Bastions & Doctrines

Holding systems is only the first half of alliance territory. The second half is shape and specialisation: which of your systems are connected, what each one is for, and how far from home you can plant a flag.

Three ideas drive everything on this page:

Connection matters. A system only pays alliance-wide bonuses while it is linked back to your Headquarters or to one of your Bastions. Cut the corridor, cut the benefit.
Every node has a job. Each system carries exactly one Doctrine — production, shipbuilding, defence, logistics, or intel — and its main building level is the dial.
Distance is buyable, not free. Bastions let you anchor territory far from home, but each archetype is capped, placement is restricted, and every Bastion is always conquerable.

Requires the Alliance Territory feature to be enabled. Staged sieges additionally require Territory Siege — see Territory Siege. Territory basics (conquest, harvest, vault, research) are in Alliances.

The three tiers
Connected territory
Doctrines
Which doctrines a node may take
Setting and switching a doctrine
Territory effects
Fortress projection
Logistics Center & warp gates
Anti-Intel & Sensor
Bastions
Founding a Bastion
Child Divisions
Embassy stun: when a treaty ends
Abandoning a Bastion
Caps & capacity
Sieges against territory
Bosses in owned space
Where to see all of this
Quick reference

The three tiers

HQ  (1 per alliance, cannot be sieged, root of the main blob)
 └── Division*  (hex-adjacent chain, 1 doctrine each)

Bastion  (standalone anchor, planted away from the blob — always conquerable)
 ├── Embassy    Bastion — 1 system,       max 5
 ├── War        Bastion — root + 2 kids,  max 3
 └── Expansion  Bastion — root + 5 kids,  max 2
      └── Division*  (adjacent to the cluster, 1 doctrine each)

Tier	Main building	Slots	Notes
Headquarters	Alliance Headquarters	100	One per alliance. Cannot be Contested or taken. Only place for Research Lab, Vault, Diplomacy Office, Archive, Bazaar. Has no doctrine.
Division	Division Center	40	Must border territory you already hold. Carries one doctrine.
Bastion	Embassy / War / Expansion Bastion	20 / 40 / 60	Planted on a standalone system. Carries one doctrine and hosts child Divisions.

A Bastion is deliberately just a Division with an archetype wrapper: same buildings, same doctrine system, same siege primitive — plus placement rules, child capacity, and one extra siege stage.

A Bastion main is the system's main building. There is no Division Center on a Bastion system; the Bastion main replaces it. Division Centers are for HQ-blob systems and for a Bastion's child systems.

Connected territory

Your territory is walked as a graph over hex adjacency, from two kinds of root:

The HQ blob — starts at your Headquarters and spreads through neighbouring systems that are not attached to a Bastion.
Each Bastion cluster — starts at the Bastion root and spreads through the child Divisions attached to that Bastion, up to its child capacity.

Systems the walk reaches are connected (the UI calls them effective). Systems it cannot reach are owned but orphaned.

Connected node	Orphaned / stunned node
Feeds alliance-wide territory effects	Feeds nothing
Projects and receives Fortress defence	No projection either way
Can run alliance scans	Cannot scan
Routes alliance warp hops	Not part of the warp network
Keeps buildings, harvest, survey, missions	Keeps buildings, harvest, survey, missions

That last row is the important one: an orphaned system is not dead, it is just no longer contributing. This is what makes cutting a corridor — taking one system in the middle of a chain — a real strategic act rather than a rounding error.

Doctrines

Every Division and Bastion carries exactly one Doctrine. The Headquarters has none.

Doctrine	What it does	Signature building	Alliance-wide effect
Production Hub	Resource extraction hub	Common or Rare Extractor	Resource production
Shipyard Outpost	Faster ship construction	Shipyard Outpost	Ship build-time reduction
Fortress	Defence, and the only doctrine that projects defence to neighbours	Defense Yard	Tonnage capacity
Logistics Center	Hosts an alliance Warp Gate for fleet hops	Warp Gate	— (utility)
Anti-Intel & Sensor	Alliance scanning and counter-scouting	Intelligence Center	— (utility)

The signature building is an activation gate, not a cost multiplier. The doctrine's effect stays at zero until that building exists at level ≥ 1; after that the size of the effect comes from the node's main building level (Division Center or Bastion main). You level one building per system, not two.

