Fed by: the Armory — Weapons, Armor, Headwear, Backpiece, Legwear, Offhand Items, Materials, Movement Types, Beastry, Unique Items, War Machines and Bardings & Saddles — and, before any of them, the figure’s Species, which is where its numbers start. Feeds: a photo’s combat stats, and through them Power Rating.

Fitting an item to a photo does not leave a reference to it. It writes numbers into that photo’s own stats — a sword’s Attack Power becomes the figure’s Attack Power, adjusted by the Stat Impact of the material it is made of. That is why a figure keeps its numbers even if the Armory entry is later renamed.

Editing an Armory row pushes the change back down to every photo wearing it, so the two do not drift. Toolbox → Recalculate Unit Stats does the same sweep for the whole collection at once, for when something has been edited around the outside — it rewrites only equipment-derived numbers and never touches Health, names, or anything typed by hand.

Every slot and what it can hold: Archive → Armory.

Fed by: the photo’s stats (so, Equipment), Faction Buffs, a Beast’s Attack and Mobility, Unique Items, and the Minifigure Rating. Feeds: Skirmish, and every comparison on the site.

One number for a figure, so two of them can be weighed without reading eleven stats each. Its shape is worth knowing even if the arithmetic is not:

Power = (Health ÷ 100)^0.65 × (everything it brings to a fight) × (the Minifigure Rating’s say)

Health multiplies rather than adds. Everything a figure carries — weapons, armour, speed, plus a flat 5 for simply being alive — is added up first, and Health then scales the whole of it, on a curve so that being tougher always helps and always helps a little less than last time.

Buffs are applied when the page draws, not stored. This is the difference between the two arrows on the left of the picture: equipment is written into a photo once, and a buff is added on every read. Change a buff and every affected figure moves immediately.

Power is summed upward — per photo, per Regiment or Equipment type, and per faction — and a faction’s total is what marches into a Skirmish.

The full formula, the curve, and why it is 0.65: Archive → Combat Stats Explained → Power Rating.

Fed by: both factions’ Power Ratings, their alignments, any Grudge between them, the distance dragged, the terrain crossed, and Logistics and Leadership auras. Feeds: Realm History, and nothing else.

Drag one faction’s marker onto another and the two armies fight. Army strength is the faction’s summed Power, and then the map has its say: alignment is a modifier and not a gate (anyone may attack anyone, and turning on your own kind costs you), a Grudge sharpens that against one named rival, and the march itself is paid for — distance reduces the attacker’s strength, terrain more so, and Movement divides that cost rather than cancelling it. No army marches free.

Then the fight is resolved figure by figure, and the result is written into Realm History. Nothing else changes. That is deliberate: the collection is a record of what has been built, and a battle nobody chose to fight should not be able to rewrite it.

Alignment tables, the distance formula, terrain, territory and the auras: Archive → Combat Stats Explained → How this feeds into Skirmish.

Fed by: visitors, two figures at a time. Feeds: Power Rating — the only feedback edge on the site.

Two photographs, picked at random and matched on how they have fared so far, and one question: which is the better build. It is an Elo ladder, so only the difference between two ratings means anything, and a new figure meeting a settled one moves a long way while the settled one barely stirs.

The ladder then multiplies Power: a figure at the bottom carries no bonus at all, one at the starting rating carries a quarter again, and one at the top carries half again. So a figure that people admire genuinely fights harder — which is the only place on this site where an opinion becomes a number.

Rating Seasons decide who is in it. A photo belongs to one season or to none, and the arena judges every photo whose season is at or below the current one. Seasons are cumulative — Season 3 comprises Seasons 1, 2 and 3 — so a batch of new figures can exist on the site for weeks before anyone is asked about them, and holding a season back takes nothing away: every rating and record is kept and comes back untouched.

The standings: Archive → Minifigure Ratings. The curve from rating to bonus: Combat Stats Explained → Power Rating.

How much punishment this unit can take before it's out of the fight. Scaled 0–500, shown as a bar for a quick read at a glance.

Attack Power (1 and up — there's no ceiling, and material bonuses can push it past 10) is raw offensive strength. Damage Type — Piercing, Blunt, Slashing, or Magic — categorizes how that damage is dealt, which can matter against certain defenses later.

Attack Range (1–20) is how far this unit can strike from, measured in LEGO brick widths — a Range of 5 means it can hit a target 5 brick-widths away. Attack Type — Melee or Ranged — marks whether it needs to close distance to fight or can hit from afar.

A backup weapon — a unit with a melee weapon and a thrown knife, say. Secondary Attack (1 and up, same open-ended scale as the primary) is that backup's strength, and Secondary Damage Type is its Piercing/Blunt/Slashing/Magic category, same options as the primary Damage Type.

How far that backup weapon reaches, in the same brick-width measure as Attack Range, and Secondary Attack Type — Melee or Ranged — marks whether it's a close-in backup or a ranged one, independent of the unit's primary Attack Type.

