Survival Guide - Dust Settles: Alliances

Table of Contents:

Purpose:

The purpose of an alliance is to provide you with an ability to join forces with other players of the game to provide each other support, information, and advice. Both useful and fun, you can share masteries as well. You can join an existing alliance or create your own.

Back to Top

Requirements:

In order to join or create an alliance you must meet two requirements. First your account must be validated. Second, you must have a communications facility constructed. Once you have met these requirements you can begin joining or creating an alliance.

Back to Top

Joining:

Once you have a comm facility you can submit a request to join the alliance of your choice. You can find out what alliances exist by clicking "Join" in the middle section of your bottom bar. This will take you to a list of the current alliances in the game. You can see the names, the leader, the number of members in the alliance, and whether the alliance is accepting new members. You can click on the alliance name to view their profile for more information. Many alliances will also post in the forums to give any possible join requirements, join incentives, and leader qualifications.

Once you have decided on the alliance that you want to join, just click "Join Request" to send a message to the leader of the alliance letting them know that you are interested in joining. Be sure to send any messages or fulfill any other join requirements as posted by the leader if there are any. Once the leader of the alliance has seen your request, he or she will then choose whether to accept or reject it. If accepted you will be a member of the alliance. If rejected you will need to look elsewhere. Once you join, you can be assigned one of two levels, "Standard" or "Trusted". Obviously, a Trusted member will have more abilities than a standard member.

Back to Top

Leaving:

If you decide that the alliance you have joined is just not right for you for some reason, you can leave. Just click the "Our Alliance" link in the Alliance link section on your bottom bar. On this page you will find a link that will allow you to leave the alliance. You should then receive a message saying that you left. You can also ask an owner or trusted member to remove you if you would like. At this point you can join another alliance or branch out on your own for awhile. Just remember, if you are getting the benefits of a mastery because of the alliance, you will lose it once you leave.

Along with requesting to be removed from an alliance, if you are a complete pain or violate some agreement within your alliance, you can be kicked out by any Trusted or Owner members. At this point, your alliance links at the bottom of the page will revert to Create or Join.

Back to Top

Creating:

Once you have a communications facility constructed, you can create an alliance of your own if one doesn't exist, yet or if you aren't interested in the ones that do. All you will need to do is click "Create" at the bottom of the screen instead of "Join". Here, you can begin filling out the information about your alliance. At the very least your alliance needs a name, though a motto, description, and flag are useful too. Once all of the fields are filled in the way you want them, obviously motto, description, and flag can remain blank/unselected, you will click "Create!" at the bottom of the screen.

This will create your alliance, setting you as the leader. You might want to consider putting a post in the forums to let people know that your alliance exists and what benefits you want to offer or purpose you want to strive for. Sending mass messages to every player is looked down on. You won't get banned for it, unless you do it too frequently, but it is not too effective at gaining recruits.

After that you will need to wait for other camps to send you a join request. You cannot add members if they are already in an alliance or if they have not sent a join request. As the leader of an alliance you can use the alliance profile page to set whether you want to receive a private message, an alliance message, or both whenever someone sends you a join request. Once you notice a join request, that player's name will appear in the "Add a member:" drop-down box so that you or a trusted member of your alliance could add them. At this point, select the camps you want and click "Add!". This will add those camps to your alliance as Standard members. You can remove an alliance member if needed using the drop-down box just under this.

As the owner you are the only one who can promote or demote a member to or from "Trusted" status. This status will allow that member the ability to change your motto, description, flag, whether you are accepting new members, add/remove members, add/remove an allied alliance, and add/remove an enemy alliance. Be sure you are prepared for the person to have this much freedom before you upgrade their status. They will not be able to remove you from the alliance, so if something happens, you should be able to correct things, no matter what.

Back to Top

Limits:

There are only a few limitations to an alliance. You cannot have more than 10 members in an alliance at any time. Once you hit 10, you will no longer be able to accept new members. Typically a message in the forums, especially if you posted your alliance there in the first place, will be appreciated for those members unable to join.

You will not be able to just randomly join or randomly add players to an alliance. For any player to join an alliance, they must send a join request and that request must then be accepted by a Trusted member or the owner of the alliance.

In order to even send a join request, you must have a communications facility and a validated account. Without these two things, you will not even be able to see the different alliances that exist in the game.

In an alliance, one of the primary drawbacks is the fact that a successful ops mission for alliance information can return total number of army units, militia, captains, colonels, Weapon Design research, Military Tactics research, weapons total, individual weapons counts, defensive formations, and individual defensive structure counts for each member of the alliance other than the member attacked. Though the ops mission will not usually find out all of these things, if the ops successfully return with the defensive formation of one camp, they will return with that same information about all the camps in your alliance other than the camp being attacked.

