Factions

A faction is the game's umbrella term for a guild, team, clan, or any other player-formed group. There is no distinction — if you band together, you are in a faction.

Membership

• A character can belong to one faction at a time. (Per-character, not per-account — your three character slots can each be in a different faction.)
• To join another faction, you must quit your current one first. Joining and quitting are both free.
• To create a new faction, you must not already be in one.
• When your character dies, you automatically leave your faction. If you were the leader, leadership auto-promotes to your longest-tenured member; if no members remain, the faction is destroyed.
• Death always shrinks your faction — the faction loses capacity and releases tiles edge-first. Only PvP deaths on contested tiles additionally trigger tile flips.

Creating a Faction

Anyone can create a faction at any time, provided they are not already in one and the tile they stand on is suitable for HQ. There is no cost and no minimum member count.

HQ tile requirements:

• The tile must be traversable.
• The tile must be currently neutral (no other faction owns it).
• The tile must be not currently contested.

On success:

• The tile you are standing on becomes the faction's HQ tile.
• The HQ tile is immune to raids and never shrinks away — it is the last tile standing.
• You become the faction's leader and the only member.

Governance

Two ranks exist inside a faction:

A leader cannot self-demotion without disbanding. To step down without destroying the faction, use leadership transfer (promote another member to leader; you auto-demote to officer).

If the leader leaves or dies without a pending transfer, the longest-tenured remaining member is auto-promoted — even if offline. They take effect as leader on their next login.

If the leader leaves and no members remain, the faction is destroyed instantly.

Notifications

Disbanding

The leader may disband the faction, but must be standing on the faction's HQ tile to do so (prevents accidental clicks while exploring).

Disbanding is immediate and irreversible. All territory becomes neutral, all members are kicked, all contested regions are cleared, and all treaties end immediately.

Faction Names

• 3–32 characters
• Allowed characters: letters, numbers, hyphens, underscores
• Must be unique

Territory

A faction controls tiles on the world map. Each controlled tile is part of the faction's zone.

Capacity

The number of tiles a faction can simultaneously control follows a diminishing returns curve:

Capacity = floor(sqrt(memberCount) * K) + 1   // +1 is the HQ tile

• K (default 16) is a server-side tuning constant.
• Solo (1 member): 17 tiles.
• 4 members: 33 tiles.
• 16 members: 65 tiles.
• 100 members: 161 tiles.

Diminishing returns keeps large factions from snowballing the entire map. One member gained or lost is not one tile:

A new member adds radius, not a tile. A death in a small faction is a catastrophic territorial loss; the same death in a large faction is barely a rounding error.

Grow and Shrink

A single membership change can release or claim several tiles at once — small factions swing wildly per member, large factions barely move.

Growth Pattern — Circle From HQ

Neutral growth expands the zone radially outward from HQ. The engine picks the neutral frontier tile closest to HQ and claims it. Consecutive neutral claims fill the innermost available ring before extending outward, producing a roughly circular zone.

The disk is the default shape, not a hard rule. Raid flips distort it:

A faction hemmed in on all sides by neighbors enters contested regions with all of them simultaneously. If that faction focuses PvP on one neighbor, every defender death releases multiple tiles edge-first — and the ones on the contested region are absorbed in one stroke. The faction's zone bulges in that direction, stopping being a circle.

Shrinkage is the inverse: contested tiles are released last, and the furthest-from-HQ tiles go first — so you lose your war gains before your core.

When a tile is released, it becomes neutral land. Characters standing on it stay where they are — there is no teleport.

Claiming Neutral Tiles

To grow the disk, the faction pays faction stamina per ring of expansion.

• Faction stamina is a pooled resource: the sum of every member's current stamina — online or offline.
• Each successful claim drains the pool proportionally across every member: a drain of N takes floor(N * memberStamina / poolTotal) from each member.
• Escalating cost: every claim costs base * 1.1^n where n is the number of tiles already claimed today by that faction.
• If cost > poolTotal, the claim is denied — no partial drain. The faction must regenerate stamina first.
• The frontier candidate is always the neutral tile closest to HQ, so the zone grows ring by ring rather than spiking outward in one direction.

Members regenerate stamina by resting in Meditation Sanctums (see Character).

