Cities & Holdings

Left side shows tabs for that holding's features (Jobs, Works, Garrison, etc.). Right side shows the content. Use ◂ ▸ to jump between your holdings without closing the hub.

Tap any holding on the map, yours or not, and the Holdings hub opens on it. If one of your own columns is standing there, the tile's muster roll comes up first. The holding's own seal carries the four doors you reach for most: Recruit, Reinforce, Works and Jobs. Open › goes through to the hub itself.

The hub is one board for the whole realm. It offers only the sections that holding actually has, so a city shows Jobs, Works, Garrison and its drill yard, while a gold mine shows what it is and what it pays. ◂ ▸ in the header walks every holding you own without closing anything, and 🏛 on the top bar opens the hub on the list of them all.

Cities level from 1 to 3. Each level adds job slots, a floor to the skyline, and eventually unlocks the best projects. A village you hold can be raised into one: from its Overview, 400🪙, 40💎 and a Follower to take the reeve's chair make it a level-1 town with crafts, a timber palisade and a yard that musters Warriors. It keeps the name it grew up with.

Jobs

Assign Followers to crafts: each one produces a resource daily. The numbers next to each craft show how many Followers are assigned (and thus the craft level). Use + and − to pencil in assignments, then Save.

Spare Followers work the city's crafts: the Market (gold), Tavern (elixir), Temple (reagents), the Magistrate (infamy), and the Bestiary (beast lore) once you have raised one.

Bread is not among them. Food is grown in the fields, not levied from a city desk. See New Fields below.

Every craft pays the same daily worth; only the coin differs. One keeper earns 25 gold, or 16 elixir, or 12 reagents. That is the same value at the rates guilds trade them, so posting a keeper is a choice of what your city makes, never of how much. The Magistrate is the exception: infamy is not traded, and it earns at its own slow pace. Infamy still matters. Your deeds plus your magistrates decide how many new Followers arrive every seventh day.

Followers are permanently assigned

When you post a Follower to a craft, they stay there. You can't move them later. The number of Followers you post sets that craft's level. Some features (like the Bestiary) only unlock at higher craft levels.

Because it is permanent, the panel lets you pencil in as many as you like first. + and − draw and rub out pips across every craft, and nothing leaves the muster until you press Save. The warning comes once, about the whole batch. Clear throws the lot away.

New Fields

A city grows a small crop of its own and no more, enough for a handful of mouths. Everything past that has to be sown.

From the Works bench, New Fields breaks open ground you hold within a few tiles of the walls: 150🪙, and it feeds you 12🍞 a day from tomorrow. Raise as many as you have ground for.

This is the shape of the whole game's growth. Every recruit costs bread, so fields are what an army is made of, and an army is what takes the ground the next field goes on. A treasury with nothing to spend itself on is a treasury that should be buying furrows.

A Charter of the Furrow, found as loot, still sows a field for free wherever a party is standing on open ground you hold.

Walls and garrisons

Any holding takes at most 10 soldiers: enough to hold a gate, not enough to make a fortress unassailable.

Defenders fight a little steadier for standing behind stone. A city or Grand Athanor is worth something on its own, and a city's walls add their course on top. They also sharpen the drill of everyone posted behind them, in peacetime and during a defence.

Walls belong to the city, not to a tile. Every city is founded as a walled town, and raising the walls builds the city itself up rather than putting a separate structure on the ground beside it: open the Build bench and pick City Walls. Each course is paid for at once and shows on the city's miniature as taller towers, with pennants at the third course. Walls cannot outgrow the Town Hall, so raise the hall to raise the walls further.

Food & farms

The faithful march on bread, not coin. Every recruit costs 1 Follower, 40 food and 20 elixir; gold buys mercenaries, structures and training, never the faithful. Cities grow a base crop (villages a smaller one), Farm workers grow more, and for real granaries you settle farmsteads.

New ground is broken with a Charter of the Furrow, seed-stock found in a Marauder hold or off the battlefield's fallen. It is never bought. Carry one in a party's satchel, march onto held, empty ground, and Settle a farmstead appears in that party's Skills sheet. Whoever leads presents the charter, and it is spent doing so. One charter, one field.

So where your bread grows is a question of where your columns have been. Clear the Marauders out of a hold and search it: a charter is worth as much to a guild as the sword beside it.

