Game Mechanics

Resource Chains

Resources are produced through a tiered chain system. Basic resources feed into processing buildings that create increasingly valuable goods. Basic and advanced (Tier 1–2) goods are open to every estate. The luxury (Tier 3) tier is the contested ceiling: each luxury building requires both a catalyst resource (primarily from contestable special locations) and a Master craftsman — see Master Specialization below.

Basic Resources

Produced by the foundational buildings on your estate. These feed everything else in the chain.

Refined Resources (Estate & Outposts)

Refined resources are the connective tissue of the economy: almost every Tier 1+ processing building requires them. You can produce them two ways.

On your estate (the steady floor): your Lumbermill, Quarry and Mine begin refining automatically once they reach level 5, producing a small amount of the matching refined good each tick on top of their raw output. This costs no extra building slot and consumes no raw resources. Output grows with building level, so levelling these buildings is the simplest path to refined materials.

At outposts (the high-throughput ceiling): refining structures (level 3+ structures) consume 4 base resource per tick and produce 2 refined per tick (2:1 conversion), at much higher volume than the estate floor. Outposts are the way to scale refined production once you want serious throughput.

Tier 1 — Processed Goods

Tier 2 — Advanced Goods

Open to every estate — no catalysts required. Steel, glass, beer and salt are part of normal progression.

Amber is the exception — it is itself a luxury good (catalyst + Master gated, see below).

Tier 3 — Luxury Goods Master required

Each luxury building produces nothing unless a Master craftsman of the matching craft is assigned to it, and requires a catalyst input. Luxuries are optional — they never gate normal progression — but they are the premium export and the main sink for top-tier gear and consumables.

Master Specialization

Build a Guild Hall (City tier, after the Guild Charter knowledge) to raise Masters. An expert who has trained a required combination of skills to level 10 can ascend to a Master of one craft — the only experts who can run a luxury building. Master slots are scarce: 1 per 2 Guild Hall levels, capped at 3. Basic luxuries need two maxed skills (e.g. Luxury Weaving needs maxed Weaving + Herding); the top luxury, Stained Glass, needs three. Ascension is a deliberate, near-permanent commitment — reverting a Master is a costly, timed respec that frees the slot. Choose which crafts to dominate; you cannot master everything.

Catalyst Sources

Four catalyst resources feed the luxury tier. Their primary, contestable source is special locations (which can be claimed, garrisoned and attacked); level 6+ outposts emit only a slow trickle. Controlling the right special location is therefore a defensible trade advantage — non-holders must buy from holders. Catalysts no longer gate Tier 2, so they never block normal progression.

Estate Development

Every estate shares the same generous building cap of 100, so you can raise an interesting estate at any tier. Growing from Village → Hub → City rewards new capabilities rather than more room, and is run as a staged construction project from the Buildings → Development tab — not a single click-and-wait.

• Village — the manual tier. Build and collect by hand; basic and mid-tier production.
• Hub — automation & efficiency. Your Cart Yard unlocks building extensions (auto-collection, reinforced storage, gleaning crews) and a larger expert roster.
• City — luxury & new trades. The six luxury workshops become buildable, and your expert roster is largest.

Each upgrade is divided into four phases. Opening the construction site is free; you then fund each phase individually with its own resource bundle. A funded phase builds on its own timer, and when it finishes you claim an interim reward into your reward chest and unlock the next phase. The four phase timers add up to the full upgrade time (6 hours for Hub — four even 1½ hour phases — and 48 hours for City).

On the estate canvas, a construction scaffold rises through the phases so your progress is visible. Claiming the final phase upgrades the tier, grants a Battle Pass XP burst, and raises a permanent landmark on your estate (a Hub charter post or a City Ringmür watchtower) that other players see when they visit and admire your estate.

Terrain & Placement Yield

Your estate grounds are not uniform. A terrain field unique to your estate gives every spot a quality for each basic resource, and it is written into the land you see: dense woods favour the Lumbermill, rocky rises favour the Quarry and Mine, and fertile flats along a creek favour the Farm and Shepherd’s Hut.

