Mayors (previously called Castellans) are Heroes that have been appointed to a Royal position in the Town. Once appointed, they are no longer idle, and can not lead attacks until removed from the position. However, your mayor bestows numerous benefits on your city based on their stats and since there is no penalty for removing a hero from the position, it is highly recommended that your cities always have a mayor if there is an idle hero.
- Attack - When the city is under attack, the mayor will gather your city's troops to defend if (s)he is the hero in the city with the highest attack value. Otherwise, the hero with the highest Attack value will take a break from useless idling in the Feasting Hall and step out to defend the city. Regardless, a mayor with higher attack values will decrease training time for units.
- Politics - Your mayor's politics decreases the time it takes to build structures and is applied as a percent bonus of BASE resource production. Note that hurrying construction for free is based on a structure's BASE build time, so higher intelligence (or research into construction) does not allow you to hurry higher level buildings without guidelines.
- Intelligence - Your mayor's intelligence score decreases the time it takes to research technologies. Keeping a hero around for research may seem inefficient, but as this is the only known way of decreasing research times (and they double every level), it is not a bad idea to do so.
Higher values in these statistics confer greater benefits.
A general practice is to maintain three (3) or more heroes so that they can be specialized in Construction/Production, Research, and Attack. The hero with the highest Intelligence is promoted to Mayor just before beginning a new research project and immediately demoted with the re-promotion of the hero with the highest Politics. The benefit of the higher Intelligence bonus is conferred upon the initiation of the research project. The same tactic also works with the queuing of army build orders. As noted previously, it is not necessary to switch to a hero with a high Attack value prior to defending the city as the game mechanics will automatically choose the best hero for city defense.