Defense Strength (1 and up, no ceiling) is how well this unit shrugs off incoming attacks. Defense Type — Heavy, Medium, or Light — is the category of armor behind that number.

A second layer of protection or attack — either a Shield (Secondary Defense, 1 and up, no ceiling) or a Melee Weapon held offhand (Secondary Attack, using the same Power/Range/Damage Type as any other weapon). A unit has one or the other, never both.

Movement is how fast a unit travels, entered as a decimal — a plain foot soldier sits around 1.00, and mounts, wings and mobility-granting gear push it higher. It divides the distance half of what an army loses marching across the map, so doubling a faction's average Movement halves the distance penalty — but not the terrain toll, which is charged by the ground crossed and is deliberately the larger half of most marches. Movement Type — Foot, Mounted, or Flying — is how it gets there.

A single number combining Health, Attack Power, Attack Range, Secondary Attack, Secondary Range, Defense Strength, Secondary Defense, Headwear Defense, Backpiece Defense, Legwear Defense, and Movement — a quick way to compare units at a glance without reading every stat individually.

The tricky part is that these stats live on very different scales — Health runs 0–500, Attack Range and Secondary Range run 1–20, Attack and Defense start at 1 with no upper limit, and Movement is a small decimal. Adding them together directly would let the larger-scale stats swamp everything else, so each factor is normalized onto a comparable range first:

Power = (Health ÷ 100)0.65 × (5 + Attack Power + (Attack Range ÷ 2) + Secondary Attack + (Secondary Range ÷ 2) + Defense Strength + Secondary Defense + Headwear Defense + Backpiece Defense + Legwear Defense + (Movement × 5)) × Rating Bonus

Health does not add to a rating — it scales the whole of it. Everything inside the bracket is what a unit brings to a fight: its weapons, its armour, its speed, plus a flat 5 for simply being a living thing with no gear at all. Health then multiplies that, measured against 100 as the ordinary figure. Halving both Range stats and multiplying Movement by 5 brings those onto roughly the same scale as the combat stats before any of it is multiplied. A stat left blank counts as 0 rather than being skipped, so an unfinished unit shows a lower rating instead of the calculation silently ignoring it — and a unit recorded on zero Health rates zero, which is the honest answer for something that cannot take a hit.

That scaling is a curve, not a straight line. Health is raised to the power of 0.65 before it multiplies anything, so being tougher always helps and always helps a little less than the last time:

Health	Multiplies the rest by
25	×0.41
50	×0.64
100	×1.00
200	×1.57
300	×2.04
500	×2.85

It was a straight line until the battle system changed, and the straight line was measured to be wrong. Version 2 fights army against army, figure by figure, and every living figure swings once a round — so twenty ordinary soldiers land twenty blows a round where one very tough champion lands one. Under the linear rule those two armies could be written down as equal Power and the twenty soldiers would win 95 times out of a hundred. Power was not describing the battle at all. Curving the health term at 0.65 brings that to 49.5% — a coin toss, which is what equal Power is supposed to mean — and leaves the ordinary case alone: across every matchup tested, the side with more Power still wins about 87% of the time, armour is still priced right, and bows and swords still come out even.

There is no separate term for a beast. A beast from the Beastry adds its Attack Power to the unit's Attack Power and its Mobility to the unit's Movement, so it reaches Power through those two figures rather than a line of its own — which is why a unit's Attack can read higher than the weapon in its hands. A beast's Attack Range is not used at all.

Power Rating shows up at three levels: on each individual photo (in its lightbox), summed across every photo in a Rank & Regiment or Equipment/Warmachine type (next to that type's name), and summed across a whole faction — Leader, Generals, Special People, every Regiment, and every siege engine (in the faction card header). A worn piece — a barding, a saddle — is worth nothing here on its own account, because it is worth its numbers to the figure wearing it instead.

The Minifigure Rating is the last term. Everything above is what a unit is written down as; the rating is what people actually think of it, and it multiplies the finished figure:

• 1,000 and below — no bonus at all. ×1.00.
• 1,200 — the rating every figure starts on. ×1.06.
• 1,900 — halfway up. ×1.25.
• 2,800 and above — the full bonus. ×1.50.

Between those it is a straight line, so 1,450 is ×1.125 and 2,350 is ×1.375. A figure nobody has judged yet sits on the 1,200 start and takes the ×1.06 with everyone else.

The top of that range is a horizon rather than a destination. Ratings have no ceiling — nothing in the code stops one climbing — but the arena always pairs a figure against the nearest rating it can find, and beating somebody close to you is worth very little. A figure that never lost a single judgement would still only be nearing 2,800 after a hundred thousand votes had been cast across the whole site. In practice a well-judged ladder spreads between about 1,050 and 1,480, which is ×1.01 to ×1.13, so the rating settles arguments between units that are otherwise close rather than deciding them outright.

