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Research & the Academy
Quick answers
- Is Iron Realms free to play?
- Yes. Iron Realms is free to play in any browser with no download and no account required. Every building, troop tier and Seat of Power is reachable without spending money — purchases buy speed and cosmetics, never a higher ceiling.
- Does spending money make you stronger in Iron Realms?
- No. Nothing purchasable raises your power ceiling. A charter audit runs on every build and fails it if any offer would sell power. During the pre-alpha nothing is for sale at all — better than that, the store gives its goods away: everything in it is free to take, once a day per item, while the realm is being built. When payments do open, spending will compress time only: it clears timers, it never raises the summit.
- How long does it take to max a keep in Iron Realms?
- Keeps cap at level 45 and troops at tier 13 — the same summit for everyone, and it is a campaign: about seven months of steady play at half an hour a day, counting keep 45 and the nineteen plots that gate it. The Fair Play ledger inside the game reads that figure straight out of the shipped constants, so it is never a month behind the build.
Research is the quietest power in the game and the most compounding. A study finished on day one pays out every day after — so the earlier you build the Maester's Academy and keep it working, the further ahead you pull.
How the tree works
Studies are grouped into disciplines that branch from a common root and gate one another with prerequisites — you must reach a level in an earlier study before a later one opens. The foundational line is Agriculture; from it branch economy studies like Irrigation, Crop Rotation, Granaries, and Millwork, and the materials line — Quarrying, Smelting, Deep Mining, and Woodcraft — with military and logistics disciplines beyond.
What to research first
- Economy foundations. Early ranks of Agriculture and the resource lines have the best return-on-time in the game because they compound for your whole career.
- Logistics / speed. Anything that shortens build or march time multiplies every other action you take.
- Military, when you fight. Combat studies matter enormously once you are at war and are wasted resource while you are not — research them when you need them, not before.
What a study actually costs
This is the single most useful fact about research and it used to appear nowhere: studies are paid for in food, wood, stone and iron — each of the four billed at sixty times the level's gem figure. Gems are no longer the price of research at all; they are the optional instant finish on a study already under way. Levels above 10 are the advanced tier, and those additionally consume Valyrian steel (one bar per level past ten), which is why steel is worth hoarding long before you can spend it.
The practical consequence: an Academy running flat out is a real draw on the same treasury feeding your build queue. Early on you will have to choose. That is intended — three things you want and grain for two of them is the shape of the whole economy now.
Maester's notes — the quest reward that had nowhere to go
Quests, founding milestones and the daily login's jackpot days pay a reward marked 📜. It now banks as maester's notes, and one note takes one second off the next study you start — spent automatically, with no button to remember.
Two limits keep it honest. A note may only ever cover half of any one study — the same ceiling the Academy's own speed bonus is held to, because time is the axis this game paces on and no single lever is allowed to be worth more than that. Whatever the cap leaves unspent stays banked for the study after. And notes buy nothing else: they are not a currency, they cannot be traded, and there is no prompt anywhere asking you to convert something into them.
Your balance is on the Academy panel beside the desks.
The last link — the tier past every deep study
Each discipline ends in a small group of studies that nothing else in the game unlocks: Great Works and Harbour Works in economy, Pattern Welding and The Unbroken Line in military, Concentric Castles and Deep Cisterns on the walls, The Great Council and The Ravenries in dominion, and the dragon line's own. They are not gated by a level of the Keep, by a price, or by anything the store sells — they are gated by the leaves of the tree. To open one you must first have finished the deep studies that feed it, which is a road measured in weeks of play rather than in resources.
They do not pay more per level than the studies below them. That is deliberate and it is checked on every build: a per-level bonus is the one thing money could reach, because a buyer can compress the timers and collect the same slope sooner. A prerequisite chain is the one thing it cannot. So the last tier's reward is reach — more levels of permanent bonus available to a lord who went the distance — never a steeper rate.
One study sits above all of them. The Long Memory is the only tech in the tree whose prerequisites cross four disciplines at once, and it is deliberately the tier's smallest bonus: the point of it is that you cannot reach it by living in one branch.
Run two studies at once
A second research desk unlocks at VIP 2 or 800 prestige — it is earned, not given. Once you have it, use both, always: an idle Academy is lost compounding you never get back. Pair a long economy study with a short utility one so neither desk ever sits empty. Until then, one desk, and the choice of what sits on it matters more.
The rule of thumb
Economy early, speed always, war just-in-time. Follow that and your research will quietly out-earn a rival who only studies what looks shiny.