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 still being actively developed. 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 builds — your starting grant comfortably covers the taught opening: a Lumber Mill (your first upgrades will want its planks), a Barracks, and your first producer upgrades. During your 4-day full shield, structures up to level 4 finish instantly and anything targeting level 24 or below finishes in 2 ticks, so bank several upgrades at once (up to 12 can wait in the queue) and watch them land. Then follow the guided steps in First Week, 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 400. At a casual one-session-a-day pace you can expect Castle 40 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 First Week once you've reached the soft-exposure stage (early graduation isn't offered during the opening hard shield). Check First Week for your remaining window.

During signup you declare a political stance — Neutral, Expansionist, Defensive, Mercantile, or Isolationist. It is public on your profile and it has real, modest effects: some quests are open only to matching stances (they show as locked with the reason), and your stance scales how strongly certain reputation events hit you — for example, Mercantile kingdoms gain and lose more reputation on contract outcomes, and Isolationist scouts caught spying pay a steeper price. There is no in-game control to change your stance yet, so choose deliberately.

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.

No. The world's turns resolve 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.

One upgrade builds at a time, but you can bank up to 12 jobs — including several levels of the same building — and each completes in order after its listed ticks. Every banked job pays its costs up front (held in escrow until it builds or you cancel). During the 4-day hard shield, structures up to level 4 finish instantly and any build targeting level 24 or below finishes in 2 ticks; the boost ends when the hard shield lifts, three days before the tapered protection does.

Deconstruct: half the ticks · 50% materials + 75% copper back · Castle never below Lv. 1 · not while defending a live war

Yes — deconstruction is a build in reverse. Pick a structure on the Kingdom page (or on any settlement) and order a level torn down. It banks in the same build queue as an upgrade, counts against the same slots, and runs for half the ticks that level took to raise — with no build-speed bonus applied, because the wrecking crew sets the pace, not the builders. When it finishes, the level comes down and the salvage lands: half the materials and three quarters of the copper that exact level cost, priced from the same table you paid. Starting costs nothing and reserves nothing, so cancelling just frees the slot and leaves the level standing. Two limits: your Castle can never go below level 1, and while you are the defender of a live war you cannot tear down your own fortifications. Everything else goes all the way to nothing. The round trip is a real loss — rebuild at full price and you are down half the materials and a quarter of the copper — so it is a correction, not a savings account.

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.

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, new orders wait until a slot frees up. Being at war no longer freezes your economy the way it once did — market listings, transfers, and queue cancellations all stay open while you fight, with cancellation priced rather than blocked. The one thing war still forbids outright is tearing down your own fortifications while you are the defender of a live war.

Settlements are your kingdom's holdings. Every kingdom has exactly one capital — the seat you've been ruling all along — and can found up to eleven towns, for twelve settlements in all: the old Charter of Twelve grants a crown twelve seals and not one more. Each town has its own buildings and its own people, and everything it produces flows into your one kingdom treasury. Towns are the horizontal road: where castle levels make each holding stronger, towns make your realm wider. Your settlement count is public — it shows on your profile and factors into your kingdom's standing.

First town: 15 plots · 5,522,475 Copper · 3,000 Food · 1,400 Planks · 1,400 Blocks · ≈ 1 day · each later town doubles the bill

From the Settlements page. Founding your first town costs 15 land plots, 5,522,475 copper, 3,000 Food, 1,400 Planks, and 1,400 Blocks, and the work takes 96 ticks — a full day. Costs are paid up front (held in escrow) and the plots are staked when the work begins; cancel before completion for a refund — plots always return in full; escrowed copper and goods may be partly forfeit if war-exposed. Only one founding can be underway at a time — the next town is a project, not a click. Every town after the first doubles the bill of the one before it and takes half a day longer to raise, and the materials climb the crafting tiers as you go — planks and blocks early, then dressed stone and steel, and finally the tier-5 masterworks. Founding your twelfth is a campaign measured in months, not an errand.

Land plots are your kingdom's territory — the same land that changes hands in war. Founding spends them; conquest wins them; losing a war costs them. Your land also recovers on its own, roughly one plot per tick, up to the holding your castle level supports — so a higher castle means more land to found with, and a war chest of conquered plots can substitute for castle levels entirely. In peace, expect your castle to be the pacer: each new town effectively asks for about two more castle levels than the one before it.

