Combat

Battles are resolved the moment a fleet makes landfall, and they are deterministic: the same forces, bonuses, and walls always produce the same result. No dice. If you scouted and sent enough, you win.

Raiding

Resource tiers, attrition, diminishing returns, and fleet strategy for raiding unclaimed shores.

Colonisation Rules

How empty shores are founded and broken enemy settlements are razed.

Fleet & Garrison

Reinforcement convoys and stationed garrisons that bolster a settlement.

The Black Tide

The hidden sea power, what provokes it, and the limits of its current threat.

Preparing for War

War is won in preparation. A fleet without proper support will break before it reaches shore.

• Harbour: all ships are built here. Higher levels unlock stronger vessels and faster construction.
• Barracks: trains ground troops and siege weapons. Level 10 unlocks catapults.
• Research: Sail research unlocks large warships and merchant ships. Weapons and armor research strengthens troops.

The War Fleet

Every attack requires warships. Ground troops and catapults cannot sail on their own. They board warships as passengers. A well-composed fleet balances firepower, troop capacity, and speed.

Small Warship

Fast, affordable, and available early. Carries 5 troops and light cargo. Ideal for scouting raids and early aggression.

Large Warship

Heavy combat vessel unlocked by Harbour 5 and Sail 3. Carries 10 troops and far more cargo.

Colonisation Ship

A specialized vessel required to found empty islands and complete the razing of broken settlements. It has 0 attack and should be escorted by warships. See Colonisation.

Marshal Voss: Field order

A war fleet sails only as fast as its slowest vessel. Review the Fleet and Units chapters before committing forces to open water.

Battle Strength

An attacker's total strength is the sum of each unit's attack value multiplied by its count. The defender's strength draws on unit defense values, wall fortifications, and the settlement's intrinsic defenses. The side with the higher strength wins. Ties go to the defender: a scouted tie is a tactical error, not a stalemate.

Morale also weighs on both sides. If the attacker's happiness falls below 40, their battle power is reduced by 10%. If the defender's happiness falls that low, their defensive power also drops. At the harshest morale tier, each side can lose up to 45% of combat strength.

Casualties

The loser's army is destroyed entirely. The winner's losses are proportional to how close the fight was. Crushing wins are cheap; narrow wins are costly.

• A crushing win against a defender with about 10% of your strength costs about 10% of your force.
• A narrow win against a defender with about 90% of your strength costs about 90% of your force.
• Walk-in. Against an empty garrison there is no fight: the attacker takes zero losses, plunders, and (if catapults are aboard) razes buildings. Wall and base-island defence apply only when there's a garrison to protect.
• Defender losses are split proportionally between stationed units and any allied reinforcements, so each contributor takes a fair share of the casualties.

Near-tie wipe

When the loss ratio is 0.95 or higher, the two armies were within 5% of each other in strength. The loser's army is fully wiped, with no per-unit-type rounding remnants. Without this rule, a defender holding by 1.7% would end up with one of each unit type left over, such as one archer, one swordsman, and one stone thrower. That is rounding noise rather than a "tattered defence". The 0.95 snap turns a near-tied battle into a clean catastrophe: decisive force still matters, the meta is unchanged, the report is legible.

The 1-unit rule

When a single unit sits at round(1 × loss_ratio), the result is simple: under 50% it rounds to zero (the unit survives); at 50% or above it rounds to one (the unit dies). No "lone hero" loophole, no "one arrow kills a hero ship" exploit.

Ships as carriers

When your fleet mixes land units and ships, the ships take a reduced share of the land loss ratio, proportional to how much land power they're carrying. Land power means every non-naval attacker, so it includes both infantry and siege units (catapults).

• Pure naval fleet (land_fraction = 0): ships take the full land loss ratio. The carrier discount only applies when there's land power on board to protect.
• 100% land (land_fraction = 1): ships take 25% of the land ratio, the maximum protection.
• Mixed: linear scaling between the endpoints. A fleet that's 50% land power by attack value gets a 0.625 multiplier on its ships.
• A single token unit cannot unlock the discount. One spearfighter in a 1,000-warship fleet gives a land fraction of about 0.0003, which produces effectively no protection.

This includes colonisation ships: they withdraw offshore alongside warships once troops disembark. The fiction: ships only take losses when the beach assault goes badly enough to drag them in.

