For immediate release · Major update

One Fleet, One Sea

The navy stops being a number in a save file. Hulls are minted by the server, one fleet cannot be in two places at once, ten coasts take a raid and six take a blockade — and for the first time in this game, one alliance can act directly against another, throttled to a published ceiling and stopped dead by a peace shield.

Iron Realms · 4 September 2026 · playironrealms.com

The hulls are minted where no client can write them

Until this week your fleet was a number your own browser kept. It rode the ordinary save path, which meant the honest answer to “how many war galleys does that lord have” was “however many they say”. That was tolerable while ships did nothing but sit in a panel. It stopped being tolerable the moment ships decided who could take a city.

Ships are now built through the shipyard, on a timer, against a ledger the server owns and no client can author. Every write is a compare-and-set, so two tabs racing the same shipyard cannot both win, and an unparseable ledger is refused rather than wiped — a fleet is not something to lose to a bad byte.

Your harbour still decides how many keels you may berth: 800 berths per harbour level, from Keep 10. A skiff takes fifty, a longship a hundred and fifty, a war galley four hundred.

One fleet cannot be in two places

The realm has had two separate naval systems for months and they did not consult each other. One raided coasts; the other carried an army across the Narrow Sea. The same hulls answered to both, so a fleet could be plundering the Stepstones and ferrying a host to Volantis in the same minute.

There is one fleet now, and it is in one place. A fleet at sea on a raid cannot simultaneously be carrying a crossing, and the panel says which. Berths against your harbour cap are the crossing; the fleet's strength is the fight; the same keels do both because they are the same keels.

Ten coasts, four of them Westerosi

The three target lists became one. A fishing hamlet, a salt wharf, a free port, Reaver's Harbor, the Stepstones, the Arbor Roads, the Pentoshi shore, the Myrish wharves, the Pillow Quay of Lys and the Mouth of the Rhoyne — ten coasts, each declaring for itself what may be done to it. All ten take a raid. Six take a blockade.

A raid is resolved entirely on the server. The coast's richness and its defence come from the shared catalogue by id, never from the message — a client that could post its own richness would be writing its own plunder — and the hulls come from the ledger. The raid cooldown is three hours, and a beaten fleet still comes home: the sea takes hulls, never your last one.

The blockade: the first time one alliance can reach another

This is the largest change here and it deserves the plainest description. An alliance may pool its hulls and sit them off a coast held by a rival alliance, and while it out-masses the defenders' pooled fleet, that seat's trade is throttled.

Four rules make it a siege rather than a way to remove somebody from the game, and all four are enforced on the server:

• The throttle has a published ceiling of one half. A blockade at full strength halves what a seat pays. It cannot ever take all of it, and there is no number of ships that changes that.
• It is broken by ships, not by waiting. The defending alliance masses hulls; the moment their pooled fleet out-masses the blockaders', the throttle is gone. There is no timer to sit out.
• Shields hold at sea. A holder under a peace shield gets no fleet off their coast at all. A protection with a naval hole is not a protection.
• Only the banner that ordered it may lift it — including not the besieged, which would have made the whole thing a formality.

You cannot blockade your own banner, and you cannot blockade a seat nobody holds: there has to be trade to strangle.

A sacked city pays nobody, and that is the point

A Free City can be put to the torch. The patron loses the city, the sack is written into the world, and for eight hours that city pays nobody — not the lord who burned it, not the rival who wanted it, not the Resident who held it last. A sack is not a way to take a city from somebody. It is a way to make sure nobody has it.

A rich pact is a guarded one: the defence a sack has to beat is the city's own accumulated wealth, so the cities worth burning are the hardest to burn.

The pacts pay, at last

We wrote in a guide that eastern income “is a flow conquest destroys, not a bonus conquest increases”. That sentence described an economy that was not running. The arithmetic existed, was exported, and was read by nothing: a lord could build a harbour, cross, form a pact, wait out the crossing, hold the city against rivals — and earn nothing at all.

