City Capture¶
The five contested cities of the mainland change hands through three very different mechanics. This variety is deliberate — it keeps the war from becoming a single repetitive contest and rewards factions that can fight in many styles.
Control Points — Britain & Minoc¶
A control-point battle is a contest of presence and coordination fought across several zones within a city.
- Each control-point city has multiple capture zones at strategic locations (gates, plazas, districts).
- A faction earns points for a zone only while it holds a majority presence within that zone — bodies on the ground matter.
- Points accumulate over the course of the battle. The first faction to reach the point threshold wins the city.
- Battles run on a timed window (roughly 30–45 minutes).
- If the timer expires with no faction reaching the threshold, the city becomes neutral — no one wins.
Control-point battles reward numbers, positioning, and the discipline to hold ground under pressure. Spread too thin across every zone and you hold none; concentrate everything in one and you cede the rest.
Weekly Siege — Skara Brae¶
Skara Brae is taken by siege — a scheduled, high-drama battle held once a week.
The schedule. The siege runs at a fixed weekly time. Everyone knows when it's coming, so everyone shows up.
The defenses. The city is protected by a ring of destructible gates — outer and inner gates on multiple approaches. Attackers must break through to reach the objective. Gates are heavily armored and take coordinated effort to destroy.
The defenders. Throughout the siege, the city is defended by a local ranger militia and elite ranger guards, culminating in a named champion. When the city is held by a faction, these defenders fight as that faction's garrison — and even wear the controlling faction's colors. When the city is neutral, they are a hostile local uprising, opposed to all factions alike.
The objective. Attackers must defeat the defending champion within the siege window. The faction that deals the most damage to the champion claims the city. If the champion survives the hour, the city falls to neutrality for the week — no faction gains anything.
The rules of engagement. Only faction members may take part. Non-faction players cannot damage the gates, the defenders, or the champion, and are turned away from the fight.
Sigil Raid — Cove¶
Cove is the most intricate prize on the map, taken in two stages: breach, then corrupt.
Stage One — Breach. Cove is walled by destructible gates (outer and inner, on multiple approaches, as at Skara Brae) and defended by an orcish garrison. During the siege window, attackers must break through the gates and fight into the city.
Stage Two — Steal the Sigil. At the heart of Cove sits a single town sigil on its pedestal. A raider must seize it and carry it out of the city.
Stage Three — Corrupt the Sigil. The sigil must be carried back to the raiding faction's own home base and placed upon that faction's corruption pedestal, where it begins a thirty-minute corruption. Hold the sigil through corruption and the city is yours.
The contest for the sigil. The sigil is fiercely contested every step of the way: - If the carrier is slain, the sigil drops to their corpse — and the first player to claim it becomes the new carrier, friend or foe. A raid can be intercepted and reversed in an instant. - While a sigil corrupts on a faction's pedestal, rival factions can raid that home base and pull the sigil back off the pedestal, resetting the attempt.
Overtime. If the siege window ends while a sigil is actively corrupting on a pedestal, the contest continues into overtime — the siege does not end until the corruption either completes (a winner is crowned) or is interrupted. Meanwhile Cove itself resets to peace, its gates restored, because the true battle has moved to the home base where the sigil is held.
Neutrality. If the window ends with no sigil actively corrupting, the sigil returns home to Cove and the city falls neutral for the week.
A Note on Variety¶
No two cities fall the same way. Britain and Minoc demand mass coordination in the open; Skara Brae is a scheduled, gate-breaking assault on a defended champion; Cove is a raid-and-hold heist that can spill from the target city all the way back to your own front door. A faction that masters only one style will find itself outmatched wherever the fight takes a different shape.