A few judgements are not enough to move anything. A figure's rating is pulled back toward the 1,200 start until it has been judged 10 times — at two matchups it counts for a fifth of what it has earned, at five for half, at ten and beyond in full. Without that, one lucky pairing would move a unit's Power as far as forty careful ones, and early on almost every figure is one lucky pairing.

A photograph joins the pool when a Rating Season at or below the current one has been picked for it, in the Minifigure Rating dropdown of its shadowbox. Anything new starts at Not a minifigure — off, not on — so a photograph is in the ladder only when somebody has said which season it belongs to. An ordinary faction's crests and places stay out of it whatever is set; a mercenary company's people are in, because a company keeps its figures in the gallery a house keeps its arms in. The rating table in the Archive shows each figure's rating, how many times it has been judged and what share it has won; hover a figure to see the Power bonus its rating is currently worth.

The weighting isn't fixed, and this one changed shape rather than degree. Health used to be added — divided by 50 at first, later by 10 — and adding it could never make a tough unit properly outrank a frail one: a 500-Health unit came out barely twice a 100-Health one, because the gear it carried was the same in both sums and dragged the ratio toward 1. Dividing Health by less and less closes the gap only by making every figure on the site enormous. Multiplying is what actually answers the question, and it lets the numbers stay small. If anything still feels over- or under-valued, the flat 5 and the 100 it is measured against are both one-line changes.

What this does to the map depends on what a faction is made of. An army of ordinary 100-Health soldiers rates slightly lower than it did before, so it holds a little less territory; an army built around genuinely tough things rates a great deal higher and spreads accordingly. Territory is granted at one square per 10 Power and mercenaries at one hire per 100 Power of gap, so those follow along on their own. Battles between two factions are barely affected either way — the odds come from the ratio between two effective powers, and a rescaling that lifts both leaves the ratio alone.

