Lineage — Living Factions (Phase 3, IMPLEMENTED 2026-07-17)

Status: IMPLEMENTED — named-faction roster live across Campaign (SP/MP) and the Eternal Realm (Global) via the shared AI-personality assignment path.

Parent: vision.md § Living factions (the north-star ask this doc fulfills — Phase 3 of the build path). Wires into: diplomacy.md (the AIPersonality archetypes each faction maps onto), index.md (current mechanics).

Why this doc exists

vision.md names the problem directly: "Today the world's rivals are seven generic AI archetypes wearing procedurally-generated names. They compute, but they do not mean anything — and players feel it." Feedback: "only like 20 names in the whole system", "the patterns are boring." This doc is the design pass vision.md deferred — it finalizes the "illustrative starting roster" into a locked, implemented set of six named factions, each with a fixed identity that recurs identically everywhere an AI kingdom appears.

The roster

Six factions, one per non-BALANCED AIPersonality archetype (BALANCED stays the "no faction" legacy default, used only as a null-personality fallback — see Wiring below). Each entry is a fixed, 1:1 archetype mapping — a given faction ALWAYS carries the same AIPersonality type, so the same name means the same behavior in every game, every mode.

The Iron Compact

Field	Value
Archetype	AGGRESSIVE
Sigil	A crossed hammer and spear over an iron ingot
Motto	"Strength is the only treaty that holds."
Homeland	The Ironspine Mountains — war-clans bound by iron tribute, not blood
Signature bias	Cavalry and Siege-heavy armies; rushes BARRACKS/MINE construction; the first to
march when opportunity favors them
Stance to player	Ancient enemy — the default rival, present in nearly every campaign

The Iron Compact is a confederation of mountain clans who settled their old blood feuds by agreeing that whoever holds the most iron holds the mountain. They tax every caravan that crosses their passes in ore, and they measure a rival kingdom's worth by how much of it can be melted down. Their agenda is simple and legible: conquest, tribute, and the humiliation of anyone who mistakes patience for peace.

The Gilded League

Field	Value
Archetype	MERCHANT
Sigil	A golden scale balanced over three coins
Motto	"Every wall has a price; every enemy, a ledger entry."
Homeland	The Amberreach coast — a compact of trade-cities that answer to no single crown
Signature bias	Prioritizes MARKET construction and gold accumulation; the AI most likely to
propose trade agreements; buys its way out of wars it cannot win
Stance to player	Courtable ally — prefers coin to swords, and says so

The Gilded League is not a kingdom so much as a cartel wearing a crown. Its "rulers" are elected merchant-princes who answer to guild charters older than most dynasties. They have no interest in territory for its own sake — only in monopoly. A League caravan that crosses your border is either an opportunity or an insult, and the League will tell you plainly which.

The Ashen Covenant

Field	Value
Archetype	MYSTIC
Sigil	A grey flame inside a broken hourglass
Motto	"Time is a wall. We are the ones who dig."
Homeland	The Cindered Reach — an arcane order built around a ruined leyline nexus
Signature bias	Rushes BASIC_MAGIC / TIME_MAGIC research and mana infrastructure; the AI most
likely to threaten (or pursue) the MAGICAL victory
Stance to player	Wary rival — indifferent to territory, obsessive about the tech and magic race

The Ashen Covenant is what remains of an order that broke something it should not have, generations ago, and has spent every generation since trying to fix it by breaking it further. They covet magical knowledge above gold or land, and a kingdom racing toward TIME_STOP will find the Covenant is racing too — quietly, then all at once.

The Verdant Throne

Field	Value
Archetype	PEACEFUL
Sigil	An unbroken circle of wheat
Motto	"The mountain falls. The field endures."
Homeland	The Long Harrow — an agrarian heartland that has outlasted three empires by refusing
to fight for any of them
Signature bias	Prioritizes FARM construction and defensive fortification; slow to anger, slower
to forgive a broken treaty; wins by outlasting everyone else at the table
Stance to player	Courtable ally — the easiest realm to befriend, and the hardest to provoke

The Verdant Throne's founding myth is that every other kingdom in the region has already fallen once, and the Throne is still here because it never bothered to win. It has no interest in glory. It has a long memory for who fed it during a famine, and who besieged it during one.

