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'.

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.