Clans & Nations

Conquest is fought by nations but run by clans. Your nation is the flag you fly and, on the war server, the side you’re on; a clan is the player organisation inside that nation which actually wages the war — and joining one is the only way to take part in port battles at all. This page is the human structure behind the sieges: nations as conquest factions, the clans that drive RvR, what it takes to found one, the roles and permissions inside a clan, the friendly-clan list that decides who can fight beside you, and how a clan runs a port it has taken.

Nations as conquest factions

You pick a nation when you create your captain — the basics of that choice, and the advice for a newcomer, are in Account, Server & Nation. For conquest, what matters is that on the war server your nation defines who your enemies are and which ports count as friendly. Every port your nation holds is home water you can stage and resupply from; everything else is a target or a threat. Your nation is the largest team you belong to — but it’s a loose one, because the actual fighting is organised a level down, by clans.

Alliances and who you can fight

Nations don’t each fight everyone individually; they fall into broader sides, with the Pirates as a faction apart. That alignment sets the macro shape of the war — who is broadly with you and against you across the map. But national alignment is not the same as the fine-grained cooperation a port battle needs: two clans being in allied nations doesn’t automatically let them fight in the same battle. That is decided clan-to-clan, by the friendly-clan list below. Think of the alliance as the war’s weather and the friendly-clan list as the actual guest list for a given fight.

Why clans matter

A clan is a player organisation within a nation, and in RvR it’s everything: belonging to one is the only route into port battles, so a captain who never joins a clan simply cannot take part in conquest, attack or defence. Beyond that gate, clans pool effort — organising fleets, coordinating the flag run and the screen, sharing knowledge — and, crucially, clans are who own ports: a captured port belongs to the clan that took it, with the income and control that brings. You join an existing clan by enlisting (the in-game clan list shows active clans by nation, so you can find one that fits your language, schedule, or friends), or you pay to found your own and recruit to sustain it.

Creating your own clan

If no existing clan suits you, you can found one — but it is an investment rather than a formality. Creating a clan costs 250,000 reals out of your own purse, and the game also enforces a minimum rank below which it simply won’t let you. Between the money and the rank gate, founding a clan is something you grow into, not something you do in your first week.

The Create Clan window asks for four things, and it is strict about the first two:

• Clan name — 5 to 32 characters, using Latin letters, numbers, spaces and the underscore. Nothing else is accepted.
• Clan tag — 2 to 5 characters, uppercase Latin letters and numbers only. This is the short badge your clan is known by, so it matters more than its length suggests.
• Description — required, up to 255 characters. It is your recruiting pitch in the in-game clan list, so write it for the captains browsing for a home.
• Tax — a rate you set at creation. It becomes the tax your clan takes in ports it owns, and you can change it later; see running a port below.

Recruiting has a floor of its own: a clan can only take on captains who have reached the rank of Ensign (70 crew). A brand-new captain below that sails alone until they get there, which is worth knowing before you promise a friend a place in yours.

Roles and permissions

A clan is run through a ladder of roles, each with more authority than the last, so that power over the clan’s assets and diplomacy stays with trusted members:

• Member — the base rank: fights, contributes, and takes part, but doesn’t manage the clan.
• Officer — can recruit and remove members and promote others to officer.
• First Officer — adds the sensitive powers: managing the friendly-clan list and configuring the clan’s captured ports (their tax, access, and defence window).
• Creator — the founder, with full authority over everything, including disbanding the clan or handing the reins on.

The pattern is that the further up you go, the more you can touch — recruitment at the officer level, then diplomacy and port management reserved to the first officer and creator. It’s worth knowing the ladder even as a new member, because it tells you who to ask when you need a friendly clan added before a fight or a question about how your clan’s port is set up.

The friendly-clan list

The single most important piece of clan diplomacy is the friendly-clan list: the explicit roster of other clans your clan will fight alongside. Only clans on that list can take slots in your port battles, attack or defence — which is why national alliance alone isn’t enough, and why the list has to be right before a battle, not during it. Managing it is reserved to senior roles, and every addition and removal is logged for the whole clan to see, so the diplomacy is transparent to the membership. The practical habit for a port-battle night is simple: confirm the allies you’re expecting are actually on the list before anyone sails.

Running a port you’ve taken

Winning a port battle hands the port to the victorious clan, and owning it is an ongoing responsibility, not a trophy. The first officers and creator configure how it runs:

• Tax. The clan sets the tax taken from activity in the port, which becomes recurring clan income — but set it too high and you drive traders away, so the rate is a balance between greed and traffic.
• Access rights. The clan controls who may use the port — for instance warships of the owning nation only, versus all friendly warships — though enemy traders can generally always slip in.
• Defence window. The clan sets the hours during which the port can be attacked, steering any siege toward a time the clan can actually field a fleet to defend it. Note what the window does and doesn’t control: it fixes the hour, not the day. An NPC-scheduled attack still lands inside your window, but you don’t get to say which evening.
• How many ports to hold at all. Since the August 2026 update this is a real decision with a real cost. The game attacks your ports on a schedule keyed to how many of them you own: a clan with a handful faces an NPC port battle roughly weekly, a clan holding twenty or more faces one every few days. The full brackets are on Hostility & Conquest.

That last one deserves more weight than it usually gets. A clan can hold too many ports — not because the map punishes greed directly, but because every additional port shortens the interval between defences that your membership has to turn out for, across the whole holding. Twenty ports and forty active members is a rota; twenty ports and twelve active members is how a clan loses its territory one weeknight at a time. Size the map you hold to the fleet you can actually put to sea on an ordinary evening.

And ownership has to be defended: a held port can be challenged again by enemy clans — or by NPC raiders, who now come on a schedule rather than at random — and a clan that can’t turn out to protect what it took will lose it back to neutral. That standing obligation, the recurring income, and the say over a piece of the map are the real endgame of Naval Action: not any single battle, but holding ground over time. It begins the moment you join a clan and follow it into its first conquest.