The Pale Court

Field	Value
Archetype	DIPLOMATIC
Sigil	A single white mask over two crossed quills
Motto	"A crown is worn. An alliance is used."
Homeland	The Duskmere marshes — a court of vassal houses who trade favors instead of armies
Signature bias	Proposes the most treaties of any faction; the AI most likely to broker
alliances between OTHER kingdoms, reshaping the board without ever fighting for it
Stance to player	Wary rival — never openly hostile, never fully trustworthy

The Pale Court rules through favors owed rather than armies raised. Every treaty it signs is a thread in a larger web, and it is never entirely clear whose interests a Pale Court alliance actually serves until the moment it matters. They are the faction most likely to have already spoken to your other rivals before you did.

The Sunfire Dynasty

Field	Value
Archetype	SCHOLAR
Sigil	An open book wreathed in flame
Motto	"What we do not know yet, we will."
Homeland	The Solmere Archive — an ancient dynasty built atop a library older than its own throne
Signature bias	Rushes the technology tree ahead of every other priority; the AI most likely to
pursue the TECHNOLOGICAL victory
Stance to player	Wary rival — a slow, patient race the player may not notice until it is over

The Sunfire Dynasty's kings and queens are chosen as much for scholarship as bloodline, and the throne room doubles as a reading room. They rarely march first, but they are rarely caught unprepared either — every Sunfire war is a war they have already researched an answer for.

Wiring across the three modes (implementation)

The roster is defined once in code — — and consumed by every AI-kingdom creation path, so the SAME faction name always carries the SAME identity everywhere it appears:

• Campaign rivals (Local/SP + Multiplayer) — LineageWorldInitializer.populateAIKingdoms draws kingdom names from the roster (shuffled per new game, so different campaigns meet different subsets of factions in different orders) instead of the old flavor-only 10-name pool.
• Eternal Realm AI realms (Global) — the same code path seeds new Global-world AI kingdoms. An ALREADY-EXISTING Global kingdom whose name is not in the roster (an abandoned real player's kingdom, which treats as AI-controlled once its owner goes inactive) is left untouched — a real player's chosen kingdom name is never overwritten.
• AI personality assignment (all three modes, one shared path) — is the single method every mode's AI-turn processing calls the first time it needs a kingdom's AIPersonality (. getOrCreateAIKingdom, called from , which SP/MP AND all share). It now looks the kingdom's name up in the faction roster FIRST — a roster match gets that faction's fixed archetype deterministically, instead of a random pick from the six types. A name not in the roster (an old-format legacy kingdom, or an abandoned real player's kingdom in Global) falls back to the original random-archetype behavior unchanged, so no existing game is affected.
• Scenario sides (War of the Realms) — this mode is IMPLEMENTED as of Phase 5 (2026-07-18, see scenarios.md). The roster is exposed as plain data () with no SP/MP/Global-specific coupling, so Phase 5's future faction-pick step can consume it directly without any rework here.
• Player-visible identity — ("list kingdoms") now speaks each rival's one-line agenda alongside its standing, so a screenless player can hear who the Iron Compact is, not just that a war is on with them.

What this doc is NOT

• Not a rebalance. Each faction's AIPersonality trait/priority weights are the EXISTING archetype values in /createDefaultPriorities — this doc adds identity and flavor on top, it does not retune combat, diplomacy, or economy math.
• Not a Mode-3 (War of the Realms) spec. That framing lives in scenarios.md (Phase 5, IMPLEMENTED); this doc only guarantees the roster the future mode will draw from is ready and unowned by any one mode.

Related docs

• vision.md — the north-star vision this doc's Phase 3 fulfills.
• diplomacy.md — the AIPersonality archetype system each faction maps onto.
• progression.md — dynasty continuity fixes shipped alongside this phase (wider name pool, de-patterned births, mortal siblings, named regents — ).
• index.md — current mechanics (authoritative for WHAT exists).