• Army strength is a faction's Power Rating — Leader, Generals, Special People, every Regiment and every siege engine, summed together. Bardings and saddles are counted through the figures wearing them rather than on their own.
• Alignment is a bonus or penalty, not a gate. Any faction can attack any other faction — including one of its own alignment — but the attacker's effective power is multiplied by a bonus or penalty based on the two alignments involved. Old rivals fight with everything they've got; turning on your own kind costs you.
• Some rivalries are personal. Alignment paints with a broad brush — every Malevolent faction is the same shade of enemy to a Noble one. A Grudge is the sharper version: it raises one faction's Power against one named faction, and nobody else. Whichever of the two starts the fight, the grudge is collected. One honest caveat: a grudge already in the database is read and honoured in every battle, but the editor's buff form cannot currently add a new one — it is the one effect in the vocabulary with no way in.
• Distance costs strength. Dragging a faction's map icon onto another triggers a battle; the distance dragged (measured as a share of the map, not raw pixels, so it's fair on any screen) reduces the attacker's strength. Movement divides that cost rather than cancelling it — Distance Penalty = Distance × 0.675 ÷ Average Movement, where Distance is a fraction of the full corner-to-corner diagonal. An army averaging 1.00 Movement pays about 14% crossing a fifth of the map and 27% crossing two fifths; one averaging 2.00 Movement pays half as much at any distance. No army is exempt — speed makes the march cheaper, never free. This used to be the whole cost of a march and was set twice as high; it was halved once terrain arrived, so that the ground crossed carries most of the weight and distance is the gentler cost layered on top. The one exception is a faction with no Movement recorded at all, which is treated as unknown rather than slow and pays no distance penalty (it still pays the terrain toll). Two auras bear on this: March Speed makes the army effectively faster, which both shortens this penalty and changes which routes are worth taking; Supply Range makes distance cheaper, which discounts the penalty and changes which routes are worth taking — a well-supplied army can afford to go the long way round bad ground.
• Factions hold territory around their marker. Territory is granted as a number of squares rather than a radius: six to begin with, and one more for every 10 Power — but the larger a faction grows, the less each point of Power buys it. What Power earns is reduced on a ladder, and the six-square floor is never touched by it:
  • Under 500 Power — keeps everything Power earned.
  • 500–999 — keeps 90%.
  • 1,000–1,499 — keeps 80%.
  • 1,500–1,999 — keeps 70%.
  • 2,000–2,499 — keeps 60%.
  • 2,500 and above — keeps half.
  So a faction of 400 Power holds 46 squares, one of 900 holds 87, one of 2,000 holds 126, and one of 5,000 holds 256. Because it is a ladder rather than a slope, a faction sitting just under a rung holds more ground than one just over it — 999 Power is worth 95 squares and 1,000 is worth 86. A Territory Reach buff adds or removes whole squares from that allowance, so the same figure is worth the same to a great power and to a hamlet. Those squares are then handed out around its marker, nearest and easiest ground first — plains before forest, forest before mountain, and open water last of all, so a faction fills the land available to it before it ever reaches out to sea. An island faction packs its island and stops there. Each faction also carries a small fixed lean of its own, so no two territories come out the same shape and none reads as a neat disc. Where two factions want the same square, all of them grow at once and take turns claiming, so contested ground goes to whichever can reach it more easily rather than to whoever happened to be calculated first. Turn the territory layer on from the map's toggle row to see the borders.
• Whose land an army may cross. Every square of the realm is passable, but not every square is welcoming. Crossing someone else's territory multiplies what that ground costs to march over:
  • Your own alignment — free. Kindred factions let each other pass, as does your own territory and the defender's.
  • A different alignment — three times the cost. Noble through Independent, Independent through Rogue, Benevolent through Malevolent, and so on — every crossing that is not your own kind and not a sworn enemy.
  • A sworn enemy — eight times the cost. Noble through Malevolent, or Malevolent through Noble — the two ends of the realm, and the only pairing the rule names. Such a march is possible, but so ruinous that going the long way round is nearly always wiser. An army that forces the crossing anyway will arrive as a shadow of itself.
  The multiplier applies to distance rather than a flat fee, so an army bends its march around foreign land whenever going around is shorter than paying to go through — it will squeeze through the thinnest part of a rival's holdings rather than bulldoze the middle. The defender's own territory is always free: reaching them is the entire point of the march, so a Good faction can assault an Evil one directly even though it would pay dearly merely to pass by. The Victory screen lists whose land was crossed and what the surcharge came to.
• Armies take the cheapest road, not the straight one. The march isn't a straight line between the two markers any more — the route is searched across the whole terrain grid and the attacker takes whichever path costs least overall, weighing terrain tolls against the extra ground a detour covers. Going the long way round a mountain range is worth it if the range is wide enough; swinging out to dodge a single square of forest never is. The route taken is drawn on the map behind the result screen, so the numbers can be checked against the ground they came from, and the battle description calls it out when an army goes well out of its way.
• Terrain is a toll paid by the yard. The realm is divided into a grid of 240×160 terrain squares — 38,400 of them — painted on the map in the editor. Every square the march crosses costs the attacker a slice of its power. The figures below are what it costs to cross a tenth of the map through one kind of ground, which is a fixed quantity however finely the grid is cut — the toll is quoted internally per square of a 60-wide reference and scaled to the grid in use, so painting the map more finely sharpens the coastlines without changing what a single march costs:
  • Road — 0% per tenth of the map. A made road costs an army nothing at all to follow, so a route that runs along one is free ground however far it goes.
  • Plains — 3% per tenth of the map. Open ground; the cost of simply being on the march.
  • Forest — 6% per tenth of the map. Slow going, broken lines.
  • Marsh — 10.5% per tenth of the map. Wet, heavy ground that swallows a baggage train — worse than woods, though not the wall a mountain range is.
  • Water — 12% per tenth of the map. Costly going for an army with no fleet, though a mountain pass is harder still.
  • Mountain — 15% per tenth of the map. Passes, cold and exhaustion.
  A given stretch of forest costs the same whether the march is short or long, so what matters is how much hard ground is crossed, not what proportion of the route it makes up. The toll is added to the distance penalty rather than multiplying it, and the 90% ceiling applies to the two combined — so no march can strip more than nine tenths of an army however brutal the route. The Victory screen lists exactly what was crossed and what each type cost, and hovering any square of the map names the ground and what crossing it costs.
• Terrain ignores Movement, on purpose. A faster army covers the same ground and pays the same toll. Speed shortens the distance penalty, never the terrain one — what reduces terrain is being suited to that particular ground, which is what the Water, Mountain, Forest and Marsh Crossing auras describe. A faction with no such aura pays the standard rate on every square.
