Star Hunting

The cheapest star first

Wild fragments are stars for the price of some tends. Scout early — cavalry pays for itself the day it finds a fragment — and treat every reachable fragment as a standing priority:

• Reach it with borders, not bravado. A fragment inside your tended frontier is safe; a lone settler sprinting at a distant one through three rivals' shadows is a donated star. Chain-tending exists precisely for creeping a city's worked line out to a fragment a few hexes beyond its rings.
• Contested fragments are wars in miniature. If a rival is also two tends away, the question isn't who tends first, it's who can hold the ground over it. A spearman standing on the approach is often worth more than the tend itself.

Taking a capital

Capital stars are bought with sieges (see Breaking Defenses); the strategic layer is target selection:

• Prefer the fallen-behind neighbor — small garrison, short march, no friends. The star counts the same as the leader's.
• Short supply lines win sieges. Attacking across the map means every replacement takes five turns to arrive; the defender's take one. Fight neighbors; befriend the far.
• Time it against the table. A siege announces itself: your dread rises, your army sits visible on someone's border. Best moment is when the table is distracted — two rivals warring, a league mid-rot.
• Grow by conquest, too. A captured city is a working city — its tended tiles and structures join your economy. Sometimes the second-best reason to take a city is simply that it's built and you didn't have to pay the AP.

Defending your stars

Every star you hold makes you more worth attacking, so defense scales with your score:

• Your capital is your birth-star. It should never be garrisoned by hope alone. One high-DEF unit (spearman or better) from the early midgame; more as your dread grows.
• Fragment tiles can be lost — the tend belongs to whoever's presence controls the ground. Fragments near borders deserve a standing guard.
• Watch the dread mirror. The moment your star count puts you within reach of winning, assume every shield you've sworn is being reconsidered (see Playing the Table). The last star is best taken suddenly — a fragment quietly tended, a one-turn siege prepared over many turns — because the table punishes a slow, visible approach to victory.

The endgame count

The stars needed to win are fixed at game start — elimination doesn't lower the bar. A 6-player game needs 4 stars from its winner no matter how few kindreds still stand. That means every star in a dead kindred's territory went somewhere — usually into the hands of whoever was already strongest. Watch the leaderboard's star column like it's the only number on the screen, because it is. And sometimes the right play is keeping a doomed neighbor alive as a buffer: their fall feeds a rival more than it feeds you.