Strike, declare, rally

The three rungs

1. Strike

   Hostility

   Nobody declares anything. You raid a world and you are at odds with its owner — the attack IS the declaration, recorded the moment the fleet launches rather than when it lands, so the victim watching it come already knows what it means. It is a state BETWEEN two players, never a right the aggressor earns: the raider is as exposed as the raided.

   How it ends Lapses on its own, once neither of you has touched the other for a while. Every new blow pushes the clock back.

2. Declare

   Conflict

   A war two players actually chose. Its point is the thing raiding cannot give you: opening a front without having to bomb a world first. Sides rather than a pair — which is what lets alliances arrive later without any of this being rewritten.

   How it ends Not by silence. A declared war ends because somebody surrendered or somebody lost — and a surrender is refused until the war has lasted a minimum, so quitting is never instant.

3. Rally

   War

   A conflict an alliance has joined, and the moment it stops being a private quarrel. There are no invitations: a leader comes to the aid of a side where they already have an ally, which is why a warband is temporary — nothing outlives the war, there is no coalition to maintain.

   How it ends The same two ways, decided on the SIDE's total rather than any one duel. Three against one cannot be settled by whichever pair crosses the line first.

The rules that shape it

Each of these was chosen over a more obvious option, and the reason is the interesting part.

• Won by ratio, not by a gap

  Victory on score asks one thing: did you destroy enough, and far more than they did. A fixed gap would have been thirty starting ships early in a galaxy and two ships late — the same war won too fast at the end and never at the beginning, with nobody touching a setting. A ratio says it at any scale, and a floor under it stops a single skirmish counting as a campaign.

• You cannot be dragged in

  Hostility is player to player, not alliance to alliance. One member going raiding does not enlist everybody else in a war they never chose. Warbands sit on top of that, deliberately: joining is an act.

• Never against your own ally

  Joining a side makes you hostile to everyone on the other one. If an ally already stands there, the game refuses — otherwise a warband would be the back door to attacking somebody your diplomacy forbids you from touching.

• A staged war pays nothing

  Every payout is indexed on what you actually destroyed, so two friendly accounts surrendering to each other collect nothing at all. Only renown moves, and renown cannot be traded. That property comes from the shape of the rewards rather than from their size: an administrator can make war more generous, not more farmable.

What a victory pays

Three payments, three different intentions — a collective one, a flat one and a personal one.

• Renown

  Collective and reputational, and it only moves in a WAR — an alliance that rallied. Losing costs less than winning pays, on purpose: if it did not, caution would beat courage and nobody would ever join an ally's fight.

• Loot

  The same flat payment to every engaged member of the winning side, larger if the war was a heavy one. Flat rather than proportional, because a shared purse split eighty ways is crumbs, and because proportional would just be a second merit.

• Merit

  Your own share of a fixed pot, in proportion to what you destroyed. Fixed per war, so the size of a coalition can never become a multiplier on the currency people pay real money for.

And it decides who owns the ground

The two systems are wired together: raiding somebody's world can open their TERRITORY to conquest, so a war is not only about what you destroy but about what you are then allowed to take. Neutral ground never needs a war — expansion has never required one.