Campaigns

War bands, fatigue by day, the strike ladder, nuclear rules, prisoners and infamy, and how to defend a flotilla that never buys a Marine.

The war band

You can only legally declare on a target whose strength sits inside a set ratio of your own — never a helpless minnow, never an apex predator you have no business fighting. The rule is directional: the defender's strength divided by the attacker's strength must fall between 0.8 and 1.5. Working the algebra out: for two flotillas of strength X (weaker) and Y (stronger), war is possible in at least one direction whenever Y/X ≤ 1.5 (the weaker side declaring on the stronger gets the more permissive bound). Both sides can legally declare on each other only when Y/X ≤ 1.25. In practice: the multiplicative spread between any two mutually-declarable flotillas can never exceed 1.5×. Check who's actually in your band before you commit to a target — it's a live, checked-every-tide quantity, not a one-time assumption, and it shrinks the further your own build order diverges from your neighbors'.

Who you can declare on

Defensive slots. A flotilla can only be the target of 2 wars it did not itself declare at once — once a defender is already fighting that many, they're off the target list until one of those campaigns runs its course. Your own outgoing wars never count against anyone else's defensive slots, only theirs, and only wars declared on them count — a defender's own offensive campaigns don't crowd out their defensive room.

Re-declare cooldown. Ending a war by mutual peace opens a 3-day cooldown between that specific pair before either side can declare on the other again — peace's price for an early exit. A war that simply runs its full 3-day clock out to a natural end carries no such cooldown; only an early, mutually-agreed peace does.

Away stand-down. A commander who hasn't published or issued an order in 7 days stands down as a target for a new declaration — any war already running against them continues untouched, but nobody can open a fresh campaign against an empty deck. Any fresh publish or order from them makes them declarable again immediately.

War length & fatigue

A declared war runs a fixed 3-day real-time window, then it's over — no permanent grudge slog. Re-declaring later starts a fresh, rested campaign. Within that window, your assault's effectiveness fatigues by the day: full strength on day 1, roughly two-thirds on day 2, and less than half on day 3. A short, punitive campaign hits hardest; dragging a war out to its full length costs you real effectiveness on top of the exhaustion described below.

Cooldowns

Each attack type has its own independent 12-hour cooldown per target: ground, air (helicopter), naval (bombard, battle, and landing all share one slot), drone swarm, nuclear, and submarine. That's six independent slots against a single rival, capping one 3-day war at up to 6 attacks per type per target — up to 36 total against one rival if every slot is used, and more again across all three wars you can wage at once (a bot-scale ceiling, not a realistic human tempo).

Postures

Ground assaults commit a different share of your army depending on posture, with matching risk and reward:

Troops left home are never at risk — only your committed slice can take losses, and that slice is further capped by your lift capacity (see Military · Lift).

The strike ladder

Standoff strikes hit from range with their own odds, defenses, and cooldowns, separate from a ground assault: helicopters, drone swarms, naval bombard/battle/landing/blockade, submarine torpedo raids, and nuclear torpedoes. Weather genuinely matters here — a squall grounds drone swarms outright and blunts helicopters, while fog degrades naval defense and blurs how fresh your intel on a rival reads. Submarines run silent: found or not, torpedoes already in the water land their damage regardless — only the Sonar Array (up to +0.42 detection across 3 arrays) and Patrol Boats (+0.02 detection each, capped +0.20) can find the wolfpack before it strikes, and a caught raid takes real attrition on the way out.

Nukes

• Day-2 gate. No nuclear release is possible until a war's second day — nobody panic-nukes on declaration day.
• Relaunch grace & manned-assault lockout. Both run 3 real days from the same launch moment: a second warhead at that target is blocked for 3 days, and so is any manned assault (ground, heli, naval) against them.
• Tech damage ceiling. A warhead's damage stops scaling with technology past tech 10,000 — there's a real ceiling, not unbounded destruction.
• Sonar interception. Each Sonar Array adds a real chance to intercept an inbound torpedo before it lands.
• Fallout. Every detonation adds a sliver of global ocean radiation that suppresses everyone's food and water collection until it dissipates — nuclear war poisons the commons, launch by launch, for attacker and target alike.
• Escalating price. Each warhead you already own multiplies the price of the next one — hoarding a stockpile gets progressively more expensive, not cheaper.

POWs & infamy

Ground battles that win take prisoners. What you do with them — ransom, swap, parole, execute, or enslave — feeds a lifetime infamy reputation score built from a weighted mix (execute and starve weigh heaviest, enslaving and slave-trading less). It's a continuous 0..1 score, and its combat effect scales linearly with that score — the full swing (POW captures cut by 70%, your attacker casualties up 25%, defender KIA up 10%) is reached only at the absolute worst score, so a nation deep in a bad reputation band but not yet at the ceiling gets a proportionally smaller effect, not the maximum one. Parole and manumission are the redemption levers, pulling the score back down slowly — roughly four paroles offset the weight of one execution. A cruelty-heavy record isn't just flavor text: defenders genuinely fight harder against a commander with a known record for it.

War exhaustion

Every tide your flotilla spends under arms wears the decks down, capped at 100 and draining only in peace — it climbs faster fighting on multiple fronts at once and faster still when your own wounded are dying for want of a bed. It drains back down at a steady rate once you're at peace, so a short, punitive campaign is nearly free, while a permanent war footing is a real, ongoing morale cost. Campaigns shows exactly where you stand and, once the fighting stops, roughly how long the decks need to recover.

Defense

You don't need a standing army to avoid being defenseless. A meaningful share of your population fights as militia in self-defense even with zero Marines — a real garrison just organizes more of that potential into an actual fighting force, up to a cap. Beyond militia:

• Fortifications — defensive improvements (bunkers, coastal guns, radar/intel arrays, the Sonar Array) each queue on a real-time build timer, so hardened defense can't be panic-bought the day a war breaks out.
• Mines engage inbound raiders first, at a chance scaling with saturation — see Military · Mines.
• Patrol Boats add mobile submarine detection and prosecution beside the Sonar Array, and double as sinkable hulls in a naval battle — a defender with no standing War Corvettes at all now has something real for an attacker to sink, and can win against a big enough picket.