> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.ashenmarch.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.
# The March
> What you see and do during a live march — the war-map HUD, the herald's crossings, grip, loop-closing, march controls, and how a march is never lost.
A **march** is a campaign in progress — you, on foot (or cavalry, or navy), putting real ground under your banner. When you record a march in the Ashenmarch app, the screen becomes a **war table**: your route burns across the land, the Herald calls out every border you cross, and your house presses into rival ground in real time. This page walks through what you see and do from the moment you set out to the moment the dust settles.
Everything the live screen shows is your effort *taking shape* — never a settled outcome. The march **predicts**; the [after-the-march verdict](/en/after-the-march) **adjudicates**. That split is deliberate, and it's why a march can only ever surprise you pleasantly.
## Setting out
You'll land on the **herald's summons** — a single gold crest, "To the Field," and one command: *Every step claims ground.*
Tap **Raise the Banner** and the march begins. GPS starts recording; the war-map wakes; your "you" chevron drops onto clear ground.
The resting screen is deliberately spare — two numbers (**TIME** and **CLAIMED**) and a single **Pause** control. Everything else lives in the periphery, so you can glance and get back to the road.
## The war table
The map beneath your march is **not a street map** — it's a stylised, tarnished heraldic table drawn from the land as *factions*. There are no roads or labels to read while you run; there's the shape of who holds what, and your route burned across it in tarnished gold.
* Your **route thread** is the mark you leave on the land — a gold breadcrumb that brightens at its most recent tail, so "where I've been" always reads clearly.
* The **"you" chevron** is the brightest thing on the table — your position and heading, always kept in clear ground so the HUD never sits on top of it.
* Each territory is filled by its state, so a glance tells you whose ground you're on:
| On the table | Reads as |
| ----------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------ |
| **Your land** — warm gold-washed | held by your house |
| **Rival land** — cool slate/indigo | another house holds this (never red) |
| **Walled rival** — a thicker, crenellated edge | harder to break |
| **Decaying rival** — fraying at the edges | vulnerable |
| **Contested** — a hatched texture | disputed ground, live combat |
| **Open wold** — bare and dotted | unclaimed, free to take |
| **Siege at home** — a warning glow + sword-and-shield | your land is under active attack |
Rival ground is always **cool slate, never crimson**; contested ground is a **texture, never an alarm colour**. Crimson is spent only on an active siege pressing your *own* hold — a genuine threat, never a scolding.
## The herald at your shoulder
Cross a border and the **Herald** announces it. A strip slides in from the top for a few seconds, then settles into a quiet **standing line** that stays until your next crossing — so you always have a readable trace of the last thing the Herald said:
* **Invading {territory}** — you've pushed into a rival's hold.
* **Fortifying {territory}** — you're within land your house holds.
* **Claiming the open wold** — you've entered unclaimed ground.
* **Contested — {territory}** — you're on disputed ground.
These are always the **present tense** — *Invading*, never *Captured*. The screen narrates the effort you're spending, because whether that effort takes the land is the survey's call, resolved after you finish.
The Herald works with your phone **locked and pocketed**. Every crossing lands as a distinct **haptic pattern** and a **spoken line** ("Invading the Barony of Westmere") — so you never have to look at the screen to know you've crossed into rival ground. The spoken herald is in your own language. A walled hold's line lands grim ("…its walls stand"); a decaying one lands light ("…it falters").
## Grip — presence, not a scoreboard
Inside the standing line sits a small row of **grip pips** (`▓▓▓░░`). Grip is a measure of **how much presence you've pressed into *this* territory this march** — distance covered inside it and time spent there.
Grip is **not** a "percent to victory." It caps at a firm grip and stops there — reaching full grip says *you've pushed hard here*, never *you've won*. Whether a rival hold actually changes hands is settled by the [rules of conquest](/en/conquering-land) and revealed [after the march](/en/after-the-march). Grip is an honest, humble hint that deliberately under-promises — so the verdict is only ever neutral or a pleasant surprise.
## Closing the loop
Claiming new ground means running a **closed loop**. As you head back toward where you started, the map helps you close it:
The default. Your trail is open and still forming — keep going.
