polbielytics

How alliance wars and war points work in Polandball Go

Once a week, alliance wars put two Polandball Go alliances against each other on a shared board of defence 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 just 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 defence 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 defence, 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 one of your squads against a defending squad. Each pairing inside it is a duel: one ball against one ball, with its own winner. The PvP ladder doesn't work like that. There, the game only reports which side won the whole battle.

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 on this site is our own ranking, not the game's. It ignores victory points. Those grow with roster size, and they pay the same for beating an inactive alliance as a strong one.

Wars are still only a few weeks old, so for now three quarters of an alliance's place comes from where it stands in the Polbielytics Ranking. That ranking blends territory, members' Global Power, members' PvP standing and alliance level.

The last quarter is the war record: the share of finished wars won over the past eight weeks. We take the low end of its confidence interval, so a short perfect run can't outrank a long strong one, and we adjust for who the wins and losses came against. Beating a highly ranked alliance counts for a lot. Losing to one costs little. A bye is neither a win nor a loss, and an alliance needs three finished wars before it has a win rate at all.

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