Marches & Gathering

“Hauled out at three-quarter load. I know what the yield tables say. The yield tables were written inside a wall.” — The Seamkeeper’s Codex, a salvager’s field notes

March slots

You start with one march slot — one column in the field at a time. Slots 2 and 3 come from the Second March and Third March research nodes (Overseer branch). Until then, every march is a choice between gathering and fighting; this is why Second March is a rush priority.

The send sheet

Tap any node and choose March to open the send sheet. It works in two modes:

Auto-assign (default). Pick your Guardians; troops are assigned automatically in proportion to your Guardians’ elements — an Earth-heavy formation drafts Ancient Guardians first, and so on. Assignment drafts your highest-tier idle troops first.

Manual override. Toggle to manual and set each troop line yourself with steppers. Use it when you want to hold your best troops home, or send cheap bulk to a low-risk node.

Either way, the sheet shows before you commit:

• March size vs your cap — base 1,000 troops, +250 per Sylvan Grove level
• Travel time — Manhattan distance × 4 s/tile (base), reduced by MarchSpeed research
• Expected haul for gather marches, or a battle forecast for combat marches (same engine the server uses — the preview is the truth)

How hauls are calculated

Worth knowing exactly, because it changes what you send:

haul = (Σ troops × 10 × troop-tier multiplier) × node-tier multiplier × research bonus

• Troop tier multipliers: T1 ×1.0 rising to ×3.25 at T7 — better troops carry more.
• Node tier multipliers: T1 ×1.0 rising to ×11.0 at T7 — node tier dominates everything.
• Capped by what the node still holds.

The lesson in the math: upgrading your target beats upgrading your carriers. Five hundred T1 troops on a T3 node out-haul the same troops on a T1 node by ×2.25 for the same walk.

Marches resolve on arrival

A gather march completes the moment it arrives: the haul is credited and the troops are freed — the “arrives in” time on the send sheet is the whole trip, not one leg of a round trip. Combat marches likewise resolve on arrival, with a battle report waiting immediately.

The gathering rhythm

Gathering is a logging-in rhythm, not a babysitting job: send your marches at the end of a session to the richest nodes you can reach, and they’ll have resolved by the next one. Essence spent on troops is recovered within a few hauls; after that the column is pure profit.

Note

Guardians on a gathering march still count as “marching” — they can’t simultaneously anchor a combat march. With one slot this doesn’t matter; with three, think about which Guardians escort the salvage runs. (Routine escort duty is a popular way to level the second five.)