Towns build from the same catalogue as your capital, with two rules. First, your capital's castle gates everything: no building in any settlement can be raised above your capital castle level, so towns widen a developed kingdom rather than replacing development. Second, two structures are capital-only: the Castle itself and the Spy Guild. Everything else — producers, refineries, housing, storage, and the defensive works (Walls, Scout Tower, Siege Emplacements) — a town can raise freely; town walls will carry their defensive weight when town-targeted warfare opens.

No — one realm, one purse, one levy. Every settlement's production lands in your single kingdom treasury, storage caps are kingdom-wide, and your people and army are one pool that towns enlarge through their housing. There is no shuttling goods between holdings and no garrison micromanagement: a town makes your kingdom bigger, not more fiddly.

No. Nothing about your kingdom changed at launch: your existing kingdom simply became your capital, with every building level, resource, queue, and citizen exactly where you left them. Founding towns is entirely optional — a kingdom that never founds one plays exactly as it did before.

Yes, gradually. Every building level in a town counts toward your kingdom's power and score exactly like a capital level, each active town adds a fixed amount on top, and war eligibility runs on score — so as you settle, the set of kingdoms you can declare on (and that can declare on you) shifts upward, exactly as it does when you build. One hard rule sits on top of the score band: a war cannot be declared when the two sides' active town counts differ by more than six. A bare town moves the needle only slightly; there's no way to leap out of your weight class overnight. Public profiles show a kingdom's settlement count, so you always know roughly what you're up against.

Not yet targetable · targeted raid: −70% output for ≈ half a day · siege: 6h warning · 7-day founding grace · max 2 raids + 1 siege per town per day · capital never sieged or razed

The war room cannot aim at a single town yet — every raid and war you can declare today still strikes a kingdom as a whole, so in practice town warfare hasn't begun. The rules that will govern it are already in force, though: targeted raids that suppress a town's output (70% for about half a day, never damaging buildings), sieges inside declared wars with a 6-hour defender warning and half-price rebuilds, and razing held to all-out total-conquest wars after repeated successful sieges. The realm enforces these protections however an attack arrives: a 7-day founding grace during which a new town cannot be targeted at all, daily caps (at most 2 targeted raids and 1 siege per town per day), and a capital that can never be siege-targeted or razed. The targeting controls come to the war room in a coming release — announced on the Patch Notes page first.

Yes — crew is a real speed lever. A batch has a fixed amount of work in it, and the crew you assign divides that work: one crew is the ordinary pace, more crews finish sooner. The catch is crowding — every extra crew makes the workshop a little less efficient, so the gain tapers and the rush tops out at roughly 4× the one-crew time no matter how many hands you throw at it. Crew is bounded by the refinery's floor space rather than your kingdom's population, so the way to craft faster in the long run is to build the facility taller. A big order is never refused for want of idle citizens any more; it just takes the time it takes.

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 — each facility opens new recipe tiers as you upgrade it — so mastering one line pays better than dabbling in five. And you don't have to craft everything yourself: past the early levels, building upgrades demand crafted components too, starting with planks and blocks and moving to steadily higher tiers as the level climbs, with producers and refineries carrying the heaviest bills. The building's card in Kingdom lists the exact unlock levels and the exact bill for your next upgrade. 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: while a resource has anything listed, new listing prices must sit inside a wide band around its going rate (currently 0.25× to 4× the average price it has sold for over the last 30 days — a resource nobody is currently selling has no band at all), each buyer has a rolling per-resource purchase volume cap, and stale listings expire (currently after about a week) 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 return when you cancel — usually in full, with one deliberate exception: cancelling a public contract after another ruler has claimed it returns only half your escrow; the other half is forfeit for breaking a claimed deal. (Cancelling an unclaimed contract refunds everything, and if the claimant misses the deadline your full escrow returns.) Your ledger shows reserved balances separately.

