Community

SFC2 is not a solo game. Most of what happens in a universe happens because players talked to each other first: a trade, a defend, a warning that someone is inbound. The game gives you three tools for that. Messages is your mail. Alliances put you in a group with a shared tag, forum and chat. Buddies is a friend list for people you work with outside an alliance.

Messages

Messages is the in-game mail system. It holds mail from other players and every report the game sends you: battle reports, spy reports, mission results, transport and deploy notices, and alliance circulars. Your buddy list lives on the same page.

The left panel has three folders. Inbox is everything sent to you, and the number on it is how many you have not read. Sent is mail you sent to other players. Trash holds anything you trashed, which is not thrown away straight away.

The row of filters across the top of the list does not move anything, it just narrows what you are looking at:

• All: everything in the folder.
• User: mail from other players.
• Alliance: circulars from your alliance.
• Battle: battle and attack return reports.
• Espionage: spy reports and probe warnings.
• General: everything else the game sends, like transports, deploys and colonization.

Click a subject to open the message in place. The rows below it stay where they are. From an open message you can reply, trash it, or add the sender as a buddy if they are not one already. Tick the boxes down the left to Trash, Mark as Read or Mark as Unread in bulk.

New Message opens the composer. Start typing a name and it searches players for you. You can only message players in the same universe you are playing in.

Circular sends one message to every member of your alliance at once. The button only shows if your rank has the Send Circulars permission. The leader always has it.

Mail does not pile up forever. Anything older than seven days is cleared out of your mailbox overnight, read or not, in every folder. If a report matters to you, copy what you need out of it before the week is up. Notes is a good place to put it.

If you would rather not get player mail at all, Settings has a Direct Messages switch in the Forum section. Turning it off stops direct messages, replies and attack formation invites. Game reports and alliance circulars still arrive.

Alliances

An alliance is a group of players flying under one tag. It is capped at 25 members. Everything to do with alliances sits behind the Alliances link in the top nav. If you are not in one, that link opens the browser. Once you join, the same link drops you straight into your alliance forum and the left panel takes you everywhere else.

What you get out of one

• A tag next to your name in the galaxy view and on the Leaders boards.
• A private forum and a live chat window that only members can see.
• Group Defend and Group Attack with your alliance mates without having to be buddies first.
• Alliance Points from the weekly Incursion, spent in the Alliance Store on perks that apply to every member.
• The ability to declare war on another alliance.
• People who will probably help you when things go badly.

Creating one

Alliances, then Create. You pick a tag and a name.

• The tag is 1 to 8 characters, letters and numbers only. This is what other players see next to your name.
• The name is 2 to 40 characters and can take spaces and basic punctuation.

Both have to be free in your universe. You cannot create an alliance while you have an application pending somewhere else, so cancel that first. You start as the leader, and the alliance comes with three ranks already made: Leader, Officer and Member.

Joining one

Alliances, then Join. The list shows every alliance in your universe with its tag, name, member count and leader, and the box at the top filters by tag or name. Click the name to open that alliance's page, which shows its description, when it was founded and its war record.

Hit Join on a row to apply. You can attach a short message with the application. If the row says CLOSED instead of Join, that alliance has turned enrollment off and is only taking people by invite.

You can only have one application open at a time. Cancel the one you have before applying anywhere else. An officer or the leader approves or rejects it, and when you are let in you land on the lowest rank in the alliance.

Alliances can also come to you. If one invites you, an Invites entry appears in the left panel with a badge on it. And in the galaxy view, the tag next to a player's planet is a link to that alliance's page, which is the quickest way to look one up.

Members

The Members list shows everyone in the alliance with their overall Leaders rank, their alliance rank, their home coordinates and any status letters. The letters mean the same thing they do in the galaxy view, so (n) is newbie protection, (v) is vacation mode, (i) is inactive and so on. The count in the top right corner is how full the alliance is.

The leader gets Change Rank, Set Leader and Remove on every row. Officers, meaning anyone whose rank has Approve Members, only get Remove, and only on members they outrank.

Ranks and permissions

Rank numbers run from 1 to 10 and lower is better. Rank 1 is the leader. It cannot be deleted and it cannot be handed out from this screen. Everything from 2 to 10 is yours: Create Rank asks for a number, a title of up to 30 characters, and which permissions the rank carries.

