War Presets
Warring Nations ships ten war presets, each a file-defined ruleset running on the same composable war engine. This page is the full mechanical reference for all ten: how each one scores, how it's won, and every formula and config number that governs it.
Declaration, scoring, and peace basics
These rules apply across every war preset before getting into what makes each one distinct.
Every war preset is a JSON file loaded from config/warringnations/war_types/, reloadable live with /war reload and listed with /war presets. A specific type is declared with /war declare-as <warTypeId> <nation> (see the full command tree on Commands: Core). An admin can retune or add an entirely new war preset without touching Java.
Declaration can weigh nation size, membership, alliances, non-aggression pacts, existing wars, minimum claims, treasury costs, PvP preferences, and an optional member vote. war.declarationCooldownTicks defaults to 2400 (2 minutes) between declaration and war start; war.endCooldownTicks defaults to 144000 (2 hours) before a war times out.
Opt-in per nation. A live vote needs war.warVoteQuorumPercent (default 50%) of members voting, then war.warVoteApprovalPercent (default 50%) of cast votes as yes, before war.warVoteTimeoutTicks (default 6000, 5 minutes) expires and it's tallied as-is.
war.minMembersToDeclarWar defaults to 1, war.minClaimsToDeclareWar defaults to 0, and war.maxConcurrentWarsPerNation caps a nation at 3 active wars. war.warSizeParityMinRatio (default 0.0, off) can block a declaration when the declarer badly outnumbers the target.
war.requireWarApproval is on by default, so staff review declarations before the countdown starts. war.offlineRaidProtectionTicks (default 0, off) is a grace window during which a nation with nobody online anywhere is immune to every war engine's capture progress.
Leaderboard power, shown by /nation top, combines claims, level, wars won, and tier. Full formula on Nations and Roles.
Peace and leverage. Score-driven demands (territory cession, reparations, a demilitarized zone, tribute, vassalage) all draw against a leverage budget, and an offer can never spend more than is available; White peace is always free, in any war preset. Full formula and every demand's weight on Peace and Diplomacy.
On a decisive win, economy.treasurySeizurePercent (default 0, off) can additionally seize a percentage of the loser's treasury, and economy.warWinXp (default 100) is awarded to the winner. Optional server switches that touch any war preset include raidCurfew.raidCurfewEnabled (default off, a daily window from raidCurfewStart 22:00 to raidCurfewEnd 06:00 that blocks /war declare, declare-as, and reinforce) and territory.protectHomeClaimFromCapture (default off, excludes a nation's home claim from Chunk Capture, Conquest, and Objectives capture -- explicitly not Breach, whose keep is the entire point of that preset).
Chunk Capture
A war of attrition fought chunk by chunk along a moving frontline.
Stand in enemy-claimed chunks to flip them to your side. The more attackers versus defenders present in a chunk, the faster it flips; the closer that chunk is to your own supply lines, the easier it is to hold. Captures are influenced by tier and support, so isolated territory far from your own claims becomes vulnerable.
Chunk Capture is one of the three war presets that use the shared war.warScoreToWin threshold (default 100, range 1-10000). The legacy war.captureTicksBase key (default 200 ticks) is currently inert: every war preset, Chunk Capture included, now reads its own capture-speed value from its own war-preset preset file instead. territory.protectHomeClaimFromCapture can exclude a nation's home claim from being captured this way.
Attrition
Kills win it, not territory; a broken army can collapse outright.
Attrition scores without moving any borders. Casualties reduce manpower, and prolonged losses can cause an army to collapse rather than simply lose ground.
Attrition also uses the shared war.warScoreToWin threshold (default 100). The legacy war.attritionPointsPerTick (default 1) and war.attritionScoreIntervalTicks (default 20 ticks) keys, which used to award war-score points per enemy-owned chunk a side held presence in per scoring interval, are currently inert; Attrition now runs on its own formula-driven scoring inside the composable war engine.
Breach
Siege rings collapse toward a keep; the defender fights to hold it.
A defending nation's home base is a set of concentric rings around its keep. The attacker has to break the outer ring before the next ring in is even contestable. Progress on the ring currently being broken leaks back toward a floor if the attacker retreats -- it doesn't reset to zero, but it isn't locked in either -- and even a ring that's fully fallen can be relieved back into contention if the defender retakes and holds it long enough. Break every ring and hold the keep long enough, and the war is won outright.
