Territory System Guide

1. The Basics - Sectors & Control

The realm map is made up of territory sectors. Each sector has a Control level (Control points) that runs from Neutral to Fully Captured, and belongs to one Alliance or to no one while it is Neutral.

After teleporting, your facility takes up to 8 hours to "stamp" the tiles around it. The sectors will be shown as chequered until this is completed.

Players are unable to claim any adjacent sectors until these have changed to solid blue.

Neutral (0%) - unclaimed (White)

Captured (50%+) - Once a sector's control passes the halfway mark, it counts as yours. It gains Supply, contributes to your alliance's territory, and changes to blue on the map. Enemy Alliance-controlled sectors are shown as red on the map. Alliances with which your Alliance have established a Non-Aggression Pact with will show in yellow.

Locked Territory - Sectors adjacent to a Facility or Strategic Outpost are locked and cannot be contested until the Facility or Outpost is destroyed.

Broken Supply - This chequered pattern will display if a sector is cut off from all Supply Lines. Over time, the sector will lose Control Points and return to neutral unless the Supply Line is restored.

Fully secured (100%) - When Control is maxed, the sector is at full strength for your Alliance.

Imagine control as a tug-of-war: your troops push it toward your alliance, while enemy forces and natural decay pull it back down.

2. Contesting & Capturing a Sector

To take a sector, send a Deployment to it using the Capture action. While your Units sit on the sector, its control builds towards your alliance every minute.

This is an example of a march contesting:

1. If the sector is Neutral, you'll build Control up from zero
2. If the sector is enemy-held, you'll first have to grind their Control back down before it turns over to you. Contesting an enemy sector takes longer than capturing an empty one
3. Once Control passes the halfway point, the sector is captured for your Alliance
4. Keep contesting to drive up to fully secured (100%)

Key rule: You may only capture tiles which are adjacent to ones you already control. Locked tiles around your keep cannot be contested and will instead tick up passively as long as they maintain supply. Territory spreads outward from what you already hold - you can't drop a march deep in enemy land and expect to take it.

3. Territory Supply

A sector can only be held and contested if it has Supply: All Alliance Territories must be connected by an unbroken chain of Territory back to an Allied Facility or Strategic Outpost.

1. Supply flows from your Facility and Strategic Outpost through your adjacent controlled tiles
2. If you try to contest a tile with no Supply, you will be told: "Target tile does not have supply, so cannot be contested."
3. Broken Supply: if a tile gets cut off from the chain (e.g. the enemy takes the tile linking it back to your Keep), it loses Control points and returns to Neutral. It will then change to chequered blue before returning to neutral (white)
4. Shields: activating a shield on your Facility will stop it from providing Supply

4. Contest Speed - How Fast You Fill a Tile

How quickly your Contest March fills a tile (and how many "captured" points you bank) depends mainly on how many troops you send:

1. Bigger marches contest faster. A larger army fills a tile noticeably quicker than a smaller one
2. There is a minimum speed so that even small marches can make progress, and a maximum cap so a single giant stack on top of this
3. Alliance size penalty: if your alliance already controls a very large amount of territory (greater than 7500), your contest speed is reduced gradually - this prevents a dominant alliance from commandeering an entire map

5. Growth & Decay

Each minute, every tile will update:

1. Yours + supplied + below 100% = Control grows a little (the tile reinforces itself over time)
2. Has control but supply is broken = Control gradually decreases each minute until it returns to Neutral
3. Actively being contested = handled by the contest rules above instead

This is why cut-off land slowly fades back to Neutral, and why your own connected tiles firm up on their own without you having to sit on them.

6. The "Territory Captured" Leaderboard

In-game, this is the Territory Captured Leaderboard:

Described as "the total number of Territory tiles captured.", here's what it actually measures and why it behaves the way it does:

1. It is your personal contest contributions over time: how much tile Control your marches have personally driven, weighted by the troops and time you put in. Fully contesting one tile from Neutral to 100% is worth roughly 1 on this board
2. It is a lifetime, cumulative total. It only ever goes up, it does not drop when you lose a tile, and it does not reset between events
3. This leaderboard tracks the specific amount of Control you have generated personally. It isn't a simple count of tiles you flipped - nudging a tile that an ally already softened over the line adds only a fraction. So this leaderboard shows the cumulative total of tiles you have fully captured (rounded to the nearest whole tile).

The leaderboard refreshes every 10 minutes, meaning there may be some lag behind your live actions.

(Not to be confused with the "Alliance Territory" leaderboard - the one that counts the tiles your alliance currently holds, so it goes up and down as territory changes hands.)