ALLIANCES
The war chest
The war chest is the alliance's shared bank: Scrap, Fuel, Rations, $ato and Hollow Cores. It has two sources and three uses.
Where it fills from
Faction tax. Every haul banked inside a faction's borders is taxed by the alliance that leads that faction's city, and the tax lands in that alliance's war chest. Leading a city is not a popularity contest: the leader of a faction's city is the most recent alliance of that faction to have taken the Citadel Throne. So the current king leads the Citadel and their own faction's city, and the other three cities keep their last champion until somebody takes the Throne from them.
The marketplace fee. The alliance holding the Market Square district takes 25% of the fee on eligible marketplace trades, or 50% if the same alliance also holds the Throne. That share is paid out of the fee the trader already paid. Nothing is printed. See the marketplace.
Setting the tax
The Leader and Vice Leaders of the owning alliance set the rates.
| Lever | Range |
|---|---|
| Resource tax on hauls banked in your faction's quadrant | up to 30% |
| Tech core tax | off, or 20% |
| Throne holder's skim of the other factions' resource tax | up to 30% |
| Throne holder's skim of the other factions' tech core tax | off, or 50% |
The Throne holder never skims their own faction, because they already collect it. An area with no owning alliance is not taxed at all.
Players can see exactly what they paid: the tax comes off the haul at banking time and the haul screen shows it.
The three ways it is spent
The objective ladder. Every chest tier that unlocks moves a slice of the current balance into that chest's pool, and members take their contribution share. Unclaimed pools go back. See objectives and chests.
The war subsidy. An Officer or above arms a percentage (0 / 25 / 50 / 100 percent). From then on, every siege deploy a member pays, an attack march or a garrison, is reimbursed at that percentage out of the chest, in the same moment the deploy is charged. It is bounded per resource by what the chest actually holds, so a chest short on Fuel still covers the Scrap, and it is never a loan: every unit reimbursed is a unit that left the bank.
A distribution. A Vice Leader or the Leader can send Scrap, Fuel, Rations or $ato straight out of the chest, either to one named member or to everyone, with an optional filter that restricts a group send to members who have been online recently. The amount is per recipient and the whole send is checked against the balance before anything moves, so a bulk send can never half-drain the chest. Officers can receive a group send but cannot start one: chest control stays with the Leader and the Vice Leaders.