You do not need the signature building to pick the doctrine — the doctrine is what unlocks it. The order is always: pick doctrine → build signature building → effect switches on.

Defense Yard is legal on every doctrine. Any node can defend itself; Fortress's identity is projection plus tonnage, not a monopoly on turrets. That also means switching away from Fortress never forces you to demolish a long-invested Defense Yard.

Which doctrines a node may take

Node	Doctrines it may take	Child Divisions	Child doctrines
HQ	none	up to territory cap	all five
HQ-blob Division	all five	—	—
Embassy Bastion	Production Hub, Logistics Center	0	—
War Bastion	Fortress, Shipyard Outpost, Anti-Intel & Sensor	2	Fortress, Shipyard Outpost, Anti-Intel & Sensor
Expansion Bastion	Production Hub, Logistics Center, Anti-Intel & Sensor	5	all five

One consequence worth planning around: Fortress — and therefore tonnage capacity — is only reachable on HQ-blob Divisions, War Bastions, and Expansion children. Embassy and Expansion roots cannot take it.

Setting and switching a doctrine

Doctrine is chosen on the system's main building (Division Center or Bastion main) by a Deputy or Leader. Opening an empty building slot on a node with no doctrine prompts you to choose one first, because the rest of the build list depends on it.

First pick is free. After that:

Switching a doctrine
Cost	The last upgrade cost of that node's main building
Cooldown	72 hours per node
While a siege is open on that system	Blocked
Buildings	Signature buildings that are illegal under the new doctrine are demolished — you confirm first, nothing is wiped silently

Only three buildings are doctrine-exclusive and can be demolished this way: Shipyard Outpost, Intelligence Center, and Warp Gate. Extractors and the Defense Yard are always kept.

The siege block exists for a specific exploit: without it, a defender would flip to Fortress the moment stage 1 opened and flip back afterwards, paying a cost that is trivial next to losing the system.

Note that the first pick also clears illegal exclusive buildings — a legacy system that somehow holds a Warp Gate cannot keep it by choosing Fortress.

Territory effects

Three doctrines pay an alliance-wide bonus. Each uses the same diminishing-returns curve with a hard ceiling:

effective% = cap × L / (L + K)

L = sum of main building levels across your connected, active nodes
    that carry that doctrine AND have its signature building at level ≥ 1

Effect	Doctrine	Ceiling	`K`	Reference budget → value
Tonnage capacity	Fortress	+5%	25	100 levels → 4.00%
Resource production	Production Hub	+10%	50	200 levels → 8.00%
Ship build-time reduction	Shipyard Outpost	−25%	60	250 levels → 20.16%

Invested levels	Tonnage	Production	Ship time
Reference (100 / 200 / 250)	4.00%	8.00%	20.16%
2× reference	4.44%	8.89%	22.32%
4× reference	4.71%	9.41%	23.58%

Why a curve and not a flat rate. Early levels pay better than a linear rate, so a young alliance feels every upgrade; past the reference budget each level is worth progressively less but never zero, so there are no dead levels and no runaway snowball from simply owning more space. The ceiling is the ceiling — alliance research may make the curve climb faster, but it can never raise the cap.

Who gets them:

Effect	Eligibility
Tonnage capacity	Every member of the alliance
Resource production	Members holding ≥ 1 colony inside connected territory
Ship build-time reduction	Members holding ≥ 1 colony inside connected territory

Any colony counts — it does not have to be your capital, and one colony gives the full bonus.

Logistics Center and Anti-Intel & Sensor pay no curve bonus. They are utility doctrines: their value is warp routing and intel, and a node running one contributes nothing to tonnage, production, or ship time.

Fortress projection

Defence built on a Fortress node counts 100% on its own system, and 50% on hex-adjacent systems your alliance owns.