The Send Aid page (in-game, the 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 Contracts page you post an enforceable supply deal: the copper you offer is escrowed the moment you post, and paid to whoever claims the contract and delivers the goods by the deadline. Cancelling is asymmetric by design: cancel before anyone claims and your full escrow returns; cancel after a claim and only half returns — the other half is forfeit for breaking a claimed deal. If the claimant misses the deadline instead, the contract breaches on its own: your full escrow returns and the claimant takes a public reputation penalty. Claiming costs nothing, but a missed deadline is a mark on your record.

Research buffs production, military, espionage, and governance. Each item takes a set number of ticks; finishing one opens the deeper research behind it, and some lines conflict with others.

Yes. Pausing is free at any time. Cancelling active, queued, or paused research returns its escrow — except while your kingdom is at war, when at least a quarter of it burns instead.

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.

Short petitions brought to you as ruler — a miller with a grievance, a priest with a proclamation, a widow with a bridge — each argued by your own court advisors, one voice per option. They appear on the Policies page above your laws. You read the arguments, weigh the stakes, and rule. Every ruling has a real, bounded effect on your kingdom, and the realm remembers how you decided.

At most one new matter a day, and your docket holds at most five. A matter you leave unruled quietly expires after about a week — no penalty, the petitioners simply move on. If you'd rather hear no new daily petitions, put the court in recess from the same panel; daily petitions stop, though consequences of your past rulings still find you — and the fool's business keeps its own calendar.

Almost always without consequence. For an ordinary petition, dismissal costs nothing — no penalty, no effect — and earns nothing: no ruling, no story, no unlock, and the same matter won't return for a long while. The day's draw is already decided, so dismissing to fish for a better petition gets you exactly nothing. One honest exception: some petitions continue a story your earlier ruling began. Dismiss one of those — or leave it to expire — and the whole tale ends there, permanently, together with whatever reward its final chapter might have carried. The court does not re-litigate an abandoned story.

By design. Each advisor tells you the direction of what their option costs and buys — "the treasury will feel it", "the north will remember" — but the precise numbers are revealed only after you commit, at the next bell (ticks are 15 minutes, so at most one bell away). The consequences are real but hard-capped: no ruling, and no pile of rulings, can ever out-muscle your actual play. Ruling on gut and living with it is the game.

By ruling in character. Specific rulings, completed story arcs, and a reputation consistently earned — merciful, iron-handed, coin-counting — unlock flag patterns, symbols, and title flourishes on your kingdom's banner and profile. All of it is cosmetic only: no banner grants any mechanical advantage, and none of it can be bought. The unlock conditions are yours to discover; the realm doesn't hand out its legends with a checklist.

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.

Yes — disband them, from the Actions column on your roster on the Military page. Until recently the only ways off the upkeep bill were starvation, casualties, and healing forfeits, every one of them a punishment; disbanding is the decision. It is offered against your available pool only — deployed and wounded units aren't on the table — and you can stand down a single unit, half the pool, or all of it in one action. The confirmation shows the consequence before you commit: population returned to civilian work, and the exact copper and food per tick you stop paying. Two honest caveats, both stated on the confirm: nothing is refunded — the training cost is gone — and the order applies at the next tick, not instantly.

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.

Two separate things. A muster fee of 2,500 copper is burned outright at declaration — you never see it again, win or lose. On top of that you post a war stake: a sum computed from your own treasury at the moment you declare and sealed there, never less than 40,000 copper. If you win, you keep it. If the defender repels you — or you declare and never actually show up — the whole stake is paid across to them.

Both sides' figures are sealed at declaration and can't be shrunk afterwards, which is why emptying your treasury before declaring buys nothing, and why the game no longer has to freeze half of a warring kingdom's economy to stop that trick. Two smaller rules follow from the stake: recalling a march already in hostile country forfeits a quarter of it to the defender, and an attacker who gets repelled can't declare on that same kingdom again for 3 days — three times the ordinary cooldown.

Yes — the attacker's whole war stake, carried to you along the same roads that carry loot the other way. It is a transfer, not minted money: the attacker really loses what you really gain. An attacker who declares and then never commits forfeits it just the same, so a declaration you shrug off is still worth something. Winning on defence also buys you a 3-day truce that the beaten attacker cannot break.

