How to Install Myth of Empires and Join a Server

Most survival games end their arms race at the point where somebody blows a hole in a wall. Myth of Empires keeps going, into siege engines, standing armies of recruited soldiers, and walls built at a scale that requires a guild rather than a person.

That is the pitch, and it is what separates this from the dozen other games that share its basic structure. You are not building a hut and defending it from a neighbour. You are building a fortification and expecting an organised assault against it, from people who spent last week making the machines that will knock it down. Listings collect on the game's hub.

What it is, plainly

An open-world survival sandbox set in an ancient China of the developer's own construction, built for large servers and long campaigns.

The base layer will be familiar to anyone who has played this genre. You gather, you craft up through tiers of material, you build somewhere to keep your things, and you tame horses to cover ground that is otherwise a very long walk.

Three things sit on top of that and give the game its shape.

Recruited soldiers. You do not defend a base alone. You raise troops, equip them from what you have made, and station them where they are needed. A base with a garrison is a genuinely different proposition from a base with a locked door, and the logistics of keeping soldiers armed is a real part of the mid-game.

Territory. Land is claimed rather than merely built on. A guild that holds ground holds it formally, and what a server permits a guild to claim is one of the most consequential settings on it.

Siege. The endgame is organised warfare between guilds, with weapons built for the purpose. This is not two players punching each other's foundations. It is a scheduled event that a group prepares for.

The gap in the internet's memory of this game

If you go looking for information about Myth of Empires, you will find a strange hole in the middle of its history — guides that stop, videos that were never followed up, forum threads that end abruptly.

The reason is that the game was pulled from Steam for a period following a legal complaint from another studio, and returned once the matter was resolved. Nothing about that affects how the game plays now. It does affect which sources are worth reading, because a great deal of what was written about it dates from before the interruption and was never updated afterwards.

Treat anything undated with suspicion, and prefer the game's own current material and recent reviews over older write-ups.

Installing it

It is a Steam purchase and installs through the Library like anything else. There is no second launcher and no separate account.

If Steam is unfamiliar, our installation guide covers making the account and locking it down before you own anything worth stealing.

Two things to do before you look for a server.

Check the recent reviews rather than the overall score. For any game with a complicated history, the last few dozen reviews are the only ones describing the version you would actually be installing.

And start a single-player or private world first. Survival games of this size expect you to know a hundred small things they never explain, and learning them alone is far pleasanter than learning them while a guild decides whether you are worth robbing. An hour is enough to stop being a liability.

Choosing a server is most of the decision

Everything about your experience is set before you connect, and the settings are visible in advance if you look.

Official or private. Official servers run at the developer's own settings, which means slow and unforgiving. Private servers are run by communities and change the game substantially, sometimes beyond recognition.

PvP or PvE. On a PvP server the siege content is the point and your walls will eventually be tested. On PvE the competition becomes about land and resources rather than about each other. Both are legitimate. Picking the wrong one wastes a month.

Rates. Gathering, crafting speed, experience, how fast things grow. This single number decides whether the game is a slow campaign or a busy fortnight. Neither version is the correct one; they are aimed at people with different amounts of free time.

Wipe policy. A server that never resets belongs permanently to whichever guild established itself first. One that resets constantly never lets anything become worth defending. Our piece on wipe schedules for solo players is written about Rust, and the reasoning transfers wholesale to any persistent survival server.

What the admin will intervene in. Land disputes, offline raiding, guild bullying, new players being farmed at spawn. Some servers police these actively and some regard them as content. Both are defensible policies. A server where nobody knows which one applies is the one to avoid.

Read a listing's description properly before committing, and read it sceptically. Our notes on what makes a server listing trustworthy go through the tells.

Connecting

There is no matchmaking. You open a server browser, choose a specific machine belonging to a specific person, and connect to it — the arrangement every game on this site shares and the one modern players most often have to unlearn.

The in-game browser is the usual starting point, and like every survival game's browser it hides more than you expect behind filters you did not consciously set. Widen everything before deciding the list is empty. Search by name if you already know where you are going, because scrolling is slow and server names in this genre are long and decorated and interchangeable.

