Expedition armies

Garrison support and expedition armies

Garrison support is the old, simple arrangement. The troops defend the village they stand in, the host cannot move them, you can call them home, and the host can send them away. Nothing else happens.

An expedition army does everything garrison support does and adds one thing: it can be given orders from where it stands. It defends its host exactly like ordinary support, including while it is reorganizing, and it never stops belonging to you.

Every expedition army keeps three identities for as long as it exists: the player who owns it, the village that produced it, and the village it currently uses as a base. Changing the base never changes the other two.

Raising one

Only the owner of the troops raises an expedition army. A host who receives your garrison cannot promote it themselves, cannot split or merge your armies, and cannot change what they are made of.

You can choose the expedition mission when you first send the troops, or promote a garrison you already have standing somewhere later. You do not have to promote the whole garrison, and the troops do not march when you promote them: only their role changes.

All the troops in one army must come from the same village and belong to the same player. Troops from two of your own villages cannot share an army. You can raise several separate armies from the same village, and each one costs its own slot.

Highborn can never join an expedition army, and cannot be sent as support at all.

Which villages can be a base

Your own villages, and the villages of players in your own banner. Nothing else. A pact, a truce, or a neutral village will accept ordinary garrison support from you but will never host an expedition army.

A banner membership also has to have settled first. The same maturity window the Banner Caravan uses applies here, on both sides. Before it elapses the two of you can still reinforce each other normally, but neither can use the other as a forward base.

That window exists so a strong banner cannot recruit a member and use their villages as a staging ground the same hour.

Capacity and slots

A village hosts expedition armies up to two separate limits. Its own troops and any ordinary garrison support it holds count against neither of them.

The first is an outside-expedition population budget, built from the village’s Armory, Marehall, Forgeworks, and Highborn Hall levels. The second is a number of army slots, from its Lord’s Keep and Highborn Hall levels. Every distinct army takes exactly one slot, even two armies raised in the same village.

Troops that arrive with no room are never turned away. They reach the village and stay as ordinary garrison support, and you can promote them later once room opens up.

If a village’s capacity later drops below what it already hosts, for example because a building was destroyed, the armies already there keep serving. The village simply accepts nothing new until it is back within its limits.

Command authority

You decide how much the host may do with your army, and you can change it at any time. A change never reaches back into an operation that has already started.

Under Approved Command the host can prepare an order, but nothing moves until you accept it. Under Full Command the host can start the same orders directly, without asking.

The orders this covers are attacking, redeploying to another base, leaving as garrison support elsewhere, and handing the campaign treasury to the host village.

Your right to call the army home is absolute and no authority level removes it. The host’s right to send a foreign army out of their village is equally absolute.

Reorganization

An army spends a short window reorganizing after it arrives, after a garrison is promoted, after it redeploys, and after it returns from an operation. The window scales with the world’s unit speed.

While reorganizing the army still defends the village it is standing in, at full strength. What it cannot do is start something new: no attack, no redeploy, no new operation.

Going home is never blocked by it. You can recall a reorganizing army and the host can dismiss one, both immediately. Only the march home itself takes time.

Marching out

An attack leaves from the base village and returns to it. The player who gives the order and the player whose troops fight are recorded separately, so a battle report always names both.

A redeploy moves the army to another eligible village, keeping its identity, its treasury, and its command authority, and starting a fresh reorganization window on arrival. If the new village cannot host it after all, the army stands down there as ordinary garrison support instead.

Sending the army as garrison support somewhere ends the campaign: on arrival the troops are ordinary support again and the old command authority no longer applies. You can raise a new army from them later.

The campaign treasury

Plunder an expedition army takes does not go into the host village’s warehouse. It stays with the army as its own campaign treasury, and travels with it: on a new operation, and to a new base if it redeploys.

The treasury can be handed to the host village, and a fixed share of it arrives. The rest is spent on the campaign itself, on provisions, the road, and local supply, and reaches nobody.

When you call the army home to the village that produced it, the whole treasury is delivered, with nothing lost.

If the army is wiped out, its treasury is destroyed with it. The winning side never captures it.

When a village falls

If the village that produced an army is conquered, every force it ever raised deserts, wherever it stands: at home, as support, as an expedition army, or in the middle of a march. Their plunder is lost with them. The new owner of that village inherits nothing.

If a host village is conquered, foreign expedition armies never pass to the new lord. The ones standing in the village fell with its garrison. The ones that were away finish their march and then turn for home, carrying their treasury.

If you leave the banner, or are removed from it, or it dissolves, the relation that allowed the base is gone. The host’s authority over your army is suspended at once. If plain reinforcement is still allowed and the army carries no plunder, it stands down where it is and keeps defending as ordinary support. Otherwise it marches home, because a treasury is never left in a village that no longer answers to your standing.

Battles with several armies

A village can be defended by its own troops and by any number of expedition armies at the same time. Each one fights as its own contingent, with its own research levels behind it.

Casualties are attributed per contingent, so an army takes its own losses rather than an average of everyone else’s. Battle reports show each expedition army separately, with its real owner and its own losses.

The real owner of an army receives the report for any battle it fought, even when someone else gave the order.