System mechanic — not covered elsewhere

Settlements

Taking a settlement is the easy part. Hold it long enough and its old owner always wants it back

Three settlements in the world can be taken, held, and lost: Penjamin City, The Rival City, and The Town. Taking one means breaking its garrison in a fight; holding one pays out a steady income called the tithe. None of it is permanent — every settlement you hold is, sooner or later, coming under attack from whoever you took it from, and losing that fight costs you everything you've built there. A separate system, the Charter Stake, lets a player found an entirely new town of their own rather than fighting over these three fixed ones.

The three settlements

Taking a settlement

Declaring a siege sends waves of that settlement's garrison — a mix of knights and soldiers — out through its four gates to fight you. Break the garrison (kill the number listed above) and the settlement is yours: a banner over the settlement, visible from outside, immediately shows who holds it. You can only besiege one settlement at a time, and can't besiege somewhere you already own.

The tithe

A settlement you hold pays a steady tithe into its own treasury, accruing continuously while you're actually playing (it stops the moment you close the tab rather than draining in the background) and collectible as cash whenever you like. Holding The Rival City specifically also discounts its own market by 25% while it's yours.

Reclamation: someone always wants it back

Hold a settlement for 7 minutes of active play and its former owner mounts a reclamation attempt, giving you a 5-minute window to reach the settlement and break the assault the same way you first took it — attackers only actually spawn once you're close enough to fight them, so an assault you're travelling toward doesn't quietly fill the far side of the map with knights while you're still on your way. Break the assault and you keep the place, and its loyalty rises. Ignore it and lose, and the settlement, its whole treasury, and every point of loyalty you'd built are all gone at once.

Loyalty: defending pays better than expanding

Successfully holding a settlement through a reclamation assault raises its loyalty, capped at 4 steps, each step adding a flat 30% to that settlement's tithe — a fully loyal settlement pays ×2.20 its base tithe. The lower half of that loyalty track can also be built more gently: fulfilling a citizen's favour inside a settlement you own raises loyalty too, at five favours per point, though favours alone only reach the halfway point (loyalty 2 of 4) — the upper half is earned exclusively by surviving an actual assault. A married spouse can also be stationed at a settlement you hold to help defend it in your place.

Version history

• Settlements introduced as something you could take permanently — break a garrison once and it was yours for the rest of the save, generating tithe quietly with nothing to defend and no way to lose it.
• Reclamation added, turning ownership into something genuinely at stake: "owning a town," described as a big part of the game, had in practice been a one-time cash unlock rather than a real hold. After this, every settlement you take is eventually contested again, and losing an assault costs you everything built there. Two deliberate kindnesses were built in alongside the pressure: the hold clock only runs while you're actually playing, and attackers never spawn until you're close enough to fight them.
• A kill-crediting bug in assaults was fixed. Whether a kill counted toward breaking an assault was originally based on proximity alone — but an assault's attackers spawn as the exact same enemy types as a settlement's own garrison, so any knight dying near your walls counted, including ones your own town guards killed while you stood there uninvolved. Attackers spawned during an assault are now individually tagged, so only kills against the actual attackers count.
• Citizen favours tied to loyalty. A citizen standing inside a settlement now reacts to who actually holds it, and fulfilling their favours inside a settlement you own contributes toward loyalty too — a gentler, parallel path to the same track that surviving an assault also builds.
• A display radius fix. The on-screen "you have arrived" notice was sharing its trigger distance with the much larger mechanical radius that decides whether an assault counts you as defending at all — so the game announced your arrival while you were still most of a field away from the actual walls, and then said nothing further for the rest of the approach. Given its own, smaller display radius; the mechanical test that decides who's actually defending was untouched.

Trivia

• The Rival City is the only one of the three that starts already owned by an active, hostile faction rather than sitting unclaimed — taking it is a fight from the very first attempt, not just on reclamation.
• All three settlements share one true permanent-destruction risk: a Nuclear Bomb caught near enough to a city reduces its buildings to rubble for good, tracked completely separately from ordinary garrison capture or the Rival City's own war.
• The Town needs the fewest garrison kills of the three to take (8) and pays the smallest base tithe (25/min); Penjamin City and The Rival City both cost more to break and pay proportionally more for holding them.
• Holding Penjamin City changes the Drift Bank's own robbery screen — the vault's float becomes your own money, and the robbery option disappears entirely in favour of a plain withdrawal.
• The Town's own houses come from a set of four building kits — a squat cottage, a wide jettied house with a stone chimney, a long low building with two doors, and a narrow, tall one with an external staircase — deliberately told apart by silhouette rather than surface decoration, so each one still reads as a different building from a distance rather than up close. Which kit stands on which plot is decided by a fixed hash rather than being hand-placed or random each visit, so the same house always stands in the same spot.