1. The Basics - Tiles & Control
The realm map is made up of territory tiles. Each tile 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.
Neutral (0%) - unclaimed
Captured (50%+) - Once a tile's control passes the halfway mark, it counts as yours. It gains Supply, contributes to your alliance's territory, and shows on the map under your colours.
Fully secured (100%) - Control is maxed, and the tile 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 Tile
To take a tile, send a march to it using the Contest action. While your Units sit on the tile (a Contest March), its control builds towards your alliance every minute.
This is an example of a march contesting with a Warlord included:
- If the tile is Neutral, you build control up from zero
- If the tile is enemy-held, you first have to grind their control back down before it turns over to you - so contesting an enemy tile takes longer than an empty one
- Once control passes the halfway point, the tile is captured for your alliance
- 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 tile 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 Keep or Encampment.
- Supply flows from your Chaos Fortress/Keep and Encampment through your adjacent controlled tiles.
- If you try to contest a tile with no Supply, you will be told: "Target tile does not have supply, so cannot be contested."
- 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. An 8-pointed Chaos Star floating in the tile indicates broken supply.
- Shields: activating a shield on your Chaos Fortress stops 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:
- Bigger marches contest faster. A larger army fills a tile noticeably quicker than a small one.
- There is a minimum speed so even small marches make progress, and a maximum cap so a single giant stack on top of this.
- Alliance size penalty: if your alliance already controls a very large amount of territory (greater than 7500), your contest speed is reduced gradually - this stops a dominant alliance from snowballing the whole map.
5. Growth & Decay
Every minute, the realm updates every tile:
- Yours + supplied + below 100% --> control grows a little (the tile reinforces itself over time).
- Has control but supply is broken --> control gradually decreases each minute until it returns to Neutral.
- 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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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 Controlled" leaderboard - the one that counts the tiles your alliance currently holds, so it goes up and down as territory changes hands.)
7. The Territory Takeover Challenge & "Top Contributors"
Territory Takeover is a timed challenge. During it, players earn points with their Alliance and unlock tier rewards and leaderboard positional rewards.
- You earn 1 point each time your Contest march pushes a tile over 50% control.
- Contribution goes to the player actively contesting the tile when it is captured.
- It only counts what happened during that challenge window and resets for the next one.