Breach does not use the shared war.warScoreToWin threshold; it wins on the ring-and-keep mechanic above. The legacy war.siegeHoldTicks key (default 12000 ticks, how long an attacker must hold the defender's home to win) is currently inert: Breach reads its own keepHoldTicks formula from its own war-preset preset file instead. Breach is also the one exception to territory.protectHomeClaimFromCapture: that setting never shields a keep, since holding it is the entire point of this war preset.
Objectives
Capture points, KOTH locations, destructible objectives, and payloads decide the war.
A handful of marked points -- capture points, a king-of-the-hill point, a pushable payload, a destructible target -- each score points as they're held, pushed forward, or finished off. A destructible target pays its bonus only once it is fully destroyed, not while merely being damaged. First side to the score threshold wins. Unlike Chunk Capture, a nation doesn't need to hold everything on the map, just score faster than the enemy.
Objectives is the third war preset sharing the war.warScoreToWin threshold (default 100). territory.protectHomeClaimFromCapture also applies here, excluding a nation's home claim from capture.
Negotiated
Presence becomes leverage at the peace table, not a land grab.
War score becomes leverage for a negotiated settlement instead of directly deciding territory. This is where the peace/leverage formula in the basics section above is fully expressed: dominance converts to a spending budget for cession, reparations, a DMZ, tribute, or vassalage.
negotiated.leverageNormalizer (default 40) is the score-margin denominator for dominance: a margin below this reads as a skirmish, not domination. negotiated.maxLeverageBudget (default 100) is the budget a side has at full (1.0) war-score dominance, and negotiated.leverageSlack (default 1.15) lets an offer over-ask by that multiplier before it's rejected as unaffordable.
negotiated.cessionWeight (default 3.0) and negotiated.dmzWeight (default 1.5) cost budget per percentage point demanded; negotiated.reparationWeight (default 0.6) costs budget per percentage point of treasury demanded as reparations. negotiated.tributeWeight (default 25.0) and negotiated.vassalageWeight (default 60.0) are flat costs to attach recurring tribute or force vassalage. Forcing vassalage additionally requires negotiated.vassalageDominanceFloor (default 0.75) minimum dominance on top of its budget cost.
Once imposed, tribute is charged every negotiated.tributeIntervalTicks (default 24000) and lasts negotiated.tributeDurationTicks (default 168000); vassalage lasts negotiated.vassalageDurationTicks (default 168000); a DMZ lasts negotiated.dmzDurationTicks (default 72000). Issuing an ultimatum needs negotiated.ultimatumThreshold (default 0.6) minimum self-dominance, and the responder has negotiated.ultimatumGraceTicks (default 2400) to accept before it auto-resolves. A plain peace offer with no ultimatum stands for negotiated.peaceNegotiationTicks (default 6000) before the war auto-resolves it; below negotiated.autoResolveDominanceThreshold (default 0.5) absolute dominance, auto-resolution defaults to white peace instead of imposed terms. A mediator's proposed terms may exceed either side's own entitlement by up to negotiated.mediationOverreach (default 1.30).
Conquest
Spend manpower to take land; can vassalize the loser.
Manpower takes territory directly, costed against the defender's tier. A decisive Conquest victory can optionally impose vassalage on the loser.
The legacy combat.conquestScoreBase key (default 20) described the original formula: the attacker's win threshold equals this value times the defender's tier weight, and points per capture equal the attacker's own tier weight. That key is currently inert -- Conquest now runs entirely through the composable war-preset-file system, reading its own scoreLimit and tier formulas straight from its war_types/conquest.json preset. territory.protectHomeClaimFromCapture also excludes a nation's home claim from Conquest capture.
Risk
Fast, blitz-paced world-map conquest.
Blitz-paced fighting over any claimed chunk on the map at once, rather than a slower push along one frontline. Territory changes hands live as the fighting moves, and the first side to reach the score threshold wins.
Modern Warfare
A grinding, economically ruinous long war.
Kill-based scoring where every casualty drains treasury as well as war score, making a long Modern Warfare war economically ruinous for both sides rather than just costly in lives. Front-line kills and home-defense kills weigh differently in the scoring.
Trench Warfare
WWI-style fortified lines that grind back and forth.
Combines capture points, a king-of-the-hill site, and a destructible objective, each worth different points, so no single target dominates scoring. Captures cost treasury as the line grinds back and forth, giving Trench Warfare the same economic drag as a real war of attrition rather than a purely territorial one.
Total War
A grand-campaign siege that sacks the loser's treasury.
A larger-scale escalation of the Breach mechanic: the attacker breaches the defender's siege rings, with more rings to break through at higher tiers, then has to hold the keep. A successful breach additionally pays reparations out of the defender's treasury, so Total War sacks the loser financially on top of the territorial loss.