You must remember that shared masteries will be lost if the person with the mastery leaves the alliance or if you leave an alliance where you were gaining the benefits. Also you will probably be asked/required to donate a few extra army units and weapons into the aid escort pool for your alliance. These soldiers will escort aid caravans between members of your alliance so that marauders and enemy alliances cannot just randomly take all of those resources for themselves.

Back to Top

Viewing Alliances:

Once you have an active communications facility, you can see information about other alliances. If you have not yet joined an alliance you will be able to see what alliances exist by clicking "Join" on the bottom bar. This will take you to a color coded list of alliances similar to what you see when you visit the statistics page, though the alliances are not listed by rank. Instead you will see the alliances' names, leader, number of members, and whether they are accepting new members or not. By clicking on one of the alliances' names you will be taken to that alliance's profile where you can find out more information about them.

The following chart is an example of what the colors on the alliance list mean. A couple of quick things to note. If you ever forget these colors, there is a hover over tooltip for each row to remind you what the color means. If you are not in an alliance, the last three color types will not be present. Also the friend and foe colors will show up even if your alliance has not set that alliance as such, as long as they have declared you their friend or foe.

Back to Top

Alliance Profile:

The alliance profile is just the alliance version of the player profile. This is where you can find out some basic information about the alliance, such as its name, motto, a description, their flag (if set), any allied or enemy alliances, and the members of that alliance and their status. If you are not a member or only a Standard member of an alliance, all you will see are these features. If you are Trusted or Owner, you will have multiple options below this information for adjusting things about your alliance. Trusted members can adjust the motto, description, flag, and member acceptance status. They can also add or remove members and add or remove alliances as either foes or allies. Owners can do all of this as well as promoting a member to Trusted or demoting them if necessary.

Back to Top

Benefits:

There are numerous benefits to being in an alliance. Beyond the fact that you can share information and strategies among your members, you can also share a few other things.

Back to Top

Aid:

Alliance aid allows you to send aid between camps in your alliance without having to pay a hefty tax to the Neutral Exchange Camp. Of course, this does have its own problems. For one, you cannot send alliance aid to a camp unless you have been in the alliance for at least 24 real-time hours. After this, you will have to worry about the safety of your caravan when they are sent out. The post-apocalyptic world is a dangerous place, full of rogue, marauding camps and possible enemies of your alliance. These camps will pose a threat to any aid caravan you send out. Your alliance will need to keep a pool of army units and weapons together ready to be sent as an escort whenever you want to send aid to an ally. You will also need buses and gas to move the resources between camps. Use the "Escort Army" link on the bottom bar to get to the page where you can donate troops, weapons, and vehicles to the alliance pool to protect your caravans. This will be especially useful since alliances cannot use the NEC's trade market to move goods between one another. You can, of course, still buy and sell to non-allied camps or use the merchant system to sell to allies.

Back to Top

Defense:

Because your camp can be frequently attacked during the game, alliances can provide you a bit of protection. For one thing they can provide you with aid to help your camp recover after an attack. Also, any alliance members near your attacker's score can pitch in their own power to help exact a bit of revenge on the camp. Any of these things can often help ease the sting of attack and can help stave off more, if your alliance is close-knit enough.

Back to Top

Masteries:

One of the best things about being in an alliance is the shared benefits from masteries. Each mastery achieved by a member of your alliance will be shared (to some extent at least) with the other members of your alliance, so you can gain the benefits provided by a mastery without getting it yourself. This means that by planning and working together, your alliance can achieve and reap the benefits of every mastery possible in the game, giving each of your camps a huge advantage towards the middle and end of the round. Of course, if a person with a mastery leaves the alliance, that mastery will no longer be shared among the other camps in the alliance unless someone else happens to have mastered it as well. The same goes for any benefits you might have been gaining if you leave an alliance. If you have a shared mastery in your alliance (whether the mastery is yours or not) the icon pictured above will be displayed just above the mid-section of your screen. You will not receive the 100 extra turns from the Time Management mastery if you do not achieve it yourself, nor will you gain any associated production increase or construction abilities (like high level weapons or defensive structures) if you don't do the research yourself. Check your Mastery page to see which masteries are yours and which ones are gained through your alliance.

Back to Top

Alliance Messages and Forums:

Alliance Messages and the alliance forums give you and your alliance the ability to send messages and announcements to all members of your alliance at once. This is very useful when trying to work out strategies and who will be going for what mastery. You will find the alliance message link at the bottom of the page, and you can reach the forums using the notification link on the right bar. Use the link inside the Alliance Message page to add your own message if needed. The links for adding new threads and replies to the forums can be found inside the appropriate room or thread at the top or bottom of the main table. You will receive announcements of new alliance messages and forum posts on the right-hand side of your screen.

Back to Top