• What counts as an army's Movement. The Avg Movement figure on a faction's card is exactly the number the march uses — the mean Movement across its Leader, Generals, Special People and Regiment photos, after any Faction Buffs are applied. Equipment & Warmachines are deliberately left out: a siege engine doesn't set the pace an army marches at. Photos with no Movement filled in are skipped rather than counted as zero, so a half-finished roster isn't dragged down by its blanks.
• Buffs count everywhere. Every stat Skirmish reads — both sides' Power and the attacker's Movement — uses buff-adjusted values, the same figures shown on each photo, not the raw numbers typed into the fields.
• Home turf helps. A defending faction gets a flat 10% bonus for not having marched anywhere. A Home Defense aura adds percentage points on top of that 10%, and applies only when the faction is the one being attacked.
• Everything above sets the fight up. What decides it depends on which battle system is running — there is a switch in the map controls, and Version 2 is what both pages open on.
  • Version 2 — the armies actually fight. Both sides line up as the individual photos they are made of and trade blows over five rounds. Every figure whose round has come and has not passed swings once, damage is dealt and tracked per figure, and whoever has more surviving Power at the end wins — each survivor counted at the health it has left, so an army with fewer but stronger figures still standing takes it. A tie goes to the defender. Health is remembered for the length of one battle and then thrown away — the same photos come back whole for the next fight.
  • Which round a unit joins is decided by its Attack Range. Round 1 is Range 15 and up — siege engines and the longest bows. Round 2 opens at 10, and the rest of the archers join. Round 3 opens at 5: thrown weapons and the longer polearms. Round 4 is everyone, and round 5 is melee only — a bow with no sidearm sits the last round out, though it can still be shot at. So a longbow line gets three rounds of shooting before the swordsmen it is shooting at can reach it — and an army of nothing but archers has nobody holding that line, and nobody swinging at the end.
  • A siege engine stops, and its crew starts. Each kind of war machine says which round it fires until — three by default, and it is already shut out of round five for being ranged, so in practice the setting decides round four. The figures assigned to work it are held out of the battle line until the round after it stops: a trebuchet's crew are engineers while it is shooting and soldiers once it is not.
  • The melee line screens what stands behind it. Archers and siege cannot be targeted at all while more than about a third of the enemy's melee units are still standing. This is the rule that makes the composition of an army matter rather than just its total: knights protect bowmen, and an army that is all bowmen has no protection to give.
  • Each blow is 5 × Attack × (Attack ÷ (Attack + Defense)). Armour blunts a hit hard without ever making a unit untouchable, and a weak attacker is never quite useless. The 5 is a lethality dial and it was measured rather than guessed — at 5 the beaten side loses roughly a quarter to a third of its number, which is what a defeat should look like. At 10 the loser is annihilated.
  • Both sides throw two dice each round. Two rather than one on purpose: 2d6 is a bell curve, so a middling round is the common case and a remarkable one is rare. At the extremes the dice are worth ±30%, but a typical throw is nearer ±12%. A pair — any pair — is worth 15% on top, and snake eyes, two ones, is a flat ×1.50 that ignores its own total and is the luckiest throw in the game. Every other throw is capped at ×1.45 so that snake eyes stands alone. A parry is the third rule: when both sides throw the same total, the blow is met — the attacker loses a fifth of that round and the defender gains a tenth, which is the one case that can carry a finished multiplier past ×1.45. The march penalty, alignment and home turf all still apply, to every swing.
  • The round screen shows you who actually swung. The two counts at the top of it — Fought this round and Out of reach — open. Press either and the regiments unfold underneath, grouped, each with the reason it is where it is: 3 Knights — range 4–8, needed 15. Siege engines are picked out in gold, and a machine that has stopped says stopped after round 3 rather than falling in with the ones that could not reach — which would be true of nothing. Its crew say they are crewing it until the round they join. A machine with too few crew to work says abandoned — needs 2 crew, and one that is working but short-handed says so on its own firing line, with the share it is managing.
  • What the siege train did, separately. When either side has one, the screen adds Equipment fought and …of that, equipment — the share of the round's damage the engines landed. A trebuchet that throws for a third of a round is worth knowing about, and a total alone will not tell you.
  • The fallen are marked where you can see them. As a battle runs, a figure that has been killed is greyed and crossed on its own side's panel beside the map, and the marks accumulate — round three shows everyone lost in rounds one, two and three. They come off when the battle closes; nothing is remembered about a figure after a fight.
  • Version 1 — one roll, settled at once. The older system, still there in the switch. Final strengths become a probability and a weighted roll decides it. The two effective powers are each squared before being compared, which keeps an even matchup at 50/50 while making a lopsided one genuinely hard to steal: a 2× advantage wins about 80% of the time and a 3.5× advantage about 92%, rather than the 67% and 77% a straight share of total power would give.
  Both systems read the same Power, the same march, the same alignment and the same mercenaries. Version 2 does not change any of that arithmetic — it replaces only the moment the winner is decided.
• The weaker side can hire mercenaries. Comparing effective power (after the march and alignment are already factored in), whichever side is behind gets 1 mercenary for every 100 points of that gap — up to 3 for an attacker, up to 5 for a defender. They're hired at random from whichever pools will fight for them: a Noble, Benevolent or Independent side draws on Hero Mercenaries, Neutral Mercenaries and Wanderers; a Rogue side draws on Neutral Mercenaries, Wanderers and Evil Mercenaries; a Malevolent side draws on Evil Mercenaries and nobody else. Where a side has more than one pool open to it they are drawn from together, so who turns up depends on how many of each there are. A Mercenary Slots aura raises or lowers those caps of 3 and 5 for the faction holding it, to a hard ceiling of 10. It doesn't cost anything (for now), and who gets hired resets fresh every battle — nothing is used up.
• Mercenaries fight under the same conditions as their employer. Their Power no longer lands on the field untouched. Hired by an attacker, they march the same ground and face the same enemy, so they take the same march penalty and the same alignment bonus or penalty — a company worth 100 that crosses a mountain range under a heavy penalty might only be worth 40 when it arrives, while the same company marching a short distance into a hated rival's lands can be worth more than its listed Power. Hired by a defender, they stand on the same ground and take the same 10% home turf bonus. The Victory screen shows both figures where they differ.
• Townsfolk factions don't participate in Skirmish at all, either as attacker, defender, or mercenary. Mercenary factions never attack or defend directly — they only ever show up as hired reinforcements for someone else.

