Alliances & ranking

Who you can work with, and what actually counts at the end.

An alliance is a border you don't have to defend and a trade network you share. It cannot be broken on a whim — cancelling runs on a timer, and your partner is told. That delay is the whole reason alliances are worth anything.

Alliances

Click a player — in the leaderboard, in your neighbours list, or on their name on the map — and offer an alliance from their card. They can accept or decline, and you are told either way.

While it holds:

  • Neither of you can attack the other.
  • Your harbours join into one trade network, which is often the bigger prize. It is not transitive — your ally's allies are not yours. See Air, sea & missiles.
  • Allies are marked in your neighbours list and sorted to the top.

Cancelling takes time. You announce it, a countdown runs, and only then can you attack. Your partner sees the countdown from the moment you start it — there is no surprise betrayal, and there is time to prepare. Plan around that: an alliance you may want out of is one you should leave before you need to.

Bots take part in this. They accept and decline, they say no out loud rather than sitting on an offer, and they will offer alliances themselves — to a neighbour of similar strength, never to the runaway leader. Harder bots use the whole toolkit; easy ones stay on economy and never touch military technology.

Clans and friends

A clan is a persistent group with its own chat and an activity feed — who joined, who left, who won a ranked round. Clan tags show next to names in game.

Friends are a lighter thing: add someone, see when they are online or in a match, and invite them straight into your waiting room. Neither clans nor friends give any advantage inside a round — there is no shared vision, no automatic alliance. They are for finding each other, not for winning.

Ranking and ELO

With an account you have an ELO rating. The rules behind it are stricter than most people assume, and all of them exist to stop rating being farmed:

  • Only humans count. ELO is worked out from how you placed against the other people in the round, pairwise. The bots filling the lobby are ignored completely — beating thirty of them changes nothing.
  • A round needs at least two humans to be ranked at all. Alone against bots is practice, not a match.
  • The winner is the best-placed human, not the best-placed participant. A bot ending on more territory than everyone does not take the win away from you.
  • Guests are never ranked and nothing is saved for them.

The public leaderboard shows rating and ranked wins. After a ranked round you can share the result — it renders an image with your placement, the map and your rating change.

Watching

Rounds already in progress are listed below the open lobbies, and you can click one to watch it live. You see the map and can read the chat, but you cannot take part, and nothing you do affects the round. It works without an account, and it is the fastest way to see how better players open a round.

Chat

There is chat in the lobby, inside a round, and a separate one for your clan that follows you everywhere. In-round chat is where alliances actually get negotiated — the offer button is only the paperwork.