Defending a Settlement

Every settlement has a base defense of 50. Even an ungarrisoned island offers some resistance. Beyond that, defense is shaped by three factors:

• Garrison: units stationed on the island contribute their defense values. A unit's attack stat only matters when sent on raids or assaults, not when defending. Allied reinforcements count too.
• Stone Wall: each level multiplies the defense of all defenders by an additional 5%, and adds 10 intrinsic defense on top.
• Watch Tower: detects approaching fleets and provides advance warning. Higher levels reveal more detail about incoming attacks, giving time to prepare.

In practice, this means wall upgrades strengthen both the garrison and the settlement's standing defenses.

No retreat

A fleet that loses the battle is destroyed. There is no mid-fight retreat: once the ships make landfall, the outcome is decided. The hedge against "I'm going to lose" is scouting, fleet composition, or recalling a fleet before it arrives.

Marshal Voss: Field order

Scout the shore before you sail. A surprise there is a shipwreck here.

Rules of Engagement

Not every settlement may be targeted. The following restrictions apply:

• Alliance members are protected from attacks by their own.
• Friendships do not prevent war. Governors may still attack those listed in their contacts.
• Newly arrived Governors are shielded by sanctuary for their first 72 hours. No attacks, raids, colonisation, or espionage may target them.
• Launching an attack or spy mission while under sanctuary forfeits that shield immediately.
• Shuttered isles turn fleets away. You may still send ships, but they find the gates barred on arrival and sail home empty — no battle, no losses.
• Battles against settlements with no stationed troops do not count toward either side's war record. Plunder and building damage still apply, but the engagement is not recorded as a war.

Plunder Protection

A fortified Storehouse shields a portion of reserves from plunder. The stronger the stores, the less a raiding fleet can carry off. Lumen, kept in the church reliquary rather than the common stores, receives no such protection. Every drop is fair game when the shrine is sacked, and any that overflows the attacker's own reliquary evaporates on the voyage home.

Raiding Unclaimed Shores

Unclaimed islands can be raided for stores, but they are not free prizes. Wild guardians defend each shoreline, and even victorious crews may suffer withdrawal losses. Repeated strikes diminish returns, and fleet composition matters more than raw numbers.

Unclaimed shores have no Storehouse, so the protection table above does not apply — the shore's full stockpile is on the table, capped only by the cargo space of the surviving fleet.

See the full Raiding guide for resource tiers, attrition tables, diminishing returns, treasure mechanics, and fleet strategy.

Siege and Razing

Surviving Catapults deal structural damage to the defender's buildings after a successful assault. Damage is paid for in siege points, not percentages. One catapult contributes 1 SP, and it takes a flat 10 SP to drop any building by one level.

• Catapult damage is applied only when the attacker wins the battle.
• Catapult research multiplies the pool: +10% per level, to a maximum of 2.0x at fully researched.
• Geometric overflow cost. The first 5 levels of a wave each cost a flat 10 SP. Each level beyond that doubles the pressure. Bigger stacks scale, but levelling an island in one wave costs an exponential number of catapults.
• If the next level costs more SP than the remaining pool, the siege halts and the report names the exact deficit. No silent failures.
• Targeting is deterministic: defensive walls, then watchtowers, kennels, barracks, production, and civic buildings. The report shows the priority trace.
• The main house is normally never targeted by catapults in an attack. A successful colonisation can raze it to level 1, not destroy it. The one exception is a Forsaken island — one whose owner has been absent for at least 14 days: any attack mission may then raze its main house. By liberation (a plain attack) the slot returns to the wild — a capital becomes a protected empty starter, a colony an ordinary wild island, and if it was the owner's last island that Governor is removed from the world; the attacker never takes ownership. (A colonisation mission against a Forsaken non-capital instead transfers it to the attacker — see Colonisation.) While the owner is active, the main house can never be razed.
• A fleet whose pool is under 10 SP does no damage, but the battle report names the exact deficit so you know what a stronger force would need next time.

Reference

lossRatio = loserStrength / winnerStrength
losses = round(unitQuantity * lossRatio)

navalLossRatio = lossRatio * (1 - 0.75 * landFraction)
landFraction = landAttackPower / totalAttackPower

cost = siegePointsPerLevel * overflowMultiplier^(levelBeyondCheapBand)

Common questions