The alignment bonus/penalty table — read as "the attacker on the left, against the defender along the top". The diagonal is the part worth noticing: every alignment fights its own kind worst of all, and the further apart two alignments stand, the more the attacker is worth.

Attacker ↓ / Defender →	Noble	Benevolent	Independent	Rogue	Malevolent
Noble	-30%	-20%	-12.5%	+17.5%	+30%
Benevolent	-20%	-22.5%	-15%	+11%	+24%
Independent	-12.5%	-15%	-15%	+5%	+17.5%
Rogue	+17.5%	+11%	+5%	-15%	-12.5%
Malevolent	+30%	+24%	+17.5%	-12.5%	-30%

Base Power here already includes any Grudge held against the other side — Base Power = Faction Power × (1 + Grudge) × (1 + Bane), on whichever side holds them, and ×1 where neither does — the two compound, as the Faction Buffs section says. The full formula for the attacker: Effective Power = Base Power × (1 − March Penalty) × (1 + Alignment Bonus), where March Penalty = min(0.90, Distance Penalty + Terrain Toll). The defender's is simpler: Effective Power = Base Power × (1 + 0.10 + Home Defense). Whichever side is weaker after that then hires mercenaries, whose Power is put through the same modifier their employer took — × (1 − March Penalty) × (1 + Alignment Bonus) for an attacker, the same home-turf multiplier for a defender — before being added on. The winner is then drawn against Attacker² ÷ (Attacker² + Defender²). Note that mercenary hiring is judged on the raw effective powers, before that squaring — so who gets help is decided by the size of the gap, not by the win odds.

Skirmish is live today — drag one faction's map marker onto another's to try it. Nothing is spent and nothing is used up: no faction loses a unit, mercenary hires reset every time, and the same armies come back whole for the next fight. The result is written down, though. Every battle fought on the site — from this page as well as the editor — is recorded in Realm History in the Archive, tagged with the system it was fought under, so the running tallies there can be read for either one. A battle abandoned with Forfeit is not recorded at all.

A buff is a standing effect written against a faction. It is either faction-wide, or an aura projected by one unit type onto every other unit type in the same faction — never onto the source's own photos. Which of the three categories it belongs to decides what it actually touches.

Unit Stats — the numbers on a photo. These add to a photo's combat stats: Attack Power, Attack Range, Secondary Attack, Secondary Range, Defense Strength, Secondary Defense and Movement. Health is never buffed. The effective, post-buff figure is what every Power Rating on the site is built from, and it is the number shown beside the raw one in a photo's lightbox. The amount is a plain figure in the same unit as the stat: +2 Attack Power means two more Attack Power.

Logistics — how an army marches. These belong to the faction rather than to any one photo, and are read when that faction attacks. The + direction always helps: a positive Water Crossing makes water cheaper, not dearer.

Effect	Amount is	What it does
March Speed	Percentage	The army marches as if this much faster. Shortens the distance penalty and changes which route is chosen, since a faster army finds a detour relatively cheaper.
Supply Range	Percentage	Trims the finished distance penalty. Unlike March Speed it does not affect the route search — the road taken is the same, it simply costs less to walk it.
Water Crossing	Percentage	Water squares cost this much less to cross. Boats, fords, a fleet.
Mountain Crossing	Percentage	Mountain squares cost this much less to cross. Wings, goats, knowledge of the passes.
Forest Crossing	Percentage	Forest squares cost this much less to cross. Rangers, axes, familiar ground.
Marsh Crossing	Percentage	Marsh squares cost this much less to cross. Guides, duckboards, a people who grew up in the fens.

Leadership — standing, reach and allies. These also belong to the faction, and are read wherever that faction appears in a battle or on the map.

Effect	Amount is	What it does
Grudge	Percentage	Raises this faction’s Power against one named faction — attacking it or defending against it. Every other opponent sees nothing. This is the only effect that names a second faction.
Territory Reach	Whole squares	Extra squares of ground claimed around the marker, added to what Power has already earned. A faction always keeps at least one square however heavy a curse is laid on it.
Mercenary Slots	Whole slots	Extra hires allowed when this faction is the weaker side. Does nothing when it is already the stronger one — there is no gap to hire against.
Home Defense	Percentage	Added to the 10% home turf bonus, when defending. +15 takes the defender from ×1.10 to ×1.25.
Alignment Standing	Percentage	Added to the alignment modifier, in this faction’s favour on either side of the field: it lifts its own bonus when attacking, and cuts the attacker’s bonus when defending.

Reading the amounts. An amount is a percentage unless the thing it counts cannot sensibly be a fraction. Only two are exceptions: Territory Reach is whole squares of ground and Mercenary Slots is whole hires. Everything else — every Logistics effect, Grudge, Home Defense, Alignment Standing — takes a percentage, and +25 means a quarter more, or a quarter cheaper, of whatever that effect names. The editor prints the unit it wants beneath the effect you pick, and every faction card lists the buffs in force with their unit attached.