There are five permissions:

• Approve Members: approve and reject applications, invite players, and remove members of a lower rank.
• Moderate Forum: pin, lock and delete topics and posts in the alliance forum.
• Officer Topics: read and post in officer only threads.
• Send Circulars: send one message to the whole alliance at once.
• Spend Alliance Points: buy perks in the Alliance Store.

The leader has all five whether the boxes are ticked or not, and the leader is the only one who can change anybody's rank.

The alliance forum

Every alliance gets its own forum, kept apart from the public one. The Public and Alliance buttons in the top right switch between the two. Topics stay up until somebody removes them.

Anyone with Moderate Forum can pin a topic to the top of the list, lock it so nobody can reply, or delete it. A topic marked Officer is invisible to members whose rank does not have Officer Topics, which is where most alliances keep target lists and war planning.

Alliance chat

Chat is the tab in the bottom right corner, and it follows you onto every page in the game. Click it and the panel opens over whatever you were doing. It shows the recent messages, a member list with a green dot against whoever is online, and a box to type in with a 500 character limit per line.

Coordinates you type get turned into links, so anyone can jump to [1:2:5] with one click. Typing @ and a name makes a pill that lights up the chat tab for that player so they notice it. The arrow button in the top right pops the panel out into its own window, which is handy if you want chat up on a second screen while you play.

Chat is for the moment. It is not a record. Anything that needs to survive the week belongs in a forum topic.

Incursions and the Alliance Store

A new Incursion spawns every Monday at 00:00 UTC in a sector only your alliance can see. Any member can hit any target in it, and a group attack counts once for everyone in the group. When the week rolls over the alliance is paid in Alliance Points for how many targets it cleared and how many members took part.

Points go into the alliance bank and are spent in the Store. They are permanent and they apply to every member, not just whoever bought them:

• Research Relay: research finishes faster, up to double speed at the top level.
• Lunar Dockyard: buildings on moons finish faster, up to double speed at the top level.
• Repair Dock: when a member is attacked at their own planet, some of their destroyed ships turn up in a repair dock and can be claimed back for seven days. Up to 70 percent at the top level.
• Gate Phase Sync: warp gates stay usable while they are upgrading.
• Gate Cargo Manifest: fleets can carry resources through a warp gate.
• Siege Missile Codes: missile strikes can lock onto Trivial and Easy NPC targets.

Buying anything takes the Spend Alliance Points permission, so most alliances keep that on one or two ranks and argue it out on the forum first.

War

Only leaders start wars. Declare War sits on the other alliance's page, and it asks for a points goal and an optional deadline. The other leader has to accept it before anything happens. Once a war is live it is tracked in the War Room, wartime attacks plunder more, and destroyed ships count double toward the goal. The full rules are on the War page.

One thing worth knowing before you sign up to one: you cannot leave your alliance while it is in an active war.

Settings, leaving and disbanding

Settings shows the tag, name, member count, your own role and the founding date. The leader can rewrite the description, which is what applicants see, up to 500 characters. The leader can also open or close enrollment and pick the accent color the alliance forum uses.

Leave Alliance takes you out. If you are the leader, the alliance picks a successor on its own: the longest standing active officer, then the longest standing active member. Players on vacation are skipped. If the last member leaves, the alliance is deleted.

Set Leader hands the alliance over to someone else. It swaps the two ranks, so you drop into whatever rank they were on, not into the rank below. There is no way to take it back once it is done.

Disband Alliance deletes the alliance outright. Only the leader can do it.

Buddies

Buddies is the friend list. It sits on the Messages page, in the panel underneath Folders.

It works both ways. You send a request, they accept it, and you both end up on each other's list. Search finds players in your universe by name, and there is an add buddy icon next to player names in a few other places too, including the galaxy view, an open message and the alliance member list. You can send 20 requests a day.

The tabs are Buddies for your list, Received and Sent for pending requests, Search, and Blocked.

What buddies actually do:

• Group Defend and Group Attack with them without being in the same alliance.
• Message them in one click from the list.
• Their overall Leaders rank shows next to their name, and the Leaders boards can be filtered down to just your buddies.

That is the whole list. There is no combat bonus, no shared resources and no extra vision. Being buddies with someone does not stop either of you attacking the other.

Block takes someone off your list, cancels any pending requests in both directions and stops them sending you another one. The Blocked tab shows who you have blocked and lets you undo it. Blocking someone on the public forum is a separate thing and lives in Settings.