🗺️ Alliance territory
Territory & banners guide
Territory is the quiet engine of a strong alliance — buffs for every member, resources for alliance research, and borders that decide your politics. Here's how the banner network works and the expansion route that wins the early server.
Territory in one breath: your borders grow outward from the Alliance HQ through banners, each claimed tile adjacent to the last — no isolated islands. Cities inside get the Territory Bonus; resource nodes need roughly 75% coverage to produce. Expansion is a route you plan toward nodes and facilities, not a paint-spill.
How the banner network works
- Everything starts at the Alliance HQ. Territory is the connected area around it; place the HQ badly and every future banner pays for the mistake.
- Expand by building banners: tap the HQ → Build Banner → claim tiles adjacent to territory you already hold. The connection rule is absolute — you cannot drop a banner on a juicy tile across the map.
- Territory is R4/R5 work. Banner placement is a leadership permission — which makes the expansion route one of the few things leaders fully control, and one of the easiest to get quietly wrong.
The mental model: banners are roads, not flags. You're not decorating the map — you're building a route from your HQ to the things that pay: resource nodes, facilities, and the ground your hive sits on.
What territory actually pays
- The Territory Bonus. Every member whose city sits fully inside the border gets an ongoing buff — and it scales up with alliance level and Prestige Buildings. A member camped outside the border is donating nothing and receiving nothing.
- Alliance resource nodes. Nodes inside the border produce resources that fund alliance research and construction — the same pool your alliance tech drinks from.
- The 75% rule. A node only counts once roughly three-quarters of it sits inside your territory. A banner that merely touches a node does nothing — route the border around it, not to it.
- Facilities. Map facilities inside your reach are long-term compounding advantages — which is why the early-server land grab matters so much (below).
The expansion doctrine
- Weeks 1–3 of a new kingdom: banners every day. Route toward every level 1–2 facility and resource node you can reach. What you claim early is yours for the server's life; what you hesitate on gets covered by rivals. Community consensus
- Nodes before vanity. A border that swallows two resource nodes beats a border that looks big. Production compounds; square kilometers don't.
- Keep the hive inside. Before any expansion push, check that every member's city is fully inside the border — the Territory Bonus for 100 members outweighs one more distant tile. The Hive Layout Planner helps you pack the hive tight around the HQ.
- Borders are diplomacy. Where your banners meet another alliance's, you have a relationship whether you wanted one or not. Settle lines early with a NAP post — or settle them late with a war.
⚠️ Exact banner costs, caps and facility levels vary by server generation and game updates — verify numbers in your own HQ menu; the mechanics above are the widely documented pattern.
The R4/R5 territory checklist
- Is every member's city fully inside the border? (Ping the stragglers — free buff.)
- Which reachable resource nodes are under 75% covered? Route there next.
- Any facility within two expansion pushes that rivals haven't claimed?
- Where do our borders touch neighbors — and do we have an understanding with each?
- Is the border defensible in a war, or a sprawl we can't hold? (Trim before KvK, not during.)