Patrols and war parties

Meeting the patrol

Road patrols are faction soldiers. They can fight nearby hostile creatures and opposing alliance soldiers while a neutral traveller passes. Standing below -20 with their own faction makes them hostile. Standing below -50 with one of that faction's allies can make them hostile too. A patrol already fighting a foe beside it can keep that fight instead of changing to a more distant player. Coming adjacent or provoking it can change that choice.

Why one group is stronger

Road patrols roll one of three starting stat bands for the whole squad. Cave guards use a band selected by cave content tier. Both then use the effective danger tier of their overworld location to increase health and melee damage. A cave entrance sets that danger, rather than the local coordinates of its interior. Veteran and Elite patrol labels mark the deep ranks. Frontier scaling leaves the normal detection range unchanged. For each danger tier beyond 1, base health is multiplied by 1.55 again and base melee damage by 1.3 again. Danger 4 then multiplies health by another 1.5 and damage by another 1.35. Danger 5 instead multiplies health by another 2 and damage by another 1.6. Health and damage are rounded to whole values. Existing armour also grows by 25% of its base value per danger tier beyond 1, rounded.

Roads, crowds and war heat

Road patrols aim for two or three guards. In the active area, new groups stop being attempted when at least four patrol members are already near a player. Warband members also count. That test happens before placement, so more than four can be present. Near an alliance border, war heat can bring two opposing groups. Below Skirmish these use ordinary patrols. Skirmish, Open War and Total War use their own warband profiles. Those profiles keep their fixed starting health and damage instead of receiving the separate frontier patrol scaling. Open ground and room still decide how many members arrive.

A patrol carries news

A road patrol can carry theft awareness from a nearby settlement of its own faction to another settlement. It carries a snapshot taken at departure. The source must already be at Alert awareness or worse. Arrival within twelve tiles of the destination, including diagonals, starts a two hundred turn wait before delivery. Any surviving squad member can deliver. When a beast kills the last carrier during a retaliation fight, the news can pass to another same-faction field soldier or be delivered directly. The player killing a carrier uses a different path and does not get this automatic preservation.