The Wardenfall Player's Guide

Start Here¶

Wardenfall is a turn-based strategy game played in a shared world. You run one barony. So does everyone else. You have a limited number of turns each day, and the game is about what you spend them on.

There is no single win condition. There is a score, a ranking, and about a dozen systems that feed each other. This guide covers all of them. If you read nothing else, read the next four paragraphs.

The one thing new players miss¶

You cannot buy a Hero. Heroes are promoted soldiers.

Every soldier you own carries a veteran rank. Soldiers who survive battles get promoted. When one reaches the top rank — ★★★★★, Five-Medal — that soldier stops being a soldier and becomes a Hero recruit waiting on your Heroes page. You give them a name and a class, and they are yours.

This matters more than anything else in the game, because Heroes are the gate on most of it. Delves, the Arena, duels, siege assaults, ascension, spellcasting and heists all need a Hero. A barony with no Hero can buy land and trade goods, and that is close to the whole of it.

So the first goal of a new barony is simple: buy soldiers, send them to fight, and keep fighting until one of them is promoted five times. Raids are the normal way to do this. The last promotion step is deliberately rare, so this takes time — it is meant to. Every established player in the world went through it.

Your first week¶

1. Buy land. Regions produce your income and set your population. Coastal and River regions are the safest opening.
2. Set your tax rate. Higher tax means more gold and less popular support. Support is not cosmetic — it drives income.
3. Buy soldiers, and buy food to feed them. An army you cannot feed will starve.
4. Recruit scouts and send them out. Scouts find raid sites. No scouting, no raiding.
5. Raid. Start with the easiest sites you have found. Raids pay gold, materials and loot, and — more importantly — they promote your soldiers.
6. Raise a Treasury and a Granary. They protect banked gold and food from raids and from spoilage.
7. Keep raiding. Watch your army's rank breakdown. When your first ★★★★★ appears, your first Hero is one page load away.

How the game is shaped¶

Three loops run at different speeds, and they feed each other.

The day pays for the turn. The turn feeds the campaign. The campaign unlocks buildings and Heroes that make the day and the turn worth more. If you are ever unsure what to do, the answer is almost always "spend your turns on raids, and put the proceeds into the next building tier."

Reading this guide¶

Sections are ordered so that each one only relies on what came before it. If you are new, read in order and stop when you reach something you have not unlocked yet. If you are established, the section list is your index.

Everything in this guide was read out of the game's own configuration. Where a number appears, that is the number the server uses.

The Daily Cycle, Turns and Your Resources¶

Wardenfall runs on a daily cycle. Once per day your barony collects its income, pays its upkeep, grows (or starves), and gets a fresh set of turns. Turns are the scarcest thing you own: raids, delves, sieges, holds and most rites all cost them, and the only way to get more is the daily cycle plus a short list of extras. Everything in this section is what the cycle gives you and what it takes away.

When the day turns over¶

The cycle boundary is midnight US Eastern (EST or EDT, whichever is in force). The countdown in the header of every game page shows the time remaining. The header also shows the realm's day number, counted from the day the first barony was raised.

There is no scheduler. Your reset is applied the first time you load a game page after the boundary. If you go to bed at 11pm Eastern and come back at 9am, your reset happens at 9am and covers the day you missed. If you skip a whole day, you get one cycle when you return, not two. Nothing accrues while you are away.

The reset can only fire once per cycle. Two browser tabs opening at the same moment cannot pay you twice.

What the reset does, in order¶

That last step matters. Positive daily income goes into your vault up to its capacity before any of it reaches your loose gold, so earnings are safe from theft by default. You withdraw to spend, or let a purchase draw the reserve for you. A deficit day works the other way: it drains loose funds and pulls from the Granary.

Turns¶

You get 15 turns per day as a base. The reset sets the counter rather than adding to it, so unspent turns do not carry over. Spend them or lose them.

Your allotment is 15 plus every permanent and temporary bonus you hold:

Turns granted above your maximum do not survive the reset. The reset sets the counter, so a courier ride or a Decree read late at night is wasted. The Stable refuses to send a courier inside the last 30 minutes before the boundary and tells you why. Nothing stops you reading a Decree in that window, so watch the clock yourself.

Crossroads dilemmas are not a turn source. One choice in the deck — excavating a find — costs a turn; none of them pay one.

What a turn buys¶

The bench only exists once you have raised the Undercroft to its final tier; without it every hero you own is in your party.

Activity tokens let you skip the turn cost entirely. A Raid Token covers one raid, a Delve Token one delve, a Siege Token one siege node battle. They drop from wins: 2% of raid wins, 6% of delve wins, 25% of siege wins, and the token that drops is a random one of the three rather than the one you were doing. The Roaming Trader also carries exactly one per visit, at 6,000 gold.

What you start with¶

The single Technology region is deliberate. Tech Level can never exceed the number of Technology regions you own, so that one region is what carries you to Tech Level 1, and Tech Level 1 is what opens scouting.

Gold¶

Gold comes from two places: your land, and your people.

Your Tech Level multiplies region gold output by 2% per level. Tax revenue is added after that multiplier, so tech does not boost taxes.

Tax revenue is your population multiplied by your tax rate as a percentage. 500 people at 20% pay 100 gold a day. Raising the rate raises the take and costs you popular support, on this schedule:

Above 50% the penalty deepens by 3 per 10 points, so a punitive rate is a real trade rather than a free upgrade. Your tax rate is set on the Empire page and takes effect at the next cycle.

If your gold goes negative for the cycle, two things happen: you lose your smallest non-Waste region, and popular support drops by 5. Your gold is then floored at zero. There is no debt in Wardenfall, only land loss.

Treasury interest¶

A Treasury pays interest each cycle on loose gold up to the tier's capacity, and a higher rate on banked gold. The combined payout is capped at 25,000 gold per cycle regardless of tier. Interest counts as part of the day's income, so it fills the Treasury up to its capacity first and only the overflow reaches your loose gold.

The size tax¶

Passive income does not scale forever. Your productive net worth is your region count valued at the game's base land prices — not the fluctuating market price — and it is measured against the median of the realm's active baronies. The ratio is your size factor. At or below 4× the median you are fully protected and pay nothing. Above it, your net passive income is throttled by a super-linear tax, so the largest baronies keep a shrinking share of every extra region. The throttle never drives your net income below zero, and it only touches passive income. Raids, sieges, contracts, events and quests are untouched.

This is the reason the endgame is active. Once you are large, another Coastal region is worth much less than another raid.

Food¶

Only River regions grow food: 30 per River per day, multiplied by your Tech Level bonus and then by your Granary tier bonus. On top of that, each cycle has a 30% chance of a fishermen's haul worth 10 food per River region.

Consumption is simple and relentless. Your population eats 0.1 food per person per day. Your army eats too, and it eats wherever it is standing.

Army upkeep¶

Troops away from home still cost you. Soldiers out on a raid, committed at a siege, garrisoning a contested hold, or marching in a column to challenge one are all charged full gold and food at the reset. Parking an army somewhere quiet does not make it free. The daily projection on your dashboard counts them the same way the charge does, so what you are shown is what you pay.

Three things reduce army gold upkeep, and they stack: a Hero with the Quartermaster trait in your party, relics that carry wage relief, and the Quartermasters' Guild at Allied standing (−15%). Combined relief cannot take the multiplier below 0.2, so troops are never free.

Population¶

Population grows by 15 per Urban region per day. If you finished the previous cycle with food in hand and your tax rate is 20% or lower, it also grows by 1% of your current population. Population never falls below 10.

Population is not just a tax base. It is your army supply: your cap on offensive troops is population multiplied by your conscription rate.

Conscription¶

Your army cap is population × conscription rate. The dial runs from 0% to 150% in 10-point steps and starts at 50%. Only offensive units count against it: Soldiers, Cavalry, Knights and Trebuchets. Ballistas are always free.

The cap is soft. You never lose troops you already raised for going over it; you just cannot recruit past your supply. The cap does clamp your free Industrial production, and the headroom calculation counts troops afield and troops you sold or retired earlier the same day. You cannot dump your army in the morning and refill it from free production at the next dawn.

Popular support¶

Popular support runs from 0 to 100 and starts at 75. It does three jobs:

• It scales your Coastal gold directly. At 50 support your Coastal regions pay half.
• Below 50 it turns the realm against you (see below).
• It contributes to your ranking score.

Each cycle it moves by your tax rate's effect plus your conscription rate's effect, plus any of these:

Below 50 support¶

Below 50 support you start losing soldiers and regions every cycle. The cause does not matter: your own tax rate, your own conscription rate, famine, or an enemy grinding you down with covert operations all count the same.

• Desertion. 0.4% of your soldiers per point below 50, per cycle, capped at 20% a day. At 25 support you lose 10% of your army every day.
• Riots. One roll per cycle, plus one more for every 25 points below 50 (three rolls at zero support). Each roll has a 1.5% chance per point below 50, capped at 60%. A successful roll takes one region of your most-owned non-Waste type.

Both are self-correcting. Ease the tax or the draft and support climbs back on its own. The game sends you a message the cycle it starts, naming what you lost.

Disbanding your army¶

Selling troops unsettles the people. The first 10% of your offensive army sold in a single Eastern day is free. Past that, support loss climbs steeply with the fraction sold.

It is measured across the whole day, so selling in small batches does not dodge it. Ballistas are exempt. Troops afield count in the denominator, so a big army out raiding makes the same sale a smaller fraction. A Cemetery softens the blow: you keep 50% of the loss at Tier 1, 35% at Tier 2 and 20% at Tier 3.

There is a free alternative. Swords to plowshares retires rank-0 regular soldiers to the fields for 5 food each, with no gold cost and no support penalty. Veterans (any soldier with a medal rank) are excluded. It is a poor trade at normal food prices and a good one during a famine, which is what it is for.

Famine¶

A food shortfall does not bite immediately.

1. Your Granary reserve is drawn first to cover whatever it can. You get a message saying how much it released.
2. The first three consecutive deficit cycles are warning only. A banner fires; nobody starves and nobody deserts. Your larder still empties.
3. From the fourth consecutive deficit cycle, penalties begin. One non-deficit cycle resets the counter to zero.

When penalties apply, per cycle:

• Soldiers die. 1% of your soldiers for every 10 food you are short, capped at 25% a day. Higher ranks die last.
• Support falls. 1 point for every 20 food you are short, capped at 15 a cycle, so a large famine slides support down over several days rather than zeroing it overnight.

Food is then floored at zero. Famine is a designed pressure, not a bug: a large army on thin land is meant to starve. The fix is more Rivers, a bigger Granary, buying food on the market, or retiring soldiers to the fields.

The five materials¶

All four tradeable materials change hands player to player on the Trade Post; the listed base prices are only a starting reference until real trades set a rate.

The bank's buyback price is not fixed. The 5 / 6 / 14 above is where it starts. Every sale pushes that material's bank price down, as far as 40% of the starting price, and each daily cycle recovers 30% of the gap back toward it. So dumping a large stockpile in one go earns much less per unit than the sticker price, and the rate needs a few days to heal. It is a way to turn a raid surplus into gold, not a way to farm gold.

Materials build things. The Treasury, Granary, Workshop, Apothecary, Stable and guild halls are all bought with them, not with gold alone.

Production buildings¶

Once you reach Tech Level 10 you can raise a Quarry, a Lumber Camp and a Forge. Each pays its material into your stores every cycle, with no raid required.

Tech Level¶

Tech Level does four things:

• +2% region gold production per level.
• +2% food production per level.
• +2% Industrial unit output per level.
• +3% combat power per level of advantage over your opponent, and −3% per level of disadvantage.

It climbs by 1 per cycle, and only up to a ceiling. The ceiling is the number of Technology regions you own, capped at 10, plus one for each active Tech Agreement you hold. Two Technology regions means Tech Level 2 after two cycles, not instantly. Buying past 10 Technology regions does nothing for your Tech Level, and the market blocks the purchase at the cap.

Technology regions also get more expensive the more you own: the next one costs its market price multiplied by 1 + 0.25 for every one you already hold. The tenth costs 3.25× the market rate.

Login streaks¶

Each consecutive Eastern day you log in extends your streak. Miss a day and it restarts at 1.

The gold is 750 multiplied by your streak day, and stops climbing after day 14. The milestone lands on every day divisible by 7, forever.

Milestones¶

Separate from the streak, a one-time ladder of 16 goals pays out the moment you meet each one. They cover every major system in the game and are meant as a route map for your first few weeks. There is no deadline and no order. An established barony that already did one of these claims it the next time it opens the dashboard.

A worked first day¶

This is what the reset pays a brand-new barony with the starting kit above, at Tech Level 1 and 75 popular support, holding no buildings.

Note the shape of that day. Your land pays roughly 1,700 gold net, and the largest single line on the page is the login reward. Passive income alone is slow. It is meant to be.

How the day is meant to be played¶

The cycle is your budget. It hands you 15 turns and a modest income, and every ambitious thing in Wardenfall is priced in those turns. The whole game is a question of what you spend them on today.

• Passive income pays the bills. Active play pays for growth. Regions cover upkeep and slowly compound. Raids, delves, sieges and holds are where the real gold, materials and relics come from, and all of them cost turns. If you finish a day with turns unspent, you have thrown away the scarcest thing you own.
• Support is the coupling between your economy and your army. A high tax rate and a heavy draft both buy short-term power out of the same account, and when that account runs dry your Coastal income halves, your soldiers desert and your land riots away. Most baronies want to sit near the top of the support band and only spend it deliberately.
• Food is the hard constraint, not gold. Only Rivers grow it and every soldier eats. A big army is not a decision you make once; it is a bill you pay every dawn. Plan the Granary before the army.
• More turns is the real upgrade. Only two things raise your daily allotment for good: the last two tiers of each guild hall (+6 at full build-out) and the three Whispers that pay a permanent turn (+3). The Chronicler award adds 2 more. That is the whole permanent ceiling — +11 on a base of 15. The Stable is different: it grants turns a day at a time, on top of your maximum, and they vanish at the next reset.
• Growth flattens on purpose. Above four times the realm's median land value the size tax starts eating your passive income, so sprawl stops paying. The intended answer is not more land, it is conquest: sieges, holds and deep raids are not throttled.
• Show up. The streak is worth 10,500 gold a day at its ceiling and pays turns and iron every seventh day, and nothing accrues while you are gone. The cycle does not run for a barony nobody is watching.

Land and Regions¶

Land is the passive half of your economy. You do not hold a map; you hold a count of each region type. Every region produces something each daily cycle, costs gold upkeep each daily cycle, and adds to your net worth. Net worth is the number the game uses to decide how hard your sieges are and how much of your passive income you keep.

A new barony is founded with 35 regions: 10 Coastal, 10 River, 10 Industrial, 2 Mountain, 1 Desert, 1 Urban, 1 Technology. The daily cycle runs on Eastern time, at the first page load after Eastern midnight.

Region types¶

Base price is the market anchor, not what you will pay. See Buying land, below.

Notes on the table:

• Tech level multiplies region gold, region food and Industrial unit output by 2% per level. It does not touch tax revenue.
• Coastal is the only type whose income depends on popular support. At 60 support a Coastal pays 90 gold, not 150.
• Rivers are the only land that grows food. Nothing else does. The fishermen catch is rolled at the daily cycle, so it does not show in the projection, and tech level does not multiply it.
• Industrial output is capped by your Conscription Policy: soldiers that would exceed your army cap are not mustered. The headroom check counts the troops you already have, the troops away on a raid, and any offensive units you sold or retired earlier the same day, so you cannot dump your army and refill it free at the next cycle. Free soldiers arrive as plain, unranked Soldiers.
• Population also grows by 1% per cycle when you hold food and your tax rate is 20% or lower. That is on top of Urban growth.
• Waste has two sources: an enemy Doomfire strike, and a Blight world event the realm fails to stop. It produces nothing, still costs 5 gold a day, and counts against your score at 30 points each. Clearing it costs 50 gold per Waste.

What Watchtowers actually do¶

Watchtowers have no effect on the tech gate for scouting and produce no gold. They can be destroyed: a Sabotage covert op (1,500 gold) razes about 25% of a barony's Watchtowers, minimum one. Sabotage is refused if the target has none.

Technology regions and the tech ceiling¶

• Your tech level climbs by 1 every daily cycle until it equals the number of Technology regions you hold. Two Technology regions take two cycles to reach level 2.
• The ceiling is hard-capped at 10 Technology regions. An active Tech Agreement adds a further +1 to your stored tech level each, and lifts the ceiling check by the same amount so your region research keeps climbing underneath it.
• Each tech level is worth 2% efficiency and 600 score. That is far more than any single region, but not the biggest per-unit score in the game: a hero level is worth 1,000 and a conquered Realm 1,200.
• The market refuses to sell you a Technology region past 10. Land taken in war can push you above 10, but it does nothing: the cap is applied where the level is computed, so the extra regions are dead weight that still costs 30 gold a day.

Buying land¶

Land is bought and sold on the Market page. Four things sit between the base price and what you are charged.

1. The realm market price¶

• Only seven types are traded on the market and repriced: Coastal, River, Desert, Mountain, Urban, Industrial and Technology. Watchtower has no market price at all, so it always costs its flat 800g base and always sells for 480g. Waste is not traded either.
• Each daily cycle the market reprices those seven from how much of that type all baronies hold against founding holdings. Scarce types get dearer, abundant types get cheaper. The supply reading is clamped to 65%-180% of base, then a small random drift (up to 8%) plus a pull back toward base is applied, so the daily tick alone lands between roughly 65% and 158% of base.
• Every region bought lifts that type's price by 1%. Every region sold pushes it down 1%. That move is hard-clamped to 65%-180% of base, so heavy buying is the only way the price reaches the ceiling, and the next daily tick re-anchors it.

2. The order walk¶

A bulk order fills like a large stock order: within a single purchase, each successive region costs 1% more than the last. The first region in a 50-region order pays market price and the fiftieth pays 49% more. The realm price then moves by the same slope after the trade, so a big land grab pays a premium and leaves prices high for the next buyer. Technology and Watchtower do not use this 1% walk: their own steeper ownership ramp, below, replaces it rather than stacking with it.

3. The expansion premium¶

Past 100 total regions held, counting every type together, all land carries a multiplier that grows with your total holdings. It cannot be dodged by switching region type, it advances within a bulk order, and it never touches selling.

Past 1,550 the curve turns logarithmic. It rate-limits expansion; it does not stop it. Going from 1,550 regions to 15,500 — ten times the land — only takes the multiplier from 8.00x to about 16.11x, roughly double, not ten times.

Two types carry their own ownership ramp on top of the expansion premium. No other type has one:

• Technology: +25% per Technology region you already hold.
• Watchtower: +35% per Watchtower you already hold, plus a flat 8 timber each. Timber is charged separately from gold and is not covered by the Treasury.

4. The newcomer discount¶

Small holdings buy below market. The break is 35% at 0 regions held and shrinks in a straight line to nothing at 100 regions. It keys off how much land you hold, not how old your barony is. It applies to every land type, on the buy price only, and it is read from your holdings before the order so it does not fade partway through a bulk buy. The Market shows it as a tag on the price.

Selling¶

Sell price is 60% of the current market buy price for that type. Selling carries no premium, no discount and no ramp, and you can sell any type down to zero. A round trip always loses the spread.

Upkeep and gold deficit¶

Every region costs its listed upkeep in gold each cycle, flat, no matter how many you hold. There is no upkeep ramp on any region type: the old River ramp is switched off by the Relative Economy, and the size tax below replaces it.

If a cycle ends with your gold negative, you lose one region of your smallest non-Waste type and 5 popular support, and your gold is floored at zero. It is a common way to bleed land without ever being attacked.

