Hostility & Conquest

Conquest is what the war server is ultimately 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 flag: buy one, carry it to the target during the hours it can be attacked, and win a flag battle to plant it. Pull that off and a full port battle — the actual siege — is scheduled for the next day. This page is the trigger; the siege itself is the next page.

What conquest is

Every port on the war 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 flag

To attack a port you need a conquest flag, bought from the Admiralty for doubloons. Holding one doesn’t let you strike anywhere at any time; the system gates it deliberately:

• 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 flag 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.
• 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.

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. 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.

From hostility to the siege

So the sequence is a chain: build hostility by taking and carrying a flag, 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.