For immediate release · Major update

Seats Stand Outside the Shield

A peace shield now covers exactly one thing: your walls. A Seat of Power is public, contested ground, and from this release no shield sits over one — not against an assault, a rally, a blockade or a raid by sea. And the sea finally keeps a record: every fight on the water leaves a battle report on both sides, the defending fleet pays hulls by the same arithmetic the raider’s does, and a lord who holds a seat gets a battle card for defending it.

Iron Realms · 15 September 2026 · playironrealms.com

Seats stand outside the shield

For a year the rule was that a holder’s peace shield covered their seats as it covered their keep: every blow kind bounced, a rally would not muster, a fleet would not sit off the coast, a raid would not touch the quays. It made a shield the strongest way to hold a seat, which is backwards — a seat is the one thing in the realm that is meant to be fought over. The owner’s ruling is that a Seat of Power cannot be shielded. The server no longer refuses a seat blow, a rally, a late rally joiner, a blockade or a seat raid on the holder’s shield; the seats ledger no longer publishes one; the map draws no dome over a held seat and the seat panel disables nothing for it.

What still holds is everything about the keep. Your walls shimmer as before, a new lord’s founding peace is untouched, the wall-break valve still raises one, and raising a blade against another lord still drops yours — storming a seat is still an act of war. A held seat is defended by what stands on it: its walls, your garrison, your bannermates’ reinforcements and the alliance shield wall. The guides, the seats-of-power page’s structured data and the Residents’ own answer to “does my shield cover my seats?” all say the new thing now, and a test holds each of them to it.

Every fight at sea leaves a report

A land fight has always produced a battle report — rounds, losses on both sides, survivors, a card you can open from the Council archive and replay. A fight at sea produced a number. A reave, an armada raid, a raid on a rival’s quays and a sack all answered the lord who sailed and wrote nothing to the record, so a won reave that lifted a relic showed in the archive as the relic and never as the fight, and the patron of a burned Free City learned about it from a kingdom-wide herald line — and only if it burned.

Every one of those verbs now writes a report to both sides, win or lose, in the same shape the land engine produces: one round, hulls where troops would be, what sailed, what the sea took, what came home. The archive offers “Read the report” on them exactly as it does on a raid, and the card reads from your chair on either side of the fight. A holder whose seat is assaulted gets the battle itself for the first time, not only the horn; the attacker’s own seat blow reaches the durable record instead of living in the eight-entry log alone; a blockade’s order and its lifting each leave a line; and an arena challenge no longer lands on “a report this build does not understand”.

Both fleets pay

When one lord’s fleet met another’s at a seat, only the raider lost hulls — the defending keels were invulnerable, win or lose, which is a rule nobody would write on purpose. The defender now pays by the same arithmetic read from the other chair: a beaten fleet loses up to half its keels scaled by how badly it was beaten, a winning fleet loses a few hulls when the fight was close, and the last hull is never taken on either side. The toll is written under the defender’s own ledger swap, after the raider’s, and both reports say what was actually written.

A crash that ate a heartbeat

A takeover rally landing on a defence that was already cleared, or wiped whole at the gate, came home with no battle attached. The client stored that empty report and then read casualties out of it inside a state update, which threw — and the throw aborted the whole heartbeat’s report drain, losing every later report in that batch, which the server had already marked as seen. A missing battle is now synthesised from the losses that are known and the war record counts a hollow report as a battle and nothing else. Pinned, so it cannot come back.

Also since the last dispatch

• The host that sails is the host the decks hold. A gathering party bound for an eastern vein is sized to the task and then to what the harbour and hulls can carry, the card says “trimmed to your berths” when the decks were the dial that bound, and a composed host sent east is trimmed rather than refused. Berths per hull doubled — a war galley carries 800.
• The Workrate Report has its own face and a fairer formula. Drawing power is de-saturated before the business term reads it, the era table is compressed to match, an interrupted career is credited a bounded share of what it was prevented from doing — gated on the record, never on an allegation — and the method page describes the algorithm that actually runs.
• The wrestling rankings and the talk page are one click from every page, and the largest wing on the site is finally in the chrome.

What is still not open

• 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 report is the server’s; the crediting is not yet.
• The narrow sea’s toll on a creature-camp crossing is cosmetic online. The client subtracts the hulls and the next heartbeat’s navy mirror puts them back. The report says what the toll would be; the ledger does not yet take it.
• A raid against another lord’s own keep by sea is not built. Their seat’s quays can be raided; their own harbour cannot.

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.