Troop Training & Army Economics

Quick answers

Is Iron Realms free to play?: Yes. Iron Realms is free to play in any browser with no download and no account required. Every building, troop tier and Seat of Power is reachable without spending money — purchases 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 pre-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 single most misunderstood system in the game, because for a long time it was almost free. It is not any more. Here is exactly what a host costs to raise and to keep.

Throughput: the yard is the army

Training runs at 0.2 + 0.1 × yard level troops per second, and a tier-t troop takes 1 + (t−1) × 0.2 times as long as a tier-1 one. Put together, the time for an order is:

seconds = count × (1 + (tier−1) × 0.2) ÷ (0.2 + yardLevel × 0.1) ÷ 3

That trailing ÷ 3 is the realm's speed dial — the same three that turns a farm's 2.0 a second into 6.0 further down this page. Every timer that gates progress is divided by it, the training yard included, so the rate column below is what your yard actually drills at rather than what the formula starts from. Cooldowns are not: a reave's wait, a rite's, a relic's are tied to a human rhythm rather than to progress, and the dial deliberately leaves them alone.

Yard level	Rate (after ÷ 3)	1,000 tier-1 troops	1,000 tier-4 troops
1	0.9/sec	~19 min	~30 min
5	2.1/sec	~8 min	~13 min
10	3.6/sec	~5 min	~7 min
20	6.6/sec	~3 min	~4 min

Raise the yard before you raise the army. The yard level is a divisor, so it is the only thing on this page with compounding returns. A level-20 yard musters seven times faster than a level-1 one, forever.

Cost: 15 food and 9 iron a head, times the tier

Every troop costs 15 food and 9 iron, multiplied by 1.35^tier−1. A tier-1 thousand is 15,000 food and 9,000 iron; a tier-4 thousand is about 37,000 food and 22,000 iron; a tier-8 thousand is roughly 122,000 food and 73,000 iron.

Read that against your production — a farm pays 2.0 food per level per second as the plot is priced, 6.0 once the realm's triple speed is applied, and 15.0 with the Intro Era's ×2.5 multiplier on top of that — and the shape of the mid-game becomes obvious. A level-20 farm under the Intro Era makes 300 food a second, which is 1,080,000 an hour; ten thousand tier-8 swords cost roughly 1.22 million food and 730,000 iron, so that is a little over an hour of the farm's entire output for the grain alone, and about an hour of a level-20 mine for the iron. An army is a project, not a purchase. Budget for it the way you budget for a keep upgrade.

Upkeep: a host eats

Your standing army draws about 1.5 food per second per thousand troops, continuously — the rate is paced with production, so a host costs the same share of the harvest at any speed. Ten thousand swords is 15 food a second off your harvest — which, at a modest farm, is most of it. The Food Ledger in your keep shows production, upkeep and net side by side; if the net line reads zero, your stores will never grow no matter how many farms you raise.

Winter makes both halves worse: the harvest thins and upkeep climbs. Lay in stores in autumn, and consider whether a host you are not currently using is worth feeding through the cold.

What actually speeds training

The Training Yard's level — the divisor above, and by far the largest lever.
VIP — +2% per level, to +30% at VIP 15, earned by logging in.
Research — the military line's training studies.
Your War Council — a seated commander carrying a train-speed talent (Stannis's Drillmaster, the star skill "The Mannis") now applies it. Seat them as Lord Marshal for the +15% well-suited bonus on top.
Court titles — Master of Whisperers pays +10% training to whoever the King has named to it.
Faith, the shrine, High Heart, world events — the Muster event is +25% on the whole category.

These add, they do not multiply, and they divide the raw seconds — so stacking a few modest ones is worth more than chasing one large one.

The practical order

Yard level first, always. It is the divisor.
Train the tier you can feed, not the highest one unlocked. A tier-8 host you cannot supply is a worse army than a tier-5 host you can.
Keep an eye on the Food Ledger's net line before every large order.
Time big musters into a Muster world event window.