Chain Bonuses & Chain-Breaking

Guide · chain mechanics & war-day chain management

What a chain actually is

A chain is a running counter of successful, back-to-back attacks — yours and, in a faction context, everyone fighting alongside you. Every time any member lands a hit that would count (a successful attack, not a loss), the shared counter climbs by one and a countdown timer resets. Let the timer run out without another hit landing anywhere in the chain, and the whole thing snaps back to zero — the climb has to start over from scratch. Full mechanical detail is on the official Chain wiki page.

The timer isn't fixed — it starts relatively short and gets a little more forgiving as the chain grows, which is part of why early chain-building (the first handful of hits) is the fragile part: miss the window in the first few minutes and the whole chain is gone before it's earned anything back.

Milestones and why the payout curve isn't linear

Respect and money from a chain aren't a flat per-hit rate — they jump sharply at specific hit-count milestones (round numbers like 10, 25, 50, 100, and on up into the thousands for the biggest chains). Hits between milestones still pay more than an unchained hit, but the milestone hits themselves are where the real spike happens. That's the mechanical reason a faction chasing a milestone will often hold back — deliberately slow the chain, or assign it to a specific member — rather than let it land on whoever happens to attack next: landing a milestone hit is meaningfully more valuable than any other hit in the chain, so factions plan around it instead of leaving it to chance.

Because ranked-war score is built directly from the respect earned per hit (see how faction wars work), a milestone landing during a war doesn't just look good — it moves the score by noticeably more than a normal hit would, which is why coordinated chaining is one of the highest-leverage things a faction can organise on war day.

What actually breaks a chain

• Timeout — by far the most common cause. Nobody in the chain lands a qualifying hit before the timer expires.
• A failed attack — an unsuccessful hit doesn't extend the timer, so a losing streak can quietly burn the clock down without anyone noticing until it's too late.
• Running out of eligible targets — during a war this is rarely the issue since the whole enemy faction is fair game, but outside a war a chain can stall simply because everyone nearby is already hospitalised or too strong to risk.