Net worth and how it is computed¶

Net worth is the gold-equivalent replacement value of your barony. It is a straight weighted sum, using the game's own price tables so it cannot drift from what the game charges.

Deliberately not counted: buildings, hero gear and trinkets, and population. Tech level is not counted separately because Technology regions are already counted at their price.

The army term counts every soldier you own, including troops away on raids, away at a siege, and garrisoning a Contested Hold. You cannot look smaller by sending men out.

Net worth drives how hard a conquest siege is and how rich its spoils are. It is not the same number as your score on the rankings, and it is not the same number as the size tax uses.

The size tax¶

Passive income is throttled for the largest baronies. This is the single most important rule about holding a lot of land.

What it measures. Not net worth. It uses productive net worth: the sum of your regions multiplied by their base buy prices, and nothing else. Gold, army, materials and buildings are all excluded, so the tax keys purely off how much land you hold.

What it is measured against. A realm anchor, recomputed once per Eastern day. The anchor is the median productive land value of engaged baronies, meaning those above 25,000 productive net worth and not routed or flagged for deletion, and it needs at least 5 qualifying baronies to be trusted. It is floored at 137,725, so the anchor can only ever rise as the realm grows and the tax can only ever ease against that floor.

Your size factor is your productive net worth divided by that anchor. A size factor of 1.0 is a typical established barony.

The protection line is 4x the anchor. At or below it you keep 100% of your passive income, with no throttle of any kind. Above it, you keep a declining share:

At the floor anchor of 137,725, the protection line sits at 550,900 gold of land value: roughly 688 Coastal, or 1,101 River, or any mix worth the same. If the realm median rises above the floor, the line moves out with it.

What is taxed. The cycle's honest net passive income, meaning region gold plus tax revenue minus region upkeep minus army upkeep. The charge is added to your gold maintenance line. It is clamped at zero, so the tax can never turn a profitable cycle into a loss; a very large barony plateaus rather than going backwards.

What is not taxed. Everything you go out and earn. Raids, delves, conquest spoils, Contested Hold income, world events, daily contracts, quest payouts and market trades are all paid in full.

In short: land income is throttled, earned income is not.

Taking land in war¶

Attacking another barony¶

• You win if your committed attack power exceeds the defender's defence power multiplied by 0.8. Committing more than you need reduces your own casualties.
• A win takes between 3% and 12% of the defender's total region count, scaled by how dominant the win was, with a minimum of 1.
• Land is taken from the defender's smallest types first.
• Waste is never taken.
• The seat-of-power floor: a defender always keeps at least one of every type they hold. A barony cannot be looted off the map.
• Because of that floor, a "victory" can seize nothing at all. The attack log records what was actually taken, not what the roll said.

Raiding¶

A winning raid in the home country can seize a region of a type fitting the site, on a chance that climbs with the site's danger. Most home sites carry a region type; Smelter's Hold is the exception and grants none. The four frontier realms are not open at the start: winning the Warden's Vault opens the Pale Steppe and the Ashscar, and those lead on to the Saltmarch and the Witherwood.

Random frontier land is drawn from Coastal, River, Desert, Mountain, Urban, Industrial and Technology. Never Watchtower, never Waste.

Conquest sieges¶

Taking a Realm hands its land to the besiegers. These are the full bundles before any scaling:

The bundle is split between besiegers by contribution, then multiplied by four things:

• Under-force cut. The coalition's total force ever committed against the tier's recommended force. Under-committing cuts the spoils proportionally, with a floor of 20%. A small party can win the fight and still take very little land.
• War-weariness. Your first siege win of the Eastern day pays 100%, the second 75%, the third 50%, the fourth and every one after 25%. A Quiet Year consumable, if you hold one and arm it at the camp, counts one win as if it came one step earlier.
• Stature scale. Above the realm's engaged-median net worth, each additional multiple of the median cuts the spoils by 20%, floored at 40%. A barony four times the median takes 40%.
• Stature bonus. A wealthy, much-conquering barony faces a harder garrison and is paid more for it, up to 2.0x. Beyond that, the garrison keeps hardening but the pay stops rising.

Quest rewards¶

The Getting Started quest pays land as well as gold: 1 River for your first land purchase, 1 Industrial for your first recruits, 1 Technology for your first alliance. Finishing it grants the Founding Baron bundle with 1 Coastal, and the Baron's Charter on your second day grants 1 Urban.

Losing land¶

• A lost defence. Same rules as attacking: your smallest types go first, Waste is never taken, and you always keep one of every type.
• Doomfire. Costs 5,000 gold, one turn, and at least one Trebuchet. It turns 8% of every region type the target holds, minimum 1 of each, into Waste. Desert is immune. Waste itself is untouched. It cannot be aimed at a military ally.
• Riots. If popular support falls below 50, each cycle rolls once, plus once more per 25 points below 50, to a maximum of 3 rolls. Each roll has a 1.5% chance per point below 50, capped at 60%, to cost you one region of your most-owned non-Waste type. That is the opposite end of your holdings from the war and deficit rules, so a low-support barony loses its best-stocked land.
• Gold deficit. One region of your smallest non-Waste type, plus 5 popular support.
• A Blight breakthrough. If the realm fails to muster against a Blight world event, up to 15% of every barony's Coastal, River, Desert, Mountain, Urban and Industrial regions turn to Waste at once, scaled down by how close the muster came. Technology and Watchtower are spared, and baronies holding fewer than 20 regions in total are spared entirely.
• Sabotage. A covert Sabotage op razes about 25% of your Watchtowers, minimum one.
• Selling. There is no floor on selling. You can sell yourself landless.

Protections¶

• A new barony is shielded for 7 days. The shield blocks military attacks, covert ops and heists. It does not block Doomfire, so a shielded barony can still be turned to Waste.
• You always keep one of every region type you hold. It cannot be taken by attack.
• A barony left with no surplus land, meaning no non-Waste type above 1, gets a 6-day regrouping shield and military attacks against it are refused outright. Doomfire is not refused.
• Some relics carry a chance for a region you were about to lose to stay yours. It applies to both gold-deficit losses and riots, and it is a reprieve rolled per loss, not immunity.

Caps and diminishing returns¶

What land is worth on the rankings¶

Land is only one pillar of the score. Military, population, support, tech, wealth, food and heroes are the others, and battle record and collection count too. A large landholding no longer sits at the top of the ladder on its own.

How land is meant to be played¶

• Build for a job, not for a total. Rivers feed you and nothing else will. Coastal earns the most but only if you keep your people happy. Urban is the engine behind your army cap. Industrial plus Mountain is the free-troops build. Technology multiplies all of it, but only ten of them ever matter.
• The first 100 regions are the cheapest you will ever buy. Newcomer discount running down, expansion premium not yet started. Expand hard and early.
• Sprawl is priced, development is not. The expansion premium and the size tax both key off how much land you hold. Buildings, tech efficiency, veterancy and hero levels are all outside both. Going tall is the way past the throttle.
• Land is the throttled income; action is not. Once you are past the protection line, the marginal region is worth less every time, and a raid, delve, siege or hold pays full. The intended shape of a large barony is enough land to fund the realm and an active loop on top of it.
• Shrinking is a real lever, but aim it at the right number. Only selling land lowers your productive net worth, so only selling land lowers your size tax. Retiring soldiers does nothing for the size tax; it lowers your full net worth, which is what sets siege difficulty and the siege stature cut. A smaller, better-developed barony can out-earn a larger sprawl.
• Watch your smallest holding. Both the gold-deficit loss and enemy seizure eat your smallest types first, so a single stray region of an odd type is what disappears when things go wrong. Riots do the reverse and take from your largest.
• Clear Waste as soon as you can. Each one costs 5 gold a day and 30 score for as long as you hold it, and 50 gold to clear once.

Armies, Units and War Between Players¶

Your army is four things at once: the force that takes land off rivals, the wall that stops rivals taking yours, the biggest recurring bill you pay, and a store of value you can sell, trade or gift. Treat soldiers as a resource with a price, not just a number. A thousand soldiers cost 5,000 gold and 2,000 food every day, whether they fight or stand in a field.

Where to find things: buying, selling and training soldiers are on the Military page. Attacks are launched from the War Room on the War page. Covert operations are run from the War Room page too. Your Conscription Policy dial is on the Empire page. The Spymaster's Lodge is built from the Buildings page.

The five unit types¶

Attack and defence are multipliers against a Soldier's baseline of 1.0. A unit with 0 in a column does nothing in that role at all.

What each one is for:

• Soldiers are the backbone. They are the only unit that earns veterancy, the only unit you can buy with food, and the only unit that can join a conquest siege or garrison a contested hold. Every other system in the game reads your soldier count.
• Cavalry hit twice as hard as a soldier and contribute nothing to defence. They are a pure attack investment. They also take only half the casualty rate of your soldiers when an attack goes badly. Cavalry and Knights are the only other units that can leave home — you can send both on a raid alongside your soldiers.
• Ballistas are the opposite: twice a soldier's defence, no attack value, and they never leave home. They eat no food, they are the cheapest unit to keep, and they do not count against your army cap. They are the cheapest way to make yourself an unattractive target.
• Knights do both jobs at 1.2. They are the flexible unit, and the most expensive per point of either stat.
• Trebuchets neither attack nor defend. Their only purpose is that you must hold at least one to call down the Doomfire. Buying more than one buys nothing except upkeep and score.

Iron is an alternative currency, not an extra one. You pay the gold price or the iron price. Iron prices are derived from the gold price at 14 gold per iron, which is what the bank pays for iron, so paying in iron costs the same and reselling the unit for gold always loses money.

Soldier prices (gold, iron and food) are set by the realm's administrator and can change; the values above are the defaults. The other four units have fixed prices.

The Barracks screen¶

Everything you do with soldiers happens in one place. The Military page is the muster — three figures for the whole force — over Barracks, where every rank of soldier and every war engine is a row.

A row reads left to right: what it is, how many you have, a bar showing that count against the rest of your army, what it is worth, its buy and sell price, a box for a number, and the orders you can give it. The bars all share one scale, so the shape of your army is legible at a glance — a broad base of regulars narrowing to a handful of Five-Medal veterans.

• The bar is two colours. Green is the garrison standing at home. Amber is men of that same rank who are afield — raiding, besieging, holding ground, marching or hunting. The count beside it shows both: the white figure is what is home, and the amber +n beneath it is what is away. Only the home figure can be spent. You cannot sell, train or plowshare a man who is three days' march from the gate.
• The bars are not linear. They are square-rooted, so twelve Five-Medal veterans are still visible beside twenty-three thousand regulars. A longer bar always means more men, but a bar twice as long means roughly four times as many. The ruler above the first bar marks the scale, and the exact number is printed beside every bar, so nothing depends on reading a length.
• Purchase with. The selector at the top of the Barracks arms gold, iron or food, and every buy price on the page is then quoted in whatever you armed. A soldier is 100 gold, 7 iron or 500 food — the same soldier, three prices.
• Every order asks first. Train, buy, sell and plowshares each open a confirmation stating the cost in plain sentences — including how many will wash out of training and never come back. Nothing on this page happens on a single click.
• What can be bought, and what only earned. Only regulars and the war engines are for sale; a medal is earned in battle, so those rows carry a dash where a buy price would be. Every rank can be sold, though — and a Five-Medal veteran fetches three times a regular.

Pay and Rations — the army's daily bill¶

The muster above the Barracks states three figures: Army size, Pay and Rations. Pay and Rations are what your whole army costs per day, already summed — and each is shown as a share of what you earn and what you grow, with a bar against that day's production. An army eating 81% of the harvest is one bad season from starving, and the figure says so long before the famine banner does.

Hover any of the three and it breaks down. Army size names every man afield and where he is; Pay and Rations list every kind of unit, its rate, its subtotal, and the share it takes. All three count men afield as well as the garrison — troops on a raid or in a siege camp still draw pay and still eat.

Buying and selling¶

• Buy on the Military page. Purchases spend your loose gold first and draw the shortfall from your Treasury automatically; food purchases draw the Granary the same way.
• You can conscript plain Soldiers with food instead of gold: 500 food each. That is a deliberate sink for a grain-rich realm, not a cheap army.
• Sale prices are around 60% of the buy price, so dumping troops you bought always loses money. Sales pay into loose gold only.
• Veterans sell for more (see the rank table). If you sell without picking a rank, your regulars go first — your medalled soldiers are the last to leave. The same rule applies to gifts and trades.
• Selling offensive units costs popular support. See the disband table below.
• Swords to plowshares retires regular Soldiers to the fields for 5 food each. No gold, and no support hit at all. Medalled soldiers are spared and cannot be plowshared. It is the 🌾 plowshares button on its own line beneath the regulars, with its own number box — the food it will yield appears on the button as you type.
• Industrial regions muster free Soldiers every day (3 per region, raised by your tech level and by +1% per Mountain region up to +250%). They arrive as raw regulars, and the number is clamped by your army cap — counting every soldier you have afield and every unit you sold or plowshared earlier the same day, so you cannot produce and dump on a loop.

Disband discontent¶

Selling off part of your standing army unsettles the people. The cost is based on the fraction of your offensive army (Soldiers, Cavalry, Knights, Trebuchets — Ballistas are exempt) sold in one day. It is charged marginally, so splitting a sell-off across many clicks does not dodge it. Troops out on a raid count in the total you are measured against; troops in a conquest siege, on a hold or marching to one do not, so selling while those are away costs you more support than the same sale would otherwise.

A Cemetery softens it: Tier 1 keeps 50% of the loss, Tier 2 keeps 35%, Tier 3 keeps 20%. Plowshares avoids it entirely, which is why it is the right tool for downsizing and the market is the right tool for cashing out.

How many units you may keep — the Conscription Policy¶

Your population is your supply. Your army cap is population × your conscription rate, set on a dial on the Empire page from 0% to 150% in steps of 10. Every barony starts at 50%.

• Only offensive units count against the cap: Soldiers, Cavalry, Knights and Trebuchets. Ballistas are free.
• Troops out on a raid still count when you try to buy more, so sending a war party out does not free room to recruit a second one. Troops in a conquest siege, garrisoning a hold or marching to one are not counted at the recruiter, so those do free up buying room — but they are counted again at the daily reset, where they clamp your free industrial production.
• The cap blocks recruiting. It never takes troops you already raised.

Above 50% each step costs 1 support a day; above 100% each step costs 2. If support falls below 50 — from over-conscription, punitive tax, famine or an enemy's covert ops — two penalties start at every daily reset: soldiers desert at 0.4% per point below 50 (capped at 20% a day), and regions riot and break away, taking your most-held non-waste type first.

Veterancy — the medal ladder¶

Only Soldiers earn medals. A soldier who survives a battle or a raid has a chance to be promoted — win or lose, survival is what counts. Each rank makes him hit harder, die slower and sell for more. Medals cannot be bought.

Behind the table: a soldier banks about 25 experience per battle he comes home from, and the ranks need 100, 250, 500, 1,000 and 2,500 cumulative. A soldier can only climb one rank per battle.

What ranks actually buy you:

• Power without bodies. Veteran power is added to your side as extra soldier-equivalents. Twenty thousand Four-Medal soldiers fight as forty thousand.
• Survivability. When a stack takes losses, the weights above decide who dies. Regulars bleed first, in battle and in famine alike.
• Resale value. Up to 3× the base sell price at the top rank.
• Heroes. A ★★★★★ soldier steps out of the ranks entirely. Whenever you have an open hero slot, one Five-Medal soldier is consumed and becomes an unclaimed Hero recruit waiting for a name and a class. Five-Medal soldiers are also the price of the Crypt's rites.

Training soldiers¶

The Pells — the Oathhall's second tier — lets you buy rank with quantity. To reach it you need the Oathhall blueprint, which a Warrior hero rolls for on a Tier-4 conquest victory, and then you build the line to Tier 2.

Training is done on the Military page. There is no separate yard to visit: each rank of soldier is a row in the Barracks, and the row carries a train button showing the rank it promotes into. Type how many and press it. Send a batch of one rank and they come back one rank higher — the ones who come back. The rest wash out and are gone for good. Drilling costs 1 turn, takes a batch of 50 to 20,000 men, and you can only run one season at a time. The men are out of your muster for the whole season and cannot raid, hold or hunt. Only men at home can be drilled.

You pay for every man you enter, including the ones who wash out. The exchange is close to power-neutral by design — it does not create strength, it concentrates it. What you gain is fewer mouths to feed and more power packed into the same number of bodies.

Attacking another barony¶

Attacks are launched from the War Room on the War page. A military attack costs 1 turn.

You choose exactly what to send: Soldiers rank by rank, plus Cavalry and Knights. Ballistas and Trebuchets never march. The defender does not choose — their entire home garrison fights.

Who you cannot attack¶

• Yourself.
• A Military Alliance partner. Break the alliance on the Statecraft page first.
• A guildmate. Leave the guild first.
• A barony under new-player protection, which lasts 7 days from founding.
• A routed barony — one holding no surplus non-waste land. There is nothing to take, and they are shielded while they rebuild.

A Truce does not stop you. Attacking through one costs you 5 popular support, voids the truce, and sends the defender a message naming you.

How the battle resolves¶

1. Attack power = (soldiers sent + their veteran bonus) × 1.0 + cavalry × 2.0 + knights × 1.2, then multiplied by a technology modifier of 1 + (your tech level − theirs) × 0.03.
2. Defence power = (their soldiers + veteran bonus) × 1.0 + ballistas × 2.0 + knights × 1.2. Technology does not modify the defence.
3. You win if attack power is greater than defence power × 0.8. The attacker gets that 20% edge for committing.
4. Casualties fall out of the power ratio. The winner loses less, the loser loses more. Your Cavalry take half the rate your Soldiers do and your Knights take 70% of it; a defender's Ballistas take only 30% of the rate and their Knights 70%.
5. On a win you seize between 3% and 12% of the defender's regions, scaled by how dominant the win was, and always at least one region.
6. Your surviving committed soldiers roll for promotion. The defender's surviving garrison does too.

Two rules cap what you can actually take. Wasteland is never seized, and the defender always keeps at least one region of every type they hold — their seat of power. A barony can be beaten down to that floor but never wiped off the map, and it will always be able to rebuild.

A victory that leaves the defender with no surplus land routs them. They get a 6-day regrouping shield and cannot be attacked while they rebuild.

If the defender's garrison changes mid-resolution — a concurrent attack, sale or purchase — the whole attack is abandoned and your turn is refunded. Nothing is half-applied.

Defence¶

Defence is passive. There is no order to give and no posture to set; whatever is at home when the attack lands is what fights.

• Your whole home garrison defends: Soldiers with their veteran bonus, Ballistas at 2.0 and Knights at 1.2. Cavalry contribute nothing.
• Troops afield — on raids, in a conquest siege, garrisoning a contested hold, or marching on one — are not home and cannot defend. Sending your army out is a real exposure.
• Every active Military Alliance partner and every guildmate musters 15% of their Soldiers, Ballistas and Knights to your defence. Each barony counts once, however many ways you are tied to them. Their contribution is raw — it carries no veteran bonus.
• If you are Allied with the Free Company, a further 12% of your own base garrison musters at your gates.

Practical defence is cheap: Ballistas cost 150 gold, eat nothing, cost only 3 gold a day, are exempt from the army cap and are worth two soldiers on the wall. The most common mistake is holding a large offensive army and no defensive one, then sending it away.

Doomfire and the Withering Curse¶

Two special attacks sit beside the ordinary one in the War Room. Both cost 1 turn. Neither takes land. A Military Alliance is the only thing that blocks them: unlike an ordinary attack they are not stopped by a guild, a truce, a rout, or new-player protection.

