The Black Tide

The Black Tide is a hostile sea power that takes root on Forsaken shores. It does not bargain, trade, or appear in the common rolls of Governors, but once it has a foothold it gathers ships, answers provocation with force, and pressures the Governors who sail near its harbours.

Combat

Battle rules, attack restrictions, and the measures used against hostile fleets.

Chart & Navigation

How islands are marked on the chart and what can be read from a selected shore.

Reports & Dispatches

Where Black Tide assaults, repulses, and sightings are recorded once fleets move.

What Governors Can See

The Black Tide is hidden from ordinary society, but it is not invisible on the water. Its islands are shown as Black Tide holdings when selected, and the owner name is presented plainly as The Black Tide. In region view, those holdings bear a black ring rather than the usual rival mark. Their shores are also shown in the fully blighted, forsaken state, as though the settlement had been left to rot even while the Tide still uses it. Those holdings do not open a normal Governor profile, nor does the Black Tide appear in rankings, contacts, or player search.

If the Tide currently holds no shores, it takes no action of its own. It can only act from harbours it owns, and a Tide reduced to zero stays silent until it claims a Forsaken shore again.

Envoy Vale: Diplomatic read

Treat the Black Tide as a hostile force of the sea, not as a rival court. One cannot flatter it, petition it, or bargain for calm water.

Watching the Black Tide

When the Black Tide raids a shore that glows brightly enough with lumen, it does not merely loot and vanish — it carries the lumen home. Its churches store the lumen it steals but never produce any of their own, so every drop in a Tide reliquary was taken from a Governor. Left unchecked, a watchful Tide builds a hoard.

Your watchtowers can be turned outward to track that hoard. Open the Watchtower at the Governor's Desk and switch to the Black Tide ledger. What you can read there depends on your watch score — the combined level of every watchtower across your realm. The more towers you raise, and the higher you build them, the further you see:

• Dark Horizon — too little watchtower strength to make anything out yet.
• Lumen Sighted — the total lumen the Black Tide has hoarded, with a bar tracking how far that hoard has come.
• Fleet Counted — how many islands the Tide holds, and whether its hoard is swelling fast, climbing steadily, or growing slowly. This is as far as the watch can see: it tells you the Tide is gathering, never exactly where.

Marshal Voss: Build the towers outward

A single tower watches your own shore. A realm thick with high towers watches the Tide itself. If you want to know what is gathering out there before it sails, that watch score is the price.

When It Acts

The Black Tide must hold at least one shore before it can act, and what it does from there is split between two impulses. It answers provocation, striking back at any Governor who attacks one of its islands — regardless of anything else. It is also drawn to lumen: it patrols its own waters and raids Governors whose reliquaries glow with stored lumen, provided their shores lie within sailing reach of a Tide harbour. A shore that holds no church produces no lumen and casts no glow, and the Tide cannot find it. Build the divine, and you light a beacon the deep can follow; stay dark, and it sails past you. Both impulses run alongside each other, governed by the rules below.

• It is attracted to lumen. It only patrols against shores whose reliquary is glowing; a church-less, unlit island is invisible to it (provocation aside).
• It respects alliance protection and new-governor sanctuary at all times.
• It only strikes Governors who have logged in recently. Long-absent shores are passed over.
• Reprisals are sized to what you brought. The Tide answers an attack with roughly three-quarters of the raw force you sent, split across multiple waves and spread across several Tide harbours so each contributes a share. A small probe draws a small but firm answer; a heavy raid draws a heavy answer.
• Repeated attacks keep a Governor marked for harsher returns. Each fresh attack draws a fresh cycle of reprisal waves; the Tide does not exhaust its memory after one answer.
• Reprisals come in waves with pauses between them, not an unbroken stream. The Tide may spread strikes across different islands before revisiting the same one.
• Marked governors may be struck across their chain of holdings. Nearby aggression is limited to shores within sailing reach of a Tide harbour.
• At higher provocation, it may commit multiple harbours against one fortified target or split waves unevenly across several shores.
• It sends full, boarded warship waves rather than lone hulls or half-crewed decks.
• It does not attack unclaimed islands.

Marshal Voss: Pressure builds

The first reprisal against a fresh offender is comparatively light. If you keep striking, the Tide settles into a campaign against you, and each wave arrives heavier and more deliberate than the last.

Going Dark

The Tide's patrols are drawn to light. It only proactively hunts shores that glow brightly enough with lumen — a shore holding little or none is passed over on those patrols. Reprisal is the exception: once you have struck the Tide, its revenge ignores the glow and follows you regardless.

So a Governor who has not provoked the Tide can darken their own shore by emptying it of lumen. Tearing down your Church drains the reliquary completely and stops the glow — at the cost of the Church itself and most of the materials sunk into it (your masons salvage only a quarter). It is a deliberate sacrifice: no Church means no lumen, no blessings, and no shrine — but also no beacon calling the Tide in.

