Correspondence is Pact or Peril played over days instead of in one sitting. Every player gets
a long real-time deadline to take their turn, and the match plays out over days or weeks with
nobody ever needing to be online at the same time.
It's one of the modes on the main menu, alongside Casual and Ranked.
Because a match can sit idle for a day at a time, notifications are how you
find out it's your move. They're worth setting up before you start one.
Correspondence lives on its own screen, reached from Correspondence on the main menu and
referred to in-game as Your Games. It's a grid of six slots, one per match, and each slot
tells you whose turn it is and how long is left on their deadline. Matches waiting on you are
flagged, and the mode button on the main menu shows how many.
From there you can start a New Match of your own, Browse Open Games to join someone
else's, open any match to take your turn, or pick up the result of one that has finished.
A Correspondence lobby is meant to sit there: it stays open and listed for up to 7 days
while people find it. You don't have to wait on the lobby screen — ready up, then back out,
and your seat is held for you until the lobby fills. It's waiting in Your Games whenever you want
to look at it.
If you haven't readied up, backing out gives up your seat. You're asked first, and told
that's what will happen. A match can't start until everyone in it has readied, so a seat nobody
ever readies would hold the whole lobby up for as long as it lives. The host is the exception: a
host's seat is always kept, readied or not.
The destructive option is a separate, clearly-labelled Cancel Match button: as a guest it
gives up your seat and leaves the lobby open for others, and as the host it closes the lobby for
everyone.
The match starts by itself as soon as every seat is filled and everyone has readied up —
nobody has to press Start, and nobody has to be there. It goes ahead even if every player has
closed the game, usually within a minute or so of the last player readying up.
Very occasionally, if the server that owns your lobby happens to be restarting, that automatic
start waits for it. Nothing is lost — everyone's seats are exactly as they were, and it
starts as soon as the server is back, or the moment the host next opens the lobby from Your
Games. It just begins a little later than usual.
Once your turn is submitted you're done until it comes round again, and the game offers to drop
you straight back to Your Games. Closing the game — or stepping out of a match mid-turn — costs
you nothing: your seat is held and your deadline simply keeps running. You don't have to be there
when the match ends either. The result waits in Your Games for you to collect, with the rewards
that go with it.
If your deadline passes, the game finishes that turn for you the same way a
turn timer expiry would — any reinforcements you hadn't placed go
down at random, attack and fortify are skipped — and play moves on to the next player.
The same goes for a capital pick in Capital Conquest:
miss that deadline and your territory with the most armies becomes your capital, then the next
player picks — or, if you were the last to pick, round 1 begins. (From the next update: until
then, a missed deadline on the last capital pick can leave the match stuck waiting.)
Miss 3 deadlines in a row and a bot takes over your seat, so the match can keep moving for
everyone else. It's a streak, not a running total: play one turn under your own steam and the
count goes back to zero.
The real-time fair-play safeguards don't apply here — "still there?", stall and siege detection
are all clock-based ideas that mean nothing against a 24-hour deadline. In Correspondence, the
deadline is the rule.
A match already in progress can be given up for good from Your Games, with Abandon. It is
permanent and cannot be undone, so know what it does before you press it:
If the match hasn't started yet, you don't need Abandon — open the lobby from Your Games and
use Cancel Match instead.
Leaving a Correspondence match is never something that happens by accident: stepping out just
parks it, and giving it up for good is the explicit Abandon button. There's no ranking penalty
either way.