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Essos

A second continent stands east of the Narrow Sea: twenty-one seats, four deep workings and a hundred and twenty camps. This page says what a lord may do with it today, and — at the same length — what they may not.

Essos is not a reskin of Westeros. It is a frontier: richer, further and deliberately incomplete. It arrived in pieces and is still arriving, so the honest way to read this page is as two lists.

What is there

Nine Free Cities stand along the western coast and the Rhoyne, each with its own banner, its own grant and its own blurb. Braavos and Volantis are the only seats outside King's Landing rated at five stars: those three top the world, and that is a decision rather than an accident of the ladder.

Twelve more eastern seats stand beyond them: three walled Volantene river towns, five Rhoynar ruins along the Rhoyne, three Sarnori holds in the northern grass, and one marker where the Forest of Qohor gives out and the Dothraki sea begins.

Slaver's Bay, Qarth, Valyria and Asshai are absent, deliberately. They do not fit on this map at this scale, and a marker in the wrong place is worse than no marker.

Four eastern deep workings join the four western ones. An eastern vein holds twelve million where a western one holds six.

Six eastern creatures stand on a board of 120 camps, taking the world from 400 camps to 520.

The Titan of Braavos stands over the harbour mouth — scenery with a story rather than a seat.

What you can do today

Sail a gathering party east

The crossing needs a harbour and hulls; the arithmetic is in The Navy and the Crossing. Once you have both, a gathering party sails to the eastern veins and works them exactly as it works a western one, for twice the seam.

The party is sized to your Training Yard's march cap rather than to your whole army: the rest of your host stays home, and gathers share one march-slot pool with field marches rather than running on two ceilings that disagree.

Take an eastern seat

All twenty-one can be taken. That is new, and it is why the realm now counts 191 contestable holds rather than 170. Braavos and Volantis are five-star seats — the only two outside King's Landing — and what they grant their holder is live the moment the banner changes: the buffs, the hourly tribute, the walls that heal, the right to name a Castellan.

An eastern seat is stormed, never claimed. There is no claim button and there never will be: a claim is a client saying “I fought this”, and one message carrying twenty-one eastern ids would own a continent. The assault is arbitrated by the server, which also refuses it outright if your harbour and hulls could not have carried the host there. The refusal names what is missing in the server's own order — no harbour, then no hulls, then a fleet still at sea from a raid, then a host too great for the berths — so the first sentence you read is the first thing to fix.

Tapping a Free City still opens its own panel rather than the western one. It gains the one verb that now works and deliberately not the other four: rally, reinforce, repair and the bestowing of a lesser title all run through machinery that assumes a Westerosi seat. One button that works beats five that mostly refuse.

Strike an eastern camp

Six eastern creatures stand on a board of a hundred and twenty camps, and a strike on one now needs the same crossing a gathering party needs: a harbour, hulls, and berths enough for the host you send. Until this release it did not. The camps were on the board from the day the east was seeded and the strike never asked where the camp stood, so a lord with no harbour at all could hit them — marches in this game are straight lines and know nothing of water.

The refusal comes before anything is spent. A barred strike costs no stamina, no troops and no ships, and it names the missing thing rather than saying no: no harbour, then no ships, then host too great, in the order you would build them.

The host that sails is the host the decks hold. A crossing does not refuse a great army — it carries what fits and leaves the rest at home, sized by the smaller of your harbour's berths and your hulls'. The rest of your garrison stays where it is.

The east pays more, and it pays in a coin the west does not have. An eastern camp yields three times the haul of a western one at the same level, double the gems, half again the commander experience — and Valyrian steel, one ingot per twelve levels of the host you break. No hunt in Westeros drops a single ingot at any level. It is deliberately a trickle rather than a tap: gathering iron and taking great seats remain the bulk sources.

And the sea takes its cut. Every crossing costs hulls, more of them on a beaten retreat than on a won one, scaled by how full the decks were — but never your last hull. That is what stops the east being simply a better western board: stamina refills for free, ships do not, so the fleet is the thing you are really spending.

The feral skim — the raid a neglected keep suffers — stays western on purpose, and the reason survives this change: its take scales with the count of neglected camps, and a lord who has not yet built a harbour still cannot reach a single eastern one.

The trade pacts, and the road nobody used to travel

A pact pays now, and it pays on the beat. Send a city what it buys and it sends its own goods back, hour after hour, for as long as you hold its favour. The largest standing investment holds the pact — no timers, no race to be awake, and nothing to defend. The rate the card shows you is the rate credited to your stores.

You are not the only one trading. The Residents send caravans east too, in character — a lord who thinks about walls buys stone, a lord who thinks about swords buys iron — so the Free Cities are contested even on a quiet realm. They are also capped, and the cap is published because it is the whole reason this is a contest rather than a wall: a Resident's standing at a city never exceeds a quarter of their own power, while you may send half of yours in a single caravan. A lord of equal power takes any Resident's pact in one send, permanently. They fill the board; they do not own it.

But the goods have to get there first. A caravan takes two hours on the road east, and it buys nothing at all until it lands: no influence, no patronage, no income. Until that changed, a pact paid from the instant the goods left the harbour, which made the distance to Essos — the whole reason the east sits behind a harbour and a fleet — cost a lord nothing. A rival cannot be outbid by a caravan still at sea, and the card shows what you have on the road apart from what you hold.

Putting a city to the sword

You can burn a rival's trade. Sail against a Free City another lord holds and its trade stops — for everyone, including you. The city lies in ruins for seventy-two hours and then rebuilds, so a sack denies a rival their eastern income for three days rather than destroying it for good. Two things do not come back: the caravans that were on the road when the walls fell, and the three days. A won sack also rolls once on the relic table, at grade III · Bannered or below and no more than once a day per lord — see Relics of the East. At most four of the nine cities may lie in ruins at once. That is the point: eastern income is a flow conquest interrupts, not a bonus conquest increases, so trading is a real choice rather than a slower version of the violent one.

And when a city rebuilds, the ledger is still there. Everything every lord ever sent to a city survives the burn, so the rebuilt pact goes straight back to whoever has the largest standing investment — usually the lord it was taken from. Burning a rival's market buys you three days and then hands it back. Worth knowing before you spend a fleet on it.

Four bounds keep it a contest rather than vandalism, and all four are published here because a limit kept secret is the same as no limit at all:

A beaten fleet burns nothing and limps home short a few hulls. A winning one still loses some — a city defends itself even as it falls.

What you cannot do yet

This section matters as much as the one above it, and it is written to be read rather than buried.

No date is promised for any of it. Every page on this site is checked against the shipped constants precisely so the line between what is built and what is planned stays visible from outside the studio — and that list is three items shorter than it was this morning, which is the only kind of progress worth reporting.

Why the east is meant to be harder

The design brief for Essos is that it should be competitive and hard with extreme rewards — that an eastern seat should out-grant any seat in Westeros, and that reaching one should need a navy rather than a longer march.

The honest summary has changed again: the east is a place to hold, a place to trade with, and a place to burn. All three of the brief's legs are in place — the veins pay double and the camps pay triple, the crossing is real and gated at every door that reaches east, and the seats out-grant Westeros and can be taken — the pacts pay on a two-hour road, and a rival's pact can be ended for good. What is left is a raid by one lord's fleet against another's own shore.

Getting there, shortest path

  1. Raise your Keep to 10.
  2. Build the harbour. One level is 800 berths.
  3. Lay down hulls until their berths match the harbour — longships are the efficient middle.
  4. Open Gathering, choose an eastern vein, and send the party.
  5. Tap a Free City on the way past, read what it would grant, and — once your harbour's berths can carry the host — take it.

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