Placing a resource producer on good ground raises its output up to +25%; a poor spot costs up to −15%. An average spot is neutral, so placement is a real choice, never a trap. While you are placing a producer the ground tints green where it will do well and red where it will do poorly, and a tag on the ghost shows the exact multiplier. Processing buildings (forge, glassworks, brewery…) are unaffected — they care about their inputs, not the soil.

Your ground never changes. The terrain field is fixed to your estate for its whole life, so upgrading your tier only opens more land: the woods, rock and creeks you planned around stay exactly where they are, and the new area extends the same landscape outward. Plan your Village layout knowing it will still make sense as a City.

Creeks & Bridges Season realm

Up to two creeks (bäckar) run through every estate. They have always been part of your ground, feeding the fertile flats your farms love. Now they flow on the map, and you build around them.

• No building may stand in a creek. A building’s footprint has to clear the water and its banks, and the placement ghost turns red over a creek.
• A road cannot cross a creek. A bridge can. Open Roads and choose Draw Bridge, then draw from a road end straight across the water; the end snaps to the far bank. A bridge is a road section like any other and costs 2.5× the stone and lumber of a road of the same length. It must actually span water.
• Carts never wade. When a creek lies between the Cart Yard and a site, a cart crosses at the nearest bridge or walks round the end of the creek, whichever is shorter, and the delivery takes as long as that route. A well-placed bridge can take minutes off every haul across the water. Carts are never stuck: if there is no way round, the goods still arrive.
• Ground across the water. If a creek separates a spot from your City Center, the placement bar warns you (“Across the bäck”). You can still build there, but its carts take the long way round until you bridge the creek.

Walls, Gates & Lights Season realm

Fence your fields and yards with walls. Open Decor and draw a wall the way you draw a road: drag it out, then pull its handles to curve it.

• Walls block like water. Buildings, roads and carts cannot pass through a wall. Carts go through gates.
• Gates: draw a road across a wall and a gate is cut automatically, with its cost added to the road. The road has to meet the wall squarely enough (at least 35°) and away from the wall’s ends and other gates. You can also add a gate by hand with Place Gate.
• Keep the City Center reachable. You cannot build on ground your walls have shut off from the City Center, and a wall that would shut off an existing building is refused. Leave a gate.
• Changing your mind: reshaping a wall with Edit Walls only charges for the length you add. Shortening or knocking down a wall, or bricking up a gate, refunds nothing.

Lights brighten your estate through its 12-minute day and night: the Fackla (torch, 3 lumber and 1 tar), the Eldkorg (brazier, 2 iron ingots and 4 lumber) and the Lykta (lantern post, 1 iron ingot, 2 planks and 1 tar). Each throws a warm pool of light after dark. They are purely decorative and replace the old decorations (trees, benches, barrels and the rest), which were removed and refunded at the price you paid for them.

City Logistics — the City Center & Cart Yard

Every estate begins with two special buildings that you never have to build:

• City Center — the heart of your estate and its central warehouse. It provides the bulk of your storage capacity and grows automatically as you advance your tier (Village → Hub → City), storing more of every resource. You cannot upgrade it by hand.
• Cart Yard — home of your carts. Upgrade it to field more carts, which deliver to more sites at once and keep your refiners fed. Carts are a shared, limited fleet that never sits idle: the moment a cart gets home it is sent straight back out to whatever needs it most. When work competes for the fleet, it is served in this order — construction sites first, then refinery restocking, then goods waiting at the Trading Post, and finally producer buffers. More carts means a faster-running city. At Hub tier the Cart Yard also unlocks building extensions — Collection Cart (auto-collects a building's buffer, ending manual collection), Reinforced Storage (doubles a building's buffer), and Gleaning Crew (a chance at bonus resources) — with more extension slots as you upgrade it.

Construction is delivery-gated. When you place a building or upgrade, carts haul its materials from the City Center to the site along your roads — you'll see them travel, and a delivery bar (sky-blue) shows how much has arrived. Work only proceeds as far as the materials on site allow: if half the materials have arrived, the building can only reach halfway until the rest is delivered. A build waiting on carts shows “% hauled” instead of a countdown.

