Alliances, rank, commanders and achievements

The six chapters before this one covered the things you build and the things you send. This one covers the things that accumulate: the people you stand with, the number the round ranks you by, the officer who carries your experience from one battle to the next, and the record of what you have done. None of them are systems you operate day to day, and all of them quietly decide how your round goes.

Some values below are round settings the round administrator can change. They are given as this round's current values and are worth re-checking against your own screens. Anything stated as a formula or a rule is fixed for everyone.

Alliances

An alliance is a named group of Commanders with a shared tag, a shared intelligence picture and the ability to fight in the same battle. It is not a chat room with a badge — membership changes what you can see and what you are allowed to do.

Forming one

Cost	10,000 ISC, paid by the founder
Tag	2–5 characters, shown in brackets beside every member's name
Name	1–50 characters
Uniqueness	Both tag and name must be unused in this round, ignoring case
Requirement	You must not already be in an alliance

The founder becomes the Leader. There is no password and no open-join setting: every member arrives through one of the two routes below.

Getting in

Two things can happen, and they are mirror images:

• An invite — an alliance offers a place to a named Commander.
• A request — a Commander asks an alliance for a place.

Either can be filed first. If the opposite one already exists, they match immediately and the join completes with no approval step: an invite you have already requested is simply accepted on arrival. Otherwise an invite is accepted only by the Commander it names, and a request is accepted only by an Officer or the Leader.

A pending request notifies the Officers and the Leader only. Ordinary members never see it, so if you have asked to join and heard nothing, the people who can act on it are the only people who know.

An alliance holds at most 10 members.

The three ranks

Every member is a Leader, an Officer or a Member. There is exactly one Leader.

Action	Member	Officer	Leader
Invite a Commander	—	Yes	Yes
Accept a join request	—	Yes	Yes
Set the announcement	—	Yes	Yes
Declare an attitude toward another alliance	—	Yes	Yes
Kick a Member	—	Yes	Yes
Kick an Officer	—	—	Yes
Promote, demote, transfer leadership	—	—	Yes
Disband the alliance	—	—	Yes
Leave	Yes	Yes	No
Station units at a mate's base	Yes	Yes	Yes

Two of those rows deserve spelling out.

The Leader cannot leave. There is no resignation. He must either promote an Officer to Leader — which transfers the position and drops him to Officer in the same movement — or disband the alliance outright. Nobody can kick the Leader either, at any rank.

Promoting an Officer to Leader is a transfer, not an addition. There is never a second Leader.

If a Leader's account is deleted, the position passes automatically to the longest-serving Officer, or failing that the longest-serving Member. If there is nobody left at all, the alliance disbands rather than continuing headless.

Leaving, kicking and disbanding

Leaving is immediate and free. There is no cooldown of any kind — you may join another alliance the same minute, and rejoin the one you left.

What leaving does cost you is every garrison arrangement, in both directions at once. Your units stationed at allies' bases start for home, and any allied units stationed at your base start for theirs. This applies identically whether you left or were kicked. The same sweep runs for every member when an alliance disbands.

Disbanding is the Leader's alone. It deletes the alliance, all its applications, all its declared attitudes and every membership, and it notifies everyone.

What membership actually buys you

This is the part worth reading twice, because most of it is invisible until you have it.

A shared map. Every base belonging to an alliance mate is permanently known to you — it appears on your map, in searches, in target lists and on the standings, with no scouting required. Beyond that, discoveries are pooled: any base one member finds is handed to every other member, and a Commander who joins inherits the alliance's entire existing catalogue of known bases on arrival. Knowledge, once gained, is never taken away — leave the alliance and you keep everything you learned, you simply stop receiving anything new.

Joint attacks. Only alliance mates of the Commander leading an operation may join it. A joint attack synchronises its arrivals, fights as one merged battle and splits the loot by damage dealt. Without an alliance there is no way to put two players' units into the same fight.

Garrisons. You may station units at an alliance mate's base and nowhere else. The previous chapter covers this in full — capacity, risk and who is credited with what — and it is not repeated here. What matters at this level is simply that alliance membership is the gate.

Two shields against interception. A force of yours in the open cannot be run down by an alliance mate: interception refuses a friendly target outright. And a scout of yours crossing or sitting inside an allied base's perimeter is never subjected to that base's passive detection roll, which it would face at anyone else's.