Patronage now pays on the hour, to the patron alone. Only the patron, because patronage is the prize a caravan is spent contesting and paying every investor a share would make outbidding a rival pointless. Accrual starts when you took the city, never when the city was founded, so a new patron is not paid for the previous holder's fortnight. A sacked city pays nothing. Residents hold patronage and can be outbid for it, but they keep no coffers, so they are paid nothing either.

The road east is a road

A caravan takes two hours to cross, and it buys nothing until it lands. Goods still at sea are goods you do not have — you cannot bid with them, and they earn you no patronage. That is what makes the crossing cost something other than ships.

The Residents cross too

The twenty-seven Residents send their own caravans east and bid for the same patronage you are bidding for. An eastern city is no longer a contest against the map; it is a contest against somebody — and they will outbid you while you are asleep.

The Residents get a room

They talk in the hall, answer to their names, write the chronicle, hold land and ride to war, and until now the only way to learn any of that was to catch one speaking and think to tap the name. There was no census: you could not find out how many there were, who was who, or that the one you were tired of could be quietened on their own.

There is a Residents room now — a roster grouped by temperament, with the all-of-them switch and a per-lord mute. Tapping a name opens the same dossier a tap in chat opens, because two cards describing one person is how they start disagreeing. A silenced Resident dims in the list and is never hidden: a census that omits the people you quietened cannot tell you that you quietened them.

The game's nouns speak five languages

The interface has been translated for a while; the nouns were not. A German lord picked a locale, watched the dock become “Rat” and “Allianz”, opened the Keep and read “Harbour”, “Sawmill”, “Troop attack”. Half a screen in each of two languages reads worse than either one alone.

Forty-four nouns in five languages — twenty-one building names, twenty seat-buff phrases, three seat tiers — with a test that walks the catalogue in both directions, because a key with no building reads as coverage and is exactly what hides a building with no key.

The map on a phone

Three things a phone screenshot showed and no desktop test could:

• The coastline was a staircase. Land and sea were decided by a yes-or-no test per vertex, so every shore was a cliff of more than a unit and a half. The transition now runs off the true distance to the water, and the measured worst step across the whole coast fell from 2.56 units to 0.99.
• The North was blown out white. The Wall was writing its own colour past the tone mapper and the frost was lerping most of the way to white beneath it. Both are turned down.
• The heads-up display collided with itself at 390 pixels. Three separate overlaps, all of them invisible at desktop widths, all of them now asserted at an iPhone viewport.

Also since the last dispatch

• The relic rides to war. Valyrian steel found in the east now counts in the arithmetic of a battle rather than sitting in a panel — and the figure a rival's client publishes about you deliberately excludes it.
• “Across the Narrow Sea” — the game now tells you the harbour exists, in the order you would build toward it, instead of leaving the whole eastern continent behind a building nothing mentioned.
• Every drawer in the game is opened by a test, and every door on the site that points into the game is checked against the game's own list of doors — a link at a renamed panel used to open the game at nothing and still read as working.
• The back trail speaks your language. The visible chevron has read “‹ Allianz” for a German lord for a while; the label a screen reader spoke was still English.

What is still not open

Shorter than last time, and still load-bearing.

• No lord has ever raided another lord's coast. The blockade reaches an alliance; the raid still reaches only the ten catalogued shores. Lord-against-lord at sea is the next piece.
• The plunder from a raid is still granted by your own client from the server's answer, because there is no server purse to credit it into. The resolution is the server's; the crediting is not yet.
• Your harbour level is still something your client tells the server, on the same honest-limit footing as your power. The ships it berths are not — those are the server's now, which is the half that decides a siege.

No date is promised for any of it. Every figure on this page is checked against the game's own shipped constants on every build, which is why the line between what is built and what is planned stays visible from outside the studio.

About Iron Realms

Iron Realms is a free-to-play browser strategy MMO of keeps, dragons, alliances and long winters, playable in any browser with no download and no account required to start. Purchases buy time and cosmetics, never a higher ceiling — a rule enforced by an audit that fails the build. The game is in pre-alpha and is built in public.

Press and player contact: Discord lordking_uhtred.