Frequently Asked Questions

Thronestead is a medieval strategy game that runs entirely in your browser. You rule a growing kingdom — raise buildings, gather and refine resources, train armies, trade on the open market, and contend with other players in a shared, persistent world that advances on a fixed clock.

No — Thronestead is live but under active development. The core loop (kingdom building, economy, crafting, research, policies, training, raids, war, espionage, and alliances) is playable now. A handful of features are still being expanded, and those are called out honestly in the answers below and on the Patch Notes page.

After signup you land on your kingdom Home. Start on the Kingdom page and queue a few building upgrades — your starting grant comfortably covers the taught opening: Castle to level 2, a Barracks, and your first producer. During the opening shield, level-1 structures finish instantly and anything targeting level 10 or below finishes in a single tick, so bank several upgrades at once (up to 3 can wait in the queue) and watch them land. Then follow the guided steps in the Chancellery Brief (Onboarding Hub), which walk you through your first week while you're shielded from attack.

The Castle is the pacing spine — it gates what everything else can reach, and the road runs all the way to Castle level 100. At a casual one-session-a-day pace you can expect Castle 10 within roughly your first two to three days, with each later level costing meaningfully more than the last — the climb is the game, and a mature castle is a months-long project, not a weekend one.

Every new ruler starts under Founding Protection. It runs in two stages: first a hard shield — no attacks, raids, or scouting in either direction — for roughly your first four days; then a soft-exposure window where direct attacks and raids stay fully blocked but scouting becomes possible in both directions. Protection is two-way: while shielded you also can't declare war or raid. It ends when the timer expires, or you can graduate early from the Onboarding Hub once you've reached the soft-exposure stage (early graduation isn't offered during the opening hard shield). Check the Onboarding Hub for your remaining window.

During signup you declare a political stance — Neutral, Expansionist, Defensive, Mercantile, or Isolationist. It signals your intended playstyle and tints your founding sigil. It never locks you out of anything — every stance can pursue every activity. There is no in-game control to re-select your stance yet, so choose the one that best fits how you intend to play.

Open a ticket from Contact Support, or raise it in the community Discord (linked from the in-game Community page). Clear, specific reports genuinely help — this is an evolving build.

The world advances in discrete steps called ticks. A new tick fires every 15 minutes, on a fixed schedule shared by every kingdom.

Ticks are when scheduled work resolves: building upgrades and troop training complete, crafting and research orders finish, resources are produced, market trades settle, and raids and wars reach their resolution. Between ticks the world holds steady.

Yes — on every in-game page the top bar shows the current tick number, a live countdown to the next tick, and the current season. (The public pages you're reading now don't carry the tick bar.)

No. Ticks resolve on the server whether or not you're logged in. You set things in motion — queue builds, training, crafting, research, trades — and they complete on schedule while you're away. Planning ahead matters more than staying glued to the screen.

Not forever. A kingdom that takes no real economic action for an extended stretch (currently about a week) while sitting on a large copper hoard stops accruing production and tax until it spends again — the pause lifts the moment real copper leaves your treasury. Anyone who logs in daily and keeps building will never see it; it exists so an abandoned kingdom doesn't quietly become the richest raid target on the map. Engaged play always out-earns idling.

Open the Kingdom page and select a structure. If you meet its resource, copper, and population requirements, click Queue Upgrade to add it to your build queue. Only one upgrade builds at a time, but you can bank up to 3 jobs in the queue — including several levels of the same building — and each completes in order after its listed number of ticks. Each banked job pays its costs up front (held in escrow until it builds or you cancel). While you're under Founding Protection, level-1 structures finish instantly and any build targeting level 10 or below finishes in a single tick.

Yes, two kinds. Storage caps: your warehouse, silo, and bank set hard ceilings, and anything produced over the cap is lost. Spoilage: stockpiles held far above a healthy working buffer decay a little every tick — raw resources and food above generous thresholds, and basic crafted goods above a smaller one. Only the excess spoils; a normal working stockpile never rots. Goods you've listed on the market still count for both — escrow is not a warehouse. The lesson: copper and goods are meant to be spent, traded, or built with, not piled.

Every finished building draws a small copper upkeep per tick. On top of that, sprawling producer empires pay an escalating surcharge: once your total producer levels pass a generous free allowance, each extra level costs more than the last (the surcharge grows with the square of the excess, and grows again at higher castle tiers). Focused kingdoms never notice it; hundred-producer sprawl funds itself less and less. Your army is never touched by this — military upkeep is its own system (see the military section).

There are seven raw resources: Wood, Stone, Iron, Food, Fuel, Hide, and Fiber. Copper is the currency, used for trade, building and upkeep costs, and enacting policies. Raw resources can be refined into crafted materials — Planks, Blocks, Ingots, Leather, Cloth, and higher tiers — on the Crafting page.

