Kaelmoor field manual

The one-paragraph version. You start with an army and a keep. Clicking enemy or empty land sends a percentage of your troops to take it, tile by tile. Your people are your army — one number — and villages are what raise its ceiling. Buildings, not territory, carry your economy. A team wins by holding 90 % of the settled world.

Nothing is settled until the war starts. Click again and your kingdom moves — the old circle goes back to the wilderness, the Keep is packed up, and you keep every soldier. Try a river mouth, look at who has settled next door, change your mind and take the mountains instead. The choosing phase is twenty seconds of shopping around.

Everyone can see everyone. Each kingdom's current pick is painted on the map in its own colour with a pulsing ring around it, so the phase is really a silent negotiation: settle beside a giant and you have made a decision, and so have they.

Where you click is where you mean, not where you must land. A spawn click is aimed: if the exact tile will not take a kingdom — it is water, somebody already lives there — the nearest ground that will is used instead, out to 18 tiles. You will never be told "no" and left hunting for the one pixel that works.

The only hard floor is 10 tiles between two capitals — exactly two starting circles edge to edge, so the tightest legal choice takes no ground from anybody. Founding your kingdom in a rival's armpit is a strategy, and the game does not argue with it.

Monster camps ask for nothing but their own palisade. You may settle directly against one: a dangerous first ten minutes in exchange for a hoard worth taking.

The map opens pulled back to the whole continent, and does not move on its own while you choose — a camera that swooped in on every click would hide the very thing you are shopping for. It travels to your homeland once, as the war opens, and then hands the camera straight back to you.

world(kingdoms) = clamp(384×240 … 672×420, grid × √((kingdoms/128)^0.6))

Every war you have open is listed under the slider — how many of your people are pushing which border, wilderness included. Each row has an ✕ that calls that attack off: the men are back in your reserve the same instant, at no loss.

The ground already taken stays taken, so cancelling costs you nothing but the ground you did not go on to take. Over-committing is a mistake you can undo — which is the whole reason the list is there, since three attacks running at once used to drain a reserve with no way to see which one was doing it.

The attack takes the entire shared border at once, advancing in even shells rather than pushing at one point. Terrain only orders tiles within the same shell: hard ground is taken later than easy ground beside it, but never skipped. Point an army at a mountain and it takes the mountain.

What a tile costs, in men

cost = 1.8                                    // base troops per tile
     × terrainDefence                         // 1.00 plains … 2.10 mountain
     × structureAuras                         // Keep, Watchtower, Rune Hall…
     × (1 + min(1.6, 0.8 × defenderDensity))  // density = reserve / tiles
     × allyAdjacency                          // +15 % beside the defender's ally
     × (1 + attackerTiles / 36000)            // overreach: supply lines
     × unitControl                            // see Combat

Two of these are deliberately anti-snowball. Because the population ceiling is sub-linear in land, a small dense kingdom has a far higher troop density than an empire, so its tiles cost much more to take. And overreach makes the map leader pay progressively more per tile the more they own.

How fast a front moves

Price and pace are separate dials. The cost above says what a tile takes in men; a second, independent budget says how many tiles may change hands per tick (a tick is 100 ms).

tiles/tick = clamp(2, 48, (1 + attackTroops / 400) × speed)

speed = 1                                                  // into empty wilderness
      = clamp(0.4, 2.5, √(attackTroops / defenderReserve))  // against a kingdom

Against a kingdom the pace is a contest of armies: bring three times their strength and the border caves in; attack a stronger neighbour with a token force and you grind. Against a realm whose army is away, you roll.

Situation	Speed
4 000 attacking a 2 000-strong garrison	×1.41
Evenly matched	×1.00
4 000 against a realm with 200 left at home	×2.50 (capped)
Badly outnumbered	×0.40 (floor)

Two-way wars

Send 4 000 at a neighbour who sends 1 600 at you, and 1 600 die on each side instantly; your 2 400 survivors carry on. This is what stops two kingdoms trading the same strip of ground for minutes, and it makes committing to an attack a real decision rather than a free option.