Refineries pull their own inputs. A refining building (forge, glassworks, brewery, and the like) keeps a small on-site stock of its inputs, topped up by carts from the City Center. It only refines on a tick when the inputs are actually on site — a refiner that has run dry shows a blue “!” badge until the next cart arrives. Its outputs still flow straight back into your central storage.

You are never hard-blocked: even with no free carts or no road drawn, a baseline hauler still delivers (just more slowly), so every build finishes and every refiner eventually resumes. Drawing roads and upgrading the Cart Yard simply make the whole city run faster — logistics is an optimisation, not a wall.

Your people eat from the fields. Troops, experts and caravan escorts eat wheat every minute, whether or not you are logged in. If your stored wheat runs short, the shortfall is taken straight out of the standing crop: uncollected wheat sitting in your farms (and any waiting at the Trading Post) feeds the estate before anyone starves. An army will never starve while there is grain in your fields, so you can go to bed without emptying every farm first.

Collecting still matters. Grain eaten in the field never reaches your warehouse, and only stored wheat can be spent on recruiting, construction or trade. What you collect is your surplus, and a farm left full long enough still overflows and wastes what it cannot hold. Feeding your people is automatic; getting ahead is not.

Combat Overview

Combat in Imperia Borealis revolves around two core stats: Offensive Power and Defensive Power. When armies clash, each side's total power determines how many casualties the other side suffers.

There are several combat contexts in the game: estate raids (PvP), bandit camps, special location garrisons, and outpost garrisons. Most modifiers apply across all types, with some being context-specific.

Casualties are damage-conserving: the kills a stack suffers are proportional to the damage it actually takes. A unit needs damage equal to its Defensive value to fall. Whole kills always land, and any leftover damage becomes a chance at one more kill, but only when that leftover is at least 10% of a unit's health.

A wide range of modifiers affect these calculations. Every modifier stacks multiplicatively, so they compound rather than simply adding together.

Combat resolves through a 6-phase system (Enter Battle → Positioning → First Attack → Charge → Main Attack → Withdraw), where units with specific keywords act in different phases. For the full breakdown of phases and all 16 combat keywords, see the Combat Guide.

Unit Base Stats

Each unit type has base offensive and defensive values. These are the raw numbers before any modifiers are applied.

Building Bonuses

Barracks

Each level of barracks provides a +5% bonus to both offensive and defensive power for all your units, up to a maximum of +50% at level 10.

Pillaging

After a successful attack on an estate, the attacker steals a percentage of the defender's resources.

Gear & Equipment

Equipment is assigned to individual units. If you have 50 militia and 30 iron swords, only 30 of those militia benefit from the sword bonus. The bonus scales proportionally to the fraction of equipped units.

Weapons

Tier progression: Iron → Reinforced → Steel. Each tier replaces the previous one on the unit.

Armor

Gear Upkeep

Equipped gear is not free once it is made. Every item your troops carry costs a slice of the materials it was forged from, every day it stays in the field. Unequipped troops still eat wheat, as they always have — but a steel-armed company also burns steel.

The cost is denominated in whatever the item is built from, broken down to raw materials. A steel sword costs steel and lumber. A crossbow costs wrought iron, lumber and iron ore. Leather gear costs wool and tar. Roughly, an item costs its own build price every five days it remains equipped.

Upkeep is charged once an hour, and it accrues from the moment gear is equipped. Taking gear off mid-hour does not cancel the bill for the time it was already worn.

Breakage & the Downgrade Cascade

If you cannot pay, gear breaks. Each resource is billed separately, and only the gear that needs the missing material suffers: run out of tar and your leather rots while your steel is untouched. Broken gear is destroyed — it does not return to your storehouse.

Troops do not fight bare-handed if you have spares. When an item breaks, the best lower-tier replacement in storage is issued automatically: steel gives way to reinforced, reinforced to iron, iron to nothing. An army you cannot afford does not vanish; it degrades, one rung at a time, and keeps fighting the whole way down.

Raiding a Stockpile

Gear sitting in your storehouse is part of the loot. A successful attack on your estate carries off part of your unequipped gear and burns part of what remains — a reserve kit is insurance, but insurance an enemy can reach. Gear already worn by your troops is never stolen this way; it is lost only when its bearer falls, or when its upkeep goes unpaid.