Only one Fortress projects onto any given system — the strongest, not the sum.
"Strongest" is measured in actual defence value held, not building level: a modest Defense Yard sitting on a huge stockpile beats a high-level yard with nothing in it.
The projecting node must be connected, active, and hold a Defense Yard (level ≥ 1).
Projected units are computed live at battle time, so they always reflect current stock.

Projected defence is borrowed, not spent. The projecting colony never loses units from a fight it did not host, and the defending colony can never lose more units than it actually owns. Losses and auto-repair are both capped at the defender's real stock.

Why "strongest" instead of banning adjacent Fortresses. On a hex grid, neighbouring cells of a system are themselves partly adjacent, so the largest set of mutually non-adjacent neighbours is three. A no-adjacent-Fortresses rule would still allow 150% borrowed defence, while adding an annoying restriction inside your own territory. Capping at one Fortress caps it at 50% unconditionally, with no placement rule at all.

Logistics Center & warp gates

The alliance Warp Gate can only be built on a Logistics Center node. Member fleets launching toward a distant target exit through the closest useful gate and fly the short remaining leg, after a warp readiness delay.

Once alliance territory is live, the alliance warp network only includes gates on Logistics Center nodes that are connected and active — an orphaned Logistics node stops routing until it reconnects. Gates built before territory went live keep working normally while the feature is off.

Fleet-hop mechanics (readiness timing, route selection) are covered in Patch Notes 1.3.6.

Anti-Intel & Sensor

The Intelligence Center turns a node into both a scanner and a counter-intelligence bubble.

Scanning (offence). Any active member can trigger an alliance system scan from the node, revealing asteroid fields and pirate strongholds / outposts around it.

Scan	Value
Radius	`ceil(√ main building level)` hexes, capped at 8
Requires	Anti-Intel doctrine · Intelligence Center ≥ 1 · main building ≥ 1 · node connected
Cost	Gas, paid from the alliance vault
Cooldown	10 minutes per node, with a live countdown

The cooldown exists because the scan is billed to a shared vault — without it, one member could drain it. Results and cost mirror the personal Sensor Array scan.

Counter-intel (defence). Enemy scouts aimed at your systems within ceil(level / 2) hexes (capped at 8) of a qualifying Anti-Intel node face that node's main building level added to your side of the intel maths. Practically: higher detection chance for the scout, and shallower reports. The strongest covering node applies.

Bastions

A Bastion is a secondary anchor you plant outside your main blob — the only way to hold territory that does not chain back to your Headquarters.

Archetype	Max instances	Child Divisions	Territory cap granted	Building slots	Footprint
Embassy	5	0	+0	20	1 system
War	3	2	+2	40	3 systems
Expansion	2	5	+5	60	6 systems

Both active and stunned Bastions count toward instance caps — they physically occupy a system. Fully built out, Bastions can hold 26 systems outside your blob.

Every Bastion is always conquerable. There is no safe structure anywhere in this design, deliberately: a permanently protected node feeding alliance bonus ceilings would be the single strongest exploit in the system.

Founding a Bastion

Conquer a standalone system — one that is not hex-adjacent to any system your alliance already controls. If it is adjacent, it is a normal Division and you will be offered a Division Center instead.
Place a Bastion main as its first alliance building (Deputy or Leader). The building you choose is the archetype, and the system locks to that archetype the moment construction starts.
Until that build starts, the system counts as an ordinary Division for territory cap and protector difficulty. Cancelling the level-0 main returns it to a plain Division.

Placement rules, validated once:

Archetype	Placement requirement
Embassy	Hex-adjacent to the territory of an Ally or NAP alliance
War	None beyond standalone + your HQ's galaxy
Expansion	At least 6 hexes from the territory of any alliance you are at war with

All Bastions must sit in the same galaxy as your HQ.

"At war" means an active war state only — not NAP, not neutral, not merely un-allied. And because the check happens once, at construction, borders may drift freely afterwards: a later war declaration never invalidates a standing Bastion, and parking a puppet alliance next to a rival's chosen site only delays when they can start building.

