Alliances

An alliance is a promise with a flag on it. It gives isolated Governors a shared channel, a public reputation, mutual contacts, rank authority, and a common reserve for the harbours that cannot afford to wait.

Fleet & Garrison

How support, convoys, and depot runs cross the map.

Combat

Where allied timing and garrisons turn into battles.

Distress Calls

Call the crew to defend an island under threat.

Correspondence

The message ledger where alliance business lives.

Alliance XP

Every way a banner raises the standing the board ranks by.

Choose the banner before the quarrel

A lone Governor can browse existing alliances, request entry, or found a new banner. Joining is quieter: a request waits for someone with join authority, and an invitation waits for the invited Governor. Founding is louder. The charter sets the name and description, creates the first ranks, opens the alliance channel, and puts the new banner into public standing.

The banner flies from every ship a member keeps round an island, so a captain can read the water at a glance. A garrison's ships fly the banners of the alliances that sent them, which is how an ally's help shows on a friend's shore. A Governor with no alliance sails under a bare mast, and a blockade flies no banner at all: it does not announce who laid it. The same flags fly in a battle's replay.

Entry matters beyond the roster. When a Governor joins, the new member and the existing members discover one another as contacts. That turns an alliance into a diplomatic map, not just a chat room.

Ranks are the real constitution

Alliances use ranks, not a single fixed officer ladder. Admiral, Officer, and Ensign are the core ranks, with Ensign as the first rank new members receive. The Admiral can create custom ranks, decide which permissions each rank holds, and assign those ranks to non-owner members. The order ranks appear in can be rearranged from the Manage Ranks screen: the Admiral stays fixed at the top and the default rank at the bottom, while every rank between them is free to move.

This is where trust becomes operational. Invitation, removal, join request control, depot deposits, depot withdrawals, flag changes, and rank management are separate levers. A rank can be allowed to stock the reserve without being allowed to empty it.

Envoy Vale: Diplomatic read

Set rank permissions before the first emergency. A rule written during a raid is usually a confession, not a policy.

The Market Depot is your alliance war chest

The Market Depot is one shared storehouse kept at the Admiral's capital. One banner, one reserve: any member holding the right key can stock it or draw from it, and every move is signed and dated so the whole alliance can see where the stores went. It opens once the Admiral's capital has a Marketplace at level 10. Let that Marketplace slip below 10 and the depot locks at once. Nothing already inside is lost, but no new shipment confirms until the level is restored. The reserve is only ever as steady as the Admiral's own harbour.

Store	Cap
Gold	10,000
Lumber	10,000
Stone	10,000
Coins	30,000 per ocean your rank may hold

Each store has its own ceiling. A deposit that would push any one store over its cap is refused whole, never trimmed to fit, so check the headroom before you send a full hold. Gold, lumber, stone and coins are the only things the reserve keeps; everything else stays in private warehouses.

Coins are the alliance's war chest for taking oceans: each claim costs 30,000 coins from the depot. Coins go in one way. No member can withdraw them; they leave only to pay for a claim. They take cargo room like any load, so a big payment needs a big merchant fleet, or it can be paid in at once from the Admiral's capital.

Two ways to move the stores

A shipment from one of your outer islands sails like any convoy. It needs merchant ships to cover the cargo and real travel time to cross the water, with the same again on the voyage home. A transfer that starts or ends at the Admiral's capital itself, the depot island, crosses the quay instantly. No fleet leaves harbour, no merchants are spent, and the stores settle the moment you confirm. A capital that sits on the depot is the fastest reserve in the world. Depot runs pay no marketplace fee and no tax: what you send is what arrives.

Two keys, not one

Stocking the reserve and emptying it are separate permissions. A rank can be trusted to deposit without ever being handed the withdraw key, which is how a careful Admiral lets the whole banner feed the war chest while only officers draw it down. Set those keys before the first emergency, not during it.

Treasurer Mora: Read the ledger

Every deposit and withdrawal is written into the depot ledger with the member's name, the amount, and the hour. A reserve nobody audits is a reserve someone will quietly drain. When the stores run short, read the ledger before you blame the cap.

The reserve earns standing too

Real logistics counts toward the banner. A member who moves a meaningful load through the depot adds a small trickle of alliance XP, once a day, pooled with the daily muster under one weekly ceiling. It will never out-earn quests or raids, and it is not meant to. It is the world's quiet reward for a banner that actually keeps its supply lines running. The Alliance XP guide lists the exact figures.