Defending

Defence is passive and automatic. It comes from several places, all multiplying the tile cost:

Source	Effect	Notes
A unit standing there	×2 to ×5	The biggest single term, and the only free one. See Tile control
Troop density	up to +160 %	Reserve ÷ tiles. Capped, so a rump state is not indigestible
Terrain	up to ×2.10	A mountain border is a wall
Watchtower	+30 %, +60 % at level 5	radius 6 — and it shoots
Keep	+25 %	radius 8
Rune Hall (dwarf)	+25 %	radius 5
Allied adjacency	+15 %	Both of you, for sharing a border. Stand next to your team
Spawn protection	×2	First 60 seconds only
A wall	absolute	Not a multiplier at all — no army takes ground through one, at any size. See Walls & gates

Levels matter on defensive buildings. Each level adds +25 % to the bonus and +18 % to the radius, and to the range of anything that shoots. A level-5 Watchtower gives +60 % defence over a radius of 10.3 and fires 45 damage a second out to 12.4 tiles.

Walls & gates

A wall is not a building. It lives on the tile itself, there can be hundreds of them, and it is drawn rather than placed — pick up the tool and drag the mouse across your own land. The line you trace is laid in one order and paid for tile by tile, so a drag that outruns your treasury stops where the money ran out.

The two kinds

Kind	HP	Cost	What it does
Wall V	620	26 wood · 52 stone · 12 gold	Blocks conquest. Blocks everything on foot — your own soldiers included
Gate N	440	55 wood · 70 stone · 40 gold	Blocks conquest the same way, but you and your allies walk through it

A rampart bars its builder as much as its enemy, which is the entire reason gates exist: deciding where your army can get out is the interesting half of drawing a border. A gate is also the weaker stonework — the doors of a fortress are its soft spots.

Where one may stand

• Your own land, and only your own.
• Dry ground — never the shallows or the sea.
• A bare tile, or one carrying a Watchtower. Nothing else may share a wall tile, and no other building can be raised on one afterwards.

A finished wall can be rebuilt. Draw the gate tool across a rampart you already own and those segments become gates; draw the wall tool back over a gate and it closes up again. It is the same segment, so it does not count twice against your total — and it keeps its damage, so knocking a wall to a sliver and "rebuilding" it is not a cheap repair.

A wall carries nothing

No building may stand on a wall, and no wall may be drawn under a building — the Watchtower included, from either direction. There are no bastions: a rampart is 620 HP and a gate is 440 wherever they stand, and a tower next to a wall is a tower next to a wall.

Nor may a wall be laid over somebody standing there, anybody's unit, yours included. A rampart raised over a man's head used to brick him in: the tile became impassable and he ground against your own stonework until something killed him. The mason simply refuses the tile — one step to the side is no hardship on a line dozens of tiles long.

A tower built into the stonework used to make the strongest defensive tile in the game strictly stronger for nothing, and it let the one building that shoots hide inside the one thing an army cannot touch. Put your towers behind the line instead — they shoot straight over it.

Bringing one down

What breaks it	Speed	Notes
Soldiers	×2.2 their damage	Four knights breach a rampart in about 4 seconds. This is the answer
Fliers	3 razing passes	A dragon or phoenix burns it from above — fastest, and by far the dearest
An attack	nothing	Attack orders do not damage walls and never will

This is what a wall actually sells you: it converts an enemy's money into an enemy's time. To get past it they must train units, walk them to your border, and spend them on masonry instead of on your army — all of it in the open, in range of everything you have. A standing order to spare buildings does not spare walls: a wall is not a province you are about to inherit, it is a door.

Once the stonework is gone the tile is ordinary ground again, and the assault you were holding back walks straight through the gap. A breach is worth widening.

What a wall costs by the mile

The price does not climb per segment — a wall that got dearer every tile would punish drawing a line at all, and a wall is supposed to be long. It climbs per block of twenty: segments 1–20 cost what the table says, 21–40 cost +35 %, 41–60 another 35 %, and so on. Fortifying a border is affordable; fortifying a continent is not.

