Ways to March

A march doesn’t have to be recorded one single way. However you already move — phone in hand, a favourite app, a watch on your wrist — Ashenmarch can turn that movement into conquest. This page walks through every path a march can take to reach the realm.

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Live in the Ashenmarch app

Recording live in the app with GPS is the primary way to march, and the fullest one. Your screen becomes a war table: your route burns across the land, the Herald calls out every border you cross, grip pips fill as you press into rival ground, and a ghost-close arc helps you seal a loop. Auto-pause handles red lights, the whole thing works phone-locked-and-pocketed, and a march is never lost even offline. Everything the live screen does — the crossings, the haptics, the spoken herald, the day/night map — is covered in The March.

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Strava

Connect Strava once and your activities flow in on their own. A run, ride, or walk you record anywhere Strava sees it is imported automatically (the moment Strava tells us about it) and matched to your ground — claiming, fortifying, and building walls exactly as a live march would. Strava is a data connection, not a sign-in: you still log in with Apple, Google, or email, and connecting Strava only lets your activities import. You can also pull activities in by hand from the Strava page, and disconnect any time. The connection details and what stays private live in Your Account.

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Apple Health & Health Connect

If your workouts are recorded by another app or device — a watch, a treadmill app, a third-party run tracker — they usually land in your phone’s health store. Ashenmarch can import straight from there:

• Android — Health Connect. Connect Health Connect from Profile → Connections and your recorded workouts import as marches.
• iOS — Apple Health. The matching Apple Health import brings workouts from HealthKit in the same way.

Imported health workouts are de-duplicated against your Strava imports and your live in-app marches, so the same run recorded in two places only ever becomes one campaign — you’re never double-credited or double-charged.

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Garmin & other watches

There’s no separate file to juggle to get a Garmin, Coros, or similar watch run into Ashenmarch. Those watches sync their activities into Strava and into Apple Health / Health Connect already — so once you’ve connected either of those (above), your watch runs arrive through them automatically, matched to your ground like any other march. You also don’t need to export a route file to run a plan. A saved War Council route is followed live in the app on your phone — Ashenmarch is the execution surface, so there’s no GPX/TCX shuffle between your planner and your watch.

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Watch apps — march from the wrist

For players who run without a phone, dedicated watch apps are in the works. The watch is a standalone capture device, not a screen mirror: it records your march on its own and files the claim later, so you can leave the phone at home. On the Apple Watch, a phone-free march is built to be run eyes-off:

• A glanceable run face — no map on the wrist (unreadable mid-stride and a battery drain). Just your time, distance, territories-claimed-so-far, and a single state word (MARCHING, FORTIFYING, CONTESTED) colour-coded to the ground you’re on.
• A haptic vocabulary — distinct taps tell you, from feel alone, when you cross into contested ground, complete a wall, or close a claim. Learnable in a couple of runs, so you never have to look.
• Claim pending, then filed — the watch records offline and holds the march until a path to the server appears (its own connection, your phone later, or the next charge). It says “a march awaits the herald,” never “saved” or “error” — and fires a success buzz when the claim finally files. The full claim ceremony still happens on the phone.

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Glanceable — widget & complications

You don’t have to open the app to know how your realm stands:

• Home-screen widget — a small heraldic banner showing your crest, rank, and holdings, with one calm-or-urgent line: your ground is holding, “[Territory] is contested — ride to hold it,” or “[Territory] weakens — a run renews it.” Tap it to jump straight to the right place in the app.
• Watch complications — on a watch face, your active march (time and distance) or, when idle, your territory count and a short herald nudge. These arrive with the watch app.

Both are re-engagement glances, not dashboards — one feeling per look: my ground is safe, or my ground needs me.

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Same rules, whichever way you march

However a march is recorded — live in-app, Strava, health import, or watch — it runs through the same survey. The minimum loop, the effort curve measured against your own baseline, the tier and decay rules, and the honest-ground checks that decide whether a march counts apply identically to all of them. A beginner’s phone-recorded personal best counts exactly as much as an elite’s watch run. Once filed, every march wears a small source ring on your Campaign Record so you can tell at a glance where it came from — gold for a live app march, Strava orange for an import, slate for another connected source. It’s a mark of provenance, nothing more.

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Device and platform availability in this guide reflects the current plan and rolls out over the beta — some watch features noted as “coming” are on their way, not yet live.