At its core, Vox Imperium is a game of strategy. The goal of the game is to have the highest score when the game ends, typically one month after it begins.

Points are awarded according to the following:

• 1 point for every square of territory within your borders
• 1 point for every Outpost
• 2 points for every Settlement
• 5 points for every Town
• 10 points for every City

Since there is a limited amount of territory on the board, and within that only a certain amount of spaces are suitable for settlement, Vox Imperium is primarily a game of territorial capture, control, and defense.

Vox Imperium is a pulse based game. Every few minutes the game awards resources based on your production, re-calculates the score, advances building production and takes care of other upkeep. This means that your empire will run itself reasonably well even when you are not paying direct attention. Depending on the map settings, pulse length can vary between 20 seconds and 2 hours.

To improve your territory and expand, you will need to construct buildings to expand your borders, or raise armies to take these buildings from others. To do this, you will have to gather the five resources (Food, Wood, Metal, Relic, Gold) from the map. Each tile has an associated resource production table which determines what that tile produces. For example, forests produce the Wood resource, while hills produce the Metal resource.

Resources come in three qualities: Poor, Good, and Rare. Construction and upgrading specialist production buildings will refine higher quality resources from the surrounding territory. Higher quality resources are required to build better troops and construct advanced buildings. When it comes to producing resources, it is not the quantity of territory you control, but the quality of the land within.

Territorial defense is primarily accomplished via construction of Stockades, Forts, and Fortresses. These structures greatly expand your borders and will automatically attack any foreign units that stray within their range. The drawback is that they require scarce Relics to construct and maintain. Competition for the Relic resource is one of the main themes of the game.