polbielytics

How alliance wars work in Polandball Go

Once a week, alliance wars put two Polandball Go alliances against each other on a shared board of defense squads. Here's the weekly schedule, how the board works, where war points come from, and what a war pays out.

The weekly schedule

Every war runs on the same week, and each phase starts at 00:00 UTC:

The Wars pages here show a banner with the current phase and how long is left on it, taken from the game's live feed. During sign-up the game doesn't list any wars yet, so the banner says what's coming next.

Matchmaking and brackets

Each war is two alliances. At matchmaking the game records each side's war power and how many members joined. Wars are then sorted into brackets, A to D, by the number of members who joined.

The battlefield

Every war is fought on a named battlefield with real ground under it. Each side's defense board is laid out in rows of zones (front, middle and back), and you fight through it from front to back. On our war pages both boards are drawn on one field, mirrored across the front line, with each side's front row nearest the middle.

Members defend by placing squads of five balls in the zones. A ball that's on defense, or has already been used in an attack, can't be sent again.

Defenders only show up when an attack finds them. A zone the other side never attacked stays hidden. That means nobody got far enough to see it, not that it was empty. The other alliance's score is hidden too while the war is on.

Attacks and duels

An attack sends a team of 1 to 5 of your balls against a defending squad. Since October 10 it is one round-based duel against every defender still standing there, and the game reports what happened to each of them: KO'd, or the HP it kept.

Damage stays. A defender that survives an attack keeps the HP it had left, so a squad can be worn down over several attacks. The squad is beaten when its last defender is KO'd.

Each war's page lists every attack, grouped by the row of the board it hit. Once there are enough duels to mean something, it also shows the attacker's duel win rate for each row.

How war points are scored

A war's score comes from these sources, in the game's own categories:

The game sets how much each one is worth in its reward reference, and that can change. The (i) next to any war score here shows the current values, read from the game rather than typed in by us. Each war's page also breaks its score down by source.

In practice:

What a war pays

Each war ladder tier pays every member by result: win, draw, loss or bye. You get War Bonds, Clay and XP, and the alliance gets alliance XP. Rewards arrive in the weekly payout after the war ends.

There's a further reward at the end of a season. It depends on whether the alliance got promoted, stayed where it was or got relegated.

The Rewards by result button on the Wars pages shows the game's current table, tier by tier. In an alliance's war history, the gift on each war shows what that war paid.

How our war ladder ranks alliances

The war ladder opens on the game's own order: victory points from alliance wars, with each alliance's war tier and record.

Where to look next