The Tideholm Almanac

You rule one island on a wide, patient ocean. From it you will grow an economy, raise an army, and reach for more land — by settling the empty grey islands or taking the inhabited ones. Everything runs in real time: your buildings rise, your troops train, and your fleets sail while you sleep. This book is the difference between learning that the slow way and the fast way. Read the first five chapters to play; read the rest to win.

Chapter OneThe Tides

Tideholm is a game of slow strategy. There are no turns and no pause. A wall you queue tonight is standing by morning; a fleet you send across the map arrives hours later, whether or not you are watching. The ocean rewards the captain who plans for the hours they are away, not only the minutes they are present.

The world is a single shared sea of forty by forty tiles. Some islands are yours, some belong to other captains, and the rest are held by the island folk — bots who are anything but decorative (Chapter Eleven). Grey islands are uncharted: unclaimed land waiting for a colony ship.

Play unfolds in seasons. Each opens on a fresh map, runs until someone wins or the season is called, and then resets — with the ruleset sometimes changed for the season ahead. What survives a reset is deliberately little: the hall of fame, and your name and banner (Chapter Thirteen). Everything else is built anew, which is the point — every season is a clean race.

Finding your way about

The game is a row of tabs and a dock. You will spend most of your time in My Island — build, train, read one island's detail — and on the Islands overview, which lays your whole holding on one screen: stocks, production, defence, and what is at sea, sorted weakest-first so the island most in need of you sits at the top. The Map is where you click a target; Reports keeps your battle and scout dispatches; Rankings, Market, Alliance, and Mail each earn a chapter below.

Two conveniences repay learning early. The dock along the bottom holds a chip for every island — click to switch, hold or right-click to pin one to the front (and to the front of the number keys). And the ⏳ chip in the top bar names the very next thing to finish anywhere in your empire — a building, a training batch, a fleet landing — with a countdown; click it and you are carried straight to that island. When the chip is empty, so are your halls, and idle halls earn nothing.

Before you commit an attack, open its target and use the battle simulator: enter a force and it estimates the outcome and your losses against the garrison you have scouted. It is far cheaper to lose a battle on paper than at sea.

Chapter TwoThree Resources

Three resources accumulate on every island you hold, hour after hour:

Your Storehouse caps how much of each you can hold. A full store wastes everything produced past the brim, so a wise captain keeps the store a step ahead of income. Storage grows generously — 400 × 1.5^level per resource — so a single upgrade buys real headroom.

Production climbs with the producing building's level, at about 12% more per level on top of the flat gain — so a Lumberyard 5 makes far more than five Lumberyard 1s. Balance the three mines against what you actually spend, not against each other: if your gold sits empty while wood overflows, raise the Gold Mine, not the Lumberyard.

Chapter ThreeRaising an Island

Every building costs about 1.55× more per level and takes 1.5× longer, so early levels are cheap and late ones are investments. Upgrades queue up to three deep. The Island Hall speeds every construction on that island — roughly 4% faster per hall level — so a captain who neglects the Hall builds slowly forever.

Chapter FourThe Muster

Six units make an army. Each costs population from your Farm as well as resources, so a bigger army needs a bigger Farm. Read the table with an eye to role, not raw numbers: a sentinel's 30 defence and a raider's 24 attack are the two pillars of the game.

Note the speeds you will feel in play: raiders are quick, the flagship is the slowest thing that sails. A wave travels at the pace of its slowest member — so a flagship in your fleet slows the whole fleet to a crawl. This single fact shapes every campaign in Chapter Seven.

Chapter FiveThe Art of War

Click any island to attack it. Travel time depends on distance and your slowest unit. On arrival, your attack power meets the garrison's defence power, and the stronger side wins. Ties go to the defender — a fact that quietly kills many a lone flagship.

The two powers are built like so:

The wall appears twice — a flat bonus and a multiplier — which is why walls are so strong on a garrisoned island. Reinforcements sent as support (Chapter Eight) add their defence to the total, so a well-supported ally is a hard nut.

The cost of winning

The loser is destroyed utterly. The winner loses a fraction of their force, and that fraction is the crux of every raid you will ever plan:

Crush a small garrison and you lose almost nothing; scrape a win and you lose most of your army. The exponent is unkind: a 3× advantage costs you about 19%, but a mere 1.5× edge costs 54%. The lesson every captain learns the expensive way — bring overwhelming force or don't bring it at all. Beyond roughly 3×, extra troops shave little further; that is the sweet spot to aim for.