Why the clearance is 6 hexes and not 15–20. Exclusion zones grow with the square of their radius. A 20-hex zone around a compact 40-system alliance spans roughly 1,685 of the galaxy's ~11,250 cells, so about seven well-spread alliances would saturate the entire map and no legal Bastion site would exist anywhere, ever. At 15 hexes it breaks around eleven alliances. Six hexes preserves the "don't plant a fort in someone's face" intent while degrading gracefully as the galaxy fills.

Child Divisions

War and Expansion Bastions host child Divisions, which are ordinary Divisions with their own doctrine.

A child must be hex-adjacent to the Bastion root or to another Division already attached to that same Bastion, and the cluster must have a free slot.
A Division Center completed next to one of your Bastions attaches automatically when the cluster has room; a Deputy can also attach an unparented Division manually.
Attachment is per-cluster: a system cannot serve two Bastions, and joining one consumes one of that archetype's child slots.

Embassy Bastions have no child capacity — they are single-system diplomatic footholds.

Embassy stun: when a treaty ends

An Embassy is placed on the strength of a treaty, so it is the one node whose founding condition can be pulled out from under it. If a NAP or Alliance ends — broken, or replaced by war — every Embassy of yours adjacent to that former partner's territory is stunned.

While stunned (48 hours)
Contributes to territory effects	No
Projects Fortress defence · scans · routes warp	No
Counts toward controlled systems and the Embassy cap	Yes
Can be attacked	Yes

Before the timer expires a Deputy or Leader must convert it to a War Bastion. Conversion:

requires a free War Bastion slot (max 3) — if you are at the cap, you must abandon a War Bastion first, inside the 48h;
always requires choosing a new doctrine, because Embassy doctrines (Production Hub / Logistics Center) are never legal on a War Bastion;
charges the standard doctrine-switch cost and demolishes buildings illegal under the new doctrine (with confirmation);
ignores the 72h doctrine cooldown — this is a forced decision, not a strategic flip;
replaces the Embassy main with a War Bastion main at the same level.

If it is not converted in time, the system is lost — it reverts to neutral. You are mailed on the treaty break, again at the halfway point, and again shortly before expiry, because a silent destructive deadline reads as a bug.

A stunned Embassy captured by another alliance arrives clean and active: the stun was a consequence of the previous owner's diplomacy and does not bind the new one.

Abandoning a Bastion

Bastion mains cannot be demolished, so abandon is the release valve that keeps an alliance at archetype cap from being stuck forever. A Deputy or Leader can abandon a Bastion, freeing that archetype slot immediately.

It releases the entire cluster. The root and every attached child revert to neutral.
Blocked while any siege is open anywhere in the cluster, so a Bastion about to fall cannot be abandoned to deny the attacker their prize.
168h cooldown per archetype, so Bastions cannot be hot-swapped around the map.
Requires an explicit typed confirmation — it is irreversible.

Releasing the children too is not a punishment, it is arithmetic: abandoning a root also removes its territory-cap grant (up to −5), so keeping the children would immediately push you over your own cap. It also keeps the action honest — abandoning is a genuine loss, not a trick for shedding a root while keeping the ground.

Abandon is load-bearing in two places: freeing a slot to capture another root of that type, and making room for a forced Embassy conversion.

Caps & capacity

max controlled systems = base (1)
                       + 4 × Territorial Expansion research level
                       + Σ (each Bastion's cap grant)

Each archetype grants exactly the child capacity it provides (Embassy +0 · War +2 · Expansion +5), so a Bastion is capacity-neutral for your main blob — it pays for its own children and nothing more.

Archetype caps are enforced when a siege starts, not when it finishes. If you already hold 3 War Bastions you cannot Contest a fourth. Gating at the start is deliberate: nobody should discover the block after completing a three-stage siege. It only blocks the root — you can still besiege and take a capped cluster's child Divisions, which are ordinary Divisions consuming ordinary territory cap.