Raids

Growth only happens into neutral tiles. If a faction has capacity headroom but no neutral tile borders its zone, it enters a raid state against every defender faction whose territory touches the attacker's frontier.

A raid is a per-(attacker, defender) state, not a per-tile flag. The contested region for a raid is the intersection of the attacker's frontier and the defender's territory.

• Multiple attackers can raid the same defender simultaneously.
• A single tile may be in multiple attackers' contested regions.
• The contested tiles remain owned by the defending faction; the attackers are flagged as contesting them.

Raid Mechanics

1. Trigger — Automatic when a grow attempt has no neutral outlet. Every online attacking member sees the Raid Opportunity UI.
2. PvP — When two characters from opposing factions walk onto the same contested tile, a PvP encounter auto-starts using the same turn-based combat engine as PvE.
   • Players already on a tile that just became contested are pulled in immediately — no grace period.
   • Other faction members from either side can walk onto the same tile and join the in-progress battle.
   • Online players only. Offline members cannot join and contribute nothing.
3. Tile flips — When a defender dies, the defending faction's capacity drops and it shrinks edge-first. For the contested tile the death occurred on, the faction whose member dealt the killing blow gets the first attempt to absorb it. For other released tiles (collateral from multi-tile shrinkage), the oldest contested flag (the attacker who first contested that tile) gets the first attempt. If an attacker's stamina pool is insufficient, the tile goes neutral and the next-oldest attacker gets a shot.
4. Raid ends for an (attacker, defender) pair when the contested region becomes empty or the attacker's capacity has no more growth headroom.
5. Defender reward — Defenders gain nothing beyond keeping their tile. There is no defense reward.
6. Attacker withdrawal — Any attacker faction may explicitly withdraw from a raid, clearing its contested region against that defender.
7. Off-hours — Raiding requires PvP-ing actual defending players. If nobody's online to fight, no raids happen. There are no raid windows or vulnerability timers.

PvP Everywhere Else

Treaties

A treaty is a mutual no-expansion agreement between two factions. While active, neither faction can contest the other's territory — no contested regions, no PvP auto-triggers, no tile flips.

Scope

• Bilateral — each treaty is between exactly two factions.
• A faction can hold multiple treaties simultaneously — one per neighbor.
• Persistent — a treaty stays active until someone revokes it (or a faction is destroyed). No time limit, no auto-expiry.

Making a Treaty

1. Propose — An officer or leader proposes a treaty to another faction. The proposing faction pays an escalating faction-stamina cost upfront. No refund if rejected.
2. Accept or Reject — The target faction's officers and leader have 1 hour to respond. No response = the proposal expires.
3. On Accept — The treaty is active immediately. All contested regions between the two factions are cleared. Any in-progress PvP between the two factions is aborted — signatory combatants are ejected with their current HP/mana/stamina (no death, no permadeath).

Breaking a Treaty

Revocation is unilateral — either faction can break the treaty without the other's consent — but it is not immediate:

1. Invoke — An officer or leader revokes. The revoking faction pays an escalating faction-stamina cost upfront (higher than creating — breaking peace is more expensive than making it).
2. 24-hour grace period — The treaty is still enforced during grace — no contesting. The other faction is notified immediately, giving them 24 hours to prepare.
3. Expiry — After 24 hours, the treaty is revoked. Contesting resumes normally.
4. 48-hour cooldown — Neither faction can propose a new treaty to the other for 48 hours. Raids can happen during this cooldown.

Treaty on Faction Destruction

If either faction is disbanded or destroyed, all treaties involving it end immediately — no grace period, no refund.

Visibility

Enforcement

Violation is mechanically impossible. The server simply skips contested-region creation for any pair with an active or grace-period treaty. There is no "surprise attack" path.

Summary

• One faction per character; switch by quitting first.
• Create freely; the standing tile becomes the immune HQ.
• Capacity follows floor(sqrt(members) * K) + 1 — diminishing returns at scale.
• Shrinks furthest-from-HQ first when members leave or die.
• Claims cost escalating faction stamina (pooled proportionally from every member).
• Raids auto-start when growth has no neutral outlet; PvP resolves tile flips.
• Dead characters auto-quit the faction; if the leader dies, the oldest member is promoted.
• Treaties suppress raids between a pair; proposer pays stamina to create; revoker pays to break, with a 24h grace and 48h cooldown.