Section 08

Alliance & State Play

Territory, secured gathering, ministries, NAPs — the parts of the game a single player can't solve alone.

Territory & banners

Everyone should live inside alliance territory. Cities inside territory gather faster and defending troops get stat boosts. Members scattered outside the hive lose both for nothing.
Unconnected banners expire and refund only 10%. Run them in straight lines toward facilities, resource clusters and choke points — not sprawl.
Alliance Resource farms (Animal Farm, Woodmill, Coal Mine, Iron Mine) collect hourly into the alliance stockpile, separate from personal resources. Claiming one needs your territory covering at least 75% of its 2×2 area — 3 of 4 tiles.
Prioritize Woodmill and Animal Farm. Wood and meat are what every member needs; coal and iron sort themselves out.
HQ placement near level 6–8 nodes cuts march times for the whole alliance.

Secured gathering

The most underused alliance tool The Secured Alliance Gathering Node lets squads collect with no threat of attack. One at a time, any of the four resources, lasts 12 hours, and unlimited members can gather it simultaneously.

Set it to meat, then rotate to wood. Coal and iron are close to a waste of the single slot you get — see the economy section for why meat drains and iron doesn't.

Facilities & fortresses

You need a connected banner path before you can attack a facility at all. Building that path quietly ahead of time is most of the work — and also the tell, since visible banners announce your target.
Capture takes 30 continuous minutes, then you hold for 3 days. That half hour is when you're exposed; have a second wave ready before you start.
Two facilities of the same type and level don't stack. Spread across types instead of doubling up.
Level 3 expedition facilities give around +15% gathering speed.
Facilities in a vulnerable state don't provide their bonus.

President ministries

Appointments are free — the only cost is queue time. They swap on a 5-minute cooldown.

Ministry	Effect	Run it when
Vice President	+10% construction, research, training	Default. Most flexible development position.
Interior	+80% resource production	Production days only — and it's additive, so it delivers far less than it reads.
Education	+50% training speed, +200 capacity	Troop scoring days. Capacity is the real prize, not speed.
Health	+100% healing, +5,000 infirmary	Immediately after a battle day.

Run a rotation, not a camp Tie ministries to the event calendar: Education on troop-training days, Health after battle, Vice President during a build push, Interior on a deliberate production day. Turn on auto-approve so it rotates without manual clicks, and publish the schedule — the buffs are only worth what players time against them.

Supreme President versions of every ministry are stronger, and come from specific SvS outcomes. Worth aiming a state at rather than just defending what you have.

Writing a NAP that survives contact

Most state NAPs fail in the same places. If you're drafting or reviewing one, check these.

Gap	Fix
No enforcement ladder	Every NAP that collapses does so here. Someone breaks it, nobody agreed in advance what happens, and the argument becomes the incident. Write it down: warning and restitution → protection revoked → alliance answers for it.
Truck raids uncovered	Does "no attacks" include a Tundra Trade Route raid? Name it explicitly either way.
Showdown conflict	Alliance Showdown rewards raiding your matched opponent — and two alliances in the same state can be matched. Decide now whether Showdown suspends the NAP, because someone will do it and be half right.
Undefined limits	"Max 2 attacks" — per day? Per week? Per target? Anyone who wants to bend it already can.
Undefined terms	"Power shifting" means nothing to a new R4. Define it.
Scoped harassment rules	A rule protecting one group implies the others aren't protected. "No harassment or offensive messages toward any player" covers the same ground without the loophole.
Fortress designation	"One fortress per alliance" needs a rule for how one becomes yours — first claimed, declared, or currently held.
Stale membership	Pin the current NAP member list with a review date. Alliances merge and die, and nobody knows who's still covered.

Truck raid policy

Worth setting state-wide, because the math is genuinely one-sided:

An in-state raid is a wasted attempt. You get four a day. Using one on a neighbour moves cargo sideways between two players of the same state — no net gain — while an out-of-state raid pulls resources in from a rival. Nothing is created either way, so the only question is which direction it flows.

Better still: prioritize lettered trucks, which belong to your current Alliance Showdown opponent. Those hit twice — you take the cargo and reduce their Showdown score.

Note that allies are already excluded from raiding, so a policy like this only bites on other alliances within your own state. That makes it a leadership-chat decision, not an alliance-chat one.

Leading well

Make alliance help a culture thing. It's free construction time for everyone and it compounds harder than any individual optimization.
Post real numbers, not guides. "Here's what my FC2 push actually cost and how long it took" beats any external link, because it's from someone in their state.
Publish the event calendar and the hold list. Most members lose more value to bad timing than to bad strategy.
Check infirmary capacity before big rallies. Members above 90% are silently not in your rally any more.
Set expectations before a first SvS. Prep discipline beats battle-day heroics, and states that treat Saturday as the whole event have already lost the part that counts.