Alliance wars are epic battles that take place between two alliances. These battles add a significant amount of strategic possibility, as they require alliances to work together to construct a strong defensive team for their opponents to face, as well as organizing the usual attacking teams. Alliances will then fight through the maps constructed by their opponents in order to obtain victory!
What Is an Alliance War Rating?
War rating represents how well your alliance has performed in alliance wars. It is used to match your alliance with opponents of a similar rating. If no such opponent exists, then the search will expand to include other ratings.
Victory increases your war rating, while defeat will cause it to decrease. The alliance that has earned the highest score during the battle will be victorious and earn better rewards, as well as increase their war rating.
You may earn points in the following ways:
- Defeating the boss in your battlegroup.
- Traveling through nodes on the map.
- Defeating an enemy attacker with your placed defenders, up to a maximum of 240 points per Champion (see the Nodes section below for more information).
- Having undefeated defenders on your map.
- Having unique Champions in battlegroups (see the Defender Diversity section below for more information).
How Do I Participate in an Alliance War?
In order to participate in alliance wars, you will need to:
- Be part of an alliance of five members or more.
- Be at least level 17.
- Join the alliance before enlistment begins.
Note: If enlistment has already occurred, and the matchmaking phase is still active, an officer can un-enlist and re-enlist so new members may join the alliance war.
Only leaders and officers of your alliance can join and manage the alliance war. As a member of your alliance, you will be able to see the status of the alliance war in the GENERAL tab of your alliance, as well as the fight loading screen.
There are three main phases in alliance wars that we will be going over in this article: the matchmaking, placement, and attack phase.
Note: Once alliance war matchmaking has begun your alliance will be unable to make changes to its selection of battlegrounds, so make sure to double check your choice!
Matchmaking Phase
Only the leadership of your alliance can join the alliance wars and look for an opponent. They will have the option to choose between one, two, or three battlegroups to be included in that particular war. The more battlegroups, the more players that can participate.
As you increase the number of battlegroups, the rewards will improve.
How Long Will It Take to Find an Opponent?
Matchmaking is not instant and can take up to four hours as it first tries to match your alliance with an opponent of equal or similar strength. The process will emphasize your alliance's war rating above all else. If such an alliance cannot be found, the search will begin to expand until it pulls from all alliances currently waiting on a match, which includes the possibility of being paired with an alliance that is vastly stronger or weaker than yours.
If the system takes a while to find an opponent, you can leave the menu and continue with your game. The search will be running in the background.
Placement Phase
This phase is all about strategizing with your alliance to determine where to place Champions. Work with your alliance to choose the most efficient strategy and join one of the available battlegroups to place your Champions. You have 24 hours to do this once the matchmaking phase is over and an opponent is found.
Each battlegroup can contain a maximum of 10 players. Players competing in alliance wars can place five defending Champions on the board and use three attacking Champions to fight through the opponent’s map.
But beware! The Champions you choose during this phase will be locked into the war and will be unusable:
- During the attack phase of the current war.
- In alliance quests.
- In story & event quests once the attack phase has begun.
Defender Diversity Points
Defender diversity points are awarded to alliances for bringing in unique Champions as defenders. You will be awarded 30 points for each unique Champion your alliance places as a defender across all of your battlegroups, with a maximum of 4,500 points per alliance war. Remember, this applies to all of your battlegroups!
Champions of the same name but different tier count as one Champion. For example, a 4-star Hulk and a 5-star Hulk both count as the Hulk, and are not unique.
Nodes
Remember that nodes like the linked, local, and global nodes can be used to your advantage, granting powerful buffs as well as 150 points per node awarded for node exploration.
Attack bonus: Each node that can have a defender placed on it will begin with 240 bonus points available to the attacking team. Each time one of the attacking alliance's Champions is lost to that node, those bonus points go down by 80 points. In other words, if the defender defeats three opponents, then that node is no longer worth any attack bonus.
Make sure that you check out the available nodes in the map. Each node on the map has a unique number that helps you coordinate with your alliance on where to place your Champions.
In order to place a Champion, tap on the Champion you would like to place, and then tap on the node you would like it to appear on. You may only place Champions on empty nodes.
The node in the picture above is a hidden node. This means that some of the Champion’s information will be hidden from your opponents.
You can change the position of your Champions while the placement phase is active. An alliance’s leader can swap any of the Champions placed on the board by the alliance members.
Attack Phase
The attack phase lasts 24 hours. Here, alliance members will try to earn as many points as possible. When a war finishes, each defender remaining on the map will award their alliance with 250 bonus points, with a maximum of 37,500 points available from defenders remaining at the beginning of an alliance war, assuming 50 defenders have been placed in each battlegroup.
You will begin with three out of five total war energy when you initially enter the board. This should give you and your alliance time to strategize based on the layout of your opponents. Every tile on the board will require one war energy to travel.
There are no consumable items to restore energy; you will need to wait for the cooldown period.
Portals
Portals allow players to move around the map more freely. Portals can allow you to move and help alliance members that are having difficulty clearing nodes or to move away from a node or path that you were not prepared for.
Consumables
While alliance consumables may be used during these battles, only 15 total can be used per alliance war. Any variation of health potions and revives can be used, but only until the cap of 15.
Remember to take linked nodes into account to help your alliance defeat other Champions on different paths.
End of the Map
Once your alliance clears the final tile of the map, your defending and attacking Champions will be released and will be usable in all game modes.
What Happens if Our Opponent Finishes Their Board First?
Your alliance’s progress in the war will be unaffected.
Skirmish Rewards
After completing an alliance war, you will receive an in-game mail message that includes the stats for all of your alliance members with their performance in that war and some Gold for each kill earned by an attacker or defender!
Season Rewards
A season is a 4-week-long event where alliances compete for season points by winning wars against other alliances of similar tiers. At the end of a particular war season, the alliances and their eligible members receive rewards based on their tier and total points for that season.
Off-Season War-Rating Changes
Alliances may experience small changes to their war rating in between alliance-war seasons. For example:
- It is possible for an alliance in tiers 1-5 to match with a tier 6+ alliance, do battle on the tier 6+ map, and experience a war-rating change despite the tier 1-5 off-season lock. This is because war-rating changes are currently tied to map tiers as opposed to individual alliance tiers.
- It is possible to be in the lower ranks of tier 5 and get pushed out by a tier 6 alliance whose rating increased enough to take your position.
- It is possible to be in tiers 1-4 while other alliances in a tier below you do battle with a tier 6+ alliance, win, increase their war ratings, and push you down into a lower bracket. This is similar to the example above, except instead of a tier 6 alliance moving you out of tier 5, a tier 4 alliance is moving you out of tier 3.
- It is possible for the total amount of alliances to change at the end of an alliance-war season or during the off-season. The creation of new alliances or the disbanding of existing alliances can alter war-rating tiers for some alliances.