Use the reserve for alliance problems, not private tidying. A depot that only rescues careless builds will empty quickly. A depot that feeds frontier shipyards, emergency walls, and liberation runs becomes part of the alliance's war plan.

A banner has a public record

Every alliance has the same page, whether it is yours or a rival's in the rankings. Its header carries the fleet rank, the leaderboard rank, and how long ago the alliance was founded. The Quarterdeck opens on where it stands by territory against every other alliance in the world, then its charter, the wars it has won and lost, and how much of the alliance quest ladder it has completed. The Members tab puts three members in the spotlight each week, judged on the week before and drawn from a rotating set of reasons, above the full roster. The Territories tab counts its islands, oceans and rocks.

Alliance XP is what your banner has accomplished together over time: completed quests, winning raids, won events, and the small daily trickle from muster and depot runs. The Alliance XP guide lays out every route. It only ever climbs: it never falls when members come and go, so a long-standing banner's standing endures even as its roster turns over. The alliance leaderboard ranks by XP, not by raw size, so a banner's reputation is more than its strength.

The correspondence channel carries the private side of that record: roster changes and the alliance's news cards, with reactions, and the Operations feed: the same cards for raids, defences, liberations and shared spy intel involving the alliance, with their engravings. Operations also appears as its own tab in the Alliance panel, so the same intelligence is reachable without opening chat.

Any member may mark an island as a target, with a note and a type: Attack (the banner means to strike it), Raid (a marked hunting ground for plunder runs), Defend (hold it and watch for incoming sails), Watch (scout it and report), or Hands Off (a standing order NOT to touch it — a truce, a future ally, someone else's quarrel). Marked targets are listed for the whole alliance and announced in the correspondence channel — and the announcement carries you to that shore on the chart when you tap it, so the banner can set its fleets on the same shore. Any member can remove a target, handy for clearing a stale mark once the island has been liberated or its marker has gone quiet.

Mark from either end: Operations takes an island by its coordinates, and an island's Intelligence marks whichever shore you are already looking at on the chart. A mark rings the island on the chart in the order's colour and shows on the island itself, note and all, so the reason travels with the order. A Hands Off mark warns anyone opening the attack orders against that shore — but it never bars the fleet. Every member can mark, so a standing order is counsel to your banner-mates, not a lock on their harbours.

An Attack target can host a coordinated attack: any member commits a fleet that holds in harbour, and the target's marker — or any rank holding the coordinated attacks permission — gives the order that sends every fleet to land as one. The strike has its own page, reached from the target's view or from the Targets board, where it stays visible through its whole life: forming (with the combined attack strength front and centre), at sea with a landfall countdown, and — for a day after landing — its outcome and the battle report, which any member of the banner may read whether they sailed or not. The landed strike is announced in the alliance feed and the world chronicle under the alliance's own name, never a single member's. The full rules live on the Combat page under Allied operations.

The Watch gathers every member's harbour watchtowers in one place. Any banner-mate with fleets bearing down on them rises to the top, so the alliance can send aid before the tide turns. Each member's incoming fleets are shown only to the depth their own watchtower reveals. You never see more than the defender does.

The Council is where the banner puts a question to itself. Any member can raise a motion, a plain question set before the alliance, and choose how long the vote stands. Every member is told by dispatch the moment it opens — barring any who have switched alliance business off in their channel notice settings — and can cast a vote for or against. A running tally names who has spoken and who is still awaited, and the motion closes with its result on the record. For now these are advisory polls: the count is kept and shown, but nothing is enforced by it.

Leave with the ships accounted for

A member can leave at any time, but an Admiral with company must pass leadership first. If the Admiral is the last member and leaves, the alliance dissolves. Existing garrisons are not recalled for you, so check stationed forces before you walk out.

Name an heir before you need one

An Admiral who falls silent does not take the alliance with them, but left to itself the rank passes by seniority, and seniority is not always who the crew would choose. Open a member's card from the roster and name them heir. They are told by dispatch, the alliance channel hears of it, and the roster marks them so every member knows the line of command.

There is one heir at a time; naming another replaces the first. The mark lifts if the heir leaves, is removed, falls silent, or is handed the leadership outright. Passing leadership to anyone clears it too, so a new Admiral always chooses their own.

Reference

Common questions