Factions, Crown, and Sovereignty

Factions are first-class political entities

Players may remain independent, but the strategic unit of the game is the faction.

• A faction has a treasury address.
• Players may join or leave factions subject to cooldown and anti-exploit constraints.
• Faction treasuries may redistribute value to members however they like using wrapper contracts or standard stream splitters.
• Tile control, frontier access, and crown victory are evaluated at the faction level, not the individual-wallet level.

Independent players are effectively single-player factions unless they later align with a larger bloc.

Earth and compliance

The Offworld Compliance Agency is Earth's faction in the Sphere.

It is a normal faction with an unusually annoying theory of law: it threatens players with notices, warrants, bounties, and administrative seizure, but it has no protocol-level enforcement privilege. OCA enforcement still requires ordinary game actions: acquisition claims, raids, armies, treasury spending, mercenary contracts, or voluntary faction membership.

Joining the OCA creates a constrained compliant-operator play style. A registered player may gain protection, access to enforcement bounties, and alignment with Earth's treasury, but accepts faction dues, disclosure requirements, permit procedures, call-up rights, and other opt-in constraints enforced through faction contracts, delegation, and UI policy.

See Offworld Compliance Agency for the full Earth faction design.

The crown condition

The map has a temporary winning state.

Let R be the current maximum occupied hex distance from the center tile.

The crown tiles are the six frontier corners on ring R:

• (R, 0)
• (R, -R)
• (0, -R)
• (-R, 0)
• (-R, R)
• (0, R)

A faction enters the winning state iff it simultaneously controls all six crown tiles.

Crown stream

While a faction holds the full crown set, the protocol opens a single CFA victory stream to the faction treasury.

• The stream is faction-level, not player-level.
• The base protocol does not dictate how the faction redistributes that inflow.
• Factions can retain it in treasury, stream it to officers, split it across members, or route it to war budgets.

This creates a real winner/loser state without forcing every individual player payout rule into the core protocol.

Crown break condition

The crown is temporary by design.

If any new tile is placed at distance R + 1, the current crown immediately breaks:

• the existing crown stream stops
• the frontier radius updates to R + 1
• the six crown coordinates are recomputed on the new outer ring

The break condition is tied to placement, not mining.

Placement and logistics

Factions shape the frontier.

A new tile deed may only be placed if its coordinate is:

• adjacent to a tile controlled by the placer's faction, or
• adjacent to a void tile

Void tiles are reserved empty seams:

• never buildable
• never traversable
• intended to stay empty in the live ruleset

For now the registry owner can still add or clear reserved void seams while the frontier ruleset is being scaffolded.

They create neutral fracture lines and logistics corridors that prevent the dominant faction from fully locking the frontier.

Which tiles must a faction control?

For any current frontier radius R, the faction must hold these six crown coordinates at the same time:

• (R, 0)
• (R, -R)
• (0, -R)
• (-R, 0)
• (-R, R)
• (0, R)

R is the global maximum hex distance from origin of any placed tile. It is not the largest complete ring and it is not faction-specific. One newly placed far-out tile can move the active crown for everyone.

Example when R = 3 on an irregular, partially filled map:

The highlighted orange hexes are the only tiles that matter for crown control in that example. A faction does not need to own every tile on the outer ring, and the map does not need to be a perfect filled radius-R hex. It only needs those six axial corner positions simultaneously.

Important edge cases:

• Gaps do not change the formula. Empty, unplaced, or void coordinates elsewhere on the map do not move the crown tiles.
• Other frontier tiles do not count. A tile can be on the radius-R outer ring and still not be one of the six crown coordinates.
• Unplaced crown coordinates block the crown. If one of the six target coordinates does not have a placed tile, no faction controls the complete crown yet.
• A single far-out placement can invalidate an existing crown. If the active radius is 3 and any player places a tile at (-4, 4), that coordinate has hex distance 4, so R becomes 4. The old radius-3 crown stops being valid immediately, even if one faction still controls all six radius-3 corners.
• The active crown is always on the current outermost occupied distance. After (-4, 4) is placed, the six active objective coordinates become (4,0), (4,-4), (0,-4), (-4,0), (-4,4), and (0,4). If only (-4,4) exists among those six, nobody controls the crown yet.
• Radius changes recompute the objective globally. The recompute applies to every faction at once; there is no separate faction crown radius.
• Radius 0 is degenerate. At bootstrap, all six crown coordinates collapse to (0, 0). Downstream crown-counting logic must special-case this so it does not count the origin six times.

Reasoning trace

• Crown control is geometric, not “largest balance wins,” so the map itself becomes the win condition.
• The crown must be maintainable but fragile. Six corners are hard to take, but easier to monitor than a whole perimeter.
• The stream pays the faction treasury rather than individual members because alliances should compound strategically, not just socially.
• Crown breakage is tied to placement because placement changes geometry; mining does not.
• Void-adjacent placement exists to prevent frontier freeze and incumbent veto lock.