Combat

Your units

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  Housecarls fight on the beaches and docks. They both attack and defend.
• 
  Faerings are small, fast rowboats built to strike the narrow mouth of a harbor. They only attack.
• 
  Beacon Forts are fixed defenses at the harbor mouth. They never move and can never be sold or traded away.
• 
  Longships are your warships, built to fight in the open sea.
• 
  Knarrs carry your soldiers and your cargo, but never fight themselves. How many you have decides how many Housecarls and Faerings you can actually land.
• 
  Your Drekar is your one great dragon ship. It grows stronger with every fight it wins, and if it loses badly, it can be sunk for good.

Every fleet you send out is limited by Command points, which come from your Longhouse Isles. A bigger fleet needs more Command points to field, so building more Longhouse Isles is how you raise the cap on how large a force you can send anywhere at once.

The three fronts

A full attack fights in three places at the same time, so no single kind of ship or soldier wins a battle by itself.

The three counter each other in a circle, like rock-paper-scissors: Longships beat Housecarls in the open, Housecarls beat Faerings on the beach, and Faerings beat Longships in tight water. No single strategy always wins.

Win two of the three fronts and you win the whole battle, and each front you win unlocks something different. Win the Deep and you can blockade ships and steal cargo. Win the Narrows and you can loot their stores and damage their forts. Win the Strand and you can seize one of their isles, the only way to actually take land in a fight. Winning two fronts but not the Strand still gets you loot and a blockade, just not land.

How a battle plays out

A battle isn't settled in one instant strike. It plays out over several rounds, and on each front, both sides lose strength based on how the two sides compare to each other, not on raw numbers alone, so a much larger fleet doesn't get an outsized advantage just for being large. Whoever holds the clear majority of strength on a front once the rounds are done wins that front.

Defenders get a home advantage just for fighting on their own ground. And if an attacker shows up badly outmatched on every front at once, they don't just lose. They lose worse: an attack that's overmatched everywhere costs the attacker far more than a normal defeat would.

Attacking someone your own size

How much you gain from a fight depends on how big the target is compared to you. Attack someone much smaller and there's almost nothing to gain, plus it costs you standing with the Harbor Authority for picking on someone who couldn't really fight back. Attack someone close to your own size and the reward is at its best. You can still raid a jarl much bigger than you, but you can't launch a full attack on them.

Getting hit recently also softens the next hit. A jarldom that's already been attacked in the last day loses less to each attack after that, so one jarl can't be picked apart by a string of back-to-back hits.

Strandhogg

A Strandhogg is a fast, surprise coastal raid, an old word for landing, grabbing what you can carry, and leaving before anyone can respond. It gives the target no warning, and their Oath-sworn allies can't get there in time to help even if they wanted to.

A Strandhogg can never take an isle, and what it steals is capped and limited to loose gold, not goods or people. In exchange for that limit, it scales fairly: the smaller the target is next to you, the smaller the reward, which is what makes it a real tool for a small jarl to strike a much bigger one without it being free money. The raiders do risk getting caught and named publicly for it.

Contraband

Contraband means banned weapons that no shop sells. Sometimes your Informants hear about a secret dealer offering some, covered in full on the Covert Ops page. There are three kinds: Fire, which burns down buildings; Blight, which poisons food and slows a jarldom's growth; and Dread, which spreads fear and weakens an enemy's fighters for a day without destroying anything.

The moment anyone uses Contraband, everyone finds out. It's written into the public record with the user's name attached, and it always costs Renown. There's no way to use it and stay hidden.