A queue is your line of in-progress jobs. There is no single "Queues" page — instead, each surface shows an In progress strip for its own work: building upgrades on Kingdom, research on Research, training on Military, crafting on Crafting, and so on. The Kingdom page is the closest thing to an overview. A queue view shows active, queued, blocked, and paused jobs; finished and cancelled jobs drop off it, and market trades are tracked separately on the Market page.

Most work runs in an ordered queue with a limited number of slots, and a slot stays reserved until its job finishes or is cancelled. If a queue is full — or your kingdom is under a war lock — new orders wait until a slot frees up.

The Crafting page (in-game, the Forge) shows recipes that refine raw resources into crafted materials. Pick a recipe, set a quantity, preview the cost, and submit. Crafting orders enter a queue and complete over ticks, just like building upgrades and training.

Yes — deliberately so. Every refining step adds value at today's prices, and the premium rises with depth: the fifth link of a chain pays a better margin on its inputs than the first. Recipes gate on both your castle level and the crafting facility's level (facilities unlock new tiers at levels 1, 3, 8, 15, and 22), so mastering one line pays better than dabbling in five. And you don't have to craft everything yourself: from building level 16 onward, producer and refinery upgrades start demanding crafted components like planks and blocks, so buying what others refine beats full self-sufficiency at the margin.

On the Market page you post sell listings at a price you choose, or buy from other players' active listings. Trades are not instant: a buy or sell is queued and settles on the next tick.

One fee: a 3% sales fee on each fill (currently never less than 1 copper), carved out of the sale total and burned — the buyer never pays more than the listed price, no player or NPC collects the fee, and there is no listing fee. A few guardrails keep one whale from owning a thin market: listing prices must sit inside a wide band around a fair reference price (currently 0.25× to 4×), each buyer has a rolling per-resource purchase volume cap, and stale listings expire (currently after about a day) with the escrowed goods automatically returned to the seller. One honest warning: goods sitting in a market listing still count against your storage and still spoil — listing a hoard doesn't shelter it.

When you post a listing, queue a transfer, or start queued work, the copper or resources it needs are held in reserve (escrow) so you can't double-spend them. Reserved amounts are returned if you cancel before they're spent. Your ledger shows reserved balances separately.

The Economy / Ledger page is your accounting hub, with tabs for Revenue, Revenue Log, Revenue Details, Producers (per-tick output of everything you own), Treasury, and Raids — each stamped with the tick it applies to.

The Bank (Royal Vault) is an outbound transfer tool: send copper or resources to another kingdom via a transfer that settles at the next tick, and is cancellable while it's still queued. It is not a personal savings account — there's no deposit-and-withdraw balance. (Shared deposit/withdraw exists only for an alliance vault, on the Alliance page.)

On the Research page you browse research groups, inspect prerequisites and conflicts, and queue research decisions that buff production, military, espionage, and governance. Each item takes a set number of ticks; prerequisites unlock deeper nodes as you complete them.

Yes — from the research queue controls you can pause an active research item, resume a paused one, and cancel active, queued, or paused research. The one exception: while your kingdom is under a war lock, pausing and cancelling are disabled (resume still works).

Yes. Policies are kingdom-wide laws — such as Warmonger Doctrine, Stronghold Doctrine, and Merchant Charter — that apply real bonuses and trade-offs. On the Policies page you can enact or repeal them. Each has a copper cost and unlock requirements (castle level and/or research), takes effect after an enactment delay of 24 ticks (about six hours), and triggers a cooldown before you can change policies in the same category again.

On the Training page (under Military), pick a unit type, set a quantity, and confirm. You need the right military building at the required level, plus enough resources and available population. Training completes over ticks.

Every soldier bills upkeep in both copper and food, every tick, scaled to the unit's power — an elite costs far more to keep standing than a militiaman, not just more to recruit. Your food production is the real army cap: there's no hard unit limit, but an army your farms can't feed deserts, shedding its most expensive units first until the bill fits the harvest. Deployed and locked units (patrols, spy missions, raid and war commitments) still bill full upkeep while away — and if they went unfed out there, they desert on return while the shortfall lasts. A standing army is a cost center by design: loot subsidizes it, but never fully funds it.

The battlefield runs a counter cycle: Infantry beats Cavalry, Cavalry beats Ranged, Ranged beats Infantry — and Siege is the only class that damages walls. A wall-defended kingdom is untouchable without siege engines, and siege engines are helpless in the open without an escort. No class beats everything; scouting the defender's composition and bringing the counter is worth more than raw numbers.

A raid is a fast, cheap, small-scale strike aimed at loot — short to prepare and resolve, with a cooldown before you can hit the same target again. A war is a larger commitment: it costs copper to declare, takes far longer to prepare and resolve, respects treaties and ceasefires, and is what alliance wars are built on. Both march over ticks, both can cost you troops, and both are blocked while you're under Founding Protection.

