The Navy and the Crossing

Three hulls, four coasts worth raiding, an alliance armada that can strangle a shore, and the harbour arithmetic that decides whether a host of yours ever stands in Essos.

Westeros is a realm of coasts and islands, and for most of this game's life every host marched by land. The sea is a second board: its own yard, its own cooldown, its own spoils — and since the harbour opened, it is the only way anything of yours reaches the far shore.

Everything below is in the game today. Where something is planned rather than built, this page says so in the same breath.

The three hulls

Ships are laid down from timber and iron in the Marches drawer, beside the land marches. There are three, and they are not a straight ladder — each is the best answer to a different question.

Hull	Cost	Strength	Plunder hold	Berths
Coastal Skiff	300 wood · 40 iron	4	120	50
Longship	700 wood · 140 iron	11	260	150
War Galley	1,600 wood · 520 iron	30	520	400

Strength wins the fight. The hold carries the plunder. The berths carry the army. Those are three separate numbers on purpose, and the third is the one most lords miss: a fleet built to raid is not automatically a fleet built to invade. Berths and hold are deliberately different tables, so balancing the raid can never quietly re-balance the crossing.

Per unit of timber, the skiff is the cheapest strength and the worst carrier; the galley is the reverse. A raiding fleet wants strength, a crossing fleet wants berths, and a fleet that does both wants galleys.

Reaving — the raid loop

A reave sends the whole fleet against one coast. If your fleet's strength beats the shore's defence you carry plunder home; if it does not, you carry nothing and lose hulls. There are four coasts, and they are a real risk ladder rather than four flavours of the same raid:

Coast	Richness	Shore defence
A Fishing Hamlet	0.35	6
The Salt Wharf	0.60	22
A Free Port	0.85	55
Reaver's Harbor	1.00	120

A clean raid fills 60% of the fleet's hold, scaled by the coast's richness and by how decisive the win was, and capped at the hold — so a bigger fleet is worth building toward and a fat coast is worth reaching for.

A loss is recoverable, always. Hull losses scale with how one-sided the fight was, but a fleet is never wiped: at minimum the flagship limps home. A reave is a gamble you can lose twice and still have a navy.

The cooldown is three hours, and it is what stops the sea being strip-mined. It is per lord rather than per coast, so there is no rotation to grind.

The alliance armada

Your hulls are also your banner's hulls. In the Alliance panel, allies pool their fleets into one armada and storm a coast no single lord could take. The two heaviest targets carry a stiffer shore for an armada than they do for a lone fleet — A Free Port at 90, Reaver's Harbor at 220 — because a pooled fleet is a different weight of attack.

Plunder is split by what each lord actually pledged. Bring more hulls, take a bigger cut; bring none and take none.

A blockade is the other thing an armada can do. Instead of storming a coast it sits off it, and while the armada out-masses that shore its trade is throttled. The throttle has a published ceiling of 50%, and that ceiling is a design commitment rather than a tuning number: a blockade must never become a way to remove somebody from the game, so even a perfect one leaves half the trade running. A blockade lifts at will, and a relieving fleet strong enough to out-mass the blockaders breaks it.

The harbour, and the crossing

The harbour opens at Keep 10 and is the only plot in the city that is not about the city. Every level puts 800 berths on the water.

What may sail is the smaller of two numbers:

crossing capacity = min(harbour level × 800, the berths of your hulls)

Both halves are real gates. A level 5 harbour with no ships launches nothing; a hundred galleys with no harbour launch nothing. And the refusal names which of the two you are short of, in the order you should go and fix them — build the harbour, then lay down hulls, then send a party the ships can hold — rather than blaming the same one every time.

One function answers that question for the whole game. The card that invites the march, the panel that shows the figure and the launch that declines it all read the same check, so the number on screen and the number enforced cannot drift apart.

A level 1 harbour carries 800 — enough that a lord's first crossing is a real party rather than a token. A maxed harbour at 45 carries 36,000, just past one full march from a maxed Training Yard (34,500): the ceiling is “your whole host, once you have built for it”, not an arbitrary number. A building is capped by your Keep, and the Keep reaches 45 only through the one Ascension.

What sails east today, and what does not

Today: a gathering party crosses to the eastern veins and works them. Four eastern deep workings stand beside the four western ones, and an eastern vein holds twice what a western one does. Tapping a Free City opens its own panel, which says what the city grants its holder and whether your harbour and hulls could carry a host there at all.

Not today: you cannot take an eastern seat, and no navy has ever fought another lord's navy. The reave targets are coasts, not players. Contested crossings and blockading a rival alliance's port are planned and unbuilt — and the reason is worth stating: a fight between two lords cannot be decided on one lord's machine. The navy has to become the server's before it can be turned on anybody.

See Essos for what stands on the far shore.

A building order

1. Keep 10, then the harbour. Nothing at sea matters before this, and the harbour is a normal build on the normal queue.
2. Skiffs first if you want to raid this week — the Fishing Hamlet's shore is 6, which two skiffs beat.
3. Longships are the mainstay: the best strength per unit of timber, and enough berths that a modest fleet crosses.
4. Galleys when you want the fat coasts or a real host on the far shore. One galley carries as many soldiers as eight skiffs.
5. Raise the harbour once your hulls out-berth it — the crossing takes the smaller number, so the two want to climb together.