Doomfire is a denial weapon, not a conquest weapon. It destroys land rather than transferring it, and Waste is a liability on the victim's score. The Withering Curse is the cheapest way to thin a target's garrison before an ordinary attack.

Covert operations¶

Covert operations are run from the War page, alongside the War Room. Every op costs 1 turn plus its price. Unlike open warfare, covert ops are not blocked by alliances, truces or guild membership — the only barony you cannot touch is one under new-player protection.

Success odds¶

Every op resolves on one formula:

• Base chance: 60% for ordinary ops, 50% for a trinket heist.
• Minus 3% per Watchtower the target holds.
• Minus their counter-intelligence (see below).
• That total never falls below a floor of 20% (15% for a heist). A fortress can make you unlikely, never impossible.
• Then your own bonuses are added on top of the floor: Backing at 500 gold per level for +6% each, up to 8 levels (+48% for 4,000 gold), plus any Thief bonus.
• The whole thing is capped at 95%.

Because the floor is applied before your backing, every level of backing buys its full 6% even against a heavily defended target. That is the intended counter to a wall of Watchtowers.

What a Spy Mission tells you¶

A successful spy report always reveals the target's Watchtower count — you need to know how defended someone is before you commit to ops against them. Everything else rolls independently.

Numbers marked approximate carry noise of a few percent, so treat them as a range. If the target has not logged in since the last daily reset, the report says so — you are reading yesterday's figures.

The Thief and the heist trade¶

A living, unbenched Thief hero who is at home can be dispatched on the three theft operations: Gold Heist, Food Heist and trinket Heist.

• He adds 0.8% success per point of Dexterity + Charisma, capped at +40%.
• He slips past one Watchtower per 5 Dexterity, up to 6.
• He fattens the haul and its cap by up to ×1.6.
• On success he earns 40 experience. If the job fails he is caught: he takes a wound of 25% of his maximum health and cannot be sent again for 12 hours.
• While the Thief system is switched on, a successful theft against the same barony can only be repeated once every 8 hours. This applies across all three theft operations, and it applies whether or not you actually send a Thief.

A trinket heist has two hard gates. You must have run a successful Gala on that barony in the last 48 hours, and the trinket must be exposed — anything secured in their Treasury cannot be taken, and it is re-checked at the moment of the theft, so a defender who pins an item while your job is in motion keeps it (and you still pay). The Ratruns, the Undercroft's second tier, cut heist costs by 15%.

Defending against spies — Watchtowers and the Spymaster¶

You have three defences against covert operations, and they stack.

Watchtowers are a region type. Each one takes 3% off an incoming op's chance. They get steadily more expensive the more you own, so carpeting the map with them is not the answer, and an enemy can burn a quarter of them with a Sabotage.

The Spymaster's building is a three-tier line, raised from the Buildings page. It adds passive resistance on top of your Watchtowers, gives you a chance to unmask whoever is running ops against you, and adds prestige to your score.

The Counter-Espionage Sweep is the active option. It costs 8,000 gold and 1 turn, needs at least a Watch-House, and jams incoming espionage for 8 hours: ops against you lose a further 40% success and anyone who does get through is guaranteed to be unmasked. It is a deterrent, not immunity — the success floor still applies. Note that the sweep currently has no button anywhere in the game; the rules below assume it is running only if you have managed to start one.

Unmasking matters because covert ops are otherwise anonymous. Once you have access to the Spymaster line, any op you fail to detect lands in your log with no attacker's name on it. Catch them and the name is yours, and so is the option to retaliate. Open warfare always names the attacker.

Upkeep — what an army costs every day¶

Upkeep is charged once at the daily reset, on your whole army — including every soldier afield on a raid, in a siege, garrisoning a hold or marching to one. Sending troops away does not stop you feeding and paying them.

What happens if you cannot pay:

• Gold short. You lose your smallest non-waste region and 5 popular support, that cycle and every cycle you stay broke.
• Food short. Your Granary reserve is drawn on first. Only the part it cannot cover is a real famine. The first three consecutive short days are warning-only. After that, 1% of your soldiers die per 10 food short, capped at 25% a day, and you lose up to 15 popular support a day. Regulars starve before veterans.

Only River regions grow food, and armies eat regardless of where they are. A big army on a realm with no rivers is a famine waiting for a bad day. Gold upkeep can be reduced by hero stewardship traits, by held relics, and by an alliance with the Quartermasters' Guild (−15%).

Soldiers are stored value¶

Count soldiers beside gold and food in every plan you make. They are not just military strength:

• They are tradeable. Units can be listed on the Trade Post for gold — you need at least one active Trade Agreement to post a listing, and an agreement with that specific barony to buy theirs; listings expire after 24 hours. Units can also be gifted outright, which needs an active Military Alliance with the recipient and costs 1 turn. In both cases regulars leave first, and troops arrive at the other end as regulars — rank does not transfer.
• They are convertible. Sell them for gold, plowshare them into food, or drill them into fewer but better troops.
• They count on the scoreboard. Per unit: Soldiers 4, Ballistas 9, Cavalry 14, Knights 16, Trebuchets 22 — and veteran power counts again at the same weight, so a Four-Medal soldier scores double a regular.
• They count in your net worth at their buy price, which under the realm's relative-economy scaling means a hoarded army raises the size tax on your passive income.
• They are the largest recurring drain in the game. An army you are not using is a decision to spend 5 gold and 2 food per soldier per day on nothing.

The practical loop: buy or produce soldiers, spend them on raids and attacks so the survivors earn medals, and keep the total no larger than your gold and food can actually carry. When it gets larger, training turns quantity into density, Plowshares turns surplus into food for free, and the market turns it into gold at a loss and a cost in popular support.

Heroes: the Character Sheet¶

A Hero is a named champion who fights for your barony. Heroes have a class, six attributes, a level, a set of traits, and nine equipment slots. They lead raids, crawl delves, storm siege nodes, fight in the Arena, defend your barony when it is attacked, and run heists. Everything on this page is one character sheet, and every number on it comes from somewhere you can go and earn.

Where a Hero comes from¶

You do not buy Heroes. A Hero is pulled out of your own army. When a soldier reaches the top veteran rank (★★★★★), and you have an open Hero slot, that body is removed from the stack and becomes an unclaimed recruit waiting on the Heroes page. You then name them and choose a class. Both choices are permanent.

The name must be a single word, 2 to 24 characters, with no spaces and none of these characters: @ ` * _ ~ | < > \.

Slots open like this:

• Your first slot is free. Every barony has one.
• One more slot per frontier realm whose Brutal apex site you beat. The Pale Steppe, Ashscar, Saltmarch and Witherwood each grant a slot the first time you win their Brutal site. The grant is per realm and does not repeat.
• Five is the hard ceiling on how many may be in play at once, no matter how many realms you conquer.

If every slot is full, extra ★★★★★ bodies stay in the army as ★★★★★ soldiers. Free a slot and one of them is pulled out as a recruit on your next page load.

The four classes¶

Class fixes your starting attributes, your base HP, and which five class skills you learn as you level. It never changes.

Starting max HP is base HP plus 5 per point of Vitality. The figures above assume no traits; a Hero rolled with Hardy or Frail starts higher or lower, because HP is always computed from effective Vitality (traits and gear included).

On "strikes per round": this number is printed in the raid battle log and is used by the armory when it ranks which item to recommend. It does not multiply raid damage — raid damage is driven by your Hero's power, not by strike count. Strikes that genuinely add attacks in delves, the Arena and siege escalades come from class skills (Cleave, Flurry of Blades, Archmage) and from light weapons.

The six attributes¶

Every level gives one point to spend on any attribute. Points are permanent. Spending a point in Vitality also raises current HP by 5 immediately, so it is never a wasted point on a wounded Hero.

These effects apply everywhere, all the time:

Each class also has one signature attribute that counts at 1.5× in the raid-power formula: Strength for a Warrior, Dexterity for a Ranger and a Thief, Intelligence for a Mage.

Raid power¶

Raid power is the flat contribution a Hero adds to your war party. It is computed as:

• Add STR + DEX + INT + half of VIT (rounded down), all using effective values after traits and gear.
• Add half the value of the class signature attribute again (that is the 1.5× weighting).
• Multiply that total by 1.5 and add a base of 15.
• Multiply by (1 + all power percentages from traits, skills, gear and haunting).
• Multiply by (1 + 0.1 × (level − 1)). A level-11 Hero is worth double a level-1 one on this term alone.
• Finally, multiply by current HP ÷ max HP. A Hero at half health contributes half of everything: power, party morale, loot and relic-find. Keep them healed.

Attributes in delves, sieges and the Arena¶

Outside raids, the six attributes drive twelve two-sided combat channels. Every channel is soft-capped: the first points buy the most, and each further point buys a little less, so a channel approaches its ceiling but never reaches it. The exact curve is cap × (1 − e−(rate ÷ cap) × stat), which means the per-point gain near zero is roughly the rate in the table.

Each class relies on a pair of attributes, and both of that pair's channels are worth 1.5× the listed rate for that class.

Which stat drives your damage: a Mage's damage in delves and sieges scales off the Intelligence channel. Warriors, Rangers and Thieves scale off the Strength channel. There is no "best of both" — pick the right one for the class you are building.

Total damage reduction in a delve or escalade is capped at 60%, counting attribute channels, class skill mitigation and armour together.

Levels and experience¶

Every level grants exactly one attribute point. Class skills unlock at fixed levels. A surname unlocks at level 15 and a title you write yourself at level 26. A title is unique across your living roster: only one Hero may wear it at a time.

The XP needed to go from one level to the next is 100 × your current level.

Level 50 is the hard maximum. Level 40 is a wall you have to break — see Ascension below.

Where XP comes from¶

Be aware of the difference. A raid divides one pool among however many Heroes rode; a delve pays that full amount to each survivor. A four-Hero delve therefore out-earns a comparable raid several times over. This is deliberate. Raids remain the better source of gold, materials, relics and gear.

Three things scale a raid Hero's share on top of the split:

• Win or lose. A won raid pays the full pool; a lost one pays 40% of it. They still fought.
• Standing orders (below): Cautious ×0.65, Balanced ×1, Aggressive ×1.30.
• Standing — how the site compares to the Hero's own level, not your empire's reach.

The raid XP pool is also flattened at the top: difficulty above 900 (after the win/loss multiplier) contributes only 5% of every further point. Pushing into harder country pays in loot and materials, not in levels.

Raid standing: fight your own tier, or just above it¶

Each Hero has a "home" difficulty for their level: 120 × 1.10^{(level − 1)}. That is about 120 at level 1, 283 at level 10, 734 at level 20, 1,904 at level 30 and 4,937 at level 40. Divide the site's difficulty by that number and read off the multiplier:

The curve falls away in both directions. Dragging a level-1 Hero behind a huge army to a site far above them pays almost nothing. Farming a site you long outgrew pays almost nothing either. The best XP in the game is a site somewhere between 1.6 and 3 times your Hero's own level.

Standing orders¶

Every Hero carries standing raid orders, set on the Heroes page. They apply to raid resolution.

Use Cautious on a Hero whose value is their loot and morale bonuses — those apply regardless of how hard they swing. Use Aggressive on a veteran you want levelled fast and can afford to patch up.

The level-40 wall and Ascension¶

An un-ascended Hero stops at level 40. XP beyond that point parks; it is not lost, but it does not level them. Breaking the wall is the Ascension Trial.

To attempt a Trial a Hero must be alive, in your party (not benched), above 0 HP, at level 40, and have chosen one of the sixteen paths. Your barony must have:

• The guild hall of the Hero's own discipline at Tier 3 — the Oathhall for Warriors, the Fellwatch for Rangers, the Undercroft for Thieves, the Wizard's Tower for Mages.
• The guild hall of the discipline they are blending toward, also at Tier 3. A pure path needs only the one hall.
• The path's Whisper standing at the right beat. The Trial opens from the Whisper, not from a button elsewhere.
• No other delve, Arena run or Trial in progress. They all share one slot.
• The Hero must be home. A Hero currently out on a raid, or away on a Thief's Work infiltration, cannot be called to their Trial.

There are two gauntlets, not one. Each is a ten-room solo run and each costs 1 turn:

• The Nemesis. A ten-room gauntlet ending at a mirror of what the Hero is becoming. Clear it and the Hero is imbued: they learn the nemesis's signature ability and can use it at once, in delves, escalades and the Arena. They are not ascended yet, and the level-40 wall still stands.
• The Proving. Return to the Whisper, which names what was taken and opens the second run on the same ground. The nemesis is gone; his second holds the field. That boss is the first run's elite promoted — 2.6× that elite's health and 1.2× its attack, with the nemesis's special ability stripped out. The elite room is filled by the site's toughest ordinary enemy at 1.8× health and 1.1× attack. Every enemy in the Proving is also scaled 1.1× harder than in the first run, and you fight it carrying the ability you took from the nemesis. Clear it and the Hero ascends: the cap lifts to level 50 and they take the path's title.

A Trial can kill. Both gauntlets run on the delve engine and use the delve's rules: a Hero who goes down is bleeding out on a real-time two-minute clock, and if you neither win nor retreat before it expires they are dead for good. Only the Arena is exempt from that clock — the Trials are not. This is the most dangerous thing you can do with a level-40 Hero.

The sixteen paths are Warlord, Warhawk, Reaver and Spellblade (Warrior); Marchwarden, Huntmaster, Shadewalker and Starcaller (Ranger); Duelist, Nightbow, Phantom and Hexhand (Thief); Battlemage, Stormstrider, Nightmage and Archmagus (Mage).

Guild-hall blueprints are won by a Hero who fights in a Tier-4 conquest, one blueprint at most per victory. Only the three martial lines drop this way — the Oathhall, the Fellwatch and the Undercroft — and only for a line you do not already hold the plans for; the Wizard's Tower is built on its own track. The roll belongs to the Hero, and it remembers: come away empty-handed and that line's odds climb 33% → 50% → 67% → 83% → guaranteed.

The roster: five in play, and the bench behind them¶

There are two pools and the distinction matters.

• The party is who you have in play. Only party members can be sent on a raid, delve, Arena run, escalade, duel or Trial, and only they lend the empire their off-battlefield trait passives. Party size is 1, plus 1 for each frontier realm whose Brutal apex you have beaten, capped at 5.
• The bench is who you retain but are not fielding. Benched Heroes cannot be sent anywhere and buff nothing. Bench capacity comes from the Undercroft at Tier 4 (the Roster), which grants 2 bench places. Without it you have no bench at all.

The rules on moving between them:

• Benching is free.
• Calling a Hero up costs 1 turn, the same as launching a raid.
• You cannot bench a Hero who is mid-anything — afield on a raid, in a delve, Arena run or Trial, on the ladders of an escalade, inside a wall on a Thief's Work, or named in a live duel.
• You cannot bench your last playable champion. At least one Hero must stay in play.
• Benching returns bound spells to the pool. Calling the Hero back up does not restore their loadout — re-inscribe by hand, because the cards may have gone to someone else meanwhile.
• A captured Hero (a Thief's Work gone wrong) still holds their party place while you get them back.

The Undercroft crown buys flexibility, not power: you still field five, but you get to choose which five — cover a class you lack, rest the wounded, match the Hero to the fight.

Equipment¶

Gear is a shared realm pool, not per-Hero property. Equipping a piece another Hero holds reassigns it off them. There are nine slot types and ten worn pieces, because Rings are worn two at a time.

There are 274 pieces defined: 69 weapons, 37 armours, 27 helms, 27 charms, 25 rings, 19 cloaks, 24 pairs of boots, 22 pairs of gauntlets and 24 belts. Rarity runs Common, Uncommon, Rare, Legendary. Exactly one piece is marked Gifted — a hand-out that sits off the drop ladder entirely.

Not all 274 are findable today. Fourteen pieces (class-matched wands, bows and daggers, plus the arcane robes) are held back for a later release and are excluded from every drop table; another hundred belong to realms past the far frontier and only appear if you are raiding there.

Where gear comes from¶

Hero equipment drops from won raids only, and only once your barony owns a Hero. The base chance is 22% per winning raid. Relic bonuses that raise gear-find multiply that up, to a hard maximum of 95%.

Gear is realm-gated: each piece belongs to exactly one realm, and a raid draws from the realm you raided. About 20% of drops instead come from a small "found anywhere" starter kit, which is mostly basic wands and staves so a Mage can always turn up a usable focus. The rest rolls a rarity by the realm's own weighting, then a random piece of that rarity:

These are relative weights, not percentages, and they are drawn over whichever rarities that realm actually stocks. The pattern is plain: deeper country is where legendaries live. Country beyond the far frontier tilts further still.

Class affinity: the right weapon in the right hands¶

Every weapon is built for one or more classes, or for anyone. Affinity is not a lock — you can equip anything — but it scales the weapon's combat stats hard:

Warriors, Rangers and Thieves are the martial side. Mages are the arcane side. Affinity applies to the weapon's attribute bonuses, its power percentage and its combat affixes. It does not apply to party morale, loot or relic-find percentages, or to the flat HP a fused item lends.

A greatsword on a Mage does not just do nothing — its stat bonuses invert into penalties. The armory ranks candidate items through the same combat maths the fights use, so affinity is already inside the score. That does not mean it will never suggest an off-side piece: it will, if everything else about the item (HP, armour, affixes) still leaves the Hero stronger overall. Read the comparison, not just the recommendation.

Weapon types¶

The weapon you carry sets the shape of your attack. Reach and attack kind only matter on the positional boards (Arena and duels); cadence, damage multiplier and initiative apply everywhere.

A light weapon's two strikes at ×0.6 come to roughly ×1.2 total, so it trades reliability for tempo and for extra chances to crit. With no weapon equipped a Hero fights as their class's natural type: Warriors blade, Thieves light, Rangers bow, Mages arcane.

Armour archetypes¶

Armour archetype is not class-locked. It stacks on top of whatever your attributes already give you.

Item affixes¶

Some pieces roll combat affixes — real perks that fire in delves, siege escalades, the Arena and duels. Twenty-two pieces in the game carry them. On a weapon they scale with class affinity like every other combat stat, which means an off-side weapon's affixes go inert rather than misfiring.

Fusion¶

Two identical pieces at the same level fuse into one piece a level higher. Worn copies count: if one of the pair is equipped, the upgrade goes straight back on that Hero in the same slot, and a spare in the armory is always spent before a second Hero is stripped. The cap is level 5. A fused item's stats scale by 1 + 0.6 × (level − 1), and it also carries a flat +8 max HP per level above 1.

A fuse is not free. It costs gold and iron, scaled by the item's rarity and the level being forged (rarity base × the target level, so a Lv2 fuse costs ×2 and a Lv5 fuse ×5). Base cost per rarity: Common 800g + 8 iron, Uncommon 2,500g + 20, Rare 7,000g + 50, Legendary 16,000g + 120. Gold draws from the Treasury as well as your purse, and an iron shortfall is converted at the Smeltery if you have one.

A level-2 item is better than either piece that made it but worse than the two of them were separately. What you buy is slot efficiency: one equip slot holding a stronger piece. The flat HP is why even a weak item is worth fusing.

Traits¶

A Hero is rolled with three traits at birth, and the composition is fixed: exactly two boons and one flaw. They are drawn from 36 birth-rollable traits (18 good, 18 bad) across seven categories, weighted 66% common, 26% uncommon, 8% rare. Contradictory pairs are impossible — a Hero will never be both Giant and Frail.