Each farmstead yields 10 food a day at full control, and like any holding of yours its fences ward the blight. A ring of farms is both a food supply and a wall.

Hiring

Recruit sits in the Army hub, and behind the ⚔ slot on the command card. It is the one door onto everything a holding will take on, and it works like the Works bench: the list names what is on offer here, and tapping a row explains what it costs to keep before you spend a coin on it. Its other half, Muster from afar, raises a recruit at a holding somewhere else and walks them to your army.

Hire	Where	Costs
Follower	any hall that trains that calling	1👥 + 40🍞 + 20⚗️
Mercenary	the same	120🪙, no Follower
Beastmaster	a level-3 city	200🪙 + 1👥
A beast	its own captured lair	a fortune, and daily gold

A veteran of the same calling standing at the hall is a mentor: a new recruit starts at half their level. Mercenaries never get it.

The drill yard

Every holding that drills a calling has a Drill section. Every unit standing there, in a party or the garrison, can buy its next level for gold and elixir. The drillmaster only charges for what is left to learn: a soldier already three-quarters of the way to the next level pays a quarter of the list price, so battle scars are money in the bank. Training takes the day; the queue shows who's drilling. Keep a high-level veteran garrisoned and new recruits start at half their level.

Barracks train warriors, Laboratories train alchemists, Shadow Guilds train rogues; cities and Grand Athanors drill warriors. Tap any owned trainer building on the map to open its yard directly. A soldier your ground cannot drill can be sent to the nearest hall that can (see Heroes & Units).

Works

Manage both building and research: pick the Build or Research tab at top, then choose what to work on. Shows what's in progress (top strip) and what projects are available.

Raising stone and studying arts share one bench, behind two tabs: Build and Research. Each tab carries only its own filters, on the row beneath. Stone is cut down to All, To raise or Raised; arts to a calling. What the realm has in hand shows above the panel, wherever it is being raised or studied.

Build

Cities can raise new structures on free land beside them: a Barracks, Laboratory or Distillery, and at city level 3 a Shadow Guild. One project at a time, a few days each, and one of each per city. Once a structure stands, its row becomes the upgrade path instead. A structure can rise up to its city's level (raise the city first to raise its halls higher). Each level multiplies the structure's daily yield, and each level above the first cuts training costs at that hall by 15%. Tap the structure on the map to see exactly what an upgrade buys and costs.

The same bench also carries City Walls, which are not a structure at all. They are the city's own curtain, so raising them takes no land and no days. See Walls and garrisons.

Research

The Town Hall researches hero skills, one project at a time, guild-wide once learned. Nothing is granted. Even a Lord's own class art (Rally, Ambush, Transmute Blast) is a study: the cheapest on the bench, and the one to start with. A level‑2 city unlocks the deeper studies (Shield Wall, Plunder, Field Mending) and a level‑3 city the masterworks (Warcry, Overwhelm, Quicksilver March). Once researched, assign the skill on any matching hero's sheet. The row of pills beneath the tab cuts thirty arts down to one calling, or to just what can go on the bench today.

The Town Hall is not the only school. A Barracks, Laboratory, Shadow Guild or Bestiary teaches arts of its own trade that the hall never offers, which is a reason to raise them past drilling in them. The full tree lives in Skills & Research.

Defense

If a visible enemy prowls within sight of an undefended holding, the game warns you and offers an emergency muster: recruits or mercenaries straight onto the walls. The warning has a Take me there button that flies the map to the threatened holding, so you can see what is coming before you decide whether to defend it.

The 🏛 button on the HUD opens the Holdings hub on All holdings: every holding with its walls, its garrison and how firmly you hold its lands, followed by your armies in the field. Each row has its own Take me there. An undefended gate is flagged in red at the top of the list, so you spot it before an enemy does. Tap a row to open that holding without leaving the hub.

Each holding's own Garrison section is where the walls are worked: who stands them, who is marching out from them, and, where the holding musters, a Follower or a mercenary raised straight onto them.

Garrison duty pays on its own, too. A soldier standing a wall earns a slow trickle of experience every day: the wall is a drill yard. Heroes learn from deeds, not drills, but a green recruit posted to a quiet hold comes back sharper. Between the drills and their wages, a standing garrison keeps your surplus working instead of piling up.