Take the whole address when you are given one. The port is part of it, and a host running several worlds on one machine cannot give them all the same number. Games of this family also advertise a separate port that browsers use to query the server, which is why the number in a listing is not always the number a direct connection wants. Copy what you are given rather than assuming a default.

Save anything you like to favourites the first time you find it. You will not find it again by browsing.

The listings on this site are queried directly rather than repeated from whatever an owner typed into a control panel, so the player counts are measured instead of claimed.

Guilds, and the part that decides whether you enjoy this

A game built around organised siege warfare is a game where being unaffiliated is a poor plan.

Join a guild early. Not on your first evening — spend that learning the controls — but within the first week. A solo player on a PvP server in this genre spends most of their time rebuilding, and the parts of the game that are actually interesting are gated behind having eight people who will turn up at an agreed time.

Choose carefully. A guild that recruits anybody is a guild that will be infiltrated. A guild with an application process, a stated schedule and rules about who may demolish what is a guild that will still exist next month, and the piece we have on running a whitelist people actually apply to describes the same instinct from the other side.

Set permissions properly when you are the one recruiting. The most common disaster in this genre is not a raid. It is somebody you invited walking off with everything at four in the morning.

The first week, in order

New players in this genre reliably make the same mistake, which is to build a base on day one in the first flat spot they find.

Do not. The first few hours are for learning what the server actually is — how the rates feel in practice, where the useful terrain is, which parts of the map already belong to somebody, and whether the people in chat are worth knowing. A base sited without that information is a base sited by accident.

Gather, keep moving, and carry nothing you would mind losing. Ride out and look at the map properly; a horse turns a forty-minute walk into a survey. Note where the established guilds have already built, because the empty-looking valley next to a fortress is empty for a reason.

Then build somewhere deliberate, small, and expendable. Your first base is a place to learn from rather than a place to keep anything. Everybody's second base is better sited than their first.

Running one for your own group

Hosting is a reasonable answer here, and for a group of friends who want the siege content without the politics of a public server it is the best one.

The thing a private server needs above all is to stay switched on. A world that exists only while one person's computer is running is a world nobody else can visit on a weekday evening, which defeats the purpose of a persistent game. That is the argument for renting rather than self-hosting, and our piece on what game server hosting costs covers sizing it honestly.

Survival games are heavier hosts than their player counts suggest. They simulate the world whether or not anybody is in it, and structure counts climb steadily over the life of a server. Undersizing shows up as a world that degrades slowly over a month rather than as an outright failure, which is a much harder problem to notice in time.

Settle the rules before anybody lays a foundation. Rates, wipe policy, whether the group is playing together or against each other, and what you as admin will step in about. Those four conversations decide whether the server lasts a season or a fortnight.

Problems

Your base was flattened while you were asleep. Check whether the server has any offline protection, because many do not. This is the single most common reason people leave a survival PvP server, and it is a setting you could have read in advance.

Your soldiers do nothing useful. Equipment and positioning. Troops are only as good as what you gave them and where you put them.

Performance falls apart near a large fortification. Structure counts are expensive to render and more expensive to simulate. This is a characteristic of the genre rather than a fault in your machine.

You cannot find the server your friends are on. Filters first, spelling second. Then ask them for the address instead of the name.

The world feels empty. Large maps and modest populations produce that. Check the server's peak hours rather than judging it at three in the afternoon.

The neighbours

Conan Exiles is the closest relative in feel — building, thralls instead of recruited soldiers, and a long-established unofficial server scene with well-run communities.

ARK: Survival Evolved is the game that set the template this whole category follows, and it kept an enormous population doing it.

Valheim goes the other way entirely: small private servers, cooperative by default, and a much gentler curve. For a group of four rather than a guild of forty, it is the better recommendation.

And V Rising sits between the two, with castles worth breaking into and a developer still actively working on it.

Myth of Empires asks for more organisation than any of them. If you have the group, that is the reason to be here. If you do not, get the group first.

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JoinGG is a live directory of community game servers. Every listing is queried directly every fifteen minutes, so the player count you see was measured rather than reported by its owner, and each one carries a copyable connect address. Myth of Empires servers are listed here, and every game on the site has its own hub. Player counts across every game are on the statistics page.