Traits do real work. They shift attributes, the Hero's own power percentage, party morale, raid loot and relic-find. Some act off the battlefield through your whole living party: Pathfinder raises your realm's scouting find (capped at +25% across the roster), Quartermaster lowers army upkeep and Wasteful raises it (clamped to ±50% across the roster). Some are combat behaviours: a Coward has a base 30% chance to bolt mid-fight, which costs the raid 12 morale and shakes the line (Wisdom cuts that chance by the same relief above); a Reckless Hero takes 30% more damage; a Greedy Hero who lingers to plunder adds +15% loot.

Wisdom is the counterweight. Every point of WIS above 5 removes 5% of every negative trait effect that Hero carries, to a maximum of 90%. Gear bonuses are never softened, only trait penalties.

Traits you cannot roll at birth arrive later: battle scars from surviving a downing, a Jenkember dependency from huffing the amber, marks laid on you by Whispers, and boons earned by paying to have an old scar re-read.

Healing, wounds, death and the reprieve¶

Healing¶

• Every living Hero at home mends 25% of their effective max HP per day on the daily cycle.
• A Warrior mends an extra 15% if your barony has the Sparring Yard (Oathhall Tier 1).
• Relic bonuses that grant Hero regeneration add on top of both.
• Heal All Heroes (the "Mend the wounded" panel on the Heroes page) heals every wounded living Hero to full in one click and charges you the materials. It brews Knitbone Draughts, each worth +25 HP and costing 12 timber and 6 iron, rounding up to whole draughts. If you are short on timber or iron but hold stone and a Smeltery, it converts to cover the shortfall and tells you exactly what it converted.

A Hero at 0 HP cannot be sent anywhere until they heal.

Being downed¶

On a raid, a Hero takes damage each round scaled to the site's difficulty (9% to 16% of it per round, before mitigation), reduced by effective Vitality, skill mitigation and standing orders, and capped at 35% of their max HP per round. Nothing can one-shot a Hero from full health.

What happens when they hit 0 depends on whether your army held:

• You won, or you retreated in good order (your army finished above 20% strength): every downed Hero is carried off the field. Wounded, not dead.
• Your line shattered (below 20%): the downed are left behind — unless the reprieve saves them.

The reprieve¶

Every Hero survives their first-ever downing for free, and never again. The first fall spends the reprieve and leaves no scar. Every downing after that, in a losing raid or a lost home defence, can kill them.

This means a veteran gets quietly more fragile the longer they serve: a level-40 champion who has spent their reprieve is more likely to die than the recruit standing beside them. One thing reverses it. The Unbroken Oath gives a Hero their reprieve back. It drops only from a won delve, and the deeper the stair the better the odds: 0.4% shallow, 0.9% deep, 1.8% abyssal. Nothing else in the game produces one.

Scars¶

A Hero who is downed after their reprieve is gone, and survives anyway, picks up a lasting battle scar they do not already carry. The scars are Old Wound (−1 STR, −4% power), Battle-Shaken (−1 CHA, −4% party morale), Lame Leg (−3 DEX) and Haunted (−6% power). Holy water cannot lift Haunted; only the Black Chapel's Rite of Substitution or a vial of the Still Water will.

Where a Hero can and cannot die¶

In a delve, a downed Hero is out of the fight and bleeding out on a real-time two-minute clock. Extract them — win the run or retreat — before it hits zero and they come home alive at 1 HP. Let it run out and they are gone for good. A Stayed Hand, a grave-charm that turns up on roughly 1 delve win in 10, buys +30 seconds on a downed Hero's clock, and they stack.

Class skills¶

Class skills are earned purely by level and apply automatically. There is nothing to buy and nothing to slot. A Hero uses exactly what they have earned, on every surface they fight on.

Skills come in three kinds. Passives are always on. Buffs fire by themselves when their condition is met. Actives appear as a clickable button with a cooldown on the delve, Arena and escalade boards. Exactly seven skills get a button: Cleave, Twin Shot, Firebolt, Chain Lightning, Meteor, Juggernaut and Deadeye. Everything else applies on its own.

Two rules on how these stack. Wound mitigation from skills adds up but is capped at 60%. Opening-strike and bloodied-fury bonuses take the largest value a Hero has, not the sum.

Party loot bonuses from Cutpurse, Hunter's Mark, Deadeye and Master Thief also apply to delve chests and conquest spoils, summed across the party and capped at +50% for gold and +50% for relic-find.

The Thief and heists¶

Only a Thief can be dispatched on a covert theft. Their contribution is driven by guile, which is Dexterity plus Charisma:

• Success: +0.8% per point of guile, plus any heist prowess from skills, capped at +40%.
• Haul: +0.6% per point of guile, plus heist prowess, capped at +60% (so up to ×1.6 on gold and food).
• Watchtowers slipped: 1 per 5 points of Dexterity, up to 6.

Fail and the Thief is made: they lose a quarter of their max HP and sit on a cooldown before the next job. Succeed and they take a flat 40 XP.

Haunting¶

Dark rites in the Crypt deepen a permanent taint on the Hero who benefits from them. Each level of taint costs −6% power and −3% party morale, and the malus stops deepening at level 5 (−30% and −15%). Taint folds into the Hero's numbers exactly like a negative trait, everywhere they fight.

How Heroes feed the rest of the game¶

A Hero is the thread that ties the systems together, and almost nothing in the late game is reachable without one.

• They convert veterans into permanent value. A ★★★★★ soldier leaves the stack — which costs 5 gold and 2 food a day — and becomes a named asset that levels, carries gear, and costs no upkeep.
• They unlock the gear economy. No Hero means no equipment drops at all. The 22% roll only happens once your barony owns one.
• They are the only key to delves, the Arena, duels, siege escalades and the Thief's Work. Every one of those is a Hero-gated door.
• They pay the empire off the battlefield. Pathfinder Heroes in your party raise your scouting find; Quartermasters cut your army's daily upkeep. Benched Heroes contribute none of this — another reason a bench place is not free power.
• They defend you. Party Heroes who are at home — not benched, not afield on a raid — join your garrison when your barony is attacked, each adding their raid power as that many plain non-veteran soldiers. A wounded Hero contributes proportionally less.
• They are the endgame ladder. Level 40 is the wall, the guild halls at Tier 3 are the key, and the sixteen ascended paths are the long-term project once land and gold are handled.

In short: keep five alive and healed, level them on sites between 1.6 and 3 times their own tier, delve for levels and raid for loot, match every weapon to its class, and never send a Hero who has spent their reprieve into a fight your army might lose.

Scouting, Raiding and the Realms¶

Raiding is the main daily loop. You recruit scouts, send them out to find places worth attacking, then commit soldiers and heroes to take those places. A raid pays gold, food, building materials, land, relics, hero equipment and rare consumables. It is also where hero levels, frontier reagents and conquest targets come from, so almost every other system in Wardenfall is fed by this one.

The loop is deliberately cheap per action and expensive in aggregate. A raid costs one turn, and turns are the scarcest resource in the game. Everything you find here is spent somewhere else: materials into the Treasury, Granary, Workshop and Smeltery; reagents into the Wizard's Tower; relics into permanent barony bonuses; and Brutal apex wins into new realms, new hero slots and Tier-4 conquest targets.

The loop in order¶

• Recruit scouts with gold.
• Send scouts to a realm on a short, medium or long journey. This costs gold and food.
• Some scouts come back with a lead — a discovered site you may raid. Some come back empty. A few never come back.
• Pick a lead, commit soldiers (and optionally cavalry, knights and heroes), choose rations and posture, and launch. This costs one turn plus food.
• The war-party marches, the battle is simulated, and they come home with loot or with fewer men.

Scouts¶

Scouts are recruited on the Expeditions page. They are a pool, not units: idle scouts sit at home until you send them.

Tech Level 1 is the gate while the new-player onboarding programme is enabled for the realm. The underlying gate without it is Tech Level 5.

Each scout gets its own return time and resolves on its own, so a batch of ten trickles back rather than landing at once. A scout still on the road can be recalled — it rejoins the idle pool, the gold and food are not refunded, and a recall never counts as a loss.

Journeys¶

Longer journeys cost more, are more dangerous, and bias the find toward higher-value sites. The gold and food costs below are per scout, and are then multiplied by the destination realm's distance multiplier.

Within a realm, scouts are also nudged toward sites you have not already got an open lead on, and further nudged (×1.4 weight) toward sites you have never revealed at all. A barony's very first dispatch returns in about 4–6 minutes, whatever journey you picked — but only while the new-player shield is still up, and only for that first send.

What improves a scout's odds¶

Find chance is capped at 90% and loss chance floored at 2% after all modifiers.

Leads¶

A lead is a discovered site sitting in your raid queue. Leads do not expire and there is no cap on how many you hold. Scouts re-find the same places forever, so the board collapses every lead on the same site into one card and reports the rest as banked copies — raiding spends one copy and the next load promotes another.

• A win consumes the lead.
• A loss does not. The site is re-listed immediately so you can regroup and go back with a heavier party.
• You can dismiss a lead you do not want.
• Leads marked by a Scout Pack or a Quartermaster's Lodestone sort to the top of the board, ahead of difficulty, because that mark is the whole reason the item was spent.

Launching a raid¶

A raid already underway can be called off. The survivors march home unharmed, the lead returns to the queue, and you get back the turn, the food, and every crafted item armed to the raid — Siege Kit, War Banner, Warpaint, Bloodrage, Greedsight, Stonesnow, Jenkember. A Raid Token is the one exception: it is not returned, though the turn is refunded in its place.

Rations¶

Rations are chosen at launch. They cost food and multiply your effective fighting strength.

How the fight is decided¶

Every raid is simulated round by round rather than settled on one roll. The garrison's strength pool is the site's hidden difficulty × 2.2. Both sides get a fortune-of-war swing of up to ±30% at the start. The fight runs at most 16 rounds; you win by grinding the garrison down before your own line falls to your posture's retreat threshold. Soldiers die at roughly 55% of the rate your army's raw strength is spent, so a decisive overmatch is much cheaper in lives than a close win.

Your army's strength going in is:

• Soldier headcount plus a veterancy bonus (each star rank is worth more than a body).
• Plus Cavalry at 2.0 and Knights at 1.2 per head.
• All of the above multiplied by the rations bonus.
• Then multiplied by your heroes' combined morale, and by any Spectral Host charge or allied Free Company bonus.

The launch screen previews your win chance, expected casualties and hero risk by running that same simulation 160 times. Those are honest odds, not a promise — the real raid is one roll of the same dice.

Posture¶

Posture is the risk dial for the army. It is set per raid.

Cautious pulls out early and always gets your heroes back. Aggressive wins close fights but turns a loss into a bloodbath and can get heroes killed.

March times¶

A raid's travel time depends on where you send it: a per-tier home band scaled by the realm's distance. Stonesnow halves it and a Jenkember huff cuts a further 25%; both stack.

Heroes on a raid¶

Heroes are optional but transform a raid. A hero must be alive, above 0 HP, not benched, not already out on another raid, and not mid-infiltration. Several heroes can ride one raid; their power, morale, loot bonuses and attacks stack. Wounded heroes fight at reduced effectiveness in direct proportion to their missing HP.

Hero morale stacks with diminishing returns: the strongest leader counts in full, each additional one at half the previous, and the positive total is capped at +25%. Negative morale (a Timid hero, a hero who fled) applies in full.

Standing orders are set once per hero on the Heroes page and apply everywhere they fight.

Hero risk. A hero who is downed is normally carried home; they are only lost if the army's line actually shatters. A hero's first-ever downing is always survived and leaves no scar. A later downing they survive without that reprieve leaves a permanent wound trait. Wounds heal at about 25% of maximum HP per day.

Hero XP. A raid mints one XP pool, split between the heroes by the damage each actually dealt — the army's damage never dilutes it. The pool is the site's difficulty on a win, 40% of it on a loss, with everything above 900 counting for only 5%. A difficulty-900 site therefore mints 900 XP and a difficulty-40,000 apex mints about 2,855 — roughly three times the pool for forty-four times the difficulty.

Each hero's share is then scaled by how the site stands relative to that hero's level. The curve peaks just above a hero's own tier and falls away in both directions, so escorting a low-level hero through deep content pays almost nothing.

A hero's own tier is 120 difficulty at level 1, rising 10% per level. Roughly: level 10 belongs in the Pale Steppe, level 15 in the Saltmarch, levels 20–30 in the Witherwood, levels 35–40 in the Hollow Downs.

Kit you can arm¶

Nothing is pre-armed. You pick items at the moment you send scouts or launch a raid, and one is spent per use. Most are made at the Workshop or the Apothecary — both are material-paid buildings you raise from the Buildings atlas, and the tier listed below is the tier you must have built before the recipe appears. Jenkember and the Raid Token cannot be crafted at all; they only drop.

If you hold none of a craftable item, the raid card offers to make it on the spot, converting materials at the Smeltery to cover any shortfall and showing the exact burn before you commit.

Jenkember has a cost. Ten lifetime huffs give a hero the Thirst trait: their comedown deepens to −20% and they fight at −5% on raids where they do not get a jar. Fifty huffs give Addict: −25% comedown, −10% craving, and a 35% chance at launch to snatch a held jar unbidden. The lifetime count drops by 1 each clean day (a day with no comedown pending), and dropping back under a threshold sheds the trait. The Absolution Vial cannot clear either trait — that is deliberate.

Stonesnow has a cost too. Your expedition corps carries a 0–100 dependency meter that rises 2 per powder used and falls 4 per day, climbing five tiers: Clear-headed, Frost-Touched, Snow-Hungry, Snowbitten, Whiteout. Higher tiers mean tolerance (a boosted run's time multiplier erodes from ×0.50 to ×0.80), withdrawal (an un-boosted run slows to ×1.10, then ×1.25, then ×1.45), desertion (un-powdered scouts are lost an extra 5% of the time at Snowbitten, 12% at Whiteout), a standing popular-support drain (−1/day, then −3), and at Whiteout a −10 hit to raid morale. One boosted mission a day breaks even; spamming the powder hooks you.

What a raid pays¶

Only a win pays. A defeat has a 40% chance of scraping back a small amount of gold — up to a third of the site's minimum gold roll — and nothing else.

Rarer things a winning raid can carry home:

What a raid costs¶

• The dead. Casualties come out of the ranks that marched, higher ranks dying slower. The fallen are added to your memorial tally and to the raisable-dead pool.
• Popular support. If 15% or more of the party falls, the realm mourns. The penalty is the loss fraction × 6, rounded, then ×1.5 if you also lost the fight, then capped at 4 points — so 4 is the worst any single raid can cost you. A built Cemetery halves it; with Cemetery rites in play the mitigation scales by tier instead (keeping 50%, 35%, then 20% of the penalty).
• An open flank. The committed force cannot defend your barony until it returns.
• The turn. One turn per raid, unless you spend a Raid Token.

The nine realms¶

Each realm past the home country is opened by winning its parent realm's Brutal apex. That win drops a map. Realms are otherwise invisible and unreachable.

The distance multiplier does two jobs: it scales the gold and food a scouting journey costs, and it scales the march time of every raid into that realm. A medium journey costs 60 gold and 60 food per scout at home; the same journey into the Riftmarch costs 300 and 300. Scout return times are not affected — those depend only on the journey length you picked.

Felling a Brutal apex outside the home realm also opens a permanent hero slot, once per realm. You may hold more heroes than that, but no more than five ever take the field at once.

The home realm, site by site¶

Wardenstone comes from exactly three places — the Drowned Temple, the Wardenwood and the Warden's Vault — and it gates the top Treasury, Granary, Workshop and Smeltery tiers. Godstone is never raidable at all.

The shape of a frontier realm¶

Every realm past the home country runs the same twelve site slots, rethemed and rescaled: two Tier-1 sites, a spread of Tier-2 sites including one war-camp that conscripts survivors, two Tier-3 shrine sites that yield the realm's signature material, and one Tier-3 Brutal apex. The deep realms add a thirteenth slot, a dedicated food site.

• Gold scales by a per-realm multiplier: ×2 in the Pale Steppe and Ashscar, ×3 in the Saltmarch, ×4 in the Witherwood, then ×5, ×5.5, ×6.5 and ×8 through the deep realms.
• Ordinary materials scale the same way, from ×1.6 to ×5.
• The wardenstone slot on the two Tier-3 sites and the apex becomes the realm's signature material instead.
• Three sites in every frontier realm also carry off food; the deep realms have four.
• The apex guarantees a legendary relic, and every apex except the Riftheart drops the map to the next realm. The Riftmarch is the end of the chain — its apex opens nothing further.

Signature yields in the first four frontier realms are 3–6 at each Tier-3 site and 8–14 at the apex. In the deep realms they are deliberately single-digit and much thinner — see below.

The deep realms and Resonance¶

The four deep realms — Hollow Downs, Glass Reach, Underdeep and Riftmarch — exist to give the Wizard's Tower's scarce spell reagents a raid source. Their gold and ordinary materials escalate hard, but the reagent itself is thin on purpose: 1–3 at a Tier-3 site, 2–6 at the apex.

To make that thinness survivable, each deep realm remembers you. This is Resonance, tracked per realm.

• A win in that realm: +1 charge.
• A loss in that realm: −1 charge, never below 0.
• At 5 of 5 you are Attuned to that realm.
• While Attuned, your next haul from a site in that realm that actually yields its signature reagent rolls that reagent at the top of its range and then doubles it. The charge then resets to 0.

The charge is only spent when it actually pays out. Raid a caravan while Attuned and the charge is untouched, so it can never be wasted on a site with no reagent to double. Resonance does not exist in the home realm or the first four frontier realms.

One legendary relic channel can hold a charge through a loss instead of dropping it.

The Deep Road¶

A full Resonance charge is a key, not just a bonus. It opens exactly one of two doors, and it is consumed either way — there is no carrying it forward.

Door one: the deep apex. A deep realm's Brutal apex will not open at all without a full 5/5 charge with that realm. The launch is refused outright and tells you how many more wins you need. Win it and you are handed a warden's map: a private Tier-4 conquest realm, guaranteed, no roll. You may hold one unanswered warden's map at a time, and a second apex will not launch until you have marched on the first. Losing the apex costs you one charge, not the whole attunement.

Door two: the siege. You can instead carry a charge into a conquest siege, where it cashes at the moment the regent falls. That pays double the signature reagent (on a base haul of 3, before your contribution share), +15% on gold and land, and doubled godstone — a Tier-3 realm's 1 becomes 2, a Tier-4's 2 becomes 4, a Great Power War's 3 becomes 6.

Both doors cost the same five wins, so they are priced to be worth about the same. Note that no deep realm drops land on a raid; the land in the deep comes from the fortress your map points at.

Loot: relics, gear and materials¶

Relics (trinkets). Relics are permanent barony bonuses and are the main long-term reason to raid. Which pool you draw from is decided by where you raided: the home realm draws the universal pool, and every other realm draws its own exclusive set. There is no cross-realm bleed.

Every Brutal apex guarantees a legendary — but only one you have not already found. Once you hold every legendary that realm can give, the guarantee lapses and the apex drops at ordinary odds instead: a 25% chance of a duplicate. Duplicates still matter, because Item Fusion needs two of a kind.

Three other things can put a relic in your hands:

• A scout-marked lead guarantees one on a win. With Greedsight also armed, the marked lead pays 75% uncommon / 25% rare rather than a flat common.
• Greedsight on its own multiplies the site's find chance by 1.5 and raises the rarity rolled by one tier.
• A barony holding no relics at all is guaranteed a common on any of its first three raid wins.

Hero equipment. A won raid has a 22% base chance to drop a piece of hero gear, but only if you own at least one hero. About one drop in five comes from a small kit that drops anywhere; the rest comes from the realm's own table, and the deeper the realm the better the rarity it rolls.