Defense alerts. When a member is attacked, the alliance can be told. Who hears it:

• Officers and the Leader always, whatever their personal settings.
• Any member with units currently stationed at the base under attack, always — their own property is at stake.
• Ordinary members only if they have switched the alerts on. This is off by default for everyone, so an alliance that assumes it is covered may not be.

The alert carries exactly what the defender themself is told and nothing more: which base, an arrival time, and the attacker's name for a solo attack or only a count of forces for a joint one. Never the composition. You will not learn what is coming from an alert that the defender could not learn either.

Alerts are grouped into waves of 10 minutes: you are told once per attacker per wave, so a joint attack assembling piece by piece does not ring the same bell repeatedly.

Two things about alliances that catch people out

You can attack your own alliance mate. Nothing prevents it. The only checks an attack faces are the ordinary ones — newbie protection, the daily cap on hitting the same Commander, and the rank band described below. Being in the same alliance is not among them. Friendly fire is not a loophole; it is simply not blocked, and it is worth knowing before you trust a garrison to someone.

Attitudes do nothing. An alliance can declare another alliance Neutral, Allied or Hostile, and that declaration has no mechanical effect whatsoever. It blocks no attack, grants no vision and permits no joint operation. It is a private label, one-directional — declaring someone Hostile does not make them Hostile toward you — and it is not even shown to the alliance it describes. Treat it as a note to your own officers. The separate ally/enemy markers you can put on individual Commanders from the Standings page are likewise a personal watch list, unrelated to this and equally advisory.

Score and rank

The formula

Your score is recalculated from four terms:

score = floor( object value / 5,000 )
      + research points
      + commander level
      + (wins − losses) × 10

Reading each term:

Term	What it is
Object value	Everything you own, valued in ISC. Each item counts cost_isc + cost_titanite × 2.0 — the round's default exchange rate — multiplied by how many you have, summed across all your bases, then divided by 5,000.
Research points	A running total, incremented each time a research completes by its ISC-equivalent cost divided by 1,000.
Commander level	Added directly. Level 14 is 14 points.
Wins minus losses	Your battle record, multiplied by 10. It can be negative, though the final score never falls below zero.

The divisor and the win/loss weight are round settings. The design brief for score wrote the last term as a wins-to-losses ratio; it is implemented as a difference, because a ratio has no answer at zero losses.

What does not count

Three omissions surprise people, and all three are deliberate:

• Resources do not count. Titanite in your silos and ISC in your account are worth nothing to your score. Hoarding is invisible; spending is what registers.
• Anything in flight does not count. Units are removed from your holdings the moment a mission launches and only counted again when they land home. A large attack force in the air is a temporary, real drop in your score.
• Anything queued does not count. An order in a build queue is worth nothing until it completes.

Stolen research is the fourth omission. Research taken by blueprint theft is genuinely yours and works exactly like research you paid for — but it awards no research points, deliberately, so that a theft cannot inflate your rank as a side effect.

When it recalculates

Two ways, and between them it is rarely far behind:

• On essentially every game page you load. Your score is recomputed as part of serving the page, so while you are playing it is live.
• Once daily, at 00:05, for everyone in the round, including players who never logged in.

The consequence: a Commander who has been away for a day may briefly carry a stale score until they next load a page or the daily pass runs. It is never more than a day out.

Rank

Rank is not stored. Your rank is the number of Commanders in the round with a higher score than yours, plus one — computed fresh every time it is displayed. Where two Commanders have exactly the same score, the one who joined the round earlier is listed above. Banned accounts are excluded entirely, from both the list and the count, so a banned Commander sitting above you stops costing you a place the moment the ban lands.

There are exactly two leaderboards: Commanders and alliances. There is no separate table for richest, most attacks, or most buildings.

The rank band on attacks

Score does more than order a list — it can gate who you are permitted to attack. When the band is switched on, a target must sit between half your score and one and a half times it, and a revenge token is what lets you ignore that. It exists to stop a large Commander farming a small one.

On this round the band is switched OFF. Score currently constrains nobody's targets. The daily cap of 4 attacks on any one Commander still applies, as does newbie protection. This is a round setting and it can be turned back on, so it is worth checking rather than assuming either way.

