Fair Play & Monetization

Most games of this kind let the biggest wallet simply win. Iron Realms is built on a different promise, and the promise is enforced by code that runs on every single build rather than by a paragraph in a marketing page. This guide states the actual numbers.

The one rule: nothing in the store raises your ceiling

Every keep in the realm stops at level 45. Every army stops at tier 13. Every Seat of Power on the map can be taken by anyone willing to do the work of taking it: grind its walls, garrison and reinforcements to nothing inside a war window, then land a Takeover blow while the 10-minute breach window is yours — every step of which is bought with troops and timing, and none of which is for sale. None of those three limits moves for money — there is no purchasable tier 14, no paid keep level, no store item that adds a percentage to your attack.

What money buys is time. Build timers run far ahead of anything your fields can starve you of, so the only thing a purchase can compress is the waiting.

The strongest single item in the game is a case in point. Relics of the East are won by storming, reaving or sacking across the Narrow Sea — a held seat rolls the whole table, a won raid a slice capped at grade II and a won sack one capped at grade III — the Sword of Eddard Stark grants +30% attack, defence and health, and health is a stat nothing else in Iron Realms raises. There is no relic in the store, no relic in any pack, and no way to buy a draw. The full table and every rate are published on that page rather than described: a drop table anyone can read is worth more than any assurance about one nobody can.

What that costs

The figures below are re-measured from the shipped pacing model — the same constants that set every build cost, remodelled after the 2026 economy rebalance rather than carried over from before it. The summit — Keep 45, counted honestly as the keep plus the nineteen supporting plots that share its build queue — takes about seven months free at roughly half an hour a day; the intended spend tiers cut the same road to about three months and about two. None of them is on sale yet.

The shape of the promise matters more than any one row, so here it is:

• The summit is identical for everyone. Keep 45, troop tier 13, every Seat of Power. No purchase moves any of those, and the charter audit below fails the build if one tries.
• Spending compresses the wait and nothing else. A free lord and a spending lord arrive at the same maximum keep and the same maximum army; from that day on, spending buys nothing, because there is nothing left to buy.
• A grinding lord can match a spending lord's daily budget. About four active hours a day of camps, hunts and seats pays out in saved build-time at parity with heavy spending — decaying through the day, so there is no reward for never sleeping and no advantage to a bot over a person.

The Fair Play Ledger inside the game reads the current pacing model live, out of the same constants that set every build cost. When you want a number rather than a shape, take it from there — it cannot drift from the build the way this page did.

The charter audit

The rule above is not honour-system. Every offer in the catalogue carries a power flag and a freeEarnPath — a written statement of how a free player obtains the same thing. A test runs on every build, walks the whole store, and fails the build if any item is marked as granting power or cannot name a free path to what it grants. An offer that would sell power cannot reach you, because it cannot get through the build that would ship it.

The same audit is published inside the game as the Fair Play Ledger, so you can read the verdict on every SKU yourself rather than taking this page's word for it.

What the catalogue holds

Published for scrutiny — and free to take during the pre-alpha, once a day per item. These prices are what they will cost afterwards.

• A Lord's Inheritance — $29.99, once per lord, ever. The best value we will sell, and deliberately the only thing that will be allowed to be: 15,000 gems, 150 hours of speed-ups, 25 million resources, a permanent second build queue and a keep skin. (The second build queue is also earned free at VIP 2 or 800 prestige — the pack buys it sooner, not exclusively.) It is sized against our own cheapest gem rate and lands about 23% ahead of it — a figure asserted in the economy tests so it cannot quietly decay into a worse deal. Capped at one purchase because a repeatable pack this good would just become a treadmill.
• Warden's Charter — $9.99 for 30 days. A daily bounty of gems, speed-ups and resources, plus a patron's banner.
• The Conqueror's Path — $1.99. The premium track of the seasonal battle pass. The free track ships with the season and is not a stub — see VIP & Battle Pass.
• Founder's Provisions — $19.99, once per lord, ever. A running start for a new house: 10 million resources, 4,000 speed-up minutes and 8,000 gems in one wagon. Everything in it is earnable free — it front-loads, it never raises.
• King's Patronage — $2.99 for 30 days. A permanent second build queue plus 3,000 gems dripped over the month. (The second queue is also unlockable free via the keep tech tree — the Patronage buys it sooner, not exclusively.)
• Gems — the Pouch of Dragonglass ($4.99, 600) and the Chest of Dragonglass ($9.99, 6,500). Gems buy speed-ups, and roughly 250 a day are earnable free from quests, events and daily login.
• Cosmetics — $0.99 each: Winterhold (a keep skin) and the Dragonfire Trail (a march trail). They change how you look and nothing else.
• A Traveller's Kit — $0.99. The cheapest thing in the store: 120 gems, 600 stamina and six hours off the queue. What a new lord actually needs, at the price of nothing much.
• The Hunter's Draught — $2.99. Two full hunting bars (2,000 stamina), 400 gems and four hours of speed-ups. Stamina regenerates free at 2 a minute to a cap of 1,000 — this buys the wait, never a higher ceiling.
• The Harbour Levy — $4.99. 8 million in stores, a day of speed-ups and 600 gems — the quay and the hulls, for a lord building toward the crossing.
• The Long Hunt — $9.99. Six full bars of stamina, 3,600 gems and forty hours off the queue.
• The Master Builder — $9.99. A permanent second build queue, two days of speed-ups, 6 million in stores and 3,000 gems. (The second queue is earned free at VIP 2 or 800 prestige, and through the keep tech tree — every pack that carries it buys it sooner, never exclusively.)
• The Winter Livery — $2.99. Three cosmetics in one wagon. Looks, and nothing else.
• The Ransom of Kings — $32.99, once per lord, ever. The largest single chest in the store: 20,000 gems, a hundred hours of speed-ups, 40 million in stores, ten full hunting bars and two liveries. It is shown about once in every twenty-five visits to the store — see below, because that sentence deserves more than a line.