The four deep realms hold 102 pieces of equipment between them, 53 of them legendary, and their legendary weapons carry the strongest combat traits in the game.

Materials. Four core materials are raidable — Stone, Timber, Iron and Wardenstone — plus eight signature materials, one per realm past the home country. Godstone is never raidable; it comes only from repelling a World Event and from Grand Treasury interest.

Signature materials have no Smeltery conversion route. If a recipe wants one, you must already hold it.

How raiding feeds the rest of the game¶

• Buildings. Stone, timber, iron and wardenstone are the only way to raise the Treasury, Granary, Workshop and Smeltery. Material Luck exists so a hoard of relics quietly steers your hauls toward whatever your build queue is short of.
• Land. Home-realm raids seize a specific region type, set per site. The first four frontier realms seize 1 to 4 regions drawn at random from seven ordinary types — Coastal, River, Desert, Mountain, Urban, Industrial, Technology. Alongside conquest, this is the main way a barony grows.
• Heroes. Raids are how most heroes level, and equipment comes almost entirely from raid drops. Beating a frontier Brutal apex opens a permanent hero slot.
• Conquest. One raid win in eight reveals a private Tier-1 or Tier-2 realm to besiege. Deep apexes hand you a Tier-4 outright.
• Magic. The four deep-realm reagents are the raid-side supply for the Wizard's Tower spellbook. The only alternative is refining six common materials into one.
• Turns. Activity tokens, Vanilla Tokens and the King's Decree all come out of raids, and turns are the binding constraint on everything else you do.
• Story. Scout discoveries are also what surface Whispers and reveal Delve sites.

The practical shape of the loop: scout on medium or long journeys into the deepest realm you have opened, bank the leads, and spend your turns on the sites that pay what you are actually short of — food from the barns, wardenstone from the temples, reagents from the deep. Push a Brutal apex only when your army genuinely overmatches it, because that is where the maps, the legendaries and the next realm live.

Buildings: the Economic Core¶

Eight buildings carry the economy of a barony. The Treasury and Granary store what you own and protect it from theft. The Quarry, Lumber Camp and Forge produce raw material every day without a raid. The Workshop, Apothecary and Smeltery spend that material: two of them turn it into consumables, the third converts one material into another. Everything is raised from the Works page, on the Buildings tab.

The rules of building¶

• One build per line at a time. Each building line has its own timer. While the Treasury is rising you cannot start another Treasury tier, but you can start a Granary, a Forge and a Workshop in the same minute.
• Tiers are strictly in order. You always raise the next tier up. There is no skipping and no downgrade.
• The cost is spent up front, the moment you press build. There is no refund, no cancel, and no way to hurry a timer once it starts.
• Builds finish on their own timer. The times below are real-world minutes and hours, not turns. Building costs you no turns at all.
• The tier lands when you next open the game. There is no background scheduler: a finished build is applied on your next page load after the timer runs out. Nothing is lost by logging in late — the timer does not restart.
• Gold can come out of the Treasury; materials cannot. Any gold price draws your loose gold first and your banked gold for the shortfall. Stone, timber, iron, wardenstone, godstone and frontier materials must be loose in your stores.
• Some relics shorten construction. Trinkets and relics carrying the build-haste effect cut build time, and their combined effect is capped at 35%.
• A finished tier is public. Every completed upgrade posts to the news ticker, the realm feed and Discord.

The Treasury¶

The Treasury does three jobs: it banks gold out of reach of the Gold Heist, it pays interest, and it secures trinkets against theft. It costs no gold at any tier — only materials, and at tier 4 that includes godstone, which no raid can produce.

Interest. Loose gold earns the lower rate, and only on the portion up to your bank cap. Banked gold earns the higher rate on the whole balance. Both are paid as new gold on the daily cycle. The combined payout is capped at 25,000 gold per day no matter how much you hold, so a full Grand Treasury does not print without limit.

Banking. You can deposit and withdraw gold freely up to the cap. You do not have to deposit by hand to be safe: on the daily cycle, positive income fills the Treasury up to its cap first, and only the overflow lands as loose gold. Banked gold is still spendable — any purchase draws loose gold first and the reserve for the remainder — but selling and gifting only ever use loose gold.

Securing trinkets. The tier sets how many trinkets are heist-proof. You pin the ones you care about; any slots left over fill automatically with your most valuable trinkets, oldest first. Everything past the cap is exposed, and exposed trinkets are the only ones a heist can take. A pinned trinket also cannot be sold to the Roaming Trader.

Godstone. The Grand Treasury is the only building in this group that needs it. Godstone is never raided, never bought and never smelted. It comes from repelling a realm-wide World Event, and from taking a Realm in a conquest siege.

The Granary¶

The Granary is the food counterpart. It raises food production by a flat percentage and holds a food reserve that the Food Heist cannot touch. It tops out at wardenstone, so unlike the Grand Treasury it is reachable without godstone.

The production bonus multiplies your regions' food output after the technology bonus. It does not create food where there is none: only River regions grow food, so a barony with no rivers gets 50% of nothing.

Storage works like the Treasury. Surplus fills the reserve up to the cap first and the overflow stays loose. On a day when you eat more than you grow, the shortfall is drawn out of the reserve automatically.

Quarry, Lumber Camp and Forge¶

These three are the passive material faucets. Each produces its own material every daily cycle with no raid, no turns and no risk. They are bought with gold rather than materials, which is what makes them the bridge out of raid dependence.

What unlocks them: Technology Level 10. Tech level climbs by 1 per daily cycle until it reaches its ceiling, and the ceiling is the number of Technology regions you own (capped at 10) plus 1 for each active Tech Agreement. So the usual route is 10 Technology regions and ten cycles, but eight regions and two Tech Agreements gets you there too. The market refuses an eleventh Technology region.

Yields are flat per cycle and do not scale with your size. Trinkets and relics carrying the output-efficiency effect raise all three, up to +40%. These buildings have no storage and no reserve — everything they make lands loose in your stores.

The Workshop¶

The Workshop spends materials on one-shot war gear: things you pick when you launch a raid or send scouts. Its higher tiers need frontier materials, which are only found in the expanded lands past the Warden's Vault.

The Apothecary¶

The Apothecary makes drinkable consumables: healing draughts used on a Hero between fights, and utility brews picked at the moment you send scouts or launch a raid.

You craft all of these on the Craftables tab of the Works page, not the Buildings tab. Healing brews are then used from the building's card or your Inventory. If you do not name a Hero, the one with the lowest share of their maximum HP is treated. Any of the three healing brews will also bring a Hero sitting at 0 HP back onto their feet — that is not exclusive to the Wardenbalm Elixir.

The Smeltery¶

The Smeltery converts one material into another at a loss. The loss is deliberate: it is what stops conversion from being free money. Use it to turn a material you have too much of into one you are short of.

Any of the three base materials trades for any other at the tier's flat rate. Wardenstone can be made at Tier 3 but never converted back down, and there is no route to godstone at any tier. Conversions are instant and cost no turns; up to 500 units of output can be made at once.

The Smeltery also covers shortfalls automatically. When you craft a raid consumable straight from the raid panel and you are short a base material, it converts what is needed on the spot, drawing from your largest pile first. Without a Smeltery, that shortcut is not offered.

Frontier materials¶

Four materials gate the higher crafting tiers. None of them exists in the home country — each is found by raiding one of the expanded lands, which open once you win the Warden's Vault.

The market¶

The market is the realm-wide shop, open to everyone with no agreement needed. It sells land, troops and food, and it buys food and raw material back. Prices move: they drift up to 8% per cycle with a pull back toward base, and every trade you make moves the price for everyone.

Land¶

Land gets dearer as you grow. Every region in a single order costs more than the one before it, and the premium keeps climbing with the total land you already hold — so a large barony pays far above the sticker price for its next region. Buying also pushes that region's market price up by about 1% per region for everyone; selling pushes it down. Region prices are bounded between 65% and 180% of base, and land sells for 60% of the current buy price with no ramp, so churning land is always a loss.

New baronies buy cheaper. The newcomer discount is 35% off the buy price at zero regions owned and fades in a straight line to nothing at 100 regions. It applies to every region type, on buys only.

Troops¶

Iron is an alternative currency, not an extra cost — you pay the gold price or the iron price, never both. The iron prices are fixed at iron's base bank value of 14 gold, so at that rate paying in iron and paying in gold cost the same, and buying a unit with iron to resell the unit for gold always loses money. Note that the bank's live iron price sags as the realm dumps iron on it (see below) while the unit iron prices do not move, so when iron is depressed, spending it on troops is worth more than selling it. Soldiers can also be conscripted with food, at 500 food each; that is a deliberate food sink, not a cheap army. The realm's administrator can adjust the Soldier prices; every other unit is fixed.

Selling veterans is priced by their rank, and selling a rank you do not hold enough of is refused. Units sell for about 60% of what they cost, so an army is not a savings account.

Food¶

Food is a live order book. Every purchase walks the price up and every sale walks it down, at roughly 1 gold per 2,000 food traded, and you pay or receive the true average across your own order rather than the pre-trade price. The price floor is 1 gold and the ceiling is 20.

Selling is deliberately worse than buying, in three stacked ways:

• You are only paid for the value above the 1-gold floor, at half rate. A market already glutted with food pays close to nothing for more.
• The rate you receive is capped at 4 gold per food however scarce food gets, even when buyers are paying 20.
• Daily takings suffer diminishing returns. The first 10,000 gold of the day pays in full. After that the sale is walked through 15,000-gold bands that pay 60%, then 30%, then 15%, halving forever — so a single day's food sales climb toward about 28,000 gold and can never reach more. There is no error and no wall, just a flattening curve. The whole curve is scaled down for young accounts: one fifth of it under three days old (about 5,600 a day), one half under fourteen (about 14,000).

The result is that a sell-then-rebuy round trip always loses gold at any volume, while genuinely buying food to feed an army works exactly as it reads.

Selling material to the bank¶

The bank buys these three and nothing else — wardenstone and godstone have no bank price. This is a sell-only outlet, so the price can only move down: each sale drops it, roughly a full base price per 800 units dumped, with a floor at 40% of base. It recovers 30% of the gap back toward base on each daily tick. That sag is what stops the Smeltery from being a gold printer — convert enough material into iron and iron stops being worth converting to.

Trading with other players¶

The Trade Post. Player-to-player listings, and the only market for stone, timber, iron and wardenstone at a price you set. Food and all five troop types can also be listed.

• You need at least one active Trade Agreement to post a listing at all, and you must have an active Trade Agreement with the seller to buy theirs.
• Listings expire after 24 hours. You can cancel your own at any time.
• Every completed material trade is recorded as the going rate, which is what the commodity price graph shows. There is no global buy or sell price for materials — the market is whatever players actually pay.
• An anti-funnel limit refuses the trade if either side has already taken in too much value today: 25,000 gold-equivalent for an account under three days old, 150,000 under fourteen days, and 500,000 after that.

The Roaming Trader. A travelling merchant with roughly a 15% chance of arriving on any given day; once he does he stays for about 30 hours. He buys trinkets you have not pinned and hero equipment nobody has equipped, and he carries a small cart of his own.

• Fused items are worth more both ways: each level above the first adds 60% of the base value.
• An Undercroft (tier 1, the Scales) raises everything he pays you by 15%.
• His cart holds 2 to 4 trinkets and hero items per visit, plus the token below. Duplicates are allowed and are the point — two copies of the same ware on one cart is a fusion pair. Rarity is rolled per ware at 55% common, 35% uncommon, 10% rare; legendaries are never stocked. Prices are stamped when the visit opens and do not change during it.
• He always carries exactly one activity token, at 6,000 gold. It is the only place to buy one.
• Anything you sell him can be bought back for exactly what he paid, for as long as he is in town. The buyback needs loose gold, so spend the proceeds and you lose the undo. Once he moves on, the sale is final.
• His asking prices rise for the wealthiest baronies only. Below four times the realm's median purse — counting banked gold — you pay the listed price, always. The median is taken from active purses of 25,000 gold or more, and if there are fewer than five of those, nobody is scaled at all. What he pays you is never scaled.

How this feeds the wider game¶

The economy is built as a ladder out of raiding. Early on, every stone and timber comes from a raid, and the Treasury and Granary exist to keep what you win. In the middle game the Quarry, Lumber Camp and Forge take over the supply of base material, which is what frees your turns for raids, delves and sieges you actually want to run rather than material runs you have to.

From there the crafting line turns that surplus back into fighting power: the Workshop and Apothecary are the reason a raid is safer, faster or richer than the one before, and the Smeltery is what makes a wrong-shaped pile useful. The frontier materials at the top of each line are the hook back into exploration — you cannot finish these buildings from home.

Two things also feed the scoreboard. Every Treasury, Granary and production tier grants flat prestige toward your ranking, and the reserves protect the two resources most exposed to enemy action. A barony with a full Treasury and Granary is difficult to hurt through theft, and a barony with the three works standing does not run dry when it stops raiding.

Buildings: the Specialist Lines and How to Unlock Them¶

Alongside the economic buildings, Wardenfall has nine specialist lines: the Cemetery, the Memorial, the Holy Site, the Wizard's Tower, the Spymaster's Lodge, the Stable, and the three guild lines (Oathhall, Fellwatch, Undercroft). Each is a ladder of tiers. Each tier costs materials (and sometimes gold), takes real time to raise, and unlocks something you cannot do any other way. Most lines also have an unlock above and beyond the cost: a story quest you must solve, a set of plans you must win in war, or a number of dead soldiers you must already have lost.

You raise all of them from the Works page, on the Buildings tab.

How building works¶

• One tier at a time per line. You cannot queue a second tier while the first is up.
• The cost is taken the moment you start. Gold can draw on your Treasury reserve; materials must be liquid.
• The build times below are the base times. Trinkets and relics that shorten construction apply on top, up to 35% off.
• Nothing in Wardenfall is on a scheduler. A finished build completes on your next page load. If a timer has run out and the tier has not moved, load the page again.
• A completed tier is realm news. Everyone sees that you raised it.
• Tiers do not expire, and nothing you do can lose one. The single exception is a World Event Construct that breaks through: that knocks tiers off the tallest buildings of every established barony, and the Cemetery, Memorial, Spymaster's Lodge and Holy Site are on its list. The Wizard's Tower, the Stable and the three guild lines are not.

The Cemetery¶

A burial ground for your fallen soldiers. Its job is to soften the popular-support hit when men die, and from Tier 2 it becomes the home of the Cemetery Rites and the Souls economy.

Unlock: cumulative soldiers lost. The gate is per tier, not just for the first one. Losses count for your whole history, so this line opens itself if you fight at all.

The Cemetery Rites (Tier 2 and up)¶

The Cemetery runs on two separate pools. Every soldier who falls adds one body to the raisable dead. Souls are not minted by death at all: the only way to get one is Soul-Harvest, which kills a living veteran of yours. Dark rites raise a Disturbance meter (0-100); benign rites lower it. Disturbance falls by 5 each day on its own.

If Disturbance crosses your tier's tolerance (50 at Tier 2, 65 at Tier 3) the grounds turn Haunted. While Haunted you lose 4 popular support per day instead of gaining any, the Necropolis morale bonus stops applying, and the Spectral Host raid bonus is 1.5 times larger (+37.5% instead of +25%). Reconsecration is how you climb back out.

The Memorial¶

The dark counterpart to the Holy Site. It starts as a monument to your fallen heroes and ends as the altar of the Unbinding. From Tier 2 up, each tier is the prerequisite for a rite you cannot perform anywhere else.

Unlock: one of your heroes must have died. Nothing else opens this line.

Tier 1 gives +2% hero morale for each fallen hero it names, up to +10% (five fallen).

Tier 2, the Crypt, opens the dark rites. Each one deepens a permanent Taint on the hero it touches, worth -6% power and -3% morale per level, capped at five levels.

Tier 4, the Obsidian Adytum, opens the Unbinding. One of your heroes (the vessel) takes one level of Taint off another hero on the same roster. Both heroes must be yours, and neither may be benched. Each rite costs 1 turn plus Relic Ash: 42 Ash for a clean vessel, rising to 186 for one already deep in the dark. Afterwards both heroes are laid up in a vigil and cannot be fielded at all - 7 hours at the start, up to 31 hours at the deepest. The Taint is gone from the donor for good; the vessel gains a permanent dark mark in exchange, and walking that back out is the Pilgrim's Path at 1.5 times the usual cost.

The Holy Site¶

The mirror of the Memorial: it takes flaws off heroes rather than putting them on. This line costs no gold at all, only raid materials and time.

Unlock: solve the whisper "The First Vow". Until you have, the line does not appear. Once a Holy Site stands, the upgrades need only materials.

The Rite of Absolution (Tier 2) spends one Absolution Vial and strips every birth flaw and battle wound from one living hero at once. Two things it will not touch: vices and addictions, and the Taint. For Taint you need the Black Chapel's Rite of Substitution, or the Cathedral's Pilgrim's Path.

Crafting a Vial (Tier 3) costs 2 godstone and 100 wardenstone. Vials also drop from repelling a Titan (two per repel), which is much cheaper if a Titan happens to be coming.

The Pilgrim's Path (Tier 4) sends one hero out alone. They come home fully healed, and one level of Taint lighter if they carried any. The price is their seat: a pilgrim still occupies their place in your party for the whole walk, so you fight a champion short until they return. The offering is Relic Ash, charged at 6 per hour of the walk and spent the moment they leave; if the hero carries Taint, the walk also costs one Absolution Vial per level lifted. A walk is 24 hours for a hero of ordinary standing and gets 12 hours longer for every step their standing has already moved, to a ceiling of 108 hours; a hero walking back out of the dark pays 1.5 times the hours and the ash. So compared with the Black Chapel's Rite of Substitution this is slow and expensive - but it costs you no champion.

The Wizard's Tower¶

The arcane line, built over the far-realm material pool. It is the only place to trade one far-realm material for another, the only place to refine common materials into scarce ones, and the only source of battle spells.

Unlock: the Wizard's Tower Blueprint. It drops from winning a Tier 3 or higher conquest (or a Great Power War) with a 40% chance per victory, and stops dropping once you hold one. There is no other way in.

Tier 4 has a second gate. You cannot raise the Archmage's Rise until all six base spells are discovered and researched. Materials alone will not get you there.

The Exchange will never hand you Spellsilk, Starfall Iron, Quicksilver or Riftshard. Those four are deep-realm reagents; you can spend them at the Tower, but the Exchange cannot produce them, and nor can the Tower's auto-buy when you are short for a spell. Refine is the one route that makes them, and it reaches only Spellsilk, Starfall Iron and Quicksilver - never Riftshard.

The Spymaster's Lodge¶

Counter-intelligence. It unmasks the people running covert operations against you and makes those operations less likely to succeed. It has no unlock condition: build it whenever you can afford it.

The op-success penalty stacks with your Watchtowers. From Tier 1 you can also run a Counter-Espionage Sweep: 8,000 gold and 1 turn buys an 8-hour window where incoming operations are 40% less likely to land and any that do land are detected for certain. It is a jamming field, not immunity.

The Stable¶

The one building that hands you turns on demand rather than spending them. Raise it, keep horses in it, feed them, let them rest, then send a courier out with the day's orders. Each courier is worth one turn, granted on top of your daily allotment.

There is no unlock condition beyond the cost.

The couriers-per-day figure is the ceiling and nothing moves it. No amount of gold, land or army raises it. Stalls and rest time only decide how likely a horse is to be ready when you log in - and rest time is the one number here a trinket can shorten.

The daily reset wipes unspent turns. The reset sets your turns to the day's allotment rather than adding to them, so a courier sent just before the reset buys a turn that vanishes. The Stable refuses to send one within 30 minutes of the reset and tells you why.