Capturing a cluster costs exactly one net slot. Because the cap grant matches child capacity, taking an Expansion cluster gains 6 systems and +5 cap; a War cluster gains 3 and +2; an Embassy gains 1 and +0. Every cluster capture nets +1, the same as taking a lone Division — a depleted cluster is even cheaper.

One thing to plan for: system protectors scale with how many systems you already control, so a wide alliance faces meaningfully tougher NPC garrisons on its next conquest than a small one does.

Sieges against territory

Territory shape changes what a siege costs an attacker:

Target	Stages	Scheduled waits	Prize
Neutral system · Division · Bastion child	2	1	That one system
Bastion root	3	2	The whole cluster

Capturing a root transfers the root and every attached child together, keeping archetype, doctrines, parent links, and buildings (minus the capture penalty). Capturing a child alone yields one unattached Division that may not even connect to anything you own — a clean risk/reward gradient between a long root siege and a quick child raid.

Open sieges elsewhere in the cluster are cancelled when the root changes hands or the cluster is abandoned.

Full siege rules — stage scheduling, the defence window, debris and Graveyard rates, the building penalty — are on the Territory Siege page.

Bosses in owned space

Pirate boss loot is modified by who owns the system the boss sits in:

Boss location	Group loot modifier
System owned by a hostile alliance (raid)	+10%
System owned by your own alliance (home)	+5%
Neutral space, or an Ally / NAP holder	none

The modifier applies to the whole shared boss pool, so it is resolved from the alliance most participants belong to — arrival order and an unallied mercenary tagging along cannot change anyone's payout. See Pirate Bosses for how the pool itself is shared.

Where to see all of this

Surface	What it shows
Alliance → Territories tab	Every node as HQ / Bastion / Division, cluster nesting, connection flags, capacity, and your live territory effects
Galaxy map	Doctrine tint on your own systems, alliance borders, siege borders
System main building modal	Current doctrine, switch action and cooldown, doctrine guide
Tonnage summary	The Fortress contribution to your empire tonnage capacity
Resource overlay	The Production Hub contribution to a colony's output
Alliance → Admin → Settings	Defence window start hour (Deputy+)

Quick reference

Thing	Value
Doctrines per node	1 (HQ has none)
First doctrine pick	Free
Doctrine switch cost	Last upgrade cost of the node's main building
Doctrine switch cooldown	72h per node · blocked during a siege on that system
Who sets doctrine / founds or abandons Bastions	Deputy or Leader
Tonnage (Fortress)	+5% ceiling, K 25 — all members
Resource production (Production Hub)	+10% ceiling, K 50 — needs a colony in connected territory
Ship build time (Shipyard Outpost)	−25% ceiling, K 60 — needs a colony in connected territory
Fortress projection	50% of the strongest adjacent Fortress's defence value
Bastion instances	Embassy 5 · War 3 · Expansion 2
Bastion children	Embassy 0 · War 2 · Expansion 5
Bastion cap grant	Embassy +0 · War +2 · Expansion +5
Bastion slots	Embassy 20 · War 40 · Expansion 60
Expansion clearance	6 hexes from at-war territory
Embassy placement	Hex-adjacent to Ally / NAP territory
Embassy stun	48h to convert to a War Bastion, or the system is lost
Abandon cooldown	168h per archetype · releases the whole cluster
Territory cap	1 + 4 per Territorial Expansion level + Bastion grants
Max Bastion footprint outside the blob	26 systems
Alliance scan	radius `ceil(√level)` capped 8 · vault-paid · 10 min cooldown
Counter-intel radius	`ceil(level / 2)` capped 8
Boss loot	+10% hostile-owned · +5% own · none neutral/friendly
Feature flags	`allianceTerritory` (territory, doctrines, Bastions) · `systemSiege` (staged sieges)

Alliances — vault, research, buildings, diplomacy, harvest
Territory Siege — staged conquest, defence windows, capture penalties
Pirate Bosses — coordinated boss raids and loot sharing
Player Classes — class bonuses on harvest, survey, and FCS
In-game: Settings → Quick Guides → Alliance Territorial Control

Alliance Territory