A wall needs a kingdom behind it

Stonework does not defend itself — somebody has to stand on it. A realm mans one segment for every 6 tiles it holds, and anything beyond that is abandoned: it crumbles at 45 HP a second until the line matches the country. Your starting circle supports about thirteen segments; a province supports a border; an empire supports a frontier.

This is why losing ground loses you walls. A kingdom beaten back to a handful of tiles cannot hide behind masonry it no longer has the people to hold — the same principle as the cap on troop density: a small dense kingdom should be a fortress, not an immovable object.

What the AI does with them

Bot kingdoms fortify too, but only the side of their border that faces somebody hostile, in short runs with a gate in the middle, paid for out of whatever is left after their buildings and their army. They are capped at 8 % of their own border ring — a bot cannot judge how much of its frontier it can afford to close, so the rule judges for it, and three quarters of every AI border always stays open. A human has no such limit.

People & recruitment

land     = 200 + 12 × tiles^0.62
housing  = Σ(popCap × level) / 300        ← no ceiling on this
ceiling  = land × (1 + housing) + Σ(troopCap × level)

Land is where people can live; villages are why they do. The territory term is small and heavily sub-linear — bare ground gives you somewhere to put people and very little more. What fills a country is housing, and housing has no ceiling at all.

One Village level = +30 % of your whole ceiling, and a level-5 village two and a half times it. Conquering without building leaves you with an empty map and no army to hold it; a compact realm of well-levelled villages can field more soldiers than an empire twice its size.

The recruitment curve

A realm does not recruit fastest when it is empty. Few people make few people; a full country makes none because there is nowhere to put them. The rate follows a skewed curve that peaks at 65 % of capacity.

troops/s = ceiling × 0.036 × curve(filled) × foodFactor × (1 + villageBonus) × race

Occupancy	Rate
10 % full	16 % of peak
50 % full	88 %
65 % full	100 % — the peak
90 % full	52 %
Completely full	0

Villages buy the rate as well as the ceiling: +10 % recruitment speed per village level, up to +150 % from all of them together. They are the single strongest building in the game.

Food

Every soldier eats. Upkeep is 0.004 food per person per second — 40 000 people eat 160 food a second, which is why a large army needs farms and not just land.

Food does more than prevent disaster: how deep the granary is sets how fast people arrive. A kingdom sitting on 80 seconds of eating grows fastest; one living hand-to-mouth crawls even though it is technically fed.

Granary	Recruitment
Empty — starving	×0.15, and you lose people every second
Thin	×0.40
80 seconds of upkeep or more	×1.35

Burning an enemy's food is a real strategic blow, not an inconvenience.

Economy

Five resources. Four come out of the ground or out of buildings; gold comes from people and trade.

Resource	Where it comes from
Food	Plains, every tile a little, Farms. Eaten by your people
Wood	Forest, Lumber Camps
Stone	Mountains, Quarries
Mana	Ley Shrines only. Never from land
Gold	Markets and Harbours, plus caravans and a small head tax. Never from land

Markets tax your people; they do not print money

Source	Effect	Notes
Market	+7 % head tax per level	…plus 0.64 gold/s of its own, and it sends caravans
Harbour	+7 % head tax per level	…plus 0.40 gold/s in port dues, and it sends trade ships. Needs open water
Both together	up to +180 %	The cap. Roughly 26 levels of trade building
Caravans	up to 367 a trip, ×2.1 at best	Market to market, by road. Richer the further, the more foreign and the less like you — and raidable. Never to anyone you have fought. A smaller load than a ship's, but the wagon is quick, so the gold per minute is the same
Trade ships	up to 725 a trip, ×2.1 at best	Harbour to harbour, by sea. Same rules, bigger hold, far longer reach — and only ever to a port on the same water
Head tax	0.0014 per person	Before the trade bonus multiplies it
Village	0.04 per level	Rent. Villages are for people, not for money

Both trade buildings were also made much cheaper to raise — a realm with no money cannot buy its way out of having no money, and the old prices meant the buildings that fix poverty were the ones poverty stopped you building.

