Honour and Bounties

The ports keep a tally on every Governor. Hold off a bigger realm and they toast you; fall on shores far smaller than your own and they lower their voices when your sails come in. Honour is that tally, and when it turns bad enough the Harbour Watch pins your name to the Tavern wall with a price beside it.

The Tavern

Where bounties are posted, and where a hunt is followed blow by blow.

Attack & Battle

The assault itself, and how a punch-down changes what it brings home.

Plunder

The quiet run, and why a second visit to one Governor costs you.

Island Prestige

The measure of a realm's size that every matchup is read from.

Your name in the ports

Honour weighs your good deeds against your misdeeds. Good deeds are fights fairly fought, bigger realms taken on, the Black Tide beaten back. Misdeeds are blows on shores far smaller than yours and the same Governor plundered again and again. The balance can sit above zero or below it, and both sides of it fade back toward zero as the weeks pass: a name has to be kept up, and a bad one is slowly forgotten. Misdeeds fade faster than a good name does.

You never see a number. The ports speak of you in labels, and a label moves in big steps, not with every plunder. There are ten of them: three below zero that warn you where you are heading, Unsung in the quiet middle where every new Governor starts, and six above it that you climb by fighting well.

Who sees what

Your own Honour tab sits on your profile, and only you can open it. It shows your label, what it means, and how it came about: the deeds that lowered it, raised it, or left it as it was, each fading as the weeks pass. Other Governors see only your label, as a small pill beside your name on your profile. Unsung shows no pill at all. If you are Wanted, they see the WANTED poster too.

Every fight has a size

Before a fleet sails, the harbour reads the two realms against each other: the prestige of every island each Governor holds, taken together. The answer is the matchup, and it decides what the fight does to your name.

A Blighted island is fair game even when its owner still logs in: a keeper who lets an island rot has looked away from it, and the ports do not mourn it.

What a fight does to your name

Honour is earned in small amounts and lost in larger ones. The kind of strike matters as much as the size of the realm.

• A punch-down always costs, assault or plunder, from the first strike. It costs more each time you return to the same Governor within the week, more again if the assault carries catapults onto one of their colonies, and more against a Governor who arrived in the last fortnight.
• Falling on a newcomer from a great height costs most of the way to Wanted in a single strike. A realm ten times or more the size of a new Governor who is still playing is not raiding, it is drowning them, and the Watch writes it down that way.
• Assaults between equals never cost, however often two realms at war trade blows, and the first two a day on one Governor earn a little. Wars are fought in the open, and the ports respect that.
• Plunder between equals: the first run a day on one Governor is free. From the second it costs, and each further run that day costs more.
• A punch-up earns. The first two strikes a day on one bigger Governor earn a little, by assault or plunder. After that an assault earns nothing and costs nothing, and a third plunder starts to cost.

Earning has conditions the costs do not. A token fleet earns nothing: it has to be a real fleet. A fight with a Governor you have lately traded or shipped goods with earns nothing. And what fights can earn you in one day has a limit.

Two more things raise your name. Holding off a far bigger realm that struck you as a punch-down earns a good deal, once per attacker in a week. Beating off the Black Tide, taking an island back from it, and raiding an abandoned shore with a real fleet each earn a little. Being attacked never costs you anything.

Envoy Vale: Diplomatic read

The cheapest way to a good name is a war with someone your own size. Two realms trading assaults lose nothing in the ports and gain a little every day of it.

Strikes, not waves

One decision costs once. Waves sent at the same Governor within about an hour of the first count as a single strike, not one per wave, and every fleet of a combined attack is one strike however its times fall. An assault and a plunder never share a strike. A wave that joins a strike already under way never earns anything of its own. A heavier wave can still cost: if it would have cost more sailing alone than the strike has cost so far, it carries the difference as a small top-up.

What you see is what you get

The Battle Forecast on the assault, plunder, colonise and combined-attack screens ends with a Matchup row, there from the moment the screen opens. A raid shows only its Honour, and a garrison, a moor, a descent, a claim or an intercept carries neither. Its ? gives the exact Honour change this fleet will bring. If it would carry you down into Ill-Spoken, Notorious, Wolf's Head or Wanted, the row says so: A punch-down · then Notorious. A combined attack shows one Matchup row for the whole send.

