War & Forts

War is declared, scheduled, and fought over a fixed timeframe, so you won't lose a town just because you logged in at the wrong moment.

Declaring

Before an attack starts, the attacker has to set war goals. Whatever they pick is the only thing they can take if they win.

• Conquer lets them claim chunks off the defender, up to 64 chunks per war.
• Capture Landmark lets them take a specific landmark the defender holds.
• Capture Fort lets them take a specific fort.
• Subjugate forces the defending town to become part of the attacker's territory.
• Liberate forces a territory to release one of its vassals.

Declaring a war costs nothing, and neither does scheduling an attack. What it costs is time.

The defender always gets at least 12 hours' warning. The 12 hours count from when you schedule the attack to when it actually starts, not from when the war is declared. Attacks never start immediately, and they can't be scheduled more than 72 hours out.

Here's how it goes:

1. Declare the war. It's free, and it's announced to the whole server. On its own it doesn't capture anything. Chunks only change hands during an attack.
2. Schedule an attack. Pick your war goals and a start time, between 12 and 72 hours from now. This is announced to the whole server too, and the countdown starts.
3. Wait it out. Both sides use the time to get people online, and other territories can pick a side.
4. The attack begins at the scheduled time and runs for 45 minutes.

So if you schedule an attack at 18:00, the earliest it can start is 06:00 the next morning, and the latest is 18:00 three days later. There's no restricted day or hour, so pick something both sides can actually show up for.

Picking a side

Other territories can join either side through the attacks menu. They can also switch sides or pull out entirely, right up until the attack's start time.

Fighting

Each attack runs for 45 minutes. That's the whole thing. It's short on purpose, because a war you have to defend for an evening is a war decided by who has less to do that night.

The attacking side takes a chunk by standing on it and outnumbering whatever defenders are also standing there. A capture bar at the top of the screen tracks progress, and an uncontested chunk falls in about ten seconds. If the defenders have more players in the contested chunk, the bar stalls instead of filling.

A chunk taken this way doesn't switch straight to the attacker's territory. It flips to an occupied state first, held by the attacker but distinct from land they've actually claimed, until the war ends and the goal that won it is applied.

Capturing a territory's capital is worth more than an ordinary chunk, contributing an extra 20% toward the total. Defending the middle matters more than defending the edges.

What stops working during an attack

While an attack is live, the commands you'd use to escape it, or to move money and items out of reach, are blocked. Try one and you'll get "You cannot use this command during an attack".

• Town commands: /tan pay, /tan spawn and /tan teleport. Everything else under /tan, like /tan gui, still works.
• Money: /pay, /trade and /bank, along with /bank's shortcuts /money, /cash, /balance and /bal. That covers every /bank subcommand, so /bank transfer is out too.
• Teleports and escapes: /tp, /tphere, /tpoffline, /tpa, /tpahere, /tpaccept, /tpall, /tpaall, /back, /rtp, /home, /phome, /warp and /spawn.
• Auctions: /pa sell, /pa sale, /pa bid, /pa auction, /pa cancel, /pa collect, /pauction, /playerauction, /ah, /auction and /auctionhouse.

The point is that nobody can teleport out, accept a teleport into safety, shove their Crowns somewhere else, or hand items over through an auction or a trade while the fight is on.

It isn't a freeze on the whole economy. Chest shops still work, since buying and selling there happens at a physical chest rather than through a teleport or escape command. Jobs works normally too. Only the commands listed above are blocked.

Forts

A fort costs 1,000 Crowns and protects every chunk within 50 blocks of it. None of those chunks can be captured on their own while the fort stands. Attackers have to take the fort first.

Taking one works the same way as taking a chunk, except attackers have to hold the fort's own 10-block capture radius and the bar takes about a minute to fill rather than ten seconds. When a fort falls, everything it was protecting falls with it in one go, and the fort now shields that ground for the attacker instead.

That makes fort placement most of a territory's defence, and most of its risk. Fifty blocks is a big umbrella and a single point of failure underneath it. A handful of forts spread across your borders means an attacker fights through them one at a time. One fort covering everything means one bad 45 minutes.

Forts also work as outposts, so you can plant one away from your main territory, and you can teleport to your own forts outside of wartime. During an attack that teleport is disabled, along with the rest of the commands above.

A fort can also be the whole point of an attack, if the other side sets Capture Fort as a war goal against it.

Ending

An attack ends when the clock runs out, when one side surrenders, or when every claimed chunk and fort on one side has been captured. Losing 70% of your chunks is the point where surrendering becomes the sensible option rather than the embarrassing one.

The winner's war goals then apply automatically. If a side surrenders, the two territories end up in a non-aggression relation.

That means winning a war doesn't lock you into permanent hostility with the town next door. You come out of it at peace, holding whatever the goal gave you, and free to negotiate from there.

Who hears about it

The big moments are broadcast to the whole server: a war being declared, an attack being declared or cancelled, and an attack or war ending. Everyone sees those in chat.

The detailed newsletter entries are different. For a declaration, cancellation or attack ending, they only go to the players concerned: the members of the territories involved and their allies. That keeps a war between two towns from filling everyone else's notifications. The exception is a war ending, which everyone gets a newsletter for as well.

Why the limits are there

A war can only take 64 chunks, and /tan claimarea won't claim more than 250 chunks in one go. Together they keep one war from swallowing a whole neighbourhood, stop a mis-sized selection from claiming half the map by accident, and stop one huge operation from slowing the server down.

Upkeep has a limit too. If a town can't pay, it loses 10% of its claims, at least 2 chunks, rather than everything at once. See Towns & Claims.

Official documentation

The Towns & Nations documentation has the full war and fort reference, including the parts we haven't enabled here. Read this page as what happens on Lion Madness and that one as what the plugin can do.