Feeding costs liquid food. The Granary reserve does not feed horses.

The Bond¶

Every courier a horse carries counts toward its own rank. Rank is the only thing a horse gains, and rides are the only way to gain it.

At Seasoned a horse can be bonded to a hero. The bond gives that hero the horse's movement and initiative on the Arena sand and in duels. One horse, one hero, both ways. A bonded horse still eats, rests, carries couriers and climbs toward its next rank. Because you keep fewer stalls than heroes, you are always choosing who rides.

The three guild lines¶

The Oathhall (Warriors), the Fellwatch (Rangers) and the Undercroft (Thieves). These are the buildings behind hero ascension, and the only buildings that pay permanent turns.

Unlock: each line has its own Blueprint, and a Blueprint drops only from winning a Tier 4 conquest. A hero of that line's class must have fought in the siege and be alive at the end. There is no level requirement on the drop. The base chance is 1 in 3 per eligible hero; every Tier 4 victory that leaves a line empty-handed adds 1/6 to that line's odds, so the fifth is guaranteed. Only one Blueprint drops per victory, and if several lines hit, the one you have missed most goes first. A line you have no Blueprint for is invisible on your Buildings page.

All three lines share one cost curve.

Only Tiers 3 and 4 pay turns. The first two tiers pay their perk and nothing else. Each turn-paying tier grants +1 permanent turn per day the moment it completes, so all three lines fully built is +6 per day. Tiers 1 and 2 are still worth raising, but do not build them expecting a turn.

Training soldiers (Oathhall Tier 2)¶

Put soldiers through training and they come out one veteran rank higher. Not all of them come out: a share washes out and is gone. You are buying quality with quantity.

A drill costs 1 turn, takes a batch of 50 to 20,000 men, and runs for a fixed season during which those men cannot raid, hold or hunt. Only men at home can be entered, and you can run one drill at a time. Gold and food are charged per man entered, including the ones who wash out.

Which halls an ascension needs¶

To send a hero on an Ascension Trial you need two guild halls at Tier 3: the one that teaches your hero's own class, and the one that teaches the class they are reaching toward. The Wizard's Tower counts as the Mage's hall, and its Tier 3 is the Wizard's Tower room.

• Warrior to Warrior, Ranger to Ranger and so on collapses to a single hall. These four pure paths are the accessible route.
• A blended path (Ranger reaching toward Mage, say) needs the Fellwatch at Tier 3 and the Wizard's Tower at Tier 3. The twelve blends are the long project.
• The hero themselves must be Level 40. The buildings only open the Trial; passing it is a separate problem.

Dependencies: what you need before what¶

Read each line left to right. Everything to the left must already be true.

• Cemetery → lose 1,000 soldiers → Cemetery. Then 2,500 lost for the War Cemetery, then 5,000 for the Necropolis.
• Cemetery Rites and Souls → 2,500 soldiers lost → War Cemetery (Tier 2) → the four rites.
• Memorial → a hero must die → Memorial.
• Crypt and the dark rites → a fallen hero and a Cemetery → Memorial → Crypt.
• The Black Chapel and the Rite of Substitution → Crypt → Necropolis (Cemetery Tier 3, so 5,000 soldiers lost) → solve the whisper "A Greater Soul" → Black Chapel.
• The Obsidian Adytum and the Unbinding → Black Chapel → Obsidian Adytum → 1 turn and 42 or more Relic Ash per rite. To have anything to unbind, you must first have used the Crypt's rites to put Taint on a hero of your own.
• Holy Site → solve the whisper "The First Vow" → Holy Site.
• The Rite of Absolution → Holy Site → Sanctuary → hold an Absolution Vial (from a whisper, or from repelling a Titan).
• Crafting Absolution Vials → Sanctuary → Temple → 2 godstone and 100 wardenstone per vial.
• The Pilgrim's Path → Temple → Cathedral → Relic Ash for the offering (plus one Absolution Vial if the hero carries Taint), and a party seat you can afford to leave empty.
• Wizard's Tower → win a Tier 3 or higher conquest, or a Great Power War → the Blueprint drops (40%) → House of the Arcane.
• Refine → House of the Arcane → Conjurer's Spire.
• Battle spells → Conjurer's Spire → Wizard's Tower (Tier 3) → find a spell recipe, research it, then buy cards.
• Spells on your heroes → research all six base spells → Archmage's Rise (Tier 4) → bind them from the Spellbook.
• Spymaster's Lodge → nothing. Build it.
• Counter-Espionage Sweep → Watch-House (Tier 1) → 8,000 gold and 1 turn.
• Stable → nothing. Build it, then feed a horse, then wait out its rest, then send the courier.
• A mounted hero → a Stable → 15 couriers carried by one horse (Seasoned) → bond it to a hero.
• Any guild line → win a Tier 4 conquest with a hero of that class in the fight → the line's Blueprint drops → Tier 1.
• Training soldiers → the Oathhall Blueprint → the Sparring Yard → The Pells (Tier 2).
• Permanent turns from a guild line → that line at Tier 3. A second turn at Tier 4.
• A pure Ascension Trial → your hero's own guild line at Tier 3 → a Level 40 hero.
• A blended Ascension Trial → your hero's own line at Tier 3 and the blend class's line at Tier 3 → a Level 40 hero.
• Roster bench slots → the Undercroft Blueprint → Undercroft Tier 4 → +2 bench slots.

How these lines feed the rest of the game¶

• War feeds the buildings. Four of the nine lines - the Wizard's Tower and all three guild lines - cannot be started at all without a conquest victory, and the Cemetery cannot be started without a thousand dead. The specialist lines are downstream of fighting, not an alternative to it.
• Conquest is the bottleneck. Tier 4 realms are the scarcest content in the game and all three guild Blueprints come from them. The pity ladder exists because of that: a line you keep missing gets easier every time, and the fifth Tier 4 victory with the right hero present is a guaranteed drop.
• Turns are the real currency. Turns gate raids, delves, sieges, holds and rites. Several things add to them - story whispers and daily contracts grant them, some trinkets carry +1 a day - but the Stable and the guild lines are the only buildings that do, and both are capped by the tier you have raised rather than by a bank balance. A whale and a three-day-old barony get the same answer out of a Paddock.
• The two poles are deliberately unequal. The whole Holy line, Cathedral included, costs only base materials and time - a story quest and a lot of stone. The Obsidian Adytum needs a dead hero, five thousand dead soldiers, a story quest and 180,000 gold on top of the whole Memorial line beneath it, and there is nothing to unbind unless you already chose to taint a hero of your own.
• Losses are not wasted. Dead soldiers open the Cemetery and fill the ghost pool the Spectral Host raises. A dead hero opens the Memorial.

The Delve¶

A delve is a dungeon crawl for your Heroes. You send a party of up to four into a themed site, move them room by room across a fogged grid, and fight everything you meet in turn-based combat. You choose how much of the map to risk. Find the boss, kill it, and the run pays in full.

A delve costs 1 turn and nothing else. No soldiers, no food, no gold. You may have only one active delve at a time, and the Arena and Ascension Trials share that slot.

What it costs to start¶

Who can go¶

A Hero can join a party if all of the following are true:

• Alive and not benched.
• Above 0 HP. A Hero at 0 must heal first.
• Not away on a raid.
• Not away on a Thief's infiltration.
• Has a class.

Heroes enter at their current HP, not full HP, and their real gear, level and skills fold into their delve attack. A Hero who walks in at half health fights the whole run at half health unless you camp or heal.

Finding sites¶

Only the Sunken Crypt is open from the start. The other three are discovered:

• Scouts. Each find a returning scout brings back has a 12% chance to turn up an entrance. At most one site opens per scout return. Sites unlock in list order.
• Whispers. Solving "The Mouth Beneath" opens the Witherwood Warren. Whisper-gated sites are excluded from the scout roll.

A site you have already delved never re-locks.

Boss HP and attack in the table are base values before depth and party scaling.

Depth¶

All three depths are available from your first run. Nothing gates them.

Abyssal enemies hit slightly softer per blow than Deep ones. Its difficulty comes from having 40 rooms and a bigger boss fight, not from harder individual hits.

The in-game recommendations are: Shallow for an average party around level 25 in uncommon gear, Deep for around level 35 in rare gear, Abyssal for around level 45 in fused gear.

Enemies scale to your party, not just your level¶

On top of the depth multipliers above, every enemy is scaled to your party's average delve attack, which already includes gear, level and trinket bonuses. There is a level-based floor, so stripping gear or bringing weak Heroes does not make a deep run easier for full deep rewards. Rewards are keyed to depth alone, so scaling does not pay you more.

Materials by depth¶

Each listed material rolls independently at a 60% chance every time a materials roll happens: every fight won, most opened chests, and a few events. A boss fight rolls at double quantity.

The map¶

The dungeon is a connected grid of rooms, not a corridor. You start at the entrance and step to an orthogonally adjacent room. Entering a room reveals its type and fires whatever is in it.

• You can see rooms touching a room you have visited, but not what is inside them until you enter.
• The boss sits at the room furthest from the entrance, measured by walking distance.
• The generator never fills a 2x2 block, so maps come out as branching passages with dead ends.
• You can backtrack freely. A cleared room stays cleared.

Every map is guaranteed to contain: the camps for its depth, two treasure rooms, one Compass and one Map. Everything else is drawn from a depth-weighted deck.

Shallow maps contain no elite rooms at all. The elite deck entry only exists at Deep and Abyssal.

Combat¶

Combat is turn-based and you drive it click by click.

• Initiative is speed plus a random roll of up to 20, rerolled every round. The roll is deliberately wider than the speed spread, so a slow enemy can still act before a fast Hero.
• One action per turn. A skill, or a carried spell.
• Cooldowns tick down at the end of each round.
• Critical hits deal 1.75x damage. Base chance is 10%, plus gear, plus 5% for the Lucky trait.
• Damage rolls vary by plus or minus 20% around the listed value.
• Burn on an enemy deals 4 per round for 2 rounds. Poison on an enemy deals 5 per round for 3 rounds. A poisoned Hero takes 4 per round for 2 rounds.
• Guard and stealth last one round and clear at the round wrap.
• A "free opening strike" — from Set a watch, or from several events — means every standing Hero lands one unanswered blow at half power before the next fight begins. It is not a full extra turn.

Class skills¶

Every Hero brings their class's three base skills, plus any earned actives their level has unlocked, plus one signature skill if they have ascended.

A Hero's delve attack is their class base, plus 1.2 per level, plus one fortieth of their raid power (which is where gear shows up). Their delve speed is the class base plus 1 for every 5 levels.

Earned active skills¶

Passive skills fold in too. Opening Volley (Ranger 28) forces the Hero to the top of initiative each round. Rallying Banner (Warrior 18) lifts the whole party's damage while its bearer stands. A Master Thief (Thief 40) in the party grants one free kill of a random non-boss enemy, once per run.

Spells¶

Spells need the Wizard's Tower at Tier IV (the Tome). That is the whole gate: without it, no Hero carries a spell into a delve at all, so nothing is castable. The Tower itself is unlocked by a blueprint that drops from winning a Tier 3 or higher conquest. Only Mages and ascended Heroes get spell slots.

With the Tome in place, a Hero casts a spell they carry from the Spellbook, and each cast spends that Hero's own card. Owning five Meteors means five cards: put two on one champion and three on another, and each of them spends only what they are carrying. Unbound cards wait in Your hand; the ones a champion holds are Inscribed to them. The exception is a spell that is also the caster's own earned class skill: a Mage past level 18 casts Chain Lightning and past level 28 casts Meteor without spending a charge. The Tower is still required to carry it.

Enemy intents¶

At the start of each round every enemy declares what it is about to do. The line appears above the enemy. Read it and respond: guard the target, kill the caster first, or spend a heal. Whether you get to act on it that round depends on initiative — a fast enemy can carry out its declared move before any of your Heroes move.

Bosses¶

A boss fires a special every 3 rounds, and declares it at the start of the round. Only the two-stage specials — The Due, and the marks the Ascension Trial bosses use — guarantee you a full round to answer; the rest land on the boss's own turn, which may come before your Heroes act. Below half HP a boss enrages once, for +40% attack, for the rest of the fight. This applies to every boss.

If the seized Hero is the last one standing, they act normally rather than being locked out.

Dread¶

Every Hero carries a dread meter from 0 to 100. It is the delve's attrition clock: fights raise it, camps and quiet choices lower it.

At 100 dread the Hero breaks. There is a 30% chance they turn Resolute (+15% damage, dread resets to 40) and a 70% chance they turn Fearful (−25% damage dealt, +10% damage taken). An affliction lasts for the rest of the run. Wisdom and robe armour both reduce incoming dread.

Camps¶

A camp offers a random 4 of 11 actions and you choose 2. At least two of the four are always usable by the party you brought, so a bad roll cannot strand you.

The "rest of delve" damage buffs do not stack. Sharpen blades, War hymn, the Blood-Pact Stone, aiding the Wounded Straggler and sharing the Drunken Veteran's flask all set the same single flag, worth +15%. Taking a second one buys nothing.

Events¶

An event room offers a written choice. There are 19 events in the deck. Seven of them carry a choice that only appears if a standing Hero of the right class is in your party. This is the main reason to think about party composition outside combat. The class option is almost always the safe one: it takes the reward without the damage, the dread or the gamble the other options carry.

The rest are open to any party and trade one thing for another: gold for dread, healing for gold, safety for information. A few are worth knowing:

• The Gambler's Bones. Stakes half your delve gold on a straight 50/50.
• The Echo Well. Pay up to 1,000g for dread −20 (it takes whatever delve gold you have, to a maximum of 1,000), or listen for +10 dread and the revealed contents of every adjoining room.
• The Blood-Pact Stone. +15% damage for the rest of the run, but every Hero loses 12% of their maximum HP. It cannot take a Hero below 1 HP.
• The Alchemist's Corpse. The green vial cleanses poison and heals 20%. The unmarked vial is a coin flip between healing 40% and poisoning the whole party.

Treasure rooms¶

You can always walk away from a chest without opening it.

Escalation: repeat runs get harder¶

The game calls this "The Deep Remembers". Repeat runs get harder, and only harder. Each site and depth pair keeps its own counter. Grinding Shallow Sunken Crypt does not harden Deep Sunken Crypt or the Hollow Grove.

Rewards do not grow with it. Gold, XP, materials and relic odds are keyed to depth alone. Farming one spot buys rising risk for the same pay. The "today" counter resets at midnight US Eastern, the same boundary as the daily reset.

Some trinkets carry a delve-torch bonus that shaves the escalation only. It can never make a site easier than it was on your first visit.

The setup screen shows the exact percentage for the site and depth you have selected, before you commit the turn.

Getting out¶

There are four ways a delve ends.

You can only climb out at the entrance. Deciding to leave from deep in the map means walking back through what you have already cleared. Fleeing mid-fight is the other exit: the chance is 55% plus 4% per point your party's average speed beats the enemies'. A failed flee lets every enemy strike you.

Failure and what it costs¶

A Hero who drops to 0 HP is downed, not dead. They are out of the run and every other Hero takes +15 dread. But a downed Hero bleeds out over 2 minutes of real time, and if that clock runs out while they are still in the dungeon, the Hero is lost permanently.

• The clock is real wall time, not turns. Idling counts against it.
• Extracting freezes it. Winning the room, retreating out, or a wipe all stop the countdown. Pull them out in time and they live.
• A Stayed Hand consumable buys +30 seconds and stacks. Spend three for +90.
• Trinkets with the bleed-out channel add seconds to the base clock.
• A Hero dragged out downed comes home at 1 HP. A Hero who bleeds out is marked Fallen and is gone.

This is the only place in the delve where you can lose a Hero for good, and it is a clock you control. If someone drops, the correct move is usually to decide immediately whether you are winning this fight or running for the entrance.

What you take home¶

Fight, boss and chest gold vary by plus or minus 20%. A few event payouts are fixed and do not roll. Party plunder skills raise the final gold total by up to 50%: Cutpurse (Thief 3, +12%), Hunter's Mark (Ranger 18, +20%) and Master Thief (Thief 40, +15%) stack across the party. Deadeye (Ranger 40, +10%) multiplies the relic chance instead, which is capped at 90%.

XP is paid to every Hero in full¶

This is the single most important number in the delve. The XP total is not a pool that gets divided. Every surviving Hero receives the whole amount. A party of four takes home four times the XP a solo run would. The only exception is a hired torchbearer, who earns nothing.

Drops on a full clear¶

These only roll if you kill the boss. A retreat pays no drops at all.

How a delve differs from a raid¶

How to play it, and where it fits¶

The delve is the game's hero levelling engine and its main source of relics. It costs no army and no food, which makes it the thing to spend a turn on when your soldiers are away, when you are short on food, or when you simply do not want to commit troops.

Practical advice:

• Field a full party. XP is per Hero. Four Heroes is four times the return for the same turn.
• Mix classes. Seven events and four camp actions are gated on a specific class. A one-class party sees a much narrower run.
• Take the Compass early. Once you know where the boss is, you can decide how much of the map to strip on the way and how much to skip.
• Spread your farming. Escalation is per site and per depth, and it does not decay from past runs. Rotating sites and depths keeps every counter low.
• Camp before the boss, not after a scrape. Camps are finite and the boss room is the only fight that can turn a good run into a wipe.
• Retreating is not failing. Half of a deep haul is a real payout, and it beats losing a Hero.
• Go deeper for the relics, not the gold. Abyssal pays 3x the gold of Shallow, but 3x the relic chance as well, and it is the only depth that can roll a legendary.

What the delve feeds: hero XP levels the same Heroes who lead your raids, storm siege nodes and fight in the Arena; relics go to your trove as empire-wide bonuses; materials feed your buildings; spell recipes become spells your Mages carry into sieges; tokens buy free runs elsewhere. It is also how a Hero reaches the level-40 wall and the Ascension Trial behind it.

The Arena, Duels and the Stable¶

Three connected systems. The Arena is a solo survival gauntlet: your heroes fight escalating waves of computer-controlled foes on a hex board. Duels are player-versus-player fights on the same board, with the rest of the realm betting on the result. The Stable is a building that produces turns instead of spending them, and a horse that has done enough courier work can be bonded to a hero, which makes that hero faster on the Arena board and in duels.

What unlocks each¶

The Arena run uses the same slot as a delve. You can have one active delve, one active Ascension Trial or one active Arena run — never two at once.

Entering the Arena¶

• Send up to 4 heroes. You may send fewer, and the waves get smaller when you do.
• Entry is 1 turn. You can choose to spend an Arena Token instead and enter free.
• Heroes fight with their real HP, real gear, the class abilities they have earned by level, and their ascended signature move if they have one. Bound spells can also be cast on the board, but only if you hold the Tome (Wizard's Tower Tier 4), and each cast spends a charge.
• The Arena never kills. Heroes who fall come home alive at 1 HP; everyone else comes home on the HP they finished with.

The board¶

The board is a hex disc of 55 hexes (radius 4) with 8 gates spaced evenly around the rim. Your party starts along the south edge. Fresh waves enter through the gates and are placed at least 2 hexes from every hero wherever the board allows — on wave 1 that minimum is 4, and the far gates are always used.

Movement¶

The equipped weapon overrides reach and attack type, armour nudges move, and a bonded horse adds move on top. The class row above is what an unarmed hero gets.

• You may walk through an ally, but never stop on one. Enemy bodies block outright.
• Pits and pillars are impassable.
• Breaking contact costs your whole move. If you step off a hex that is adjacent to an enemy, your move budget is spent, however far you actually went.
• You get a move budget and one action, and you can spend them in either order. Strike first and you may still step, as long as movement remains.