Alliance score

An alliance's score is not the sum of its members:

alliance score = sum of member scores ÷ √(number of members)

The square root is the whole point. A plain sum would make recruiting anyone, however weak, always correct; a plain average would make recruiting anyone below your mean always wrong. Dividing by the square root sits between the two: a new member helps, but a tenth member helps less than a second did.

Your Commander

You have exactly one Commander. He is created when you join the round, carries your name, starts at level 1, and belongs to that round — a new round gives you a new one.

Experience and levels

Experience comes from destroying enemy units, and from nothing else. Not from building, not from researching, not from completing missions, not from achievements.

XP = ISC value of enemy units destroyed ÷ 100 × role multiplier × (1 + bonuses)

The role multiplier is what your Commander was doing:

Situation	Multiplier
Attacking and winning	×1.0
Joining an ally's attack	×1.0 (on your own share of the damage)
Successful interception — escort destroyed	×1.0
Defending your own base	×0.5
Defending as a stationed garrison	×0.5
Interception that fought and lost	×0.5

Defence pays half of what attack pays. That is deliberate, not an oversight.

Two bonuses multiply the result: House Asturian carries +10% Commander XP, and the War College skill line adds +10% per level.

Interception has a floor. Any interception that actually reaches combat pays at least 2 XP even if it destroys almost nothing, so that running something down is never literally worthless. No other kind of battle has a floor: a defence that destroys nothing pays exactly nothing.

XP is never lost. Losing the force he rides, or the base he stands on, costs him no experience and no levels, ever.

The curve

XP needed to reach a level = 100 × (level − 1) ^ 1.5

Level	Total XP
2	100
3	283
5	800
10	2,700
15	5,238
20	8,282
30	15,617
40	24,355

There is no maximum level.

Milestones, titles and skill points

Every 5 levels is a milestone. A milestone grants exactly one thing: one skill point. Your total earned points are your level divided by five, rounded down — level 4 has none, level 20 has four, level 40 has eight.

Milestones also carry a title — Commander, Lieutenant, Captain, Major, Colonel, Brigadier, General, Marshal, High Marshal. The title is decoration only. It changes nothing, and it stops at High Marshal while levels keep going.

The skill tree

Skill points are spent in a tree of six branches, holding 19 lines and 41 levels in total.

Branch	Lines	Levels	What it touches
Attack	3	7	Damage, unit durability, the opening exchange
Defense	3	8	Defending strength, structure damage, warning time
Economy	3	6	Harvest rate, bank spread, power throttling
Logistics	4	8	Build times, travel speed, Starport delivery
Command	3	6	Commander XP, research speed, joint-attack delay
Recon	3	6	Scout and spy speed, reveal radius, catching scouts

Every level of a line adds its effect again. Assault Doctrine is +2% attack per level, so three levels is +6%.

The nineteen lines, in branch order — Attack, Defense, Economy, Logistics, Command, Recon, the same order as the table above:

Line	Levels	Per level
Assault Doctrine	3	+2% attack
Veteran Corps	2	+3% unit HP
Shock Tactics	2	+5% first-round damage
Garrison Command	4	+3% defence while defending
Fortification Engineer	2	−5% damage to structures
Rapid Response	2	+5 minutes attack warning
Harvest Overseer	3	+4% harvest rate
Banker's Favor	2	Bank spread ×0.9
Power Discipline	1	Power throttle floor +0.15
Drill Sergeant	3	−4% troop build time
Construction Foreman	2	−5% building time
Fleet Marshal	2	+5% travel speed
Starport Liaison	1	−1 day Starport delivery
War College	2	+10% Commander XP
Research Directorate	2	+5% research speed
Allied Coordinator	2	Joint-attack delay ×0.75
Pathfinder Corps	2	+15% scout and spy speed
Deep Survey	2	+25% scout reveal radius
Counter-Intelligence	2	+10% chance to catch enemy scouts

Unlocking. Within a line, levels must be taken in order — level 2 needs level 1. Some lines also need another line first: Shock Tactics needs Assault Doctrine 2, Rapid Response needs Garrison Command 2, Power Discipline needs Harvest Overseer 2, Starport Liaison needs Fleet Marshal 1, Allied Coordinator needs War College 1, Counter-Intelligence needs Pathfinder Corps 1. Fleet Marshal is the one either/or in the tree — it opens on Drill Sergeant 2 or Construction Foreman 2, not both.

