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 the Royal Guard takes 24 hours and can only be done after the first two days of the round. Joining the Elite Guard requires already being in Royal Guard and takes another 24 hours. Once you are in Royal or Elite Guard, 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.

After the 48-hour wait, leaving Royal or Elite Guard is instant.

Attackers often join Elite Guard.

Some Explorers join the Royal Guard, but never Elite Guard due to the explore cost penalty.

The Chaos League is separate from Royal and Elite Guard. It takes 12 hours to join, you cannot leave for the first 12 hours after joining, and leaving takes an additional 12 hours to go into effect. Chaos League members have these additional effects:

• They can perform all war and black operations against other Chaos League members.
• War spells between Chaos League members are empowered, have a 25% chance of critical success for 50% more damage, and can critically fail and damage the caster.
• 75% of losses due to failed operations between members are automatically re-trained.