Envoy Vale: A lamp in the dark

Lumen is a lamp held up in the night. It lights your rites — and it shows the Tide exactly where you stand.

How It Grows

The Black Tide grows crudely and directly. It favors those works that help it gather raw materials and launch fleets: the Main House, raw-material camps, the Barracks, and the Harbour. It also raises a Church on its holdings — not to worship, but as a reliquary to store the lumen it raids from glowing shores. A Tide church stores lumen but never produces any of its own.

Other civic works — housing, stores, walls, and towers — are ignored entirely. Resources are spent on military production and church-storage as quickly as they come in. The Tide bootstraps its raw-material camps and then leans on world-level production advantages rather than endlessly deepening every mine before it sails.

Small Warship

The Tide's principal warship: cheap enough to mass and swift enough to keep pressure on marked shores.

Stone Thrower

The common fighting body carried by those fleets. The Tide prefers numbers over refinement, filling decks with crude levies rather than disciplined specialists.

Catapult

The Tide laces its waves with siege engines, tucked behind the boarding crews. Light pressure carries none. As a campaign against a single Governor wears on, the engines arrive in greater number, and the walls begin to crumble in earnest.

What It Ignores

• Happiness, food, and population limits do not affect it.
• It does not trade, spy, or pursue research.
• It does not raise merchant ships, spy ships, or guard hounds.
• It does not build walls, watch towers, or other defensive works.

How To Read A Black Tide Holding

A newly claimed Black Tide island may inherit buildings from its previous ruler or begin nearly bare. Either way, treat every holding as a future harbour of reprisal. Given time, the Tide turns raw material into swarming fleets. A quiet harbour is not a harmless one.

How It Spreads

The Black Tide takes Forsaken shores into its grip. An island becomes Forsaken once its Governor has been absent for at least 14 days — the same single threshold that governs liberation and conquest. Once an island is Forsaken the Tide may roll in and claim it, repurposing the harbour into another launch point. It does not found new settlements on empty water, and it never claims a shore whose Governor is still active.

• Only Forsaken islands are eligible — the Governor must have been absent ≥ 14 days. A starter you abandoned during onboarding is not Forsaken until that threshold passes.
• Once claimed, the island is sterilised of civic life. Walls, housing, and stores are torn down or ignored as raw material is funnelled into fleet production — but a church is raised and kept as a lumen reliquary.
• The number of shores the Tide chooses to hold is limited. It does not pour endlessly across the map.

How To Clear One

A Black Tide holding is removed by force, not by treaty. If a Governor wins a normal attack against the Tide and leaves no real defending units alive, the holding is broken and the island is released back to the world.

• A cleared starter island returns to the starter pool.
• A cleared non-starter island returns as an unowned colonisable shore.
• Plunder is taken in the usual manner before the harbour is abandoned.
• A liberation is a shared victory: every Governor active in the world that hour receives a small mix of reclaimed stores, waiting to be collected from the Claims tab.
• The Black Tide can be reduced to nothing. Strip it of every shore and it falls silent, with no further reprisals or strikes, until it gains a foothold again.

Marshal Voss: Field order

If you mean to clear a Tide harbour, strike hard enough to leave no garrison standing. A half-measure wins you plunder; a clean victory wins back the shore.

What the Black Tide Does Not Do

• It does not found new settlements on empty water.
• It does not claim a shore that still belongs to an active Governor.
• It does not prey on distant unmarked Governors with no harbour nearby.
• It does not appear in rankings, contacts, or social ledgers.

If You Return After Losing Everything

A Governor whose realm is gone, whether the Tide swallowed it, a rival claimed Forsaken shores, a long absence ended the tenure, or the council reset the seat, is not sent back to the beginning. Rejoin the same world and you are granted a fresh island that already stands well above bare ground: a strengthened main house and storehouse, a working marketplace, a barracks and harbour ready to raise a fleet, raw-material camps already dug, and a stockpile of goods to rebuild with. The on-rails counsel for new Governors is set aside, since you have sailed these waters before, and a returning dispatch explains what became of your old realm.

New-governor sanctuary still applies to the new shore, the same protection any fresh arrival receives. Use it to rebuild before you provoke anything, the Tide least of all.

Envoy Vale: A second tide of fortune

Losing a realm is not the end of your story here. Come back and the council will see you re-established with enough in hand to matter again. What you do with that second chance is yours to decide.

Council Advice

Governors who leave the Black Tide alone may never see it act. Those who mean to provoke it should do so with full knowledge of its nearest harbours, its likely muster strength, and the state of their own shores. For the broader rules of battle and interception, see Combat and Reports & Dispatches.

Reference

Common questions