Where the skills apply, and where they do not

This is the rule that decides whether your points were worth spending, and it is easy to miss.

Four skills are global and work everywhere, always: Commander XP, research speed, joint-attack delay, and the bank spread. Every other skill is local — it only works where your Commander physically is. He is in one of four states:

State	Local skills
Posted at a base	Apply at that base
Riding an attack force	Apply to that force
Travelling	Nothing applies, anywhere
Recovering	Nothing applies, anywhere

So a Commander in transit between your own bases is contributing nothing but his four global skills, for the whole journey. Moving him is a real decision with a real gap in it.

Two consequences worth stating outright. His travel-speed skill does not speed up his own redeployment — he is Travelling, so it does not apply. And a stationed ally's Commander skills never help at your base: only the host's own Commander, standing there, grants defensive skills to the garrison, however well-developed his ally's tree is.

Respec. You have exactly one free reset, once, ever — it hands back every point to spend again. Beyond that, allocation is permanent for the round. There is no paid respec and no second chance.

Where he stands, and what happens if he falls

Your Commander occupies one place at a time and you choose it.

Riding an attack. He can board a force at launch, from the base he is already standing at. He cannot catch up with something already in the air, and he cannot ride while recovering or already riding. While riding he holds no base at all — which means razing the base he left cannot touch him. He returns to the mission's origin base with the survivors.

Redeploying between your own bases costs nothing but time: 45 seconds per tile, along the same ground route an attack would walk. He cannot be redirected mid-journey.

He can never be killed. If the force he rides is wiped out, or the base he is posted at is razed, he enters recovery for 6 hours — unavailable, with all local skills suspended — and then reappears at your main base. No experience is lost, no levels, no skill points. Recovery is the whole of the penalty.

The trade in riding along is therefore real but bounded: his Attack-branch and travel skills apply to that force, and the cost of losing it is six hours of a diminished Commander rather than a Commander gone. Note also that his presence is visible to the enemy under the ordinary rules of fog and scouting — if they can see the force, they can see he is on it.

Achievements

There are 35 achievements, of which 32 can currently be earned. They fall into six categories — general, attack, defend, alliance, logistics and build — and each awards points from one of exactly four bands:

Band	Points
Easy	1,000
Medium	5,000
Hard	20,000
Server first	50,000

Every achievement's value is one of those four numbers; none has a bespoke figure.

They are awarded the instant you earn them, inline with whatever you just did — not on a tick and not when you next open the page. The Achievements page only displays what you already hold.

Eight are hidden until earned: you will not see them listed in advance, and there is no teaser.

They belong to your account, not to the round. Achievements and their points survive a round rollover permanently. But several of the counters that trigger them live on your per-round record and reset — infantry built, transports delivered, interceptions won, bases scouted. Since only one achievement is repeatable, crossing a threshold again in a later round usually does nothing.

Only one achievement can be earned more than once: winning a round.

The points shop

Achievement points are a currency, and there are three things to spend them on:

Item	Cost	What it does	Lasts
Rename your Commander	10,000	Changes your name everywhere	Until you rename again — 30-day cooldown
Premium for this round	100,000	A ★ beside your name, and removal of the free 200-item limit on your mailbox and event history	This round only
Profile flair	10,000	Unlocks a custom accent colour on your identity card; recolour freely afterwards	This round only

Premium buys visibility and convenience and nothing else — no combat, economy or build-speed advantage exists to be bought, by design. There is no way to spend real money on any of it.

Renaming changes your login name as well as your displayed name; there is no separate display field.

Achievement points are not your score

The single most common confusion in this chapter, so plainly:

	Score	Achievement points
Belongs to	This round	Your account, forever
Comes from	Objects, research, level, win/loss	Achievements
Used for	Rank, and the attack band when it is on	Buying the three items above
Spendable	No	Yes

Earning achievements does not raise your rank by a single point, and no amount of score buys anything in the shop. They are two separate numbers that both happen to be called points.

What other Commanders can see of your record is the count of achievements you hold and their total points, on your public profile. Which specific ones you have earned is yours alone.