The Realm at War

Quick answers

Is Iron Realms free to play?: Yes. Iron Realms is free to play in any browser with no download. Play offline with no account, or sign in to join the live realm. Nothing is for sale during the Alpha; when purchases open they will buy speed and cosmetics, never a higher ceiling.
Does spending money make you stronger in Iron Realms?: No. Nothing purchasable raises your power ceiling. A charter audit runs on every build and fails it if any offer would sell power. During the Alpha nothing is for sale at all — better than that, the store gives its goods away: everything in it is free to take, once a day per item, while the realm is being built. When payments do open, spending will compress time only: it clears timers, it never raises the summit.
How long does it take to max a keep in Iron Realms?: Keeps cap at level 45 and troops at tier 13 — the same summit for everyone, and it is a campaign: about seven months of steady play at half an hour a day, counting keep 45 and the nineteen plots that gate it. The Fair Play ledger inside the game reads that figure straight out of the shipped constants, so it is never a month behind the build.

The rebel holdfasts are not scenery. Behind the 80 rebel keeps on the map, rebel lords raid each other, storm Seats of Power, and band into free companies. They do it on two boards, and which one you are looking at decides what your orders can move.

Update, 24 September 2026: this guide used to describe one board of eighty lords, all taking a turn every four minutes, and it promised that an ordered NPC conqueror would soften a real Seat of Power's garrison for you. Some of each kingdom's rebel lords are now shared keeps with rules of their own, set out below. The promise was never true: no order you give reaches a real garrison. The page now describes both boards as the game runs them.

Two boards

The shared rebel lords. In each kingdom, up to 40 of the 80 holdfasts (20 to start) are real keeps on the server. Everyone in the kingdom sees the same lords, the same companies and the same seats, and they keep moving while you are logged out.
Your private board. The rest of the holdfasts are yours alone: a simulation that runs in your browser and that nobody else sees. Offline or signed out, all 80 are on it.

How the shared lords turn

The shared lords act on the realm's own turn, at most once every 80 minutes, after the Residents have taken theirs. Each keeps the standing order his holdfast always had, one of the five postures below. No order button changes it; a call to your banner is the one thing that does.

Each matures over about 60 days toward a ceiling of 1,000,000 power, half the Residents' 2,000,000.
He takes a Seat of Power only while a war window is open, only with 6,000 swords standing at home, and only a seat that is unheld or held by another rebel lord or a Resident. A seat a person holds is not on his map at all.
His raids fall only on other rebel lords and Residents, never on a person's keep.
Rebel lords band into free companies, with each other and with Residents. A company keeps its gates barred, so no player can join one.

Calling a shared lord to your banner

Open a shared rebel lord's dossier and you can call him to your banner. He answers on the spot, by his temper: a turtle keeps behind his own walls, a lord who rides alone stays alone, and none will join a banner already crowded with the realm's own lords, or one with no room left. One who swears to a player's banner turns loyalist and reaches for seats and raids, inside the same rules as above.

Your private board

Your private board takes a turn every 4 minutes while the game is open. After a long absence it plays only a short catch-up, so you come back to a changed board rather than an unrecognisable one.

Its lords' power runs from 200 up to a hard cap of 60,000. A lord who fortifies grows about 0.0029% a time, a pace solved so that a lord takes about three years to climb from the floor to the cap.
An unheld seat on it stands behind a garrison of 6,000, the floor a lord must beat to take it.
A private holdfast you storm lies in ruin for two hours before a new lord claims it.

It names the real Seats of Power, but every seat a real lord holds is taken off it, and nothing it does is written back to the realm. A private lord who "seizes" a seat does so in your board's dispatches and your own chronicle, and nowhere else.

The five postures

Both boards use the same five:

Turtle: holds the walls and fortifies, and never marches.
Raider: rides against the nearest rival lord in reach, and shuns seats.
Conqueror: hunts seats above all, and raids when none is in reach.
Opportunist: raids, and reaches for seats as the chances come.
Loyalist: a lord sworn to a player's banner (on your private board, one you ordered to yours). He reaches for seats and raids.

Every lord on either board looks for a raid or a pact within 26 tiles of home, and for a seat within half as far again (39).

The Realm at War panel

Signed in, the top of the panel is the shared board: your kingdom's rebel lords (ten at most, strongest first), their free companies and the latest of their deeds.
Below it is your private board: its free companies, its great lords and its dispatches.

Sending orders

On your private board you can send word to any of its great lords: Hold, Raid, Conquer or My banner. The order changes that lord's posture on your board and nothing else. It softens no real garrison and takes no real seat, and the shared lords never hear it. The only way to change a shared lord's posture is to call him to your banner.