Casual is online multiplayer with no rank on the line — relaxed games against real
people (with bots filling any empty seats). Same rules as Ranked, none of the pressure.
Correspondence is casual play stretched out over days: every player gets a long real-time
deadline to take their turn instead of a turn timer, and the match plays out over days or weeks
with nobody ever needing to be online at the same time. It runs casual rules throughout — the same
gold, achievements and casual stats — and it never touches RP or the ranked ladders.
It has its own door on the main menu and its own screen, Your Games.
Full details — the turn deadline, waiting for a lobby to fill, missing a deadline and abandoning
a match: Correspondence.
Casual carries no ranking penalty for leaving. If you have to drop, you can — abandoning
a casual match won't ban you or cost RP. (Ranked is strict about this; see
Ranked → Penalties.)
In Correspondence, leaving a match is never something
that happens by accident — stepping out just parks it, and giving it up for good is the
explicit Abandon button.
The only casual penalties come from the anti-griefing fair-play kicks below, and even
those are light:
These run in every live online game (Casual and Ranked alike), and siege detection also runs
locally in Single Player. They keep games moving and punish griefing.
Correspondence doesn't use any of them; its turn
deadline does the same job.
If you stop taking actions, a "Still there?" prompt appears after about 30 seconds
idle (sooner if you've already been flagged), with a 10-second countdown. If it expires,
your seat is handed to a bot so the other players aren't stuck waiting — and whether you can
come back depends on how many humans are still in the game:
This covers the capital picks at the start of a
Capital Conquest match too, not just regular turns. Go
idle on your pick and you get the same prompt, and the same rules above decide what happens:
rejoinable or permanent depending on how many humans remain, with ranked's abandon penalty on a
permanent takeover.
A stall is a turn that runs out the clock having conquered at most one territory.
A siege is repeated full rounds with no real engagement. A round counts as engaged if
you conquered at least one territory or made at least 3 attacks that round.
Bot takeover & pacts: when a human is converted to a bot, all of that player's
pacts are automatically broken.
See also: Ranked & RP · Game Modes Overview · Match Settings