Match Dynamics

Ironhold is pre-alpha. Everything here is checked against the current build, and all of it is subject to change.

Founding a kingdom

A founding match begins with your King and a small group of peasants gathered around a campfire, not with a finished castle. Possess the King, choose a site inside the marked founding area, and place the Keep. Your peasants build it while the rest of the realm waits. RTS command and the full starting army become available when the Keep is complete.

The camp is an opening landmark rather than a permanent production building. Idle founding peasants stay close to it until work is available, and immediately leave that routine when they are assigned a real job.

Influence and expansion

A completed Keep establishes the territory where your economy and military buildings can be planned. The placement view shows this kingdom influence as a boundary; the whole footprint of a building must fit inside it. Ordinary buildings do not extend the boundary themselves, so a chain of cheap structures cannot leapfrog across the map.

Claimed Wells are the expansion anchors. Each one creates a smaller pocket of influence and raises your barracks limit, turning a remote objective into a place where a forward estate can actually grow. A small outpost appears beside an owned Well so that territorial control is visible even when the influence overlay is hidden. If ownership changes, the same outpost changes allegiance with it.

Plans and builders

Placing an ordinary building commits its resources and creates a construction plan rather than an instant finished structure. The nearest reachable unemployed peasant reserves the job, travels to the entrance, and builds it over time. Until completion, the plan provides no housing, storage, production, barracks capacity, or influence.

Construction is part of the labour economy. Drafting peasants into soldiers or spreading work across several sites leaves fewer hands available to build. A blocked route, reassigned worker, or worker death pauses the plan while it looks for a replacement. Plans can be prioritised or cancelled, and active sites can be attacked before the finished building exists.

Town movement

Buildings occupy real space. Their entrance faces local forward, with a short traffic lane that must remain clear when you place them. Workers, builders, and freshly trained troops use that entrance, so streets and approaches are functional parts of a settlement rather than decoration.

Wells

You can capture neutral Wells or build a new Well outside your existing influence. A new site must be reached and built by a peasant, and enemies can attack it during construction. Once complete, a Well adds a pocket of territory, estate population and one extra barracks slot.

Once claimed, a well stays yours after your units walk away. Its benefits end if another lord captures it or the Well is destroyed. An enemy standing in the same radius contests it: capture progress freezes for both sides, so parking a few units on a well you cannot take is still worth doing.

The barracks limit

You can only run two line barracks, plus one more for every well you hold. That cap counts your line barracks, including the Infantry Barracks and Archery Range — and nothing else. The Hero's Altar and Siege Camp are exempt, so building them never costs you a troop-production slot.

This is the main reason to fight over wells. More barracks is more parallel training, and training throughput is what caps army size in a long match.

Continuous training

Each barracks has a queue, and can be set to keep re-queuing a batch rather than stopping when it empties. Set it once and the building keeps producing.

It switches itself off when you can no longer pay for the next batch — whether that is resources, manufactured goods, or population. If your army has quietly stopped growing, an auto-training barracks that ran out of weapons is the usual culprit.

The barracks upgrade

Your heavier troops — swordsmen, macemen, pikemen, knights, crossbowmen — are locked until you spend honour on the barracks upgrade. Honour is earned by fighting — there is no way to farm it from your own territory — so access to better troops is gated behind actually committing to battle rather than sitting behind walls.

Day and night

Days are considerably longer than nights, with a gradual transition between them. Night is not cosmetic: detection range is cut sharply, so units, walls and buildings all spot enemies far later than they would in daylight. An archer who would normally engage at long range will hold fire until the target is close.

Once it is dark enough, fog closes in over ground you have no vision of. Night is the window for moving an army somewhere it should not be able to go unseen — and the time to be nervous about your own blind spots. The whole cycle can be switched off in the lobby if you would rather not play with it.

Winning