When players get together into friend groups, they often form a Guild in order to share common goals. The guild structure lets them communicate and share resources more easily, and in many games, it also lets them share a guild hall and guild logo.
GUILD TYPES IN STARS REACH
Our plan is to support several types of player organizations. Regular guilds are the sort you are used to from other games, and we see the function of these as primarily social. Because of this, we let you join more than one!
We are also planning on having two more guild types: armies and companies. You can only belong to one of each of these new types of guilds. Both require exclusive membership in order to minimize obvious cheats and keep things fair.
Armies can declare war on one another and companies compete economically instead, and have some special functions related to that.
Lastly, players can also form governments, which are sort of like guilds, but they are based on where you declare your citizenship.
In Stars Reach, we don’t really have the concept of a “guild hall”, but guilds will often organize to govern an entire planet. They can create a visual identity for themselves (via clothing, armor, and/or spacesuits) and they can also visually brand their spacecraft and equipment.
In many games, there is also the concept of a megaguild, which may have hundreds or even thousands of members. It is extremely likely that these organizations will be present within Stars Reach also.
ALLIANCES AND BENEFITS
But megaguilds are not to everyone’s taste. That’s where Guild Alliances come into play.
Let’s say you’re a small- or medium-sized guild running a single planet (or even a couple of planets), but your guild wants to start a trade collective beyond your current reach or a self-defense force to protect your solar system, something that would normally require the coordination and resources of a much larger guild (like a megaguild). With Alliances, you can reach out to other guilds and formalize friendships and bonds between your groups, becoming recognized publicly to any outside forces that your guilds cooperate with, while still retaining their own individual identities.
The Alliances structure provides you channels to formally contact other guilds, start conversations and agree on Alliance identities. This gives your trade discussions more weight, allows you to set up mutual pacts of your choosing, and eventually, when PvP is prevalent in more solar systems, even create military agreements.
It also lets you unify those different organization types into one larger entity: a player organization might have a social guild at its heart, but also include an army and/or a company.
Direct benefits to Alliances include:
An alliance-specific chat channel
Alliance tagging on your character’s nameplate so it’s visible to others (when you so desire)
Alliance logo and colors that can be branded on any guild’s equipment, uniforms, spacesuits, or starships. Even settlement buildings can bear their signature logos.
An alliance roster so that alliance members can be contacted by any other alliance member.
An alliance-specific newsnet channel.
Alliance-specific mission boards, banking functions, and more.
Thus, you can participate in most of the recruiting power and political might of a megaguild while still retaining the cozy friendship of a small core of players, as long as you can balance the personalities and relationships between the guild leaders and keep your Alliance together…which is a game unto itself.