Conquest & Settlements
Raise a kingdom. Feed it. Take everything else.
Your first winter goes fine. You have grain, the fields are close, and the border is somebody else’s problem.
It is the fourth winter that takes kingdoms. Three towns to feed, a war you did not pick, and a granary that ran dry in Frostmoon.
Four crowns, and not enough ground for them
Every island is drawn from a seed, so no two reigns begin on the same ground. Three rivals are seated on it with you. In the gaps between you, the free companies hold what nobody has yet been strong enough to take off them.
Old money, thin soil, and more coastline than it can watch. You start here unless you say otherwise.
Sworn brothers who agree on one thing: the island is not big enough for four.
Deep woods, good hunting, and no interest at all in the borders you have drawn.
Rich, slow, well walled. Nobody attacks it first, and it is usually the one still standing.
Winter takes two thirds of the harvest. It takes armies whole.
Harvest ×0.3 · Marching ×0.65 · Losses on the road ×2.2
You are not fighting a kingdom. You are fighting the calendar.
One valley, four times. The same buildings, the same camera, twelve moons apart.
Thaw, and roads that swallow a cart.
Dry roads, long days. The only season an army moves well.
The granaries fill. Everyone knows what is coming.
Frozen ground, and a third of the yield.
Nothing announces the turn of the year. The ground changes over about three weeks, and you watch it happen.
A camp, then a village, then walls
Pick the first site as though you cannot move it, because you cannot. Farms want plains, lumber wants forest, a quarry wants hills that have broken open. Iron wants luck.
No two towns may stand close together, so every good site you take is one your neighbours will never have.
Clerks run all of it. Build past what your towns can administer and the treasury starts paying couriers by the day, until the day it cannot.
Ground, and what you put on it
Fourteen things to raise, each one gating the next.
Camp
Farmstead
Lumber camp
Pasture
Quarry
Iron mine
Wharf
Lodge
Village
Market
Storehouse
Barracks
Watchtower
City
You know only what you rode out to see
The map keeps what you last saw: the town, the banner over it, the year you were there. It will not mention that the town burned in Huntmoon and the banner changed. For that you send somebody, and you wait.
A border is not a line. It is pressure, and it moves while you sleep.
An army marches at the pace of its slowest ox cart.
March, and count who comes home
Past your own supply the packs go empty. Then it is outlaws in the woods, a guide who picks the wrong pass, a slope coming down on the column in the dark. Each one has a name and a number in the chronicle.
Lose enough heart and the company turns for home without asking. That costs more than all the rest of it together.
So you never ask whether you can win the battle. You ask whether there will be anything to eat when you arrive.
Country worth having
Terrain is not scenery. It is the price of every march you order.
The island is already drawn.
Free, in the browser, with nothing held back.