting, merge your highest-tier tile one more time.
Legacy upgrade priorities after each reset
Legacy upgrades are bought with Culture and persist forever. My buy order, refined over many loops:
- Fellow Pilgrims (3/10/25/50) — starting Villagers mean your fresh 3x3 produces from the first second.
- Craftsmanship (5) — unlocks the Workshop; worked Workshops make the Scout bring Stockpiles, fixing early storage.
- Animal Husbandry (10/25/50) — halves the Auto-Scout interval per level. Compounds with everything.
- Chief's Order (15) — the Apprentice starts unlocked, skipping its 1,000 Food + 200 Ore cost every single run.
- Divine Mandate (25) — Auto-Scout from the first second. Paired with Chief's Order, your run automates itself immediately.
- Cultural Renown (10/30/60/100) — +50% Culture per level. Buy levels as soon as they're affordable; they pay for themselves within a reset or two.
- Traditions (Agricultural/Forestry/Mining, 5/50/500/5000) — passive +1/+10/+100/+1000 per second income that flows even with no tiles worked. The cheap tiers are great; the expensive tiers can wait.
Honorable mention: Reinforced Stockpiles (10–200) raises the compounding per-tier bonus on every tile by 5% a level, which quietly lifts both production and storage all run. Border Expansion at 10,000 Culture and Plans for Citadel at 1,000,000 are your long-term sinks — aspirational until they suddenly aren't.
Pacing across multiple Resettlements
Loops two through five are about velocity. Each reset starts faster than the last thanks to your Legacy kit, and your stacked past societies pay growing Tribute — which funds Gold upgrades like Taxes (+1 Gold/sec per population per level) and Grain Silos, all of which survive every Resettlement. The rhythm: automate instantly, compress Villagers upward, reset when the "Resettle for X Culture" number stops climbing at a pace you're happy with. If a session of play raises X by less than a fresh run's snowball would, you're past the efficient stopping point.
The pivot comes at 200 Culture: Plans for Mage Tower opens the road to Mana, spells, and the game's second reset layer. Once you're consistently banking triple-digit Culture per loop, start saving for it and read the Ascension and Magic guide before you commit. Until then, finish Cultural Renown — all four levels triple your Culture income, and everything downstream of prestige gets cheaper in real-world hours. For smaller optimizations between resets, the tips page is worth a skim.