Several buffs of the same effect add together, then the total is clamped, so a run of small blessings stacks but no single mistyped figure can break a battle. Percentage reliefs — the four crossings and Supply Range — stop at 90%, so hard ground and long marches never become free; March Speed will not drop an army below a quarter of its pace; Territory Reach moves the allowance by at most 200 squares and never below one; Mercenary Slots moves the cap by at most five either way and never past a hard ceiling of 10; and the alignment modifier, however much standing is stacked behind it, stays between ×0.10 and ×3.00. Grudges against the same faction stack with each other; a grudge against a different one is counted separately and does nothing in this battle.

Where the source unit matters, and where it doesn't. For Unit Stats, a buff hung on a particular regiment deliberately skips that regiment's own photos — a Warlord doesn't buff himself. For Logistics and Leadership there is no such distinction: these describe the faction as a whole, so if the faction has the buff it has it, and whether it was written down as faction-wide or against one regiment only changes how it reads in the editor.

Grudge is the one effect that names an enemy. Every other buff describes its faction in general; a Grudge describes a particular hatred, and applies only in battles against the faction it names. It is worth the same whether that faction is attacked or does the attacking, and it is applied to Power before the march and the alignment table, so it compounds with them the way real strength would. Mercenaries hired into such a battle do not share the grudge — it belongs to the faction, not to swords bought for the day. Mercenary and Townsfolk factions cannot be named as a target, since neither ever meets anyone on the field.

Bane is the same idea, carried by an object. A Unique Item can be given a Bane: extra Power for whoever holds it, but only against the enemy it was made for. Unlike a Grudge, that enemy can be a whole alignment rather than one faction — a blade forged to kill the Evil, not merely one particular king. A Grudge belongs to a people and a Bane belongs to a thing, so the two compound: a faction with an old score, whose champion also carries the right sword, collects both.

	Name	Category	Damage Type	Attack Power	Range	BL#

	Name	Defense Type	Defense Power	BL#

	Name	Defense Power	BL#

	Name	Defense Power	BL#

Greaves, leg armour, boots — whatever a unit wears below the belt. Its Defense is its own term in that unit's Power, alongside Headwear and Backpiece.

	Name	Defense Power	BL#

What goes in the hand that is not holding the main weapon. A figure has one offhand: a shield or a second weapon, never both. When it is a weapon it is drawn from the Weapons table above and fights as the Secondary Attack; when it is a shield it is one of these, and its Defense Power is the figure's Secondary Defense.

A shield's shape lives in its name — a kite, a heater, a round — because shape is what a builder recognises it by, and nothing in the maths reads it.

	Name	Defense Power	BL#

Tamed animals brought into battle — warhounds, hunting hawks, bears, and anything else that fights alongside a unit rather than being carried by one.

A unit can have one at its side. The beast's Attack Power is added to that unit's Attack — a swordsman with 7 Attack and a warhound worth 3 fights at 10 — and its Mobility adds to or subtracts from the unit's Movement, the same as a weapon's or a piece of armour's does. Its Attack Range is listed here but goes unused: a beast lends a unit its strength, not its reach. Where a unit has one, it is named in that photo's Equipped list.

	Name	Attack Power	Attack Range	Mobility	BL#

One-of-a-kind gear — a named blade, a king's crown, a shield with a history. Each is built from an ordinary item in the tables above plus a material, and then given a name, a story, and often a power: a named ability that may be pure flavour or may carry a real effect into battle.

The numbers are fixed rather than recalculated. An artifact is what it is: change the base item in the Armory years from now and the artifact does not move. Click any picture to see it larger, with its full record.

	Name	Slot	Built From	Attack Power	Defense Power	Range	Mobility	Its Power

The engines of war — trebuchets, ballistae, battering rams and whatever else the realm has learned to build. Each kind is defined once here, with what it is and what it is good and bad at; a faction's own siege train then says which of these its machines are.

A positive number is an advantage and a negative one a cost — a trebuchet that throws for +30 and slows the march by −15% is one machine with two lines. Some apply always, some only on certain ground or against a certain enemy, and the line says which.

What it takes to move and work one. A siege engine is not carried by the figure standing next to it, so each kind says how many it needs: crew to move it — the figures who haul it, and who march at its pace rather than their own — and crew to work it, which is full strength, with fewer fighting weaker in proportion. Below the fewest to work it is abandoned where it stands — it does not fire in any round, though it is still standing there to be shot at, and the round screen says it was abandoned rather than letting it vanish. Its crew stop waiting and fight from the first round, because there is nothing left for them to work. An empty figure and a typed 0 are different answers: empty means nobody has said, 0 means it needs nobody, and a machine with no floor set is never abandoned.

None assigned is not the same as none needed. These rules are counted from the figures actually attached to a machine, so a machine that nobody has been assigned to yet fights exactly as it always has — it is not treated as having a crew of zero. Attach one figure and it starts being judged on who is there: one hand where four are wanted throws at a quarter. That is deliberate, and it is the difference between a question nobody has answered and an answer of "one".

