Attacking the Black Tide

A raid robs the Tide. Only a siege removes it. Read the island before you sail, bring an escort that survives the watch, and send catapults if you mean to keep the shore. Every strike deepens its grudge against you, so make each one count.

Read the island first

Every Tide island carries a black bar under its name: how much of its garrison still stands. Strike it and the bar drops; leave it and the Tide repairs it to full after six hours without an attack. It says how worn the island is, not how many ships wait behind its walls. A larger settlement on the chart is a stronger island, though no building tells you how many troops wait inside; for that you scout.

The watchtower ledger

Your watchtowers can be turned outward too. Open the Watchtower at the Governor's Desk and switch to the Black Tide ledger. The more watchtower levels across your realm, the more you read: the size of its lumen hoard, how many islands it holds, how fast the hoard is swelling, and the marks along the bar, the depths the hoard rises through. The hoard sits in the Tide's fortresses, so what you raid out of a fortress comes off the bar, and a hoard driven back down has to climb the same water twice. The hoard is what tears the Lumen Rupture open when it climbs high enough, and a fortress raid is the one lever a single Governor has on it.

What a Tide fleet carries

The Tide masses Small Warships carrying Stone Throwers, and, as a grudge deepens, archers, swordsmen and then Catapults. Fortresses keep dense garrisons behind high walls, and the great fortresses hold warband troops stationed with them. Raiders and warbands keep merchant hulls for ferrying lumen home to a fortress. Warbands carry the siege engines.

A raid robs it, a siege removes it

Winning the battle plunders the island and leaves it Tide. The island is only freed once its main house is battered down to its foundations, the same rule that frees an abandoned Governor's island. Only Catapults can touch a main house, and no single wave can bring down more than 5 building levels, so a well-built Tide harbour takes three or four waves. The Tide does not rebuild between them unless you leave it six quiet hours, so send the waves closer together than that and each one lands on the damage the last one left.

How many waves. Count the main house's levels and divide by 5, rounding up: that is the fewest waves, if each one wins and carries enough catapults to use its full allowance. A wave that loses the battle breaks nothing. Attack & Battle covers how catapults break walls and halls.

Master Quill: Margin note

A half-measure wins you plunder. Only a siege wins back the shore, and a fleet with no catapults will never win one, however large it is.

Survive the watch

A fortress keeps a ring of black hulls circling it, and the size of the ring is the size of its watch. If that watch sinks your escort, the troops aboard go down with the ships, so bring warships in proportion to the ring. A Governor's patrol tires; the watch over a great fortress never does. Raiders and warbands keep no such ring, which is why a raider is the first Tide island most Governors clear.

Every wave you send deepens the Tide's grudge against you by one step, and the first steps answer at the island you sailed from. What each step brings, and how a Rotsalt ward turns it away, is on When it attacks you.

When the main house falls

When the main house falls, plunder resolves and the island returns to the world. Governors active in that world during the preceding hour receive reclaimed stores and coins, up to three liberation gifts per UTC day. The allowance resets at 00:00 UTC and counts gifts issued, even after collection. Each gift still scales with the freed island’s size. If the island held a blackened idol, it falls to the Governor whose wave razed the main house.

Further liberations still earn public credit on the Black Tide Liberators board but issue no more gifts once your allowance is spent. Gifts already waiting remain yours to collect.

The freed island returns to the world as an unclaimed shore, and any Governor may then send a charter to settle it. If the Tide lost its last warband in that ocean, the storm lifts with it.

Strip the Tide of every shore and it falls silent until it gains a foothold again.

Master Quill: Who gets the idol

The idol goes to the Governor whose wave razed the main house, not to whoever did the most damage. In a shared siege, the last wave is the one to be on.

Common questions