Less than you fear — unless you hoard. A raid can only touch your unprotected copper: an amount equal to your recent production (currently about half a day's output) is a protected floor no raid ever reaches, so an active spender is nearly loot-proof. Above the floor, a successful raider takes a percentage of the excess, capped per raid and capped again per attacker over time — and 15% of everything looted burns in transit, so raiding drains the world rather than pumping it. Attackers always lose troops too (currently at least one unit per battle, waived only against tiny or hopelessly outmatched garrisons, so a small defender can't be ground to nothing). Fresh alliance intel on a target improves the raider's take, which makes shared scouting genuinely valuable. The economics are deliberate: raiding a disciplined, defended kingdom loses money; raiding an idle hoarder pays. Spend your copper and keep walls up, and you're a bad target.

From the War Room you declare war on a target and review the pre-combat forecast before committing. Your army then marches and prepares for several ticks; at the resolution tick the whole battle is simulated at once and you receive a tick-by-tick battle report. While a war is engaged, the Battlefield page lets you dispatch support, send reinforcements, run recon, and recall units (some of these are role-gated to the attacker or defender).

Only while march progress is below 50%. After that threshold your forces are committed. Use the recall controls on the Battlefield page to monitor active marches and recall while still eligible.

Espionage is intelligence and counter-intelligence. From the Spy (Shadow Cabinet) and War Room surfaces you can scout an enemy's military or economy, bribe for intel, run counter-intel sweeps, and raise a counter-intel shield. On Patrol Watch you set standing patrols that detect and catch incoming scouts. Note: destructive espionage — sabotaging buildings or stealing resources by spycraft — is not available yet; those options are listed in the interface but disabled while they're finished.

Yes — raids and lost battles can wound or kill troops and cost you loot. After a serious defeat your kingdom enters Recovery. The Recovery page shows your losses, remaining assets, and a milestone-based rebuild plan; during a recovery window you also make one permanent Restoration Arc choice that shapes how you rebuild.

Yes. You can found a new alliance or apply to join an existing one from the Alliance page, which is the single hub for members, the alliance vault, roles, war coordination, and a changelog.

Yes. Alliances have Leader / Officer / Member tiers plus custom roles with granular powers, and leaders can kick members, change roles, transfer leadership, and manage vault budgets and heraldry. Alliance chat works too — there are shared global channels and an alliance-only channel.

Yes. The alliance vault supports deposits, withdrawals, and budget allocation, and alliances can set a custom motto, banner, and crest through heraldry. (These are cosmetic and organizational — see the VIP note below on gameplay fairness.)

There isn't a single "alliance declares war" button. Instead, alliance war envelopes form automatically from the wars your members are fighting; on the Alliance Wars page you track those envelopes and negotiate peace. (Automated standing orders are planned but not in this build.) On the Diplomacy page you can propose and manage treaties between alliances — Non-Aggression, Mutual Defense, Alliance, and Tribute agreements. Sanctions, embargoes, and grievance-filing are not player-facing features today.

Player-to-player mail lives on the Compose page (the Herald's Desk), which also drafts dispatches and publishes decrees. Your notifications and event outcomes have their own feed on the Notifications page.

Monuments are the opt-in endgame: colossal multi-stage projects that consume enormous batches of high-tier crafted goods and pay out in prestige only — no combat or income bonus, ever. There are two kinds: a kingdom-scope dynasty monument you can pursue solo, and an alliance-scope wonder with shared funding — members pool contributions into a stage vault (a real transfer, burned when the stage completes, with several distinct funders required per stage). They're where a mature economy's surplus goes to become a name on the map. In-game, the Monuments page — reached from the realm search or the "put your surplus to work" nudge on your treasury — lets you browse both, read every stage's cost and prestige reward, and contribute.

Prestige is a pure scoreboard — a record of what you have built and won, with zero effect on combat, income, storage, or any discount another player is measured against. You earn it three ways: completing monument stages (the largest track), war (raids against defended targets), and trade (fulfilling market orders), alongside a season-experience milestone track. The in-game Prestige page shows your score, how each track is earned, and where you rank.

No — solo stays viable all the way up; the road is just longer. Friends make you faster, not stronger: trading partners speed up the crafted-component walls at high castle levels considerably, shared scouting reports make raids pay better, alliance PvE raids are built for groups, and wonders pool funding. None of it grants per-member power — the design is "easier with friends," never "mandatory guild."

Open the Settings page after signing in. You can adjust display preferences such as reduced motion and dense tables, manage notifications, and more.

Use Contact Support to open a ticket. You can also reach it from the in-game Support hub while signed in.

Yes. The Account Delete page — reached through the Support hub — guides you through a two-step, permanent removal (request, then confirm by email). This cannot be reversed.

No. VIP and one-time donations grant cosmetics, identity flair, and small UI conveniences only. They never change combat, economy, queues, gameplay slots (building, army, or policy), intel, raids, population, prestige, or any score another player is measured against — this is enforced in code. See Support & VIP for the full pledge. (Purchasing may be temporarily offline depending on the current build.)