Alignment Wars

The Alignment War is the city-wide Hero-vs-Villain conflict, run out of the Watchtower. It's opt-in — enrolling puts you on your alignment's roster for a real, ongoing war: claiming territory, fighting enrolled players on the opposite side, and capturing the enemy's flag, all feeding into a weekly tally that decides who runs the city that week.

Enrolling

Enlist at the Watchtower — instant, no cost, no requirements beyond being logged in. Once enrolled you show up on your faction's roster, gain access to territory claiming and flag actions while Exploring, and start earning (and risking) War Points.

There's no way to leave mid-week once you're in — you're on the roster for the rest of the current war week, and it resets automatically for everyone at the next tally.

Territory

The map is the same 60×60 grid used for Exploring. Every tile is either unclaimed or held by a faction, and each side has a small permanent home base (far west for Heroes, far east for Villains) that can never be claimed by the other side.

Claiming happens automatically as you explore, if you're enrolled and have Auto-Claim on (or you can trigger it manually while standing still) — it costs Explore Turns, not a separate resource:

• Unclaimed tile — always succeeds. Costs 2 turns.
• Enemy-held tile — an 80% roll to flip it. Costs 2 turns either way, win or lose.
• Adjacency rule — you need at least 2 friendly tiles in the 8 surrounding squares before a claim will even attempt to hold. This keeps claims growing outward from territory you already control instead of leapfrogging around the map.

Winning tiles award War Points (see below), capped at 25 successful claims per reset — since Explore turns reset at both noon and midnight, that's up to 50 a day. Past the cap, tiles still flip normally, they just stop earning War Points until the next reset. District control itself (see Exploring's district perks) is a separate, slower-moving layer on top of this — it's about who controls a whole quadrant of the map, not any single tile.

War Points

War Points (WP) are your personal war score and your faction's collective score. Three ways to earn them:

• Claiming enemy territory — +1 WP per successful claim (before the 25-claim-per-reset cap).
• Fighting enrolled enemies in Combat — beating another enrolled, opposite-alignment player in PvP awards the winner WP and costs the loser WP. Capped at a small number of WP-earning wins per opponent per reset window (noon/midnight) — repeatedly farming the same enemy for War Points stops paying out past that cap, though the fight itself still happens normally.
• Capturing the enemy flag — a big lump of WP, see below.

All three amounts scale up if you're on a losing streak — see "Underdog Bonus" below.

The Flag

Each faction has one flag, seeded at their home base. To capture it:

1. Walk onto the enemy flag's tile while enrolled and alive — you pick it up automatically.
2. Carry it back to your own base zone. The instant you're both carrying it and standing on home territory, it's captured.
3. The enemy's score for the current week takes a real hit, and their flag vanishes for 10 minutes before respawning at their base.

Getting spotted matters: picking up the enemy's flag broadcasts a city-wide alert naming you. Carrying a flag is visible on the war map to the opposing faction the whole time you're holding it (your own side can't see it on the map while you carry it). You can drop it manually at any time if you're about to get caught — it just falls where you're standing, up for grabs by anyone. Getting knocked out in Combat while carrying it does the same thing automatically — the flag drops right where you were standing, so carrying it is not a free pass from a fight.

Picking up your own flag (if it's out in the open, dropped by whoever last carried it) starts a short recovery — hold onto it briefly and it warps itself home automatically, no need to walk it back.

Capture rewards taper off if your faction has been winning: fewer consecutive weekly wins in a row means a bigger capture bonus, capped at a floor so it's never trivial. This exists so an already-dominant faction doesn't run away with it purely off repeated flag captures.

Retreat

Enrolled players can spend 10 turns to instantly teleport back to the center of their own base zone from anywhere on the map — a fast way to get home when things go bad, or to rush a captured flag home rather than walking it back the long way.

War Finds

While exploring as an enrolled player with at least 1 War Point, there's a small chance per move of a War Find — a little bonus roll layered on top of normal Exploring rewards:

• Snow Cone — added straight to your Lunchbox.
• Field rations — +50 Explore Turns, no item involved.
• The Last Slice — added straight to your Lunchbox.

These are on top of Exploring's own normal event odds and district-based rare pet finds — being enrolled in the war doesn't change your regular Exploring rewards at all, this is purely bonus.

Underdog Bonus

If your faction loses the weekly tally, everyone still enrolled on the losing side gets a WP-gain bonus for the next week — it grows the longer your side keeps losing (capped), and resets to zero the moment your faction wins. It's the game's way of keeping a losing week from snowballing into a hopeless one — the more you're behind, the more every claim, fight win, and flag capture is worth.

Titles

Titles are live badges of your current standing, not a snapshot taken at the tally — they update the instant your War Points or claims change, and all clear to none at the Sunday reset along with everything else.

There are two independent tracks:

Hold a title from both tracks at once (any of General/Captain paired with any of Overlord/Enforcer) and they fuse into a single title, Warlord, instead of stacking — so "Captain" + "Overlord" displays as "Warlord {name}," not "Cpt. Overlord {name}." Disgraced never fuses with a claims title, since it's a penalty state rather than a second achievement.

The Weekly Tally

Every Sunday, the war resolves for the week. Each faction's score is their total War Points plus their total tiles held (plus any carryover from flag captures during the week). Whichever faction has the higher score wins.

Rewards:

• A cash payout to every enrolled contributor on the winning faction who ended the week with positive War Points, scaled by level.
• A Gym training bonus for the week's Top 10 War Point earners, Top 5 fighters, and Top 5 territory claimers — these lists count players from both factions, so a strong losing-side performer can still land on their own top list even if their faction doesn't win overall.
• The Top 10 War Point earners (either faction, ranked #1-10) also get a personal cash payout scaled by rank and level — bigger for #1, tapering down through #10 — plus a temporary +100 Intel bonus that lasts for the week. The Intel bonus is reverted automatically the next time the tally runs, whether or not you make the Top 10 again.

Every enrolled player, not just the top scorers, gets a personal notice announcing their final War Point total and whether their faction won, lost, or drew the week.

After the tally, the entire map resets and reseeds — both factions get a fresh checkerboard of starting territory (not just their tiny home bases), War Points and daily claim counts reset to zero, flags return home, and a new week begins immediately.

Tips

• Territory claiming is free War Points if you're already exploring — turn on Auto-Claim and you'll pick up tiles as a side effect of normal movement, no extra effort.
• The adjacency rule means claims spread fastest from a solid, connected block of territory — jumping into isolated enemy pockets usually just fails the 2-friendly-neighbor check.
• Flag runs are high-risk, high-reward — you're announced to the whole enemy faction the moment you grab it. Bring backup or go when the enemy's attention is elsewhere.
• If your faction is losing, don't sit it out — the underdog bonus makes every action worth more, and a strong comeback week is very achievable.
• The 25-per-reset claim cap only limits War Point income from claiming, not claiming itself — keep flipping tiles past the cap if you want the territory, you just won't get more WP for it until the next noon/midnight reset.