The consequence is deliberate: burning an enemy's material reserves is a legitimate way to fight. Starve the forges and the army in the field starts losing its weapons on its own.

Keyword-Granting Weapons

Advanced weapons unlocked through the knowledge tree grant combat keywords to equipped units, changing how they fight in the phase-based combat system. When only some units of a type are equipped (e.g. 30 of 50 militia have crossbows), the army splits: equipped units fight with the keyword, the rest fight normally.

Monk & Shaman Auras

Religious units provide passive aura bonuses to your entire army, not just their own combat power.

Rituals

Rituals are temporary, powerful effects activated by spending faith. Some are available to all followers of a religion; others require specific specialization perks.

Base Rituals (Available to All)

Perk-Unlocked Rituals

Specialization Perks

As you progress along a religious specialization path, you unlock passive bonuses and powerful rituals. You may only choose one perk per tier. Below are all perks that directly affect combat.

Berserker Path (Aesir — Offense & Raiding)

Paladin Path (Christianity — Defense & Garrisons)

Other Paths with Combat Effects

Tool Buffs

Consumable tools crafted at the workshop can provide temporary combat effects.

Bounty Board

The Bounty Board is a daily PvE campaign system, gated behind the Bounty Hall building. It gives players a structured combat path that does not require attacking other estates.

• The board rotates once per UTC day and is identical for every player, so leaderboards and conversation align around the same set of contracts.
• Each day offers 6 bounties: 3 easy, 2 medium, 1 hard. Difficulty determines step count, payout, and recommended army size.
• Bounties are multi-step campaigns — a mix of combat raids, timed siege phases, caravan dispatches, and expert assignments.
• Only one active bounty at a time. Abandoning starts a cooldown before the next can be accepted.
• Rewards arrive as claimable chests: resources, gear blueprints, battle-pass XP, and cosmetics. A completion bonus is granted once every step is claimed.

Territory & Alliance Modifiers

Defenders benefit from geographic and alliance advantages. These bonuses apply only to the defending side.

Claiming & Sieging Fortifications

Raising, contesting, and sieging parish fortifications is an alliance-only activity. You must belong to an alliance to take part, and only an alliance leader or officer can start a claim or a siege — the cost is paid from the alliance treasury.

To take an enemy-held parish, your alliance lays a siege against its fortification while it is claimed or still in its contested window. A siege camp is raised beside the fort and the two garrisons fight an automatic battle every hour until one is destroyed or the 24-hour timer runs out. There is no way to attack a fortification with a lone army — unaligned players cannot siege, so join or found an alliance first.

Fortification Upkeep

A fortification keeps two separate stores, filled by two different caravans. Mixing them up is the most common reason a fort starves or decays while its owner thinks it is well supplied.

Send wheat with the Send Food caravan (or switch on auto-supply, which tops the garrison up automatically). Send everything else with the Send Upkeep Resources caravan. Upkeep never charges wheat — all food pressure sits on the garrison store.

The three fortifications closest to your alliance's home parish pay no upkeep at all, so a small alliance can hold territory without being priced out. Beyond those three, the daily bill grows with distance, and a parish granary discounts it (−10% / −20% / −30% by level).

Upkeep by fortification tier

A larger fortification demands more, and each tier brings a new industry into the bill — the same goods its upgrade required. Storage grows at the same rate as the cost, so a bigger fort costs more in total but never needs resupplying more often.

Base amounts per day, before distance and granary adjustments. Storage per resource rises with the same 1.5× per tier (5,000 / 7,500 / 11,250).

Upgrade before you can supply the tier and the fort will starve. Because payment is all or nothing, a tier-2 fortification held by an alliance with no forge or glassworks pays nothing at all — however much stone it is sitting on — and begins decaying six days later. Tier 3 goes further: cured meats and stained glass are city-tier goods, and stained glass needs a Master craftsman and a catalyst. Raising a fortification is a commitment to keeping that industry running, not just a one-off payment.

