🗺️ T-MINUS 4 DAYS: CITIES, STRONGHOLDS, & EXPANSION 🗺️

📝 OPERATIONAL NOTE This guide is intended to give easy-to-follow guidance and does not endeavor to be a full explainer. We want you to be able to take a clear instruction and, by following it, increase your odds of success. Just like at the start of the game, there is a lot to know, and sometimes it is best to just know what to do and then fully understand it later.

Understanding the map in Season 1 is the key to our success. We are playing a territory game now, and the rules of expansion are extremely strict. When Season 1 starts, the map resets and every alliance is teleported to the edge of the new map with no owned territory. To establish our starting territory, we must capture a Level 1 Stronghold first.

From there, we expand. Here are the five fundamental concepts about capturing land and moving as a team that everyone must understand.

1. THE DESTINATION vs. THE ROAD

Our ultimate goals are the Cities. Capturing Cities is how the alliance scores Influence Points, and the alliance ranking at the end of the season pays out big rewards based on these points. Owning a city also gives the alliance combat buffs and access to the buildings and factories that get built next to it. Our alliance can control up to 4 cities in our own warzone at one time.

Think of Cities as the destination. Military Strongholds, on the other hand, are the stepping stones. We must capture and use Strongholds to build the physical path to those Cities.

2. THE ADJACENCY RULE & THE SPEED LIMIT

We cannot just teleport across the map and capture a high-level City. The game enforces a connected territory rule: our alliance can only declare war on a city if our owned territory is connected to it through Military Strongholds. We will be working Stronghold by Stronghold to build a continuous bridge across the map.

Because of this, the game enforces a strict speed limit on expansion: there is a limit of 2 Stronghold captures per alliance per day. Since we only get two steps a day, leadership must carefully plan which ones we capture and when.

🎯 CRITICAL CONCEPT: LEADERSHIP SELECTS TARGETS & INITIATES ATTACKS Under our expansion strategy, leadership will select all target Strongholds and initiate the official attacks. R5 and R4 officers will coordinate which step of the road we are taking, mark the target on the map, and start the rallies. To ensure our daily allowance of 2 captures is spent precisely on the correct path, all members should simply look for these official targets and join the rallies led by officers.

3. EXECUTING THE CAPTURE

Winning these Strongholds and Cities requires massive coordination and constant rallies. This is exactly what we have been practicing with Marshall Guard.

During a capture, leadership will be giving urgent and important instructions in Alliance Chat. You must reduce chat noise and focus entirely on the attack. Furthermore, just like in Marshall Guard, you must ONLY participate in the capture. Absolutely no hitting zombies, doom elites, or other targets while an attack is underway.

4. CATCH AND RELEASE (ABANDONING TERRITORY)

There is a hard cap on how much total territory we can hold at any one time. Because we have to build long roads of Strongholds to reach the center of the map, we will constantly hit this limit.

To keep paving our road forward, leadership will be actively "abandoning" the lower-level strongholds we captured on previous days to free up capacity for today's targets. Additionally, we may trade or relinquish territory to further our political and diplomatic needs.

• 😎 Stay Chill: When you look at the map and see our territory shrinking behind us, do not panic and do not get upset. This is the intended strategy. We can’t keep everything we gain.

5. THE MOVING HIVE

As we pave our road across the map, the hive will need to move frequently so we can stay close to the front lines and our targets.

When we move, the hive will not always be a perfectly neat 10x10 grid right away until things settle down. That is perfectly fine. The most important thing is that we simply stay together. Being physically clustered is extremely valuable. It allows us to efficiently run rallies, cure each other's virus infections, and progress as a single unit.

When leadership calls for a hive move, use the teleports you have been hoarding to rejoin the group as quickly as possible.