Buildings carry the economy, not territory

Land yields are deliberately thin and suffer diminishing returns with size; building output is 3.2× the table value and scales with level. Measured: 441 tiles of plains produce 4.2 food/s alone, and 64.2 food/s with four level-5 Farms on them. A compact, developed realm out-earns a sprawling empty one.

Storage caps at 3 000 of each resource, +3 000 per Warehouse level — so the first one doubles what your realm can keep, and everything past the ceiling is simply thrown away.

Buildings

Costs below are what you pay for your first one. Every further building of the same kind is +65 % dearer, and each level costs the base price again. There is no limit on how many you own — the escalating price is the brake.

Every building says what it is

Twenty-six buildings at sixteen pixels are not tellable apart by silhouette, so each one writes its own name under it on the map once you are zoomed in far enough to see them separately. Every name — on the map, in the build menu, in the wheel and in the tooltips — also carries a mark saying what the building is for:

Mark	Means	Which ones
○ ring	Economy	Farm, Lumber Camp, Quarry, Ley Shrine, Market, Harbour, Warehouse — it produces, stores or taxes
△ spearhead	Military	Barracks, Watchtower, Mage Tower, every racial hall — it trains, garrisons or shoots
⌂ house	Housing	The Village, alone. It is the only building whose product is people

Construction takes time

Placing and upgrading

• Clicking on or beside your own building of the same type levels it up rather than starting a second one next door. Maximum level 5.
• A build order that lands on impossible ground is nudged to the nearest tile that works, up to 4 tiles — asking for a Harbour on a beach means "put a Harbour on this beach".
• Buildings on conquered tiles change hands at half health and half their levels. The Keep, the Watchtower and every monster lair burn instead.

Shared by every people

Military halls — each people builds its own

Every hall also raises your army limit: +2 per hall, +1 per level on top of a base of 3, to a ceiling of 80. A second Barracks visibly raises it — that is the reason to build one.

Units

Units are not a second economy. They are tile control, a strike force, and the only way to reach a building. Each unit type is limited by the buildings that make it (2 at level 1, +1 per level), and every one already in the field makes the next +30 % dearer.

Humans

Dwarves

Elves

Every people — the Warship

Combat

Tile control — where you put your army is the strongest defence you have

Every unit within 3 tiles of a contested tile shifts what that tile costs. Only the strongest unit in range counts — it does not stack. Piling twenty soldiers on one tile is worth exactly one soldier; the same twenty spread along the border protect twenty times as much of it.

• Defenders raise the price by 300 % per point of holding power, up to +700 % — which any unit of 2.34 holding or better already reaches.
• Attackers lower it by 36 % per point of assault power, up to −78 %.

Holding the tile	Holding power	Tile costs
Nobody	—	×1.0
Blademaster	0.7	×3.1
Knight / Archer	1.0–1.1	×4.0–4.3
Wizard / Longbow / Crossbowman / Druid	1.2–1.4	×4.6–5.2
Shieldbearer	2.2	×7.6
Phoenix / Dragon / Runesmith / Battle Golem	2.4–4.0	×8.0 (the cap)

Read the top two rows together: the dwarves' cheapest soldier reaches 95 % of the ceiling, where humans and elves need a Dragon or a Phoenix to get there. That is what the Shieldbearer is paid for — and what it pays for by carrying no weapon.

A tower and a soldier add, they do not compound. A max-level Watchtower is +60 %, so tower plus Shieldbearer is ×8.2 of open field, not the ×12.2 the two would multiply out to. It is still the hardest ground on the map — but spreading the pair over two tiles now protects twice as much border, which is the shape a defence is supposed to have. Your own and allied units draw a faint disc showing exactly what they cover.