When it stops. A machine fires until a set round — three by default. It already clears rounds one to three on reach and is already shut out of the last round for being ranged, so in practice that setting decides round four. The figures assigned to it are held out of the battle line until the round after it stops: a trebuchet's crew are engineers while it is shooting and soldiers once it is not.

An engine does fight, and its photograph counts toward its faction's Power. And the list above is fought with. Seven of the things a machine can change reach the battle: army march speed, supply range, holding ground, and the four crossing reliefs. They join the faction's own auras and are capped together with them, counted once for every machine of that type the faction owns — so five trebuchets are five trebuchets, and still cannot slow a march further than one very heavy curse could.

March speed is the one that asks who. A line written against the machine itself is charged to the figures assigned to haul it: their own Movement drops, and the army feels it through the average — a slowed pair among forty barely shows, the same pair among ten is felt. A line written against the whole army slows everybody. A machine wanting six haulers with two assigned slows those two and no more, so a half-crewed engine is cheap to march; that is a rule rather than an oversight.

What still only sits on the page. A machine's Attack, Defense and Movement are its own and reach a battle through its photograph, but there is no way yet to write one that raises the whole army's Attack. Nothing can be aimed at a castle wall, because there are no walls in a battle. And "against a kind of defender" — heavy armour, cavalry — is not something a photograph can declare itself to be. Those are written down, and the realm knows them before Skirmish does. Click any picture to see it larger, with its full record.

	Name	What it is	Advantages & disadvantages	BL#

What a horse wears and what a rider sits on. A barding is worn by one figure and never fights on its own account — it has no crew and it is not in the battle line; whatever it is worth reaches a fight through the knight carrying it. A saddle is the same shape of thing, usually smaller.

A positive number is an advantage and a negative one a cost, exactly as for a war machine. Each line also says who it is for: most help whoever wears them, and a line marked the whole army reaches past its wearer to everybody marching with them.

Some carry a named power as well: the half of what a thing does that a number cannot say. These are recorded rather than fought with, for now.

	Name	What it is	Advantages & disadvantages	BL#

Every buff written on a faction, gathered into one list — what it is called, what it does, how much of it, and who it reaches. A Unit Stats buff adds to a photo's own numbers; Logistics and Leadership describe the faction itself — how it marches, how far it reaches, and who will fight for it. Combat Stats Explained above has what each effect does.

Faction	Name	Category	Effect	Amount	Applies To

Every weapon, shield, and piece of armor is available in a range of materials — from crude Wood up through Solid Gold — each with its own visual identity and effect on the stats of whatever it's applied to.

Stat Impact is that effect as a percentage, applied to the item's base Power when the material is picked: +25% makes a sword a quarter better, −10% makes it a tenth worse. Click any colour square — or tab to it and press Enter — to see what the material is and what it does.

A few materials are made of two others. Their square is drawn half in each colour, and the LEGO colour and hex code are replaced by the names of the two they are mixed from: such a material borrows its look from the pair and nothing else — its own Stat Impact is its own.

Color	Material	Category	LEGO Color Name	Hex Code	Stat Impact

The colours the realm is actually built from, named once. Every material above is made of one of these, so a colour is written down in a single place and everything that uses it follows — rename Brown to Earth Brown and every material made of it is renamed with it.

These are LEGO's own colour names, which is what makes them worth keeping in one list: Reddish Brown and Medium Nougat mean something exact to anybody buying the pieces, in a way that a hex code on its own does not.

Color	Name	Hex Code	Used By

What a figure is, before anybody hands it a weapon. Each species carries the numbers a creature of that kind starts with — a Human begins at 100 Health, a Dragonkin at 250 — and the way it moves.

A species is a starting point: a figure begins from these numbers and then keeps its own, so a particularly large Dragonkin can be tougher than its kin. A blank means the species says nothing about that stat rather than that the stat is nought — most species have no natural Attack, because their weapons are the ones they are holding.

	Name	Units	Health	Attack	Range	Defense	Movement	Movement Type

How a figure gets about. Each entry bundles a Movement Value — the decimal a plain foot soldier sits near 1.00 — with the Category it belongs to: Foot, Mounted or Flying. "Warhorse" is Mounted at 0.90; "Griffin" is Flying at something rather higher.

A figure's own Movement is what the march actually reads, and it is the number on the photograph rather than the one in this table — a species and a movement type give it a starting point, and a particularly swift horse keeps its own. Movement divides the distance half of a march's cost; it never touches the terrain toll.

	Name	Category	Movement Value

Every creature in the realm. A war beast is one a unit can take into battle — a warhound, a hunting hawk — and its numbers are in the Armory's Beastry above, where they belong: a beast lends its Attack Power to whoever it fights beside. An animal does none of that. It lives here, it belongs to nobody, and it is in this list because the realm has more in it than the things that fight.

	Name	Kind	Attack Power	Mobility	About