Alliances & Diplomacy

You may belong to exactly one alliance at a time (by design — no dual-tag espionage). Founding one costs a real resource sum from a colony you own (a genuine development spend, so it earns points); joining is by invitation from an officer or leader. Membership caps at 20 per alliance — large enough for a real co-defense team, small enough that no single alliance can absorb the whole server.

Roles run leader → officer → member, with the expected powers (officers can invite/kick members and edit the description; only the leader can promote, demote, or disband). A leader can only leave if they're the last member — otherwise they must hand off leadership first; the game never allows a leaderless alliance to exist. Members who leave or get kicked keep everything they personally own — colonies, fleets, anything stationed elsewhere. Reinforcements are personal gifts between players, never alliance property.

A 20-member cap isn't the only lever against one alliance simply absorbing the server. Several independent systems each chip away at the same problem:

• Cheap counters, not bigger fleets.The Doctrine counter-cycle (see Fleets & Combat) means the answer to the game's most expensive hull costs a fraction as much — raw spending power alone can't dominate a fight.
• Holding ground is cosmetic, not compounding. A galaxy map can show one alliance as the visible controller of a system once it holds a real plurality of the player colonies there — but that status is purely informational (map shading, nothing more). It grants no production, combat, or reach bonus, on purpose: visible dominance never becomes mechanical dominance.
• The hardest win condition is deliberately un-snowballable. The Galactic Ascendancy(see The Season & Winning) requires holding rare ground across three separate, individually contestable fronts at once, each on a continuously-running clock — a single dominant alliance still has to defend every front, forever, and losing just one anywhere resets its clock. Size doesn't buy you a shortcut; it just gives you more ground to have to defend.

Every telegraphed hostile attack or spy against any member's colony shows up on the alliance's shared co-defense board— the exact same information a personal Incoming list shows (never the attacker's composition), plus the target member's name. A live push notifies every online member the instant a new threat appears. Each row carries a one-click Reinforce button that prefills the fleet-send form — from seeing a threat to helping cover it in two clicks.

Reinforcing still costs the helper real travel time, and the host's colony still pays the stationed fleet's upkeep — co-defense is real logistics and a real gift, never a free button.

Alongside the global channel, your alliance has its own private channel — membership is checked on every single message and every history read, so leaving or being kicked cuts off access immediately, with no lingering session leak.

Several per-colony automation toggles close the gap for the hours nobody is watching:

• Alliance Alert(on by default) — the instant a hostile attack launches at that colony, one line drops into alliance chat with the impact time. It's free and leaks nothing the co-defense board doesn't already show.
• Auto-Shield (off by default) — if armed and your Emergency Shield is off cooldown and affordable, it fires automatically the moment a hostile attack (never a spy probe) launches. It costs and works exactly like pressing the button yourself.
• Auto-Requeue Build(off by default, per colony) — the instant a building lane goes empty, that same building's next level is queued again automatically, so a colony keeps growing while you're away instead of sitting on an idle queue slot until you next log in.
• Auto-Requeue Research(off by default, per account) — the moment your one active research slot frees up, the same technology track's next level starts automatically from wherever it was last hosted. Both toggles fail silently rather than interrupt anything if the next level is unaffordable, maxed out, or its requirement no longer holds — the same “never break the base flow” contract Auto-Shield follows above.

A trusted Co-Pilot — one appointed commander — can raise your Emergency Shield on your behalf, but only once you've been offline for a while, and that is the entirety of their power: a co-pilot cannot see your colonies, read your reports, spend your resources, or command your fleets in any way. The shield they raise is byte-for-byte identical to one you'd raise yourself. Two players can co-pilot each other across timezones — the intended shape: mutual night-watch.

Holding jump gates is inherently alliance-scoped — only an alliance can keep one captured. Holding territory around Aurium nodes similarly tends to become a team project once contested ground is worth defending continuously.

Disbanding an alliance is the one truly irreversible lever: every member is stripped from it, and if the alliance was hosting a megastructure, that megastructure is destroyed along with the alliance. This is deliberately dramatic — any confirmation dialog for disbanding should be read carefully.