Artefacts are powerful items crafted by the ancient tribe of Natars and they grant immense power to whoever own them.
Artefacts can be divided by their scope: village-scope (affect only the village where they are located) and account-scope (affect the whole account).
There are many types of artefact, which are explained in more detail later in this article. In most cases there are small (village-scope), large (account-scope) and unique (also account-scope) artefacts of the same type.
On regular servers the artefacts appear in the middle stage of the game and they are initially placed in special Natars villages.
There are two ways to get artefacts:
1. You can capture them with your hero. Follow the links to learn how to steal them from Natars or from other players. The artefact pickup limit was removed and the hero can now pickup artefacts without restrictions. You can capture an unlimited number of artefacts.
2. You can conquer the village that holds the artefact.
Even if you own more artefacts, only a maximum of 3 are active out of which only 1 can be account-scope. In case there are 2 account-scope artefacts amongst your 3 oldest artefacts the next village-scope artefact will become active. If player has 3 village-scope artefacts and conquers a fourth, which is account-scope, the third (most recent) village-scope artefact gets deactivated, and instead of it the fourth artefact will get active after the countdown.
Village-scope artefact effect always overrules the effect of account-scope artefact. Therefore those effects do not stack.
On Birthday Special servers (like Path to Pandora), there are no artefacts, but the regions hold ancient powers with the same effects. Click the following link to learn more about regions and their powers.
The buildings are more durable against attacks by catapults and rams. Does not count for the Wonder of the World, but the account wide and unique type count for all other buildings in the Wonder of the Wold village.
The troops travel faster.
The Scouts, Equites Legati and Pathfinders are better at spying, and defending against spy attacks. All scouts in the village/account as well as all scouts sent for spying from this village/account are affected. Additional you can see the type of troops attacking you at your rally point, but not the amount of troops.
The troops consume less crop.
The troops are trained faster.
Grants ability to build great warehouse or great granary.
Artefact raises cranny capacity and additionally causes enemy catapult attacks to fire randomly (targeting a resource field any resource field may get hit, targeting a building any building may get hit). World Wonder can always be targeted and hit.
This artefact changes its effect every 24 hours, and can get any of the effects of other artefacts, except the ability to build great warehouse or great granary. Also the effect scope is randomly decided between account and village wide every 24 hours.
Normal artefact of this type may get also negative effects, for example troops might get slower, or they might consume more food. Unique artefact of this type may only get positive effects, but the magnitude of the effect is still random. It might grant speed increase of factor of 1.01 for example.