Nothing on the map is hidden

There is no stealth and no detection. There were thieves once — three of them, one per people, with three halls to train them, invisibility, detection radii on half the buildings and a whole set of rules about being seen. They came out of the game, and every unit is now simply visible to anyone who can see that patch of ground. One fewer thing to learn, and one fewer thing to balance against everything else.

Reach is measured body to body

Not centre to centre. Units keep each other about 0.8 tiles apart, so a melee unit whose raw range was under that could never satisfy its own reach check. This is why a Blademaster can hit a Knight and a Knight can hit a Golem.

Being shoved

Units push each other apart, and the push is split by mass: heavy units barely move. Six goblins shift a Shieldbearer 0.31 tiles; six Battle Golems shift it 1.37.

Attrition

Units standing in enemy territory lose 0.5 HP per second. Deep strikes have a clock.

Orders

Order	How	What it does
Move	right-click with units selected	The squad marches as a formation — each unit gets its own standing place on a spaced disc, nearest unit to nearest place, and parks where it stands on arrival
Spare buildings	X or the bar under the troop slider	These units will not attack any building except a Watchtower — that one shoots back. A captured province is worth far more than a razed one
Disband / Scrap	Delete or the bar under the troop slider	Removes the selection — caravans and merchantmen included, so a trader that has gone somewhere useless is never permanently in the way. A transport still at sea gives half its passengers back
Meteor	F with a Wizard selected	90 damage in radius 3 at the cursor. Costs 35 20, 12 s cooldown, range 10.5

Units under explicit orders only stop for buildings they walk past — they will not wander off to besiege something two screens away.

Two standing orders for the whole realm

These are the buttons under the troop bar, and they apply to everything you own.

Order	What it does	What it costs
Defend	A standing garrison: posts every soldier you have evenly along the contested border, and re-posts them every two seconds so the line follows the frontier as it moves. Moving the army by hand stands it down	Nothing
Repair	A standing order: masons mend damaged buildings and walls until you switch it off. The button turns and keeps turning while they work	Gold only
Your people's power	One devastating ability, aimed at a point on the map. See below	12 000, and rising

The race power — and what a late-game fortune is for

By the second half of a big match a developed realm earns faster than it can possibly spend: every plot worth a farm has one, every hall is at level five, and the stockpiles sit pinned at their ceiling wasting income. So each people has one devastating thing to burn a treasury on.

first use   12 000 wood + 12 000 stone + 12 000 gold  =  36 000
every use after that                                 =  +80 %

• Wood, stone and gold only. Never food, never mana — those are what a realm is already short of, and this is meant to drain a surplus, not compete with feeding your army.
• It only hits what is hostile to you. Aiming it at your own province does nothing at all, so there is no way to misfire into your own farms.
• Strikes aim themselves. Each one falls on something of theirs inside the ring when there is something, and at random inside it when there is not.
• It reaches anywhere on the map. There is no distance limit — what you are paying is thirty-six thousand of three resources, and that is the whole price. A realm squeezed into a corner needs this more than anybody, not less.
• The ground it takes goes back to the wilderness — walls and all. Nothing else in the game removes standing stonework at range, which makes this the answer to a neighbour who has fortified a border you cannot push.

Sizing the blast

Arm the power and a ring appears at the cursor. Scroll to grow or shrink it, from 16 tiles to 150 — and 150 is a circle of seventy thousand squares, over half the land in the world. The wheel moves it by a share of its current size, so fourteen turns take you from one end to the other.

The number of shots never changes. A calling always throws 100–120 strikes, whatever ring you set — only how far apart they land is up to you. Wind it in and a hundred rocks fall inside sixteen tiles and nothing is left standing; wind it out and the same hundred are scattered across half a continent, a wide shallow ruin rather than a killing blow. That is the whole decision.

What the masons do

Your realm mends 26 HP a second in total, spread over whatever is damaged, stonework first. That is deliberately far below what an army does — four knights take a rampart apart five times faster than this puts it back — so it never reads as invulnerability. What it does do is bleed an attacker's progress while they work, and quietly put a province back together once they have gone.

