Territory is going to be extremely important in late game play. It provides very powerful services that give your ships a lot of bonuses, and it provides Iso Emulsion for some of the most powerful research in the game (check out the territory tree in your research tab).
Once a week, every territory has a territory takeover. This is at a set time for each territory. To find this out, click on the territory, then click on the green flag icon.
To join a territory takeover costs depends on the number of diamonds a territory has. You can only join a takeover for a territory adjecent to one of your own AND connected by a warp path (the blue lines) AND one that has no more than one more diamond than one you already have. So if you have no territory, you can only take a one diamond territory. You must control a two diamond territory to take over a three diamond one.
| Territory | Iso Cost* | Cores Cost* |
|---|---|---|
| One Diamond | 450,000 Iso 1 | |
| Two Diamond | 500,000 Iso 2 | 50,000 |
| Three Diamond | 700,000 Iso 3 | 100,000 |
If you already control the territory, your alliance automatically joins the takeover. Once you've joined, the fight begins.
To win a territory, you need to score more points than any other alliance which has joined that takeover, so it may not be a one on one fight. Points are scored by having ships in that territory. For every whole minute that your ship is in the system, you gain 1 point. This means if your ship dies before a minute is over, it gains no points.
The second way to score points is by occupying capture nodes. This will earn you an extra 3 points per minute for a total of four. Again, it must sit there a full minute to gain these points.
The last third of the takeover, all points are tripled. So whoever is controlling the territory at that point should be gaining a lot of points, sealing a win.
Normally it's pretty straightforward, when you lose territory, you lose it. But what happens when you lose a territory that is connecting your other territories? Since all your territory must be connected, there are consequences.
So here Beku connects Brijac and Bimasa. If BRIT were to lose this territory, then the rest of BRIT's territory is no longer connected. If you no longer have connected territories, you should longer be able to activate services in any territory. In addition, you can only join a takeover that reconnects your territories.
So if you lose one you don't think you can take back, you'd have to choose to drop some other territories potentially to be able to use the territories you have.
The goal of a territory takeover is to keep your ships alive for as long as possible. If its a first territory takeover, you probably are a newer alliance with fewer strong ships, so in this case speed is to your advantage. Taking small, fast ships like Realta or Kehra will allow you to stay ahead of bigger ships chasing you, staying alive for as long as possible. In addition, when they do die they require no resources and few to no speedups to repair, so you can get them back out there again quickly. Any of your stronger ships should be crewed properly for PVP and should be used to take out enemy combatants and to hold the capture nodes, with a strong emphasis on the nodes as they are worth so much more.
Ships that are in the territory score one point every minute -- this doesn't mean they need to be there the full minute, but just need to be alive during the changeover from one minute to the next (i.e. from 4:00-4:01), which means as long as your ships are still alive and in system at this point, they score. This means that when you're constantly sending ships in, even if they're only alive for a few seconds, they can still score points. So if you are competing against an alliance that severely over-powers you, you can still score by spamming in ships.
Cloaking is also quite useful, as it can score points with ships that you don't have to pay attention to. The Amalgam cloak is relatively easy to get (it's in the Amalgam refinery) and lasts for over 20 minutes, depending on research. This means you can send a cloaked Amalgam into the system and be able to score points that can't be stopped till the cloak runs out. As you get to higher levels, the g3 epic cloaks tend to be relativey cheap and since you've been opening a lot of epic chests, there is a good chance that you have a lot of blueprints for them as well, and you can buy their cloaks for faction credits. You can fill some more spots with safe ships in a defense with cloaked g3s as well.