Facing and flanking¶

A unit faces the direction it last moved or struck. A blow counts as a flank when it lands from more than about 97 degrees off the target's facing, meaning from the side or the rear.

• A flank adds 15 percentage points to the chance to hit.
• A flanking blow deals 1.5x damage on an ordinary strike or ability. A blast attack is the exception: it deals 1.3x on a flank.
• Enemies face you the same way, so a hero standing behind a foe that has turned to fight someone else is worth a lot.

Hit chances are clamped between 5% and 99%, so an ordinary strike is never certain and never hopeless. Two things skip the roll entirely and always land: a blast attack (a Mage's basic strike, and Meteor), which also ignores evasion, guard and damage reduction; and the true-strike ascended moves, Unerring Shot and Truescatter.

Line of sight¶

• A pillar between you and a target blocks a ranged attack or ranged ability.
• Melee against an adjacent foe is always clear.
• The gap-closers (Charge, Shadowstep and the ascended dive, The Stoop) and Meteor ignore line of sight. A pillar will not stop them.

Terrain and hazards¶

Each layout scatters 3 to 6 hazards across the board.

Placement rules, so the board never seals itself off:

• Every hazard sits at least 3 hexes from each hex your party started on, and that exclusion is measured from the starting hexes for the whole run, not from where the heroes have since moved.
• No hazard on a gate hex or the ring of hexes around it.
• At most 3 blockers (pits and pillars combined), and no two blockers next to each other. Anything that would break those rules becomes spikes instead.
• The whole hazard layout is reshuffled at every checkpoint wave.

Turn order¶

There is no "your side then their side". Every round, each living unit rolls d20 + its move + its initiative, and heroes and foes interleave in that order. The order is rerolled every round.

• Whoever acted last in a round cannot also lead the next one. They slip to second.
• At a unit's own turn start, its guard stance and dodge charges expire, its cooldowns tick down by one, and burn, poison and spikes bite.
• Move raises your initiative roll directly, which is why a bonded horse improves turn order as well as reach on the board.

Waves, bands and checkpoints¶

Each wave is one themed band, named in the log when it arrives, rather than a random bag of monsters. Bands unlock as you climb and the older ones keep appearing, weighted toward whatever opened most recently.

A normal wave takes one of three shapes: a swarm of 5 to 10 of the band's smallest foes (28% of the time), one heavy with a screen of 3 to 4 (a further 22%), or a mixed 3 to 5. The first two only happen if the band has the right foes for them — the menagerie has no small foes so it never swarms, and the coven has neither, so it always arrives as a mixed group. Every 5th wave is a checkpoint and sends a boss, 2 guards and further escorts (2, rising by 1 every 10 waves).

Shape varies; difficulty does not. Every wave is scaled to a fixed threat budget, so a swarm of small foes and a single large one cost you about the same.

Clearing a wave: press on or bow out¶

• Bow out banks the whole pot and ends the run cleanly. You keep everything. It is only offered between waves, once a wave is cleared.
• Press on starts the next wave. On a normal wave every hero heals 12% of maximum HP as a breather.
• Pressing on from a checkpoint wave locks the pot into the bank and heals every hero 30% of maximum HP.
• A wipe forfeits everything won since the last checkpoint. So does leaving mid-run instead of bowing out.
• XP is never at risk. Gold rides the pot; XP is banked the moment a wave is cleared, so a wipe cannot take it back.

Ability cooldowns carry across waves. A few effects reset each wave: Iron Cadence's attack stack, the Rampage kill streak, and the once-per-fight Opener.

How hard the waves get¶

The Arena scales to the party you actually bring, on two separate axes:

• Foe health tracks your party's offence (attack and crit).
• Foe damage tracks your party's durability (HP, evasion, damage reduction).

They are separate so that buying damage actually buys damage. A single scalar on both would have raised foe health to cancel your new attack and raised foe attack you had no extra HP to absorb, making a damage upgrade a net loss.

On top of the party scaling, each wave past the first multiplies foe health by 1.09 and foe attack by 1.05, compounding. That ramp is the difficulty curve; the bands only change what the fight looks like.

The threat budget also keys off how many heroes you mustered, because one hero against a wave built for four is far worse than a quarter of the fight:

What a run pays¶

A cleared wave adds gold to the pot and XP to each hero. Both grow with the wave number:

Gold grows at 1.16 per wave and XP at 1.08, so the deep waves pay much better in coin than in experience. A run cleared through wave 10 is about 7,460 gold and 362 XP per hero; through wave 20 it is about 40,380 gold and 1,144 XP per hero, before the pay rate below.

The pay rate¶

Those figures are the full rate. What a wave actually pays — gold and XP alike — is scaled by how hard the fight really was: the foe health scale you drew, divided by 0.7, multiplied by the party-size multiplier from the table above. The result is capped at 1.00 and floored at 0.05.

In practice: a small or weak party gets an easier wave and a smaller payout, so there is nothing to farm by sending one under-geared hero at shallow waves. A geared party of four sits at the cap and is paid in full.

Milestones¶

Milestones are checked against the deepest wave you reached, not the wave you banked on, so a wipe past one still pays it.

Your deepest wave ever is recorded as a barony record. Relics that carry the arena-purse channel raise the gold you bank, up to +60%; they do not touch XP.

Arena Tokens¶

The Arena Token is Arena-sourced only. It is never in the general win-drop pool that Raid, Delve and Siege Tokens come from, and the Roaming Trader does not carry it.

Mending or reviving can be done on your turn or between waves. Neither works in a duel.

Duels¶

One barony challenges another to a fight on the same hex board. Each player controls their own champions. Every other barony can bet on the result.

Issuing a challenge¶

• Sizes are 1v1, 2v2 or 3v3. You name your champions when you challenge.
• The purse is 0 to 250,000 gold per side. The defender must match it. A purse of 0 is allowed.
• Your stake is taken when you issue the challenge; the defender's is taken when they accept. Each stake is drawn from liquid gold first and the Treasury reserve for any shortfall. The winner takes both.
• You may have one challenge in motion at a time as the challenger.
• An unanswered challenge expires after 48 hours and your purse is returned. A declined challenge returns it immediately.
• Champions must be alive, above 0 HP and in your party. You need a Level 23 hero somewhere on your roster to challenge or accept.

Betting¶

Accepting opens the betting. The matchup goes out as realm news and any barony that is not fighting may back a side until the next daily reset (Eastern). The fight starts then.

Settlement is pari-mutuel. Winners get their stake back plus a share of the losing pool, in proportion to how much they staked. If either side's pool is empty there are no odds, so every wager is refunded. No gold is created or destroyed by a duel; it only moves between players.

The fight¶

• Same board and same rules as the Arena: hex movement, facing, flanking, line of sight, hazards. Hazards are kept clear of both starting positions. The challenger starts south, the defender north.
• Party-power scaling is switched off. Both sides fight at their true stats, so gear and levels decide the bout outright.
• Champions act on the shared initiative order. You play your units when their slot comes up, whenever you log in during the day.
• If a side's turn sits untouched for 3 hours, their champions are played by the Arena AI instead. Nobody can stall a fight.
• The fight window closes 24 hours after it opens. A fight still undecided then plays itself out.
• There is no bowing out and no Arena Tokens.

How a duel ends¶

• One side falls, or
• the fight passes 20 rounds, at which point the side with the higher fraction of living HP wins. An exact tie goes to the defender.

Duels are non-lethal and cost nothing in health. Champions fight as snapshots taken when the challenge was accepted. Their real HP is untouched, win or lose, and no hero can die in a duel.

The Stable¶

Every other building spends turns. This one produces them. Feed a horse, let it rest, then send it out as a courier: that is worth one turn. Sending it spends the rest, so the horse goes hungry again and the cycle starts over.

The turn is granted above your daily maximum, so it is useful even on a full day.

Things worth knowing:

• Build times above are the base. Relics carrying the build-haste channel shorten them.
• The courier cap is a building, not a bank balance. No amount of gold, land or soldiery raises it. A large barony and a three-day-old one get the same answer from this feature.
• Feeding spends liquid food only. The Granary reserve is a famine buffer and cannot be used to feed horses.
• Rest is real wall-clock time and needs no visit to tick. A horse is ready when its clock has passed.
• The daily courier count resets at the Eastern daily boundary, the same one the realm reset uses.
• A courier cannot be sent within 30 minutes of the daily reset. The reset sets your turns to the day's allotment rather than adding to them, so a turn earned just before the boundary would be swept away. The game refuses the ride and keeps the horse's rest instead.
• Relics carrying the courier-rest channel shorten rest by up to 45%. Rest can never reach zero.
• Renaming a horse is free, has no cooldown, and allows up to 24 characters. Clearing the name restores the stall's default.

The Bond: a horse that carries a hero¶

A horse levels on one thing only: couriers carried, ever. Not gold, not food, not the tier of the building. Because the ride cap is 1 to 3 a day and nothing moves it, a horse cannot be bought up the ranks: Seasoned is 15 rides (5 days at a Coaching Yard's 3 a day) and a Destrier is 55, which is about 19 days at that same top rate and far longer below it. The count is per horse, so 3 rides a day spread across 4 stalls does not level any of them 3x faster.

At Seasoned a horse may be bonded to a hero.

• The bonus applies on the Arena board and in duels. It is a positional bonus, so it does nothing in raids, delves or sieges.
• Extra move is extra ground per turn and a better initiative roll, because the roll is d20 + move + initiative. A Destrier is worth 5 to the roll, not 3.
• The bond reads the horse's current rank, so a mount keeps improving under a hero who never re-bonds.
• One horse, one hero, both ways. Bonding a hero who already rides moves them and clears the old stall.
• Bonding costs nothing: no gold, no turn, no cooldown. The rides already paid for it.
• The hero must be alive and in your party. A benched hero cannot be saddled.
• The bond does not retire the horse. It still eats, still rests, still carries couriers and still climbs toward its next rank.
• You keep 2 to 4 stalls and field more heroes than that, so a mounted party is never the whole party. Choosing who rides is the point.

How this feeds the rest of the game¶

• The Stable is the answer to running out of turns. Turns gate raids, delves, sieges, holds and rites, so anything that grants them helps every system at once. That is why the ceiling is a building tier and not a price.
• The Arena is the cheap way to level heroes. One turn, no death risk, and XP is banked wave by wave even if the run ends in a wipe.
• Only gold is at risk. Checkpoints are the safe points; at every clear you decide whether the next wave is worth the pot you are carrying.
• Duels move gold between players and never create it. Purses and wagers only change hands between baronies.
• The Bond connects the two. Courier work in the Stable buys extra move and a better initiative roll on the Arena board and in duels, where acting first often decides the fight.

Conquest: Realm Sieges¶

Conquest is the endgame land engine. You march regular Soldiers to a fortified Realm, camp outside it, take the fortress one piece at a time, and decide the Regent's fate. A won siege pays regions, gold and — at the higher tiers — godstone, split between everyone who fought for it.

It lives on the Conquest page. There is no building to raise and no level to reach. The only thing standing between you and a siege is having a Realm on your map, and the only way to get one is to win raids.

Two things make this different from a raid. First, a siege is a campaign: it runs in real time whether you are watching or not, and your army is away and undefendable for the whole of it. Second, the fight itself is played click by click — the fortress is a set of nodes and each node is a turn-based battle you command.

Finding a Realm¶

Realms are discovered, never handed out. Nothing spawns "for everyone" except a Great Power War.

• Win a raid. Every won raid has a 12% chance of turning up a fortified Realm. Raids in the home realm turn up a Tier 1; deeper ground (any frontier realm, or a home-realm site at difficulty tier 3 or higher) turns up a Tier 2. Raids never turn up anything above Tier 2.
• The cap. That roll is skipped if you already hold 6 of your own undisturbed sightings. Clear some before you can find more.
• Take a Realm and the regent may flee. The Empty Keep ending leaves the Warden's Map, which marks a Realm one tier higher with 50% richer coffers. This is the normal road to Tier 3 and Tier 4 Realms: win Tier 2s until one regent runs.
• Great Power Wars are realm-wide. One is rolled for once per day (about a 5% chance) and only when none is already running. Everybody can see it and everybody may march.
• Realms expire. A Realm you never march on despawns after 3 days.

Who may march on it¶

The Realm you find is yours alone. Nobody else can see it, and nobody else can march on it, until you let them in.

• You may invite your guildmates and your military allies. Nobody else — an alliance no longer hands out the map by itself, it only decides who you are allowed to ask.
• An invited barony sees the Realm on their own Conquest board and can march when they like.
• You can revoke an invitation, but only while their army is still at home. A committed force keeps its seat.
• Anyone already holding a seat in the muster keeps it regardless.
• A procedural Realm seats at most 6 baronies at once. A Great Power War seats 30.

The tier ladder¶

The recommended force is what the whole coalition should muster between them. Fall short of it and your spoils are cut — see Spoils below. A Great Power War asks for 64,000 between everyone who joins; it is meant to take most of the realm, or two very large baronies.

One caveat on the Great Power War number. The spoils cut is judged against that 64,000. The under-force lethality that makes node battles deadlier is not: it is judged against the Tier 4 figure of 16,000, and against your own storm rather than the coalition's total. A Great Power War does not demand that every barony show up with 64,000 men.

Defender strength by tier¶

A Great Power War uses the Tier 4 band.

Mustering and marching¶

• Marching costs 1 turn. It is charged once, when the column steps off.
• Only Soldiers can march. Cavalry, Ballistas, Knights and Trebuchets never leave home.
• The minimum commitment is 100 Soldiers.
• You can send an exact mix of ranks, or just a number. A plain number sends your greenest first — regulars march ahead of your medalled veterans.
• Veterans who march keep their rank. Survivors rejoin the army at the rank they left with; casualties are taken from regulars first.
• Travel time is set by tier (1 to 3 hours). Certain rare relics shorten it, never by more than 60%.
• Everyone who holds the map to that Realm gets a message the moment your column steps off.
• You may hold only one active campaign per Realm. To add men, reinforce.

Your army is away, not gone. Committed troops still eat their daily gold and food upkeep, still count toward your score, and still count toward your army size everywhere it matters. What they cannot do is defend your barony. A siege leaves you open.

Reinforcing¶

• Reinforcements march the same 1 to 3 hours and join the line on arrival. Minimum 100.
• One reinforcement column at a time. You cannot send a second while the first is still on the road.
• Reinforcing costs no turn.

Withdrawing and turning back¶

• You can recall the whole force or part of it, and you can name the ranks you want back. By default the greenest come home and the veterans hold the line.
• Recalled troops march home over a real leg. If they were still marching out, they only re-cover the ground already crossed — aborting a ten-minute march is a ten-minute walk home.
• The rest of your force keeps besieging. You can even march a fresh column back out while the old one is still walking home.
• Pull everyone out and the campaign ends for you. Whatever the fortress has already lost stays lost.
• You can change your mind: a homeward column can be turned around and sent back to the walls, at the cost of exactly the time it already spent walking home. That is only offered when you have no other force still at the Realm.
• Spoils on recalled troops are forfeit. Recalling does not refund the march turn.

The camp¶

Your force arrives and makes camp. There is no gate and no waiting period: you may storm the fortress at any moment. Waiting simply makes it easier, and it costs you men.

Starving the garrison¶

• The garrison starves for as long as any force is camped at the walls. It falls from full strength to a floor of 50%, and no further.
• The time to reach that floor at the recommended force is 5 / 6.5 / 8 / 10 hours by tier.
• Outnumbering them speeds it up, being thin on the ground slows it down. The multiplier is the square root of the whole coalition's camped force against the tier's recommendation, and it is bounded between ×0.7 and ×1.6 — the tier still sets the ballpark.
• Defenders in every node battle fight at the garrison's current strength. A fully starved fortress fights at half power. This is the single biggest lever you have.
• Every garrison soldier starved credits 3 contribution to the besiegers, split between them by committed force — so camping earns you a share of the spoils even before you fight.

What camping costs¶

• A slow bleed of 0.12% of your committed force per hour, to skirmishing, sickness and stray shot.
• A camp event every 2.5 to 5.5 hours, each killing 0.3–1.2% of your force and knocking morale down.

Together that averages roughly 0.3% of your force an hour, not 0.12% — the events cost more than the bleed does. Starving a Tier 3 garrison to the floor takes 8 hours and about 2–3% of the army you brought.

The last row is one extra event drawn from the fortress's own theme, so which of the six you get depends on who is holding the walls. The Bonebound Court and the Spire of the Magi have the worst of them.

Morale¶

A campaign starts at 70 morale. Camp events push it down; a carried node pushes it up. If it ever reaches 0 the army loses heart and lifts the siege itself: the survivors march home, and you get nothing. That is a backstop against parking an army outside a wall for days without attacking, not something you should ever meet in a normal campaign.

Camp chat¶

Every siege has a shared board that all its besiegers read and write. You can post if you hold an active seat in the muster — marching in, camped, storming, or already a victor. Messages are capped at 240 characters, the last 40 are shown, and one lord may post once every 2.5 seconds.

Tending champions between fights¶

A champion at a siege camp can be patched up on the spot by spending their class's frontier material. This is the only way to heal a hero mid-campaign; otherwise they recover on the daily cycle like everyone else.

These materials come from raiding the frontier. A champion you cannot afford to steel simply marches unsteeled.

The escalade: taking the fortress node by node¶

A fortress is not a health bar. It is a ring of nodes, and each one is its own turn-based battle that you lead. Break through to the Regent's Hall and the campaign is over.

The node ring¶

You do not have to take everything. One breach in the outer ring opens the Yard. The shortest road to the Regent is four battles at Tiers 1 and 2, five at Tiers 3 and 4. Every node carried also bleeds the garrison itself by 8%, so taking the extra outer nodes buys you a weaker fortress for the fights that matter, at the cost of turns and men.

Progress on the fortress is shared by the whole coalition. A node your ally carries is a node you do not have to.

Launching a storm¶

• Each node battle costs 1 turn, or one Siege Token for a free storm. There is no cooldown between battles — turns are the pacing.
• You need roughly 200 Soldiers in camp before the launcher will form columns.
• Your force splits into two columns. By default the storm takes 80% of what you have committed: the Vanguard is 30% of your committed force and the Mainline is 50%, with the last fifth holding the ring.
• You choose the storm size, up to every man in camp, and you can name the exact ranks that go up the ladders. Veterans in the storm hit harder.
• A thin storm out of a large camp is judged as though the whole camp were that thin — less wall damage, less contribution, and the under-force penalty below. You cannot buy full credit while sending a token party.
• Take up to 2 champions (3 if you raise a Second Banner). They fight with the same class skills, gear and bound spells they use in a delve.
• Heroes are never killed at the walls. They come home at 1 health at worst.
• A champion carrying inscribed Wizard's Tower spells can cast them here, spending their own cards, exactly as they would in a delve.
• Carrying a node earns each champion who fought 30 XP per realm tier. Carrying the Regent's Hall pays 90 per tier. A storm you withdraw from or lose pays nothing.
• An armed Spectral Host can be marched in as a third column, the Ghost Host. Its losses are not real deaths and the garrison is never sized to it.
• Every man a column loses is a real Soldier gone from your army, and joins your realm's fallen.
• A board left untouched for 24 hours retreats on its own.

The columns and what they do¶

A column that loses half the men it formed with falls back and is out of that battle. When no column and no champion is left standing, the storming party is shattered — everyone who fell is dead, the node is not taken, and the defenders there brace against you. Ordinary attacks do half damage to a gate or door; only the ram gets through properly.

