10 · Alliances

Status: Skeleton · Owner: TBD · Updated: 2026-09-23

Purpose

Define the social layer. In this genre the alliance is the retention system — players quit games, but they rarely quit their friends.

To define

• Size cap and why
• Ranks, permissions, and leadership succession (including for inactive R5)
• Join flow: open, application, invite-only; alliance discovery UI
• Alliance help (build/research acceleration) and its rate limits
• Alliance territory, flags/banners, and shared buildings
• Alliance tech tree and donation mechanics
• Alliance-only content: rallies, bosses, wars, fortresses
• Rally mechanics: who leads, join window, march composition, rewards split
• Gift/chest system on member purchases
• Diplomacy: allied alliances, NAPs, declared wars — supported or social-only?
• Communication: chat channels, pins, translation, mail
• Alliance vs alliance ranking and season rewards

Think about

• Alliance help is the highest-value mechanic in the genre and it is nearly free. Tapping "help" on a teammate's build costs nothing and creates constant small reciprocity. It is why players open the game. Design it in early and make it frictionless — one tap, help-all, from anywhere.
• Time zones are an unsolved problem you must solve anyway. A global alliance cannot rally at 3am for half its members. Options: scheduled war windows per server region, language-based server assignment, or asynchronous participation (set defences, contribute in advance). Ignoring it means alliances fracture by region on their own.
• Leadership dead-hand is a top-5 churn cause. The leader quits, nobody can promote, donations pile into a corpse, and 40 players drift away. Automatic succession on inactivity is not a nice-to-have — spec it now.
• Chat quality is a design feature. Machine translation, pinned coordination messages and a readable war-room UI decide whether cross-language alliances can actually function. This is where your most engaged players spend their time and it is usually the least-designed screen in the game.
• Rallies are your synchronous content. A 40-player coordinated strike is the emotional peak of games like this. Get the join window, the countdown and the reward split right, and make the payoff feel collective — shared cinematics, contribution breakdowns, alliance-wide announcements.
• Toxicity and gatekeeping. Big alliances hoard resources, farm newcomers and freeze the server. Some counterweight — anti-snowball rules, caps on territory, underdog bonuses — keeps a server alive past month three.
• Alliance size vs drama. Small alliances (30) are intimate and fragile; large ones (100) are impersonal but stable. Many games ship ~50 with sub-squads. Pick against the size of your rally content.
• Decide if diplomacy is a system or a social convention. Formal allies and NAPs in the UI make politics legible and reduce misunderstanding; leaving it informal creates richer drama and zero engineering cost.

Open questions

#	Question	Blocks	Owner
1	Alliance size cap?	Rally design, map, server sizing
2	How are war windows scheduled across time zones?	Events, server split
3	Is diplomacy a formal system?	UI, scope