Morale — the shield of the small

When a much larger attacker strikes a much smaller human, their attack is dampened by morale (down to a floor). The giant's fist swings soft; the underdog's defence stands full. It is the game's built-in protection against being farmed by a whale — and it means that when two unequal captains finally trade blows, the larger one is fighting at a discount they may not expect. Against the island folk, no such mercy applies: humans hit bots at full strength.

Victors plunder what their surviving holds can carry, drawn proportionally from the defender's stores, and sail home with it. An empty store is a wasted raid — which is why a raided captain who evacuates first gives the attacker nothing but a long trip.

Chapter SixWidening the Map

The grey islands are yours for the settling. Build a Harbor, train a Colony Ship, and send it to an uncharted tile — the first ship to land claims it as a fresh colony. A newly settled island begins small and grows like any other.

Because the price counts islands held, a conquest (next chapter) also raises the cost of your future ships. And so the seasoned captain buys every colony ship they intend to build before taking an inhabited island — a small discipline that saves a great deal of gold.

Chapter SevenTaking What's Held

An inhabited island is not settled — it is conquered, and conquest is a campaign, not a single blow. Every island has loyalty, from 100 down to 0. The instrument that lowers it is the Flagship:

• A winning attack that includes a surviving flagship drops loyalty by 25–40.
• When loyalty reaches 0, the island — buildings, stores, and all — becomes yours, and your surviving army garrisons it.
• Loyalty regenerates slowly (about 2 per hour), so strike in a sustained rhythm, not in scattered pokes.
• A fresh conquest starts restive at 25, and lose your last island and your people flee to a new one — you are never quite out of the game.

The doctrine

From 100 loyalty you need three or four winning flagship waves. The craft is in how you throw them:

Remember that the flagship is the slowest sailer, so each loyalty hit is a long round trip and the ladder unfolds over hours. Plan it against a moment you can watch — or against a sleeping defender (Chapter Eleven).

Chapter EightShields, Spies & Allies

Support — how alliances actually hold ground

Click any island and choose Send support to station troops there as defenders. Stationed troops fight and die in that island's defence, and their power is added to the garrison in full. Recall them whenever you wish. Reinforcing a threatened colony — your own or an ally's — is the difference between a scouted-open target and a fortress.

Scouts — and counter-scouts

A Scout reveals a target's garrison, stores, loyalty, and buildings — the intelligence every raid and conquest should begin with. But the defender's own scouts fight back: send more scouts than they keep at home, or none of yours return and they learn you tried.

The corollary is one of the game's deepest tricks. A raider will only strike a measured, beatable target — so an island whose scouts catch every incoming spy can never be measured, and therefore is never raided by an opportunist. A screen of counter-scouts is armour made of ignorance.

Alliances & the mailbag

Found an alliance or accept an invitation in the Alliance tab. Allies cannot attack one another, your tag shows beside your name on the map and the rankings, and — with support — you can genuinely hold ground together: one captain's sentinels standing on another's wall is how the strongest positions in the game are built. Against a shared enemy, an alliance is worth more than any single fleet.

The Mail tab is your correspondence with any captain on the map — to plot, to bargain, to threaten, or simply to keep a rival warm. In a game this patient, a well-timed message often moves more than a wave. It is also where your captain's profile and banner live (Chapter Thirteen).

Chapter NineThe Tidepool

The Tidepool, in the Market tab, is an automatic market: swap wood, stone, and gold at a live price with no trading partner needed. It needs a Harbor — but unlike an ordinary shipment it uses no merchant slot, so it works when all your merchants are at sea.

The price moves as you trade: the pool holds reserves of each resource, and a swap that drains one side makes it dearer. Small, shallow pools mean large swaps suffer heavy price impact and are capped — so trade in measured amounts, or deposit to become a provider and earn a share of every swap's fee.

The Vault

Beside the Tidepool sits the Vault — a personal strongroom for gold. Deposit and the coin leaves your island for a treasury only you can reach; a raider can sack that island to the boards and never touch what you have locked away. Withdraw returns it to an island's stock, up to the room its Storehouse has left — so nothing overflows and is lost. Instant, and gold only.

The Tidegate

Past the Vault stands the Tidegate — where gold steps outside the game's ledger altogether. Peg in and vaulted coin is sealed into a balance keyed not to any island but to your nostr banner; peg out and it returns. Every move is signed in your own browser by your own key, and the signed history — the trail — is yours: any soul holding your public key can verify it, and no harbourmaster can rewrite it. Only banner-flying players see the gate at all.