Payment is all or nothing: if the fort is short on even one resource, nothing is deducted and the day counts as unpaid. Miss six days in a row and the fortification begins to decay — you then have 24 hours to resupply before it is destroyed and the claim is lost. A decaying garrison also eats wheat twice as fast. Paying at any point clears the decay.

Border Defense

When defending in a border parish, defenders receive a +15% bonus to defensive power.

Alliance Buildings

Parish Quest Effects

Active parish quests on a defender's estate can grant variable defensive bonuses.

Foreign Trader at Visby

A visiting Hanseatic merchant docks at Visby with a rotating daily stock of finished luxury goods — and, on some days, a rare gear blueprint. The stock refreshes at midnight UTC and is the same for every player that day. It exists to give landlocked and non-coastal estates a guaranteed path to luxuries they cannot produce at home (the catalyst chains behind amber, stained glass, and similar goods are coastal-only), even when no other player happens to be selling them.

Prices are deliberately steep and paid in base resources (wheat, stone, lumber, iron ore), so it is an expensive fallback rather than a cheap shortcut. You buy by sending a caravan to Visby to collect the goods, exactly like accepting any market listing, so you need a trading post and an idle caravan. Each offer stays available to everyone until the next rotation.

The Bryte's Report

When you return after 2+ hours away, your estate steward — the bryte (Old Norse bryti, the overseer who ran a lord's estate in his absence) — reports what passed: the most notable event front and centre (battles, returned ships, milestones), a tally of what your estate produced and endured, and what stands ready for your orders. At most one report every 6 hours.

Night-market salvage: if your storage overflowed while you were away, the bryte sells part of the surplus and converts it to Battle Pass XP — 1 XP per 40 value-weighted units (higher-tier goods weigh more), capped at 150 XP per day. Upgrading warehouses is always better than letting goods spill, but lost production is never a total loss.

Kontör & Hanseatic Ports

Established estates can convert surplus production into gear, blueprints, experts, and cosmetics by dispatching merchant ships to four foreign Hanseatic ports out of the Kontorhuset building. Each port has its own preferred cargo, reward category, and risk profile:

Each port has its own talent branch that resets at season end, so investing in a port is a season-scoped commitment. For ports, holds, jackpot odds, risk modifiers, and the talent tree in full, see the Kontör Guide.

Modifier Stacking Order

All combat modifiers stack multiplicatively and are applied in the following order:

1. Base unit stats (offensive & defensive values)
2. Barracks bonus (+5% per level)
3. Gear bonuses (per unit type, scaled by equipped fraction)
4. Monk / Shaman auras (capped army-wide bonus)
5. Specialization perk multipliers (passive offensive / defensive)
6. Ritual multipliers (temporary faith-powered effects)
7. Enemy weakening (e.g. Intimidation reducing enemy defense)
8. Territory & alliance bonuses (defender only)
9. Tool combat buffs (e.g. Battle Brew)

Casualty reduction sources (Guardian, Battle Hardened, Martyr's Blessing) stack additively with each other, then reduce the final damage taken.

Season Surfaces

Each season runs in its own realm with a fixed end date. While core mechanics carry over, several systems are season-scoped and reset when the season closes — giving every league a clean finish line and a fresh status race.

Season Leaderboards

Personal Wrap & Season Titles

The Season tab shows your personal rank on both Merchant and Privateer boards plus headline stats (tier, battle pass tier, admires received, titles earned). At season close, the top 1 Most Admired estate earns a unique season-tagged title, with ranks 2–5 receiving the season's runner-up title. Reaching 100 lifetime admires grants the "The Admired" title at any time.

Further Reading

The mechanics on this page are summaries. Each system below has its own dedicated guide:

• Combat Guide — the six combat phases, all 16 keywords, and per-unit damage timing.
• Knowledge Guide — the four knowledge paths (Warfare, Production, Commerce, Parish), node costs, and expert study.
• Specialization Guide — the six religious paths and how perks and rituals chain together.
• Outpost Guide — building, upgrading, and defending parish outposts (plus level 6+ catalyst output).
• Kontör Guide — the Hanseatic merchant trade, holds, jackpots, risk, and seasonal talents.