That is the entire catalogue — sixteen items, and this page names every one of them because a test refuses the build if it does not. There is no $99.99 tier, no loot box, no gacha, and no item whose value you cannot read before you buy it.

The Ransom of Kings, and why an occasional shelf is not a loot box

One item in the store appears intermittently, and we would rather explain it at length than have you wonder.

What is occasional is the shelf. Never the contents. A loot box is a purchase whose contents are random — you pay, then find out what you got. The Ransom of Kings holds exactly the same published goods every single time it appears, printed in full before you commit, and it may be bought once per lord ever. There is nothing to roll and nothing to chase.

And the appearance is a rate, not a roll. It is not Math.random, which would mean one lord opens the store two hundred times and never sees it while another sees it twice, with nobody able to check which happened. Every lord gets a stable offset derived from their own founding date and then sees it on every twenty-fifth load — exactly one in twenty-five for everybody, a different sequence per lord, and reproducible after the fact from the account and the visit count.

No countdown, no stock number, no "only 3 left". Those are the levers that turn an offer into pressure, and none of them is here. If it is not on the shelf today it will be on it again, and it will hold the same things.

It is also not the best value in the store, deliberately. At 788 units of currency per dollar it lands just under A Lord's Inheritance's 800, so the $29.99 beginner pack keeps the "best value we will sell" claim it is sold on. What makes the Ransom the biggest thing in the store is its absolute size, not its rate — which is the only honest way to build a headline pack in a game whose charter forbids selling an advantage.

The Council Market — where earned gems actually go

Everything above is bought with money. The Council Market is the other half of the economy and the more important one: a shelf in the Council where gems you earned by playing buy things, and the only currency it accepts is that one. No real-money purchase ever appears here.

It exists because a free lord earns roughly 340–380 gems a day: about 250 from quests, events and the daily — the figure the store prints beside every pack — and the rest from the Residents' own gifts — and for most players that outran anything habitual to spend it on. Surplus gems became rushed timers, which quietly burns the pacing the whole economy is built around. Optional, repeatable convenience is the honest sink.

Three rules govern every listing, and a test fails the build if one is broken:

• Convenience or cosmetics only. Nothing on the shelf raises a ceiling. Peace shields, anti-scout cloaks, speed-ups, teleports, resource wagons, hunting draughts, keep skins — every one of them is time or comfort, never a bigger number at the summit.
• Every listing names a free way to earn the same thing. If it cannot be won from play, it is not stocked.
• No arbitrage, in either direction. A shield bought as an item costs exactly what raising the same shield directly costs. Buying the item is pre-purchase convenience — something in your bag before you sleep — and never a discount, so the Market can never become the cheaper route to anything.

The Hunt shelf, and why it is not a paid energy meter

The newest shelf sells hunting draughts: a wineskin is 500 stamina, poured straight into the bar you spend on camps. That deserves the plainest answer we can give, because a shop that sells stamina is the exact shape of the thing we refuse two paragraphs below.

The difference is that nothing here gates play. Your bar refills free to 1,000 at 2 per minute — a full bar in eight hours and twenty minutes, from empty, for nothing — and a draught is priced at precisely what that wait is worth on the other clock: one gem a minute, the same rate a speed-up has charged for a minute of building since the first one shipped. It buys back time you could have had by coming back later. It is not a bigger bar, it is not more strikes per day at the ceiling, and no draught anywhere raises the cap.

Two of the shelves are new and worth naming. Cloak the Walls (8h or a day) makes a scouting raven read nothing true about your keep — a defensive bluff, not a stat. The Advanced Teleport lets you choose the ground you settle on rather than trusting the winds; held in the bag, it is the piece that makes relocating next to your alliance before a war window a plan instead of a gamble.

The things we chose not to build

A fairness promise is mostly a list of refusals, so here is ours: no pay-to-win stat packs. No randomised chests sold for money. No energy meter that stops you playing until you pay. No paid revive or paid march that a free lord cannot match. No offer that expires in ninety seconds to panic you into buying it. No pricing that changes based on how much you have already spent.

Cosmetics are cosmetic

Skins, sigils, banners and seasonal flair change how you look, never how hard you hit. Seasonal flair currency is cosmetic-only and resets each season, so it can never become a stored advantage. See Heraldry & Cosmetics.

Where to read more

• Economy & Pacing — the timer model these numbers come out of.
• The Iron Bank — borrowing against your own future production, with no real money involved.
• Free-to-Play Mastery — how to hit the daily budget without spending.
• The VIP Value Guide — what the Charter does and does not accelerate.