- "The sun shall shine on no land that is not our own."
- — Herodotus, classical Greek author, The Persian Wars
Empire is the second 
Civic Research available at the Library. It is required to research the third Civic technology, Feudalism.
In addition to increasing the city limit by + 1 and expanding National Borders (as with other civic research), researching Empire unlocks the Religion upgrade at the Temple and the Oath of Fealty attrition technology upgrade at the Tower.
The default cost is 160 
Food while the default research time 18.3 seconds (275 frames).
Quick reference card
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Background
Empire refers to emergence of the geographically extensive group of states and peoples united and ruled either by a monarch or oligarchy during the Classical Age, primarily through the use of coercive force. The term itself comes from the term imperio coined by the Romans with the meaning of "power" or "dominion".
The difference between imperio and regno or "kingdom" is a very Italian - and Western - distinction. A regnum was understood to refer to a kingdom, which would have been administered by its own native rulers, whereas an imperio would have been larger and more cosmopolitan, consisting of various communities, cultures and denominations which did not always supply the members of those that exercised hegemonic power within the empire itself.
Ostensibly, the term "empire" did not emerge until the appearance of the Romans, who applied this term to the vast reach of area the Romans had conquered and administered then and previously. Even so, the Romans weren't the first to have created an empire, nor was theirs the largest in their time (the Han empire was vastly superior in size and manpower alone). Prior to the existence of the Roman empire, similar polities welded together through the use of military force had existed such as the Qin and Maurya dynasties (the first "true" empires in the Roman sense) in Asia, as well as various other smaller polities, such as the Macedonian Empire (founded by the Greek Argead dynasty), and the Egyptian, Chaldean, Median, Achaemenid, Hittite and Assyrian empires of the Middle East.
| Civic Research | ||
| Preceded by: City State |
{{{current}}} | Succeeded by: Feudalism |