Mending	Gold per HP	A full repair
An ordinary building	0.09	18 gold on a 200-HP Farm
A wall, a gate or a Watchtower	0.55	341 gold on a 620-HP rampart

War at sea

Build a Harbour on a coastal tile, press H, and click a shore across the water. A transport carries your attack ratio there and lands it as an invasion.

• Transports route over water only — a real path, so they round a headland instead of grinding along it.
• Click a little inland and it lands on the nearest beach rather than sailing in circles.
• Redirect one mid-voyage by right-clicking with it selected.
• Right-click open water and it holds station there — sails out, waits, and does not time out. Park a loaded ship off a coast and choose your moment.
• The number under the hull is how many men are aboard, shown only on your own and your allies' ships. To everyone else it is a hull on the horizon.
• Landing on an ally's coast disembarks without invading.
• They are defenceless at sea. Sinking one drowns the men.

Warships

Which is what the Warship is for. With a Harbour of your own, right-click open water and a hull is laid down at your nearest pier and sails to the spot you clicked. It fights like any other soldier — it hunts on its own once you are at war, and takes orders like a squad — with one difference that decides everything about it: it never touches the shore. It claims no ground, scrubs none, and cannot help you take a single field.

• What it kills: transports, merchantmen, other warships — and Harbours, which it can burn to the ground from the water.
• One berth per Harbour level. A level-3 pier keeps three hulls. A navy is bought pier by pier, and every hull already at sea makes the next one dearer.
• Every people sails the same ship — a human carrack, a dwarven ironclad, an elven cutter — with identical statistics. You should know whose fleet is on the horizon before you can read its health bar; you should not have to learn three sets of numbers.
• It is in the Light edition too.

The three peoples

Monster camps

The wilderness is not empty. Camps are tiny teamless realms that hate everyone — including each other — scattered across the whole map, roughly one per 1 400 tiles of land.

Lair	Breeds	Notes
Orc Camp	Orc Raiders, occasional Ogres	Raiders burn territory as they pass
Goblin Warren	Goblins	Fast, fragile, always in numbers
Murloc Lagoon	Murlocs	Always coastal
Wyvern Nest	Wyverns	Fly over everything
Griffin Nest	Griffins	Very fast, wide vision

Creatures stay on a leash near their lair. Every camp sits on a hoard it has foraged and plundered, and whoever destroys the lair inherits all of it — camps are worth hunting. Raze the lair and the warband dies with it.

Cleared camps do not stay cleared: a new warband moves into the wilderness elsewhere after a while. New camps never appear on a built-up patch, and are refused on claimed land 65 % of the time. Camp-held ground does not count against the victory line.

War & trade

A war has to be declared

Your soldiers will not attack a kingdom you have never fought. Two armies can stand on either side of a border indefinitely and neither will draw. Watchtowers hold their fire. Even a wizard's blast spares bystanders from a realm you have no quarrel with.

There are two ways to start one, and both are deliberate:

• Attack their territory. The ordinary way, against a neighbour you share a border with.
• Send your soldiers after one of their units. Select your men and right-click the unit itself — a caravan on the road, a patrol crossing your fields. This works at any distance and needs no shared border, which is the whole point: a loaded wagon belonging to a kingdom on the other side of the map used to be untouchable no matter what it drove past. Your men will chase it until it is dead, and any other march order calls them back.
• Send your soldiers at one of their walls. Select your men and right-click the wall. Same gesture, aimed at stonework — and the only answer to a frontier somebody closed against a realm they had never fought. See Walls & gates.

From that moment the two realms are at war permanently — soldiers engage on sight, towers shoot, ground can be taken by units, and the trade road between you closes for the rest of the match. Kingdoms you are at war with wear crossed swords over their name on the map.

There is no chat. What is left of diplomacy is help for your own team, and on a team-mate's ground the two mouse buttons do the two things worth doing: right-click opens the wheel, with Aid in the middle, left-click opens the aid cart. Everything else is map pings.