That change is what is recorded when the fleet fights, win or lose. Recall the fleet and nothing is counted, unless another wave of the same strike goes on to fight. If the fleet is turned away on arrival, because the island became yours, an ally's or nobody's, or its Governor shuttered the realm, nothing is counted either. If the change shifted while the screen stood open, the harbour asks you to look again before it lets the fleet go.

What a punch-down does to the fight

Size changes the fight itself, not only your name. The smaller the realm against yours, the less of the haul your crews carry home from a won assault or a plunder run, down to a tenth at the widest gap. A plunder run on a much smaller shore is also harder to get away with.

And a punch-down assault is seen. You cannot hide a fleet that size from a harbour that small: a great realm's sails are known in every port, and they are counted and named from the headland long before they land. Unsigned Sails hides a raider among equals, not a giant among fishermen. A punch-down assault or colonisation carries your name, rite or no rite, and so does a combined attack that punches down. In an alliance operation each member is judged on their own fleet: a member who punches down is named, and their alliance with them. A plunder run stays anonymous whatever the matchup.

Wanted

Wanted sits apart from the ladder. Your misdeeds alone decide it, whatever good stands beside them: a Governor who fights well on one coast cannot buy off what they do on another. A warning reaches you well before you cross the line, and another notice when a bounty goes up on you.

Plunder counts toward Wanted like any other misdeed, and it stays anonymous all the same. The poster never says what you did or to whom. Every poster carries the same short reason, so a robbed Governor never learns from it who robbed them.

A Wanted Governor's profile carries the WANTED poster, the ticker announces it, and the morning after a bounty goes up the Daily Chronicle opens on a WANTED page.

How a bounty works

Cross the Wanted line and the Watch posts a bounty on the Tavern wall: one reward, paid by the Watch, and one job to bring you to account. The job is one of three: strike down a number of your troops, plunder a quantity of your goods, or win a number of battles against you. The notice has a window to be finished in, and the window stops while the Wanted Governor is shuttered, so nobody can wait a bounty out behind a shield.

The Watch keeps only a few bounties open in a world at once and rests between one bounty on a Governor and the next, so a Wanted name does not always get a poster the same hour.

A hunt is shared

Every hunter's blows add to one tally. When it reaches the job, the hunt is over: the reward and the Honour that comes with bringing a Governor to account are shared by what each hunter struck. The blow that fills the tally counts only what was still needed, so the Wanted Governor never loses more than the job asked for, however many hunt them.

• A hunter whose part is under one twentieth of the job is not paid; the notice names the smallest part that is.
• Coin no paid hunter earned (the rounding, and the shares of hunters under the floor) goes to whoever struck the last blow, if that hunter is paid; otherwise to the largest paid share.
• Combined attacks count. So do alliance operations, whose kills are shared between the members by the attack strength each fleet brought. An operation's battle counts as one battle won, however many members sailed in it.
• A won battle counts toward a job of battles only when the defenders lost at least 100 land troops in it, every defender counted, garrisons included. Taking a lightly held shore is no battle won, however many hunters take it.
• Every hunter who joined in gets a celebration when the hunt ends, paid or not.
• The coins arrive as a claim: collect them from Dispatches, under Claims, within thirty days.

Anyone who holds an island can hunt. The Black Tide's blows never count. An ally or a friend cannot be attacked at all, so they cannot hunt you either.

Hunting costs you nothing in the ports, whatever the size gap: no punch-down cost, no cut to the haul, and your name is not forced into the open. It earns nothing either, beyond your share when the job is done.

Marshal Voss: Field order

Strike early. A share is paid by what you did, so the hunter who lands the first heavy blow takes the larger part. The last blow takes what is left over, but only if that hunter's own part was big enough to be paid.

When the hunt ends

Brought to account: the hunters are paid, the ticker names the largest signed share, and the Wanted Governor's misdeeds are cut by a good part, which may be enough to lift them out of Wanted. The trail went cold: the window closed first; nothing is paid and nothing is forgiven. A Governor who loses their last island is taken off the wall.

Common questions