Quite a lot — objectives are contracts now, not labels. Each of the seven sets its own preparation and battle length, how much loot is on the table, how much you must stake, and what happens to the losers on the field. Loot Strike is the short, rich plunder run and stakes heavily for the privilege. Break Fortifications is the baseline siege — less loot, more wall damage, and it can take ground. Total Conquest gives the defender the longest warning in the game, stakes the most, and is the only other objective that can occupy. Punish Army is cheap to enter and turns more of the loser's wounded into dead. Win Field Control damages no walls at all and sends more of the fallen home wounded instead. Delay Pin takes almost nothing but holds the defender out of anyone else's war for the longest battle window there is — and is priced as the most expensive contract in the game because of it. Defensive Hold is a pure show of force with no loot either way, though repelling one still pays the defender. The declare screen shows the selected contract's numbers before you commit.

No — the battle is yours to fight. Each side of a war holds a meter of War Points: currently 8 to start, refilling one point roughly every 75 minutes. The attacker spends them to order an attack from the Battlefield page, choosing what kind it is: a Ladder Assault (storms the walls with soldiers, currently 4 points), a Bombardment (wrecks walls with siege engines, 4), an Undermine (tunnels under the wall, quiet, 4), or an All-Out Attack (everything at once, 8 — and it only unlocks once their wall is below half). The baseline fighting between attacks is unchanged, so a war nobody touches still resolves exactly as it always did. Ordering is what changes the outcome.

An ordered attack can't land sooner than 9 hours out, and the defender is told the moment you order it. That is deliberate: nothing in a war lands on someone without warning, and being awake at the wrong hour is never what decides it.

Your Battlefield page shows the warning the moment it is ordered — that an attack is coming, and roughly when. It cannot land inside 9 hours. Doing nothing is free and safe: your army defends exactly as it would have anyway. If you want the sturdier answer, spend War Points on a response: Brace (currently 1 point) repels ladders and all-out attacks; Counterattack (currently 3 points) destroys siege machines — and undoes an Undermine outright — but is risky against a ladder-borne attack. Swap freely (a swapped response is refunded in full) until orders lock one hour before impact.

The warning tells you the hour, not the kind. A scouting mission with the Assault Preparations focus (Spies page, or over a live battle from the War Room) names the attack if the read is good enough; as the attacker you can scout their Battle Posture the same way. Attacks can be faked: a Bluff (currently 2 points, at most twice per war) arrives with no army behind it and burns whatever the defender spent bracing — only a deep read sees through it, and it is revealed publicly once it lands.

Asleep? Arm a standing order: Brace automatically against any attack answers every telegraph for you, and Answer a known attack with a chosen response waits until your spies name the kind. Both spend War Points when they fire and never override a response you chose yourself. The attacker's last chance to call an attack off expires before your last chance to answer it, so no one wins a battle by being awake at 3am.

Yes. Fifty sparring holds stand on the Nation Finder alongside real kingdoms — ten difficulty levels, five army doctrines each — and you declare on them through the ordinary war flow. Filter for them with the Training chip. Lv. 1 is pitched at a kingdom just out of Founding Protection and Lv. 10 at roughly a month of play, and within a level the holds are matched on size so the variable is composition: each doctrine teaches a different counter. The usual score-matching band is waived for them, so you can always reach the rung you want.

Be clear about one thing: your losses are real. The fight is fought by the same rules, with the same casualties and the same spoils as a war against a player — the training is in the outcome, not in a safety net. The hold itself is restored to its founding roster and treasury each turn, so it never snowballs off beating you and every player meets the same opponent. Sparring holds don't appear on the leaderboard, can't be occupied, and hold no land.

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 runs from the Spies page (in-game, the Shadow Cabinet) and the War Room. The intelligence ladder is scouting an enemy's military or economy, bribing for intel, and running counter-intel sweeps; you also raise a counter-intel shield to defend. Scouting costs no copper but risks the scouts you send: against a defended target they can be wounded, captured, or killed (captured and killed scouts are permanent losses), a spotted party alerts the defender, and a counter-intel-heavy realm can feed you false numbers — flagged as low-confidence in the report. Higher-tier agents unlock the two destructive spy operations: sabotage cripples a chosen production building's output for twelve hours, and infiltration siphons copper from a target's coffers (up to a fifth of what they hold). Both are dispatched from the Spies page, resolve when your agents return, and — like scouting — can be detected: a caught operation loses agents and shows the defender exactly what was hit. On Patrol Watch you set standing patrols that detect and catch incoming spies.