The Tavern

Through the gate, down at the dockside, stands the Tavern — a different house entirely, on a different shore, that honours your sealed gold all the same. Its game is Tide Dice: set your odds, cast your stake, and the next Bitcoin block rolls the bones. The block does not exist when you bet, so no soul alive — not the house, not any server — knows the roll before the tide comes in. Your mark salts the dice, every wager is signed by your own key, and any stranger can verify any roll from the public chain alone.

Chapter TenThe Great Beacon

There is a way to win the whole world: raise the Great Beacon, a colossal lighthouse, to its winning level. Its progress is announced to every captain at each level, so it cannot be a secret — the wonder is a target as much as a triumph, and the last levels give your rivals time to gather against you.

The Beacon is the most demanding structure in the game. It requires a high Island Hall to begin, its costs are charged the moment you queue each level, and its final level is vast — you will want your Storehouse tall enough to hold that cost, and a river of resources flowing to the wonder island while it builds. Building it is a season-defining project, and the captain who announces one at level one is inviting the whole ocean to a duel.

Chapter ElevenThe Island Folk

The bots are the world's living content. They build, train, raid for loot, expand — and they remember who attacked them. Understanding their natures is half of a campaign.

Their habits, which you will exploit

Every bot keeps a sleep window — hours in which it does nothing at all: no building, no training, no reaction to your fleets. A conquest timed to a sleeping bot meets no fresh defence between your waves. Every bot also holds grudges: attack one and it will, once armed, send a wave at your nearest island — a wave that, broken on a good wall, costs it far more than it costs you. And a bot whose stores you keep empty can never afford to rebuild — the farm loop, at its purest, is a cow that funds your fleet while it sleeps.

Chapter TwelveThe Admiral's Craft

The chapters above are the rules. What follows is the wisdom — the hard-won habits that separate a captain who knows the game from one who wins it.

Gold is your clock

Wood and stone arrive quickly; gold does not. Nearly every ambition — ships, flagships, the finest units — is gated by gold long before the other two. Raise the Gold Mine earlier than feels natural, and price every plan in gold.

Overwhelming force, or none

The loss curve punishes the narrow win. Do not send a fleet you merely think will win; send one that will win at three-to-one and come home nearly whole. A raid that costs half your army to make is a raid you should not have made.

Walls before soldiers

Defence in stone never bleeds. When shoring up an island, the wall is the first purchase and the sentinels the second — and a handful of walls across your frontier will turn a dozen opportunist raids into a dozen funerals.

The unseen giant

A large empire cannot be freshly scouted by ordinary bots — the "don't poke giants" rule keeps them from measuring you at all. Your naked colonies stay safe from opportunists until you conquer a pre-scouted bot island, whose old intelligence you inherit; that stale reading fades within half a day, and the colony goes quiet again. Only warlords, who ignore the rule, can measure a giant on purpose — guard against wolves, not against the flock.

Evacuate, don't defend the indefensible

A raid takes stores, not land. If a wave is coming to a lightly held island and you cannot make it win, spend the stores or ship them away before the raiders land. They will sack an empty larder and sail home with nothing.

Suppress, then take

A bot you mean to conquer need not be strong when you arrive. Strip its army and its stores in the days before; keep it too poor to rebuild; and let its own grudge-waves bleed themselves on your wall. When the flagship finally comes, it faces an empty shell its own vendetta helped hollow out.

Chapter ThirteenBanners & Names

In the Mail tab you may link a did:nostr identity — a self-owned key that becomes your captain's banner, shown beside your name in mail and the rankings. Generate a key on your own device, and paste back only the public half; the secret never leaves your hands.

The banner is more than decoration. Because it is yours rather than the season's, it survives the reset — link it once and it flies from the first day of every season after. Your name persists; your deeds accrete to it. It is the one thread of continuity the ocean allows, and the beginning of a reputation that outlives any single map.

Chapter FourteenThe Season Turns

When a season ends — by a Beacon lit, a runaway leader, or a called close — the world is archived to the hall of fame and a fresh map opens, often under a tuned ruleset. The colony curve may bite harder; the Beacon may demand more; the balance of gold and stone may shift. Read the opening announcement of each season the way a sailor reads the sky: the rules you mastered last time are the rules of last time.

What you carry across is your banner, your place in the hall of fame, and the craft in this book. Everything else you build again — which is the mercy and the point of a season. No lead is permanent; every reset is a fair start; and the ocean is always, patiently, waiting for the next tide.

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