Hostility & Conquest

Conquest is what the Caribbean server is really for: nations fighting to own the map’s ports, one siege at a time. But you can’t simply sail up and attack a port — an attacker first has to build hostility against it and earn the right to strike. The current machinery for that is the conquest mission: a clan earns the right to take one, carries its flag to the target during the hours it can be attacked, and wins a flag battle to plant it. Pull that off and a full port battle — the actual siege — is scheduled for the next day. Defenders don’t get that luxury: the game also throws NPC fleets at player-held ports on a schedule of its own, with no flag and no attacker to see coming. This page is the trigger; the siege itself is the next page.

What conquest is

Every port on the Caribbean map is owned — by a nation, and specifically by a clan within that nation — or it sits neutral. Conquest is the contest to change that ownership. A nation pushes its borders by taking enemy and neutral ports, and defends what it holds against the same pressure coming the other way. The map is therefore never settled: it shifts week to week as clans attack, lose, and retake ground, and the whole economic and strategic shape of a nation — where it can build, trade, and stage from — rides on which ports it controls.

Building hostility: the conquest mission

The conquest flag is no longer an item bought off the Admiralty shelf. To attack a port, your clan takes a conquest mission — and the right to take one is earned. Only the nation’s top clans on the national leaderboard, ranked by recent activity, may start conquest missions; within such a clan only the officers and the clan creator may take one; a clan can have only one mission running at a time; and the mission’s price scales with how active the targeted port is. The mission puts the flag in play — and the system still gates when and how you can use it:

• The attack window. Each port can only be attacked during a defined window of server time — the defending clan sets it, so the fight happens at an hour they can muster for. You claim and carry the flag against a target only during its window.
• Carry it to the target. With the mission taken, you sail from friendly water toward the port and have a limited time to get within range of it. The flag holder is conspicuous — a red flag flies over the ship, visible to everyone — and carrying it slows you down, so the run-in is itself a vulnerable, watched journey.
• The mission rides on one hull. The ship used to take the mission is recorded, and the mission must be finished in that same ship — lose it along the way and the mission fails with it. The attacker’s ship isn’t just carrying the flag; it is the attempt.
• Cooldowns. A port that was recently fought over can’t be attacked again immediately, which stops a strong nation from grinding a weak one into dust hour after hour.

The flag battle

Once you’re in range you launch a flag battle — an open fight, in a bounded arena, that both sides can join. Your job as the attacker is simple to state and hard to do: survive and hold. If the defenders fail to show and contest you within the opening window, the flag is planted and the attack succeeds outright. If they do come, the clock extends and you must weather them for its duration; the flag holder is marked out in the player list, the obvious target everyone on the other side is trying to sink. The arena has a hard boundary — stray too far outside it for too long and your ship is lost — so the flag battle is a concentrated, can’t-run-away brawl rather than the open-ended skirmishing of an ordinary open-world battle.

When the game attacks you

Everything above describes a port battle that a player sets in motion. There is a second route to one, and it needs no flag, no mission and no human attacker at all: the game itself sends NPC fleets against player-held ports. The August 2026 update rewrote how those targets are picked, after player feedback, so that they now arrive on a schedule a clan can plan around instead of landing at random.

The pace is set by how many ports your clan holds. The more ground you own, the more often the game will come and test whether you can defend it:

Those are the August 2026 brackets and, like everything in conquest, they are tuning values the developers will revisit. The schedule is also not exact: a battle is usually set within its interval, but the date can slip by a day or two either way, so a clan can know roughly when its next defence is coming without knowing the day.

Read the consequence carefully, because it is new and it cuts against instinct: every port you take raises the rate at which the game attacks all of them. A clan holding four ports fights one of these a week; a clan holding twenty fights one every few days. Territory is no longer something you can simply accumulate — past a certain point it becomes a standing rota that your membership has to be able to turn out for.

Reading the conquest map

The game gives clans the intelligence to plan all this. The conquest competition map shows who owns what right now and how ownership has shifted over the current week, so a clan can see where a nation is winning or bleeding ground. Conquest information lists every scheduled upcoming port battle — attacker, defender, and the time it’ll be fought, in server time — which is how players know where to be and when. NPC-scheduled attacks appear here too, which is where a clan finds out its next defence has been set; treat the listed date as firm to within a day or so rather than to the hour. And a PvP leaderboard ranks the most successful fighters since the last reset, the individual scoreboard running alongside the national one. Between them, a clan can read the whole front at a glance and pick its next move.

What taking a port is worth

A planted flag doesn’t win the port by itself — it schedules the port battle that will, the following day, with the planting clan as attacker and the current owner as defender. Win that and the port changes hands: it becomes your clan’s to manage, a source of recurring tax income and control over who may use it, and another tile of your nation’s territory on the map. That ownership — the income, the access control, the standing of holding ground — is the prize the whole conquest machine exists to award, and how a clan runs a port it has taken is covered in Clans & Nations.

It is also a bill. Alongside the income and the standing, a port you take is a port you are now expected to defend — against rival clans whenever they come, and against the game itself on the NPC schedule described above, which quickens for every additional port your clan holds. Weigh a target against the fleet you can actually field on a weeknight, not against the map you would like to own.

From hostility to the siege

So the sequence is a chain: take a conquest mission, carry its flag to the port, win the flag battle to plant it, and trigger the port battle the next day — the large, scheduled, twenty-five-a-side conquest fight where the port is actually won or held. That siege, its fleet preparation, the scoring circles, and how victory is decided are the subject of Port Battles.

That chain is how you start a siege. It is not the only way one starts: the game schedules its own against the ports you already hold, on the cadence set out above, and those arrive with no flag and no attacking clan behind them. Same fight, same twenty-five a side — you just don’t get to choose when.