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.

No. The Bandit Camp, the Raider Warband, the Mercenary Company, the Warlord Host, and the Fortified Stronghold are not sovereign realms — each keeps a single war-camp, holds no towns, claims no land, and tends no fields. Their strength comes from the warbands they muster, not from settlement. Founding and expansion belong to player kingdoms alone; the marauders have not yet learned to settle, and if that day comes it will be declared in the patch notes first. The same is true of the sparring holds you can declare on for practice — they own no land and found nothing.

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. Membership changes land immediately — accepting an invitation, leaving, a kick, a role change, a leadership transfer, and disbanding all apply the moment you confirm them rather than waiting for the next tick. (Wars still bite: while your alliance has an open alliance-war envelope, nobody can leave, be kicked, or disband it. A personal one-on-one war doesn't hold anyone in place.)

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, an alliance-wide conflict forms automatically from the wars your members are fighting; on the Alliance Wars page you track those conflicts and negotiate peace. (Standing orders — automated marches — exist in the realm’s rules, but there is not yet a way to set them from the game.) 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.

Grant programs are rules your alliance's treasurers set up to pay copper from the alliance vault to members who meet published criteria — a starter grant for new members, a rebuild fund after a war, and so on. Programs pay automatically once a day (or after an officer approves, depending on the program's mode), always within a hard budget, and every payment is visible to the whole alliance on the alliance Programs page. Eligibility is judged only on what your kingdom has actually built, mustered, and paid in the game — never on logins, and never on commendation votes. Grants move existing vault copper; they never create it.

Payouts respect three limits: the program's own budget, a daily alliance-wide outflow cap (currently 10% of the vault per day), and your own copper storage headroom. Anything that doesn't fit is deferred — recorded and paid on a later day, never silently dropped, and never burned against your storage cap.

No. Large awards and loans require approval from two different officers, no one may ever approve their own award, program budgets are hard caps, daily outflow is bounded, and the full grant and loan trail is readable by every member. The whole ledger sits in daylight, where every member can read it.

A treasurer offers terms; nothing happens until you explicitly accept. The principal is then paid to you from the alliance vault, and the total you owe is fixed at that moment — there is no compounding interest, ever. Repayment is automatic: each game day an installment is deducted from your copper right after the alliance tax, either a flat amount or a share of your recent tax income. Ready-made term sheets exist — currently the War Chest Advance (up to 40,000 copper — the war declaration fee — repaid at 1,500/day over 28 days, total due principal +5%) and the Builder's Bond (up to 10,000 copper, repaid as 20% of your daily tax income over 28 days, total due principal +10%).

The deduction takes what you have and never takes you negative — a shortfall is recorded and collection retries each day during a grace window (currently 288 ticks — 3 days). If the loan is still short when grace runs out, it defaults exactly once: remaining installments are waived, deductions stop, and the default is recorded against your kingdom's reputation along with a public record. No troops are seized, no penalty is minted. Repaying in full and on time earns a positive reputation mark instead.

The loan binds your kingdom, not your membership. The daily installment schedule keeps deducting after you leave — it never accelerates because you left — and you keep read access to your own loan ledger. The only forgiveness is an explicit write-off by the lending alliance's treasurers. If the lending alliance disbands, or your kingdom is deleted, the loan is written off: no phantom debts, ever.

Yes, any time, from the loan's payments list on the alliance Programs page — an early payment settles the oldest installments first. Note that the total due was fixed when the loan was made, so paying early doesn't shrink the bill; it just clears it sooner.

Once per game day, the game takes a snapshot of every alliance member: warchest copper, days of war upkeep it covers, tax contributed over the last week, an activity score (0–100), and pass/fail against whatever standard the alliance's officers have published (building levels, unit counts, warchest floors, tax minimums, recent activity). Members see their own line and the published standard; officers see the roster. It is always a stamped daily snapshot — never live surveillance — new members get a three-day grace, checks the game cannot evaluate are marked as such rather than failed, and the audit moves no money and enforces nothing by itself.

