The Prestige Cycle, Cosmetics Earned, Never Bought
On the choice waiting at Rank C, and the trophy case that survives it.
The choice at the summit
A citizen who reaches Rank C is offered a choice as old as the Republic itself: rest on your laurels, or begin again. Those who choose to begin again earn a prestige, and the world advances into a new era of Roman history. Eight eras await, from the Early Republic of 509 BC to the Byzantine Ascendancy of 600 AD — the whole lifespan of Rome, walked one climb at a time.
Each era is not a palette swap. The mines grow richer, the enemies sharpen, the sell multipliers steepen, and the world itself takes on the color of the age, from Republic silver to Imperial blood to Byzantine gold. The second climb is a different empire.
What resets
We will not soften this: prestige is a real reset. Rank returns to I, currency balances return to their starting amounts, and equipment returns to base — you re-forge your arsenal from ore up. The fifty-chapter story resets with you, which is not a loss but a door: new faction loyalties, new choices, new endings, and events that only surface in later ascensions.
A reset with no weight would be a gesture. The climb has to mean something for the era badge at the end of it to mean something.
What persists
The golden rule of the cycle: nothing earned through play is ever lost. Your cosmetics — trails, hats, kill effects — are permanent and travel with you across every era. So do your achievement progress and the badges of every era you have lived through, each one remains equippable after the reset that followed it.
The result is a trophy case that grows with every empire you build and abandon. A player who has walked all eight eras wears that history; you can read it in the badges they carry before they swing a pickaxe.
Earned, never bought
The rarest of these cosmetics are purchased with Auctoritas, the one coin of the realm that cannot be bought: it accrues from enchanting, disenchanting, and the long grind of prestige itself, and it is untradeable. It is spent on the cosmetics and unlocks that money cannot reach.
Tags tell the same story from another angle. Earned through rank, prestige, achievement, and season, they signal where you have been, not what you have bought. That is the whole design of the cycle in a sentence: the climb resets, the record of the climb never does, and no wallet can write that record for you.