When you come back near your start point *and* the shape you'd enclose is big enough to hold, the start seal brightens and a dashed **ghost-close arc** stretches from you to it. The Herald whispers that a holding is taking shape.
You're close enough to close. The arc *invites* you to finish — it never closes the loop for you. You end the march when you're ready.
The arc is **live guidance, not a promise** — GPS drifts, so the app treats "close enough" generously, but the final geometry is surveyed on your full track after you finish. If the shape you close is too small, the Herald tells you gently to range wider. The [minimum loop size](/en/reference) lives on the Game Reference.
## Auto-pause, and what counts
Stop at a red light or a water fountain and the march **auto-pauses** — distance and time freeze so a two-minute wait doesn't pollute your pace. Start moving again and it **auto-resumes** on its own; you never have to tap to keep going. If you forget to end a march entirely, it eventually **auto-closes and files itself**, so it's never lost.
This ties into a rule worth knowing: **effort counts moving time only**. Paused and stationary time is excluded from your pace and your baseline — exactly like every serious run tracker — so standing still never penalises you. (How effort scales your march is on the [Game Reference](/en/reference#effort-curve).)
## Day and night
Direct sunlight washes out a dark map, and most marches run in daylight. So the war table has two skins of the *same* table: a **tarnished (night)** treatment and a **parchment (daylight)** one that survives the sun. It follows your device's light/dark appearance automatically and never flickers mid-march; you can also pin it to Parchment or Tarnished in run settings.
## March controls
While you're marching, the only control on screen is **Pause** — by design. Nothing that ends or discards a march is reachable while you're moving, so you can never end a march by a pocket tap. Ending is always two deliberate acts: pause first, then choose.
Tapping **Pause** (or an auto-pause) opens the pause screen with exactly three actions:
| Action | Gesture | What it does |
| ----------------- | ------------------ | -------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Resume march** | single tap | back to marching, no confirmation |
| **Save march** | single tap | ends and records the march → the survey and [verdict](/en/after-the-march) |
| **Abandon march** | hold, then confirm | discards the march entirely — nothing is recorded |
**Resume** is the biggest, brightest, safest choice. **Save** is a single tap because losing a finished march is far worse than an accidental save. **Abandon** is set apart, quiet, and guarded by a hold *and* a warning ("Nothing is recorded. Your march and the ground you covered are lost to you.") — it's the one and only way to deliberately throw a march away.
## If your march is interrupted
If your phone crashes or is killed mid-march, the app doesn't quietly lose it or quietly file it. On next launch you get an honest review — **"Your march was interrupted"** — with the ground you covered shown on the map, and a choice:
* **Continue** — pick the march back up and keep recording. Offered only when you're still standing where the track left off, so nothing is fabricated across a gap.
* **Submit march** — file what was captured and go on to the normal [verdict](/en/after-the-march).
* **Discard** — throw the recovered march away (with a confirm).
A crash never means a lost march. The ground you'd covered is recovered and handed back to you to decide — a boon rescued from a mishap, not an error.
## A march is never lost
Marches record **offline-first** — no signal is never a problem. If you run beyond the map data the app cached at the start, the war table simply goes bare and the Herald falls quiet, with one calm line: *"Territory data unavailable here — your march records all the same."* Your route, your numbers, and the recording carry on; the war-map resumes the moment you're back on cached ground.
A finished march that can't reach the server yet doesn't vanish either. It's held safely, shown on your Home screen as a **pending march** that files itself when the path clears, and carries an *"as of…"* caption so you always know how fresh things are. A march leaves the queue only when the server truly has it.
## Where a march came from
Once filed, every march wears a small **source ring** around its activity icon on your Campaign Record, so you can tell at a glance where it came from:
* **Gold** — recorded live in the Ashenmarch app.
* **Strava orange** — imported from Strava.
* **Slate** — another connected source.
A Strava-imported loop claims exactly like a live-recorded one — the ring is provenance, not privilege.
***
The verdict — what your march claimed, fortified, and earned.
Claims, tiers, fortification, decay, and walls — the rules the survey applies.
Sieges, defending your ground, and planning marches with the War Council.
Loop minimums, the effort curve, and every other number in one place.
*Game values in this guide reflect current live settings and may be tuned over time — the [Game Reference](/en/reference) is refreshed when they change.*