Officers publish tracks — ordered steps like "build a granary to level 3" or "win a raid" — and members (or applicants) enroll. Press Verify and the game checks your kingdom's actual state; completed steps latch permanently, and finishing a track graduates you. Verification itself moves no copper — if a track promises a reward, it pays out only through a grant program, with all the usual budgets and caps. Officers can override a step with a required, audit-logged reason.

While an alliance war is open, diplomats can post target assignments — who hits what, at what priority, with a short note — on the war's Target Board (on the alliance Programs page; your own kingdom's War Room page is a different, personal one). Members claim targets and mark them done. The table is visible to your alliance only, becomes a read-only archive when the war settles, and gives no advantage in the fighting — nothing about how a battle resolves ever reads it.

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."

The Crier (reachable from the Community page, or directly at /herald — no sign-in needed to read) is the realm's political stage. It gathers each week's wars declared, treaties signed, ratified, and broken, and every concluded peace — and beneath each official record, the words of the rulers involved. When a peace bundle is ratified, the Crier publishes the full signed peace document: every term and both signatory alliances, permanently. (The Crier is a public stage; your own kingdom's decrees are still published from the Herald's Desk panel on the Messages page.)

If the event is yours, yes. The attacker and defender of a war can each publish one address per war while it is fresh (about one game day, plus a short grace after it resolves). Alliance diplomats can likewise publish one address per side on a ratified peace and one notice on a treaty their alliance signed. Addresses are words only — they never change game numbers — and all Crier prose runs the same content moderation as other public text and can be reported in-game.

An alliance's diplomats can enter a public Formal Commendation (praise) or Formal Censure (rebuke) of a kingdom or alliance into the permanent political record, in the alliance's own name and with a short citation. Each issuing alliance may keep one commendation and one censure live per target at a time — reissuing replaces that alliance's old record, and the issuer can withdraw it. They are purely political theatre: they never affect combat, income, reputation scores, or eligibility for anything, and a censured target is notified rather than surprised. (These alliance judgements are distinct from the everyday thumbs-up commendations rulers trade on the Social page.)

Alliances can open message boards (currently up to 3 per alliance) on the Alliance Boards page — reached from the Community hub, which also links the Crier and the Press; the conduct rules for all of them live in the Legal Hub’s Rules of the Political Stage. Each board is configured by its alliance: readable by everyone or by members only, postable by all members or by officers only. Threads support replies, officers can pin important threads, and everything is asynchronous — nothing punishes absence, and threads stay up for a long season (the scribes archive threads only after 84 days of silence). New-post markers help you catch up in a couple of minutes a day.

You can delete your own post within a grace window of posting (currently 96 ticks — 24 hours). After that, officers of the board's alliance can hide a post: hiding leaves a neutral stub so the thread still reads sensibly, is recorded in the alliance audit log, and can be appealed — restoration is handled by staff, and staff decisions always override officer ones. Nobody — not you, not officers, not staff — can edit a published post.

They stay, attributed to you exactly as posted. Your right to post ends with your membership.

An embassy is a shared public board between exactly two alliances. One alliance's diplomat petitions for it; if the other side accepts, the embassy spends one game day (currently 96 ticks — 24 hours) visibly under construction — the whole world can watch the two powers build it — and then opens. Members of both alliances can post; everyone can read. Only one embassy can exist per pair of alliances at a time.

No. On an embassy board, each side moderates only its own members' posts. If things go badly wrong, either side can lock the whole board — the lock is recorded, and only the side that locked it (or staff) can unlock it.

Either side's diplomats can close an embassy, and closure is permanent for that embassy: the board becomes a public, read-only archive, and who closed it is public information — diplomatic receipts persist. The two alliances can petition for a fresh embassy later.

A gazette is your own newspaper. Every kingdom can found one (and an alliance can sponsor one more), give it a masthead name, and publish long-form articles — broadsheets — under it on the Press page. Articles group into weekly issues and anyone can read them. The press is where the realm argues about what it all meant: the Chronicle remains the official record of what actually happened.