Action	Cost	Notes
Gift resources	10 % tax, 0 % with a Market	Instant. The answer to terrain specialisation
Send your people	free, 8 s per recipient	Right-click a team-mate's ground and take Aid in the middle of the wheel. The share your attack slider is set to leaves your reserve for theirs at once, with nothing lost on the way. Only what fits under their population ceiling crosses — the rest simply stays at home, so you can never waste men on a country that is already full
Relief caravan	free, 8 s cooldown	Up to 600 of each resource. Both kingdoms need a Market. It walks the real distance and can be raided — the killer takes a quarter of the load, and the rest is lost
Adjacency defence	automatic	+15 % for both of you, for sharing a border
Market network	automatic	Every team-mate's Market raises the whole team's income by 4 %, up to +20 %
Map pings	free	"Attack here", "defend here", "need resources"

Caravans

Every Market sends gold caravans to other markets on its own — you never build or pay for one. The freight is set when the wagon leaves (up to 500, richer the further it is going). Kill somebody else's and the freight is yours.

How a trader finds its way

Wagons and merchantmen steer themselves, and you never give them an order. Two rules govern how: they go round what they cannot go through, and they reconsider the errand every two seconds.

• Obstacles are routed around, not walked into. A wagon works out a real road to its market and follows it — round a bay of deep water, round a spur of High Peaks, and through the gate in a rampart rather than into the stonework beside it. A merchantman does the same at sea, working round a headland instead of pressing against it. Neither will ever set out at something it has no route to.
• The orders are re-asked every two seconds. An errand that was legal when it was set can stop being legal while the journey is still happening — and until recently nothing noticed. Every wagon and hull now re-checks, on the road:
  • Is the market still standing and finished?
  • Has it changed hands? A market captured by somebody you are at war with is no longer a place you may trade, even though the building has not moved.
  • Is it still reachable — over land for a wagon, over one connected body of water for a hull?
• If the answer is no, it goes somewhere else. The trader picks the best market still open to it and sets off there, exactly as the dispatch would have chosen. Only if there is nowhere left at all does it turn for home with the load unsold — and only if it has no home to return to either is it scuttled.

A wagon cannot swim. A market across open water, or behind a sealed mountain range, is never chosen and cannot be chosen by hand: the road has to exist. Trade over water is what harbours are for.

It does follow a real road, though. A caravan routes properly around anything in its way and finds the gate in your own wall rather than pressing into the rampart beside it — so walling your realm in does not quietly strangle your own trade. If one ever does end up somewhere useless, select it and Scrap it.

What a delivery is worth to the sender, as a multiple of the freight:

Partner	You get	They get	Why
Your own market	×1.0	—	Moving money from one pocket to the other
An ally	×1.0	40 %	A shared enterprise: both treasuries grow
A rival	×1.6	nothing	You take their host's share and 20 % for the nerve. You are extracting, not developing
Another people	+0.5	unchanged	What a dwarf hall wants is not what an elf grove wants, and the merchant profits by the gap
A rival of another people	×2.1	nothing	The best trade in the game

Trade ships

Harbours do exactly the same thing, over water. Each one sends merchantmen to foreign harbours on its own: out with a hold of goods, the host paid on arrival, and you paid only when the hull ties up at home again — the same round trip, the same payout table, the same permanent grudge rule. A hull carries about 45 % more than a cart of the same trade and sails much further, and the limit is one ship at sea per harbour level you own.

What is different is the map. A ship is stopped by the first stretch of land exactly as a wagon is stopped by the first stretch of sea, so a harbour trades with every harbour on its own water and none anywhere else — a port on a landlocked lake trades only with that lake. That is what makes an island kingdom viable: no road reaches it, and it does not need one.

Victory & defeat

There is no clock on the war. It ends when a team holds 90 % of the settled world — every claimable tile, minus whatever monster camps are squatting on right now, and minus every tile under a wall or a gate. A bar in the top bar tracks the leader's share.