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The Navy and the Crossing
Six hulls, ten coasts worth raiding, an alliance blockade that can strangle a rival banner's seat, 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 six hulls
Ships are laid down from timber and iron at your Harbour — its panel in your keep is the shipyard. No harbour, no keel; and a harbour berths 10 keels per level (ten at Lv 1, 450 at Lv 45), a cap on laying new keels that never touches hulls already afloat. There are six, in three tiers of two: a generalist and a specialist at each. Skiff, longship and war galley are the straight ladder — more of everything, for more timber. Reaver, cog and dromon are not power creep grafted onto that ladder: the reaver trades cargo for speed, the cog trades combat power for cargo, and only the dromon — the capstone — is simply better than its tier-mate on every column, which is what a lord's endgame flagship is supposed to be.
| Hull | Cost | Strength | Plunder hold | Berths |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Coastal Skiff | 300 wood · 40 iron | 4 | 120 | 100 |
| Reaver | 260 wood · 90 iron | 8 | 90 | 70 |
| Longship | 700 wood · 140 iron | 11 | 260 | 300 |
| Cog | 950 wood · 90 iron | 7 | 420 | 650 |
| War Galley | 1,600 wood · 520 iron | 30 | 520 | 800 |
| Dromon | 2,600 wood · 950 iron | 46 | 680 | 950 |
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. The reaver is the fastest keel in the yard and hits above its cost, at the price of a thin hold; the cog barely fights at all but out-carries every warship, which is what makes it a troop transport rather than a raider; the dromon is the deepest keel a harbour can lay, and the longest to lay it — each hull now has its own build time (below), and the dromon's is the longest of the six.
Ships are laid in batches now, like troops, but slower per hull. Order a count at the shipyard and the harbourmaster lays the whole batch on one clock — a higher harbour level shortens it, but a hull is a fact the realm checks (it decides whether an eastern seat can be stormed), so building a real navy is still meant to take real time, not a single click repeated a few hundred times.
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 ten coasts on one catalogue — six on the western shore and four across the Narrow Sea — and they are a real risk ladder rather than ten flavours of the same raid. The eastern four cost a crossing, exactly as an eastern seat does: no harbour at your keep, no raid on the Pentoshi Shore.
| Coast | Shore | Richness | Shore defence | Reached by |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| A Fishing Hamlet | Westeros | 0.35 | 6 | a lone fleet |
| The Salt Wharf | Westeros | 0.60 | 22 | a lone fleet |
| A Free Port | Westeros | 0.85 | 55 | a lone fleet, or the alliance armada |
| Reaver's Harbor | Westeros | 1.00 | 120 | a lone fleet, or the alliance armada |
| The Stepstones | Westeros | 1.15 | 220 | a lone fleet, or the alliance armada |
| The Arbor Roads | Westeros | 1.30 | 320 | a lone fleet, or the alliance armada |
| The Pentoshi Shore | Essos | 1.20 | 150 | a lone fleet |
| The Myrish Wharves | Essos | 1.35 | 240 | a lone fleet, or the alliance armada |
| The Pillow Quay of Lys | Essos | 1.45 | 300 | a lone fleet |
| The Mouth of the Rhoyne | Essos | 1.60 | 480 | a lone fleet, or the alliance armada |
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.
A won reave also rolls once on the relic table, reaching grade II · Sung and below — never the higher grades a held seat can mint — and at most once a day per lord, however many coasts you take. The full table and every rate are on Relics of the East.
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 armada's list is the coasts marked for it in the table above — six of the ten — and it meets each at the same shore defence a lone fleet would: one catalogue, one number per coast. A pooled fleet does not get a harder copy of a lone reaver's target — it gets the weight to reach The Stepstones, The Arbor Roads and the Mouth of the Rhoyne at all.
Plunder is split by what each lord actually pledged. Bring more hulls, take a bigger cut; bring none and take none.
Stationing the armada off one of those coasts wears down that shore's defence for your next armada reave there, by up to 50%. It softens a shore and nothing more: no trade runs through a coast on the catalogue, so nobody's income moves when the armada sits off one.
