Guards
Joining a Guard is a way to narrow the range of dominions which can target you for invading, espionage, and magic. This can be useful for defending from bottom feeding as well as not letting much smaller dominions perform ops on you.
As a member of a Guard, only other dominions within the Guard ranges (see below) can target you for any ops. The only exception to this is recent invasions, which enables a dominion that has been invaded within the past 12 ticks to ignore guard status by itself or by the dominion who invaded it to the extent that it may perform spy and wizard operations, including war-only operations, upon the dominion who invaded it. This does not extend to invasions, guard status strictly will not allow invading outside its range even against a dominion that has recently invaded you.
- No Guard: from 40% to 250%.
- Royal Guard: from 60% to 166%, -2% platinum production.
- Elite Guard: from 75% to 133%, +25% exploration costs and the same platinum penalty as the Royal Guard. (I.e: -2%, no double penalty.)
Joining a Guard takes 24 hours (48 total for Elite Guard) and can only be done after day 5 of the round. Once you are in, you cannot leave for 48 hours. Additionally, performing any actions on a Dominion out of the range of the Guard you are joining will reset the application to 24 hours.
Leaving a Guard is instant.
Attackers often join Elite Guard.
Some Explorers join the Royal Guard, but never Elite Guard due to the explore cost penalty.
Starting in round 28 the Shadow League was created which enables war-only black ops between members. Shadow League application requires 24 hours to join and players cannot leave for 48 hours after joining, black ops without war reset leave timer. Shadow League members have these additional bonuses:
- 75% of losses due to failed ops between members are automatically re-trained.
- Info op strength costs are halved.
- Infamy decay reduced by 25%.