Nerve¶

Blows, telegraphed horrors and a column breaking all fray your party's nerve. At 100 the actor snaps: usually Shaken (−25% damage dealt, +10% damage taken), and about 30% of the time Fervent instead (+25% damage). Clearing the node calms everybody by 15. The Ghost Host cannot be shaken.

The defenders¶

Each node is manned by companies drawn from the fortress's theme. What they do:

Set-piece attacks are telegraphed a round in advance and fire every 3 rounds:

Fortress themes¶

At Tier 3 and above, both keep-ring nodes call in a Last Reserve: an extra company pulled from the Yard at 65% health. The hardest fights are at the end of a campaign, not the start.

How hard a node is¶

Defender strength is the product of four things, and you control three of them:

The practical reading: camp before you storm, and go around rather than throwing men at the same wall twice. A node you have already failed against is the worst target on the board.

Under-force lethality is judged on your own storm, not the coalition's total — specifically on the campaign-equivalent force described above, so sending a token party out of a full camp is judged as if the camp itself were that thin. A well-forced ally is safe at a siege where a freeloader gets crushed.

The Walls meter¶

Every node you clear banks contribution, and that contribution drains the Realm's Walls pool (6,000 to 50,000 by tier). The pool is not the win condition — the fortress falls at the Regent, not at a number — but a worn fortress defends worse: at zero walls its companies form at 70% of full health. Contribution per node is a blend of the force you actually stormed with and the node's own worth, so a small barony clearing a node is not credited a tenth of what a large one gets for the same fight.

The Thief's Work¶

Before a storm you can send a single Thief against a single un-taken node.

• Costs 1 turn. The Thief is inside the walls for 1 hour and cannot raid, delve or storm anywhere in that time.
• One shadow inside a given fortress at a time. You cannot start one while your own storm is on the ladders.
• The odds are locked in the moment you send the Thief, against the node's alertness and the fortress alarm as they stand at that moment. Alarms your later assaults raise cannot change a roll already made — but alarms you raised before sending do. Infiltrate early.

On success, the sabotage holds until the node falls and it serves the whole coalition. The node's alertness is wiped. At the Gate the way is left unbarred — the gate itself fights at half health and the portcullis never drops. At any other node the watch is thinned — one supporting company never reaches its post.

On failure, the node braces and the whole fortress stirs. Your Thief takes a wound worth 40% of their max health (it never kills them) and, 35% of the time, is taken alive instead. A captive sits in the fortress dungeons until somebody completes the conquest — any member of the coalition will do — and walks out at half health. If the siege lifts entirely they are ransomed home instead.

If your storm carries the node while the Thief is still inside, the work fizzles harmlessly and they slip back out unhurt.

The Postern Key¶

A rare find off a sacked Realm. Give it to a Thief and, 15 minutes later, the first approach is simply carried — no battle, no roll, no wound, no turn spent. It only turns on a fortress that is still completely whole, so it opens a campaign and can never shortcut one already underway.

The Regent's fate¶

Break the Retinue, take the hall, and the champion who did it chooses the ending — for the whole coalition. The gold multiplier and the land decision apply to everyone's share.

Vassalage is the gold play and it costs the coalition every region. Do not pick it without telling your allies.

The Empty Keep¶

There is a 25% chance you take the hall and find the regent already gone. There is no choice to make: gold pays at ×0.4, the land is still yours, and you also take the Warden's Map, which puts a Realm one tier higher on the board of whoever took the hall, with 50% richer coffers. A Tier 4 Empty Keep reveals another Tier 4.

It is the only ending that reveals a harder Realm — executing, ransoming, vassalising and sparing the garrison all reveal nothing. Every victory message says which of the two happened, so you are never left guessing.

Spoils¶

Spoils are split by contribution. You earn contribution two ways: clearing fortress nodes, and starving the garrison while camped. A column still marching when the walls come down, with no contribution, takes nothing — but its march turn is refunded and the siege does not count against its war-weariness.

What a Realm is worth¶

A Great Power War is the only siege that pays Technology regions. (Raids can also turn one up, and you can buy them on the land market — but no ordinary Realm has any in its spoils.)

The four multipliers on your share¶

All four land on gold and regions together. One or two sieges a day never feel war-weariness at all; an eight-win day pays like about three and a half. The Quiet Year, a rare find, forgives one weariness step on a campaign you seal it to — sealing is free and reversible, and it is only spent when a Regent actually falls.

Godstone is not scaled. It is an indivisible pool allotted once across the whole coalition by largest remainder, so a Tier 3's single stone always goes to somebody — the largest contributor. Every victory message spells out any cut that was applied to your share.

What else falls out of a sack¶

The guild-line roll belongs to your heroes, not to you: only champions who actually fought at that siege roll for it, only for a line you do not already hold, and exactly one blueprint can drop per victory. Coming away empty-handed makes the next Tier 4 win more likely.

Losing¶

There are three ways a campaign ends badly. A shattered storming party costs you the men who fell and braces that node, but the campaign continues. Morale reaching zero lifts the siege and sends the survivors home with nothing. Recalling everyone ends it by choice. In all three cases the fortress keeps whatever damage you already did — and so does anyone else on your map.

An abandoned Realm reverts to fresh at the next daily reset, but only if nobody is holding it. A Realm you are actively camped at, marching on or storming is never reset out from under you.

Notoriety: sieges get harder and richer¶

Every Realm is keyed to the besieger, not to the calendar. A wealthy lord and a famous conqueror both face a garrison that musters harder.

Risk and reward climb together only up to a point. The garrison keeps hardening toward triple strength while the sack tops out at double, so the tenth Realm you take is meaningfully harder than the first and not meaningfully richer. That is deliberate: conquest is meant to be an escalating challenge, not a compounding income stream.

The Contested Holds¶

Holds are the other half of Conquest and live on their own Holds page. They are king-of-the-hill ground: ten sites exist, one holder each, and holding one pays you every hour.

• Two are open at a time, on 24-hour windows. One always pays gold and one always pays food. One of the two is always a lesser hold (below).
• When a window closes the garrison walks home. Hours you banked were paid as you earned them and are never clawed back.
• Claiming empty ground costs 1 turn and at least 500 Soldiers. Reinforcing your own hold costs another turn.
• A hold takes at most 25,000 Soldiers. That ceiling is checked against the garrison that will be standing there, so you cannot reinforce past it in slices, and it applies to a challenge column too.
• Challenging costs 1 turn and a 45-minute march. You can cancel while the column is still on the road and the men come home at once, but the turn is gone.
• You can recall your garrison at any time, including mid-fight, and the men are home instantly. Leaving fewer than 500 standing counts as abandoning the ground entirely.
• Hold garrisons and marching columns eat their daily upkeep exactly like a siege force, and count toward your army everywhere.

The clock¶

The clock runs the whole time you hold ground, at two speeds.

• Contested — somebody's column is on the road to you — runs at full speed. An hour of wall-time banks an hour.
• Quiet runs at half speed for the first 4 hours, then slides linearly to zero at 12 hours of unbroken quiet. A full day of nobody bothering you banks about four hours of pay, not twelve.
• Being contested resets the quiet run. Surviving an attack buys you the full-rate window all over again.

So a holder genuinely wants to be attacked, and a challenger who marches and loses has just paid the person they attacked. Ground nobody wants stops paying.

What an hour pays¶

A site pays gold or food, never both; every site pays the materials. Partial hours stay on the row and carry forward, so a holder never loses time to rounding, and they are not inherited — a new holder starts their own record from zero.

A full day of unbroken contest is 216,000 gold, which is a Tier 4 sack for twenty-four hours of being attacked without once losing the ground. A full day of quiet on the decayed clock is far less. The 25,000-man garrison that would make a hold unassailable costs roughly 125,000 gold a day to keep standing there, so squatting light turns a profit and squatting heavy bleeds.

The lesser hold¶

One of the two open sites is bracketed: only a barony whose whole army is at or under the realm's engaged median may claim or challenge it. The other site is open to everybody.

• "Whole army" means every man you own — home garrison, raiders, siege columns marching, camped, storming or walking home, other hold garrisons, and columns still on the road. Parking your excess somewhere does not get you under the line.
• The bracket never falls below 2,000 (four times the minimum garrison) and never rises above the 25,000 ceiling. If the realm has fewer than 5 engaged baronies it defaults to 25,000, which gates nobody out.
• A lesser hold pays exactly the same rate as any other. The bracket is about access, not a discount.

The ten sites¶

How a challenge resolves¶

No dice. Both armies are measured in effective power — headcount weighted by veteran rank — and the defender's is multiplied by the ground bonus. The bigger number wins. Net worth, buildings and technology play no part; a hold is won by whoever actually shows up with an army.

Losses scale with how close the fight was. A rout is cheap for the winner and a near-run thing is ruinous for both. A winning challenge column becomes the new garrison on the spot; the loser's survivors walk home. The attacker loses more when they fail than when they succeed, and the defender loses far more when the ground changes hands.

How Conquest feeds the rest of the game¶

• Land is the point. A Tier 4 sack is 300 regions, which no amount of buying can match. Regions drive income, production and score, and River regions are the only ones that grow food.
• Godstone only comes from here and from repelled World Events. It is the Grand Treasury's unlock currency, and Tier 3 is the lowest siege that pays any.
• Blueprints gate whole buildings. The Wizard's Tower comes off a Tier 3+ win. The Oathhall, Fellwatch and Undercroft come off Tier 4 wins, rolled by the heroes who fought there — and those halls are what open the Ascension Trials.
• Turns are the real cost. One to march, one per node battle, one per Thief's Work, one per hold action. The shortest possible campaign is five turns at Tiers 1–2 and six at Tiers 3–4, on top of everything else you wanted to do that day. Siege Tokens are the only thing that buys you around it (and only for node battles — never for the march).
• Soldiers are the other real cost. Every man lost at a wall is gone, and every man committed still eats. A siege is a bet that the land is worth more than the army it takes to get it.
• Your dead are not wasted. Soldiers who fall in a campaign join your realm's fallen and your raisable dead, which feed the Cemetery line and its rites — including the Spectral Host you can march back into the next storm.
• Holds are the fast money. They pay without a raid and without a sack, but only while somebody wants the ground. They are also the one system in the game that deliberately rewards you for being attacked.

Playing it well¶

1. Bring the recommended force. Both punishments — the spoils cut and the under-force lethality — are keyed to that one number.
2. Camp before you storm. Waiting out the starve clock halves the garrison for about 2–3% of your force.
3. Send a Thief in early, before your own assaults teach the walls to watch.
4. Take one outer node, not four, unless you want the garrison bleed more than you want the turns.
5. Never attack the same node twice. Go around.
6. Cap yourself at one or two sacks a day. The third pays half.
7. Invite people. Contribution splits the spoils but the fortress is shared, and six baronies clear a Citadel far faster than one.

Ascension and the Sixteen Trials¶

Ascension is the endgame for a single Hero. A Hero stops levelling at 40. To go further they must pick one of four paths open to their class, raise the guild halls that path needs to Tier 3 (one hall for a pure path, two for a blend), and clear two solo gauntlets. The first gauntlet grants the path's signature skill; the second lifts the level cap, grants a title, and — for paths that carry magic — sets spell-slot capacity.

The Level-40 Wall¶

Every Hero hard-stops at Level 40 until that Hero personally clears their Ascension Trial. The cap is per Hero, not per empire: one ascended Hero does not raise the wall for the rest of your roster.

• Unascended Hero: level cap 40.
• Ascended Hero: level cap 50.
• XP above the wall is lost. Banked XP is clamped to one level's worth — 4,000 XP at Level 40 — and anything above that is discarded as it is awarded.
• Heroes who were already above Level 40 before the wall existed are grandfathered. They are never de-levelled; their XP simply parks.
• The wall applies to every player, whether or not Ascension itself is open to them.

What you see: the Hero's card on the Heroes page shows the wall and names the guild line the road runs through. Separately, a Whisper called a wall-call appears on the Whispers page — one per class, lit while any un-benched Hero of yours stands at the wall without a path. Choosing one of its four options is the path pick. The Hero card has no picker of its own. The wall-call only appears if Hero Ascension is open to your account; the Level-40 cap applies either way, and a player without the feature sees only a placeholder note on the Hero card.

Choosing a Path¶

A path is picked once the Hero is Level 40, alive, and unascended. In practice the pick is a one-shot: the wall-call completes on that click, and it will not re-light for a Hero who already has a path, so there is no way to change your mind. Two things gate the pick, and the same two gate the Trial launch:

• Your Hero's own class guild line must stand at Tier 3.
• The blended discipline's guild line must also stand at Tier 3.

A pure path (blending your own class) collapses to a single hall, which makes the four pure paths the cheap route and the twelve blends the expensive one. The Mage's hall is the Wizard's Tower; the other three are the guild lines below.

Picking a path seeds that path's own Whisper. That Whisper is the only place the Trial can be launched from.

What Ascension Costs and What It Changes¶

On clearing the second gauntlet, permanently:

• The Hero's level cap rises from 40 to 50.
• The Hero's class line is replaced by the path name everywhere it is displayed.
• The path's title is earned and set as the Hero's active title.
• The path's signature skill is kept for good (an imbued Hero already had it).
• The Hero's spell-slot capacity is set by the path.

Spell slots. Only the Mage discipline carries magic. A pure Mage path holds 3 slots, a Mage-based blend holds 2, a martial path that blends in Mage holds 1, and every other path holds 0. An unascended Mage already carries 2, so ascending is a gain for the Archmagus and a wash for the other three Mage paths. Slots are worth nothing unless your empire holds the Wizard's Tower at Tier 4; without it, no Hero anywhere carries spells, ascended or not, and no spell can be bound or cast in the field.

The Sixteen Paths¶

The Trial¶

The Trial is launched from the path's own Whisper on the Whispers page. There is no button anywhere else. The Whisper runs through four beats — the summons, raising the halls, the Trial, the Proving — and each gauntlet only opens while the Whisper stands at its matching beat. Between the two you return to the Whisper to have the skill named; that click is what advances it to the Proving.

Trial launch requirements¶

• The Hero is alive, not benched, and above 0 HP.
• The Hero is Level 40 and not already ascended.
• The Hero has a chosen path, and it is one of the four open to their class.
• Both required halls stand at Tier 3.
• The Hero is home. A Hero out on a raid, or away on a Thief's Work infiltration, cannot be called to their Trial.
• No delve, Arena run or other Trial is already active for your empire.
• You have 1 turn to spend. It is taken at launch.
• The path's Whisper stands at the matching beat.

How the gauntlet is built¶

The Trial runs on the delve engine, so the Hero fights with their full kit — class skills, earned skills, gear, attributes, carried spells. But it is not a normal delve. It runs in gauntlet mode.

The grid shape is generated fresh each run, so no two Trials look identical. The room types are deterministic: the boss sits at the farthest room from the entrance, a camp sits on the last step before it, the elite sits about 60% of the way along that road, one cache appears from the second room onward, and everything else is a fight. Of the ten cells that works out to the entrance, the cache, the elite, the camp, the nemesis, and about five plain fights. There are no random event rooms in gauntlet mode.

Enemies scale to the Hero's actual combat sheet — gear, attributes and boons included — not just their level, and are then knocked down to 0.15 of that, because a lone fighter takes every swing instead of splitting the attention of a four-Hero party. The scale has a floor keyed to the Hero's level, so stripping your gear to make the Trial easier does not work. The multiplier moves enemy health and attack together.

Stage 1: the nemesis¶

Each path has its own site with rank-and-file enemies, one elite, and one nemesis at the end. Each nemesis carries its own special move — usually the hero-side version of the skill you are there to take: the damage cap, the unmissable shot, the parry, the hex, and so on.

Clearing it does not ascend the Hero. It imbues them: they now carry the path's signature skill on every combat surface while still unascended. The imbuing grants no spell slots — a Mage keeps the 2 they already had, and nobody gains the path's capacity until they ascend — and the Level-40 cap still holds. Return to the Whisper to have the skill named and to open the Proving.

Stage 2: the Proving¶

The Proving is the same ground, generated from the stage-1 site rather than hand-authored.

• Every enemy is 1.1× harder than on the first run.
• The elite room holds the site's toughest ordinary enemy at 1.8× health and 1.1× attack.
• The boss is the stage-1 elite, at 2.6× health and 1.2× attack, with the nemesis's special move removed.

Read that last point carefully. The Proving boss is scaled up from the elite, not from the nemesis, so in raw health it is always the smaller of the two bosses — trial elites run 82–92 base health, so the Proving boss lands around 213–239, against nemeses of 270–400. What makes the Proving hard is that every other enemy is hotter and the boss has no special move to telegraph.

Clearing the Proving ascends the Hero.

Failure and retries¶

A Trial Hero cannot die. The Hero fights alone, so the moment they go down the run ends as a loss — and that is true of every way a Trial can drop them, including the cache trap. The bleed-out clock that kills a downed Hero in an ordinary delve only advances while a run is still in progress, and this one is already over. The Hero comes home alive at 1 HP.

Nothing else is spent. The Whisper beat does not advance on a loss, so the same gauntlet can be attempted again as often as you like, at 1 turn per attempt. Heal the Hero first — a Hero at 0 HP cannot be launched.

The Ascended Signature Skills¶

Each path grants exactly one active skill. It appears on the Hero's action bar in delves (including Trials), in siege escalades, and in the Arena. Cooldowns are counted in rounds and are shortened by the Hero's cooldown-reduction stat.

An imbued Hero — one who has felled their nemesis but not yet cleared the Proving — already carries their path's skill on all three surfaces. Only the spell slots and the raised level cap wait for the full ascension.

The Arena uses positional twins of these skills. The multipliers and cooldowns are identical; what changes is that each one gains a hex range — Execute reaches 1, Iron Cadence and Siphon 3, Bind 4, Hex 5, Unerring Shot and Truescatter 6, and The Stoop becomes a 3-hex charge. Two also behave differently: Star Volley hits only foes within 4 hexes instead of every foe on the board, and Fade gives one dodge charge (the next blow whiffs) plus the guaranteed crit, rather than removing the Hero from targeting for a whole phase.

Blueprints¶

A guild line cannot be started at all until you hold its Blueprint. Blueprints are not bought, crafted or traded. They drop from one place only: a Tier-4 conquest realm victory.

The roll belongs to the Hero, not the barony. Every Hero recorded as having fought in that siege for you rolls separately, for their own class's line.

Every condition on the drop¶

• The realm must be Tier 4. Tier 1 to 3 victories never drop a guild Blueprint.
• The Hero must be one of those recorded as having fought in that siege.
• The Hero must still be alive when the victory is settled.
• The Hero must be a Warrior, Ranger or Thief. Mages are excluded outright — the Wizard's Tower is not a guild line, so a Mage on a Tier-4 victory contributes nothing to this roll.
• The line's Blueprint must not already be held. A Hero whose line you already have does not roll.
• Hero Ascension must be open to your account. If it is not, no roll happens and no pity progress accrues — you cannot bank luck on content you cannot receive.
• There is no Hero level requirement. The buildings rise freely; only the Ascension Trial itself demands a Level-40 champion.
• At most one Blueprint drops per victory, however many Heroes hit.

How many Heroes that means in practice: a single storm seats 2, or 3 if you spend a Second Banner, which seats a third champion for one storm. But the record of who fought is kept for the whole siege and adds up node by node, so swapping champions between node battles puts every one of them into the roll at the regent's fall.

The pity ladder¶

The base chance is 1 in 3. Every Tier-4 victory a line comes away from empty-handed raises that line's chance by 16.7 percentage points, so it is guaranteed on the fifth. Counters are kept per line — winning the Fellwatch never resets your Oathhall progress — and a line's counter resets to zero the moment its Blueprint drops.