The blockade proper is alliance against alliance, and it is the server's. From a held seat's panel on the map, a banner with hulls orders its fleet to sit off a rival alliance's seat, and while the besiegers' pooled hulls out-mass the holders' the seat's trade is throttled. A seat held by a lord who swears to no banner can be blockaded too, and that lord has no pooled fleet to answer with: their own keels count for nothing at sea, so the throttle sits at the ceiling, and they lift it only by joining a banner whose hulls out-mass the besiegers. 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. The rules it cannot lose: it names the banner that ordered it and never a lord; it is broken by hulls, not by waiting — the strength that binds is re-pooled from the live ledgers on every read, so a banner that loses its keels loses its grip and holders who mass keels under a banner lift it themselves; a peace shield does not reach a seat's coast — a seat is public ground, so the holder's bubble neither refuses the order nor zeroes a standing throttle; you cannot blockade a seat your own banner holds, nor an unheld one, because an empty shore has no trade to strangle; a fleet out reaving counts for neither side; and it is scoped to your kingdom, so a blockade in one kingdom touches nothing in another. Only the banner that ordered a blockade can lift it, and the besieged are shown who is strangling them and by how much, because a throttle a holder cannot see is the worst version of this mechanic.
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. It is also the shipyard: hulls are laid at the harbour and nowhere else, and every level lets you lay ten keels more. That is a cap on laying, not on having — when it binds, the next keel is refused and the fleet already afloat is left alone.
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. The four eastern coasts in the table above are raided across the same water.
Every eastern seat can be taken. An eastern seat is stormed the way a Westerosi one is — walls, garrison, reinforcements, then the takeover — but the host must first cross, and the crossing refuses in a fixed order: no harbour, then no hulls, then a fleet still at sea from a raid, then a host too great for the berths. The server asks those four questions in that order, from its own ledger of your hulls, so the refusal the panel shows you is the refusal that is enforced. An unheld eastern seat stands garrisoned rather than empty, a capture rolls on the relic table (see Relics of the East), and no eastern seat is worth a throne point, because the Iron Throne is a Westerosi quarrel.
One lord's fleet now fights another lord's. A rival's held seat can be raided by sea: your keels against theirs, and the stores of the lord who holds it if your raiders get ashore. Their fleet defends it — so a banner that has sent its keels out reaving has left its own seats open, which is a choice rather than a number. Their peace shield does not reach the seat's quays — a seat is public ground and stands outside the bubble over their walls — but the protected floor and the alliance vault shield their stores exactly as they do against a land raid, and a beaten raid carries nothing home. Both fleets pay. The defending keels lose hulls by the same arithmetic the raider's do, read from the other chair — half the fleet scaled by how badly it was beaten, a few hulls when the fight was close, never the last hull — and both lords get a battle report of the fight: one round, hulls where troops would be, readable from the Council archive like any raid on land. The realm settles it; nothing about the outcome is decided on the raider's machine.
See Essos for what stands on the far shore.
A building order
- Keep 10, then the harbour. Nothing at sea matters before this, and the harbour is a normal build on the normal queue.
- Skiffs first, at the harbour, if you want to raid this week — the Fishing Hamlet's shore is 6, which two skiffs beat. A reaver does the same job faster and hits harder, at a thinner hold, if speed matters more than plunder.
- Longships are the mainstay: the best strength per unit of timber, and enough berths that a modest fleet crosses.
- Cogs once you have won the fight and need the hold — a troop and plunder hauler, not a warship, with more capacity than anything else afloat.
- Galleys when you want the fat coasts or a real host on the far shore. One galley carries as many soldiers as eight skiffs.
- Dromons at the top of the game: the capstone hull, strictly better than a galley in every column, and the slowest keel a harbour lays — a real campaign to build, not a late-game freebie.
- Raise the harbour once your hulls out-berth it, and once its keel cap is full — the crossing takes the smaller number, so the two want to climb together.
Every hull's plunder hold, combat power, berths and build cost, plus what a harbour of each level takes to fill — see the Navy database.