Publishing is capped (currently 3 articles per kingdom per day, with a tighter limit on posting several at once) and every article runs the same moderation as other public prose; masthead names are held to the same strict standard as kingdom names. Articles can currently run up to 8,000 characters.

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.

Your score adds three things: military (your available troops, weighted so higher tiers count for much more per head), economic (your building levels, weighted so upgrading beats sprawling, plus your settlements), and governance (your completed research). Coin on hand counts as well, but only up to a share of what you have actually built — a treasury with no kingdom behind it scores nothing, and no amount of hoarding will lift you past someone who built more.

That cap is also why spending is safe: as long as you keep a working reserve, paying for a building, a unit, or a research does not cost you score, and what you bought raises it. Army upkeep does not quietly drain it either. If your score does fall, the usual reasons are real ones: troops lost, wounded, or committed away from home (only available troops count), a building deconstructed, or a treasury spent all the way down to nothing. And if your number holds steady while your rank slips, that is other kingdoms growing, not you shrinking.

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.

A region is your kingdom's neighborhood — a named community of kingdoms with its own public page and message board. Your alliance remains your army: wars, treaties, and the shared vault all stay there. You hold exactly one region residency and one alliance membership, and neither ever gates the other — your whole alliance can live in different regions, or the same one, freely. Regions have no combat mechanics at all: nobody can raid, sabotage, or seize a region.

Every kingdom starts in one of the six founding territories — you are never regionless, and the starting placement is a default, not a lock. From the Region page (the Province Hall) you can browse the directory and move: Open regions admit you immediately, Approval regions hold your request for a border officer to accept. (A player-founded region can be full — its charter caps residents until the region grows — but the six founding territories always have room.) There are no region passwords. You can move at most once per day, and once your kingdom is at least 7 days old you can found a region of your own for 50,000 copper (burned, like all fees — no one collects it).

Each region carries a threaded message board for its residents. Start threads (titles up to 120 characters, posts up to 4,000), reply, and report anything that breaks the rules — reports go to the same moderation queue as everything else, and players you've blocked stay hidden for you. You can delete your own post within a day of writing it; after that only a board moderator can. Threads quiet for about 12 weeks are archived. Boards are pure community space: nothing you post ever affects the economy or combat.

Endorsements only count once both kingdoms — the one endorsing and the one endorsed — have lived in the region for a continuous 7 days. You can give and receive endorsements immediately; they simply sit uncounted until both residencies mature. This is deliberate: it means a crowd that moves in together can't instantly out-vote the people who actually live there. Moving regions restarts your clock.

An endorsement is your public approval of a fellow resident — one tap on the resident roster, retractable at any time. Counted endorsements make almost everything local happen: they speed your neighbor's influence, decide who is Lord Steward, and earn World Council seats. Each kingdom can hold at most 10 outgoing endorsements, so they stay a considered signal rather than something sprayed at everyone; there is no cap on how many you can receive. Endorsements are region-scoped — moving away deletes the ones you gave and received.

Influence is your standing in your region, and it accrues entirely on its own: 10 a day for simply living there, plus 2 per counted endorsement you hold, up to 50 a day. You never lose it for being away — absence is never punished in Thronestead — and it is spent on only three things: the rare hostile border action (ejecting or banning a troublemaker), refreshing the region's face (banner, description, tags — 25 influence, for officers holding that power), and contributing to your region's community projects — collective builds that, once finished, grant every resident a small daily influence bonus and the region a one-time prestige boost. It cannot be traded, pooled, or bought. One honest warning: influence belongs to the region, not to you — move out and it resets to zero.

The Lord Steward is the region's standing community leader: the resident of at least 28 days holding the most counted endorsements, recomputed automatically each dawn. There are no ballots or terms — leadership follows the endorsements, so it can change any morning the count does (ties go to the longer-standing resident). A steward wields only the powers the region's founder has delegated (board moderation and polls by default), and in the six founding territories stewards hold exactly those delegated powers and nothing more. Founders themselves keep their authority permanently unless they leave or abdicate.

Only at a steep and rising price — regions are built to be coup-proof. Ejecting a resident costs the acting officer 200 influence plus twice the target's own influence (banning costs more still), so the longer and better-connected your residency, the more untouchable you are; a member with eight or more counted endorsements out-earns any possible attacker forever. The founder and the Lord Steward can never be ejected or banned at all, and only officers granted the border power can even try. If you are ejected, you keep everything that matters — your kingdom, army, and treasury are untouched; you simply move house.

A region may hold one small perk, chosen by its founder or steward at most once per season, from a fixed whitelist of two: Neighborly Trade (market fees between two residents of the same region drop by 3% — capped at 5%) and Festival Banners (cosmetic flair on residents' profiles, no numbers at all). That's the entire list, and it's law: perks can never touch combat, production, or anything a season already controls. The region page always shows the active perk with its exact percentage.

A founder can appoint up to 10 officers, each holding any mix of four powers: appearance (banner, description, tags), comms (board moderation and announcements), polls, and border (approving joins, ejections, bans). Regional compacts are friendly ties between two regions — each side's members can read (not write on) the other's board, and the regions cross-list on each other's pages; they carry no mechanical effect. Polls are 3-day, 2-to-5-option ballots for residents, advisory only — a way to settle where the flood-festival is held, not a lever on the game.

The World Council (the Council of Crowns) is the realm's deliberative body, and its seats are earned socially, not bought: you are seated while you hold at least 3 counted endorsements from neighbors in an established region (one with at least 5 residents past the 7-day mark). Seats are recomputed each dawn — keep your neighbors' trust and you keep your chair. One seat is one vote, never more; seats cannot be transferred, delegated, or stacked, and nothing purchasable affects them.

Any seated kingdom can draft a proposal on the World Council page — you pick a category, pick a template, and fill in the blanks; the council speaks in fixed plain-language forms, so there is no fine print to lawyer. A proposal needs 10 seated backers within 7 days to reach the floor, then queues for its category's session. Five categories run in parallel, one vote each at a time, and every vote runs 4 days (96 hours). The voter roll is frozen the moment a vote opens: if you're on it you keep your full ballot — castable and changeable until close — even if you lose your seat mid-vote, and seats gained after opening don't vote in that window. Writs of Commendation pass on a majority; anything that touches numbers needs 60%.

The council's honors and censures: permanent public writs voted onto a kingdom, displayed on its profile beside its standing, and recorded in the realm chronicle forever. (The anonymous neighborly commendations on the Social page are a different, gentler custom — a council writ is the realm's voted judgement.) Their mechanical effect is exactly zero — a condemned kingdom loses nothing but face, and a commended one gains nothing but it. Each kingdom can face at most one writ proposal per season, and you can never author, back, or vote on your own. A later council can vote to lift a mark — the writ is greyed, but the record of its setting endures. History is never erased.

Very little, on purpose. Resolutions choose from a short fixed menu of realm-wide edicts — nudging market fees, war spoils, the respite after a raid, and similar dials — each by a few percent at most (never more than ±5%), each lasting one season (21 days) before it lapses on its own. Combined with a region perk, the world's total pull on any one dial is hard-capped at ±10%, and realm law clamps the sum of every source — council, region, seasons, policies — so an edict can soften a harsh season but never cancel it. The council cannot mint or take copper, touch any specific kingdom's assets, change combat rules, or write new kinds of law: the menu itself only grows through game updates, never through votes.

Yes — by the same door it came in. Any seated kingdom may propose a Repeal against an active edict (or against a writ); it needs the same 10 backers and a 60% vote. A passed repeal ends the edict at the next dawn rather than instantly — the same "takes effect at dawn" rhythm every edict follows — and an unrepealed edict expires by itself after its season. A failed proposal of any kind can't be re-submitted for 7 days, so the session queue can't be spammed.

Yes — from Settings (also linked from Support). 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 — and the realm enforces that. See Support & VIP for the full pledge. (Purchasing is sometimes offline for a spell.)

Every enforcement action comes with one appeal, reviewed by a person (Code of Conduct §10). Suspended, banned, and disabled accounts can still sign in to file it — the Appeal page is exempt from the lockout, and the decision appears there under “Your appeals”.