Mandate Order Tips and Tricks for New Rulers

The useful Mandate Order tips and tricks are the ones that stop a city quietly stalling. Most early problems are not combat losses; they are population that never arrives, a production chain with a missing link, or goods that pile up because nobody can move them. This page collects the habits that keep a Warring States settlement growing, drawn from the community walkthroughs and the official store material.

The Four-Tent Population Rule

Population growth in Mandate Order is gated by housing, not by time. A new-player tips video walks through the maths: crews arrive in batches of up to four, each crew is five people, and each tent houses five, so a full batch of four crews needs four free tents. If you do not have room for all of them, you cannot accept any, and the city stalls. Public approval decides how many crews are due, which means a well-run city needs more housing capacity precisely when it is doing well.

Item	Value or rule
Tent capacity	Five people per tent
Crew size	Five people
Crews per arrival	Up to four at once
Per-tent batch need	Four tents for a full arrival
Driver of crew count	Public approval, which rises and falls over time

• Keep four tents free at all times rather than building housing only when it is full.
• Watch public approval to see how many crews are coming next month.
• Do not demolish housing for industry; relocate or expand elsewhere.
• Scale housing with growth, because more approval means bigger arrivals.

Plan Space Before You Build

• Sketch the housing line early, because houses are placed in rows and moving a whole residential block later is slower than planning it.
• Leave room for an industrial district, since workshops and processing buildings want to sit together.
• Lay extra roads first so buildings snap into place and transport routes exist before they are needed.
• Relocate instead of demolishing. The tips video highlights that moving a building rebuilds it but shows you its footprint, which is far better than a demolition that loses the structure.
• Keep production near its raw materials, so carts spend less time travelling and more time delivering.

Check Craft Inputs and Diagnose Shortages

Most stalled cities are missing a link in a chain, not a resource on the map.

Symptom	What to check first
Farm exists but food is low	Spring cultivation, summer maintain or fallow, water, fertiliser and autumn harvest progress
Well exists but water is short	Whether the well is staffed, and the water at the well rather than in storage
Material exists but a building says it is missing	Producer, worker assignment, local inventory, valid destination and transport route
Field quality is falling	Whether the summer season should be used for fallow recovery
Goods are not moving	Staffed buildings, Post Station cart support and road connectivity

• Read the recipe before placing the producer, so you build the intermediate step too.
• Diagnose in order: production, workers, storage, transport, season, military demand.
• Do not treat the visible shortage as the cause; the warning is usually the last stage of a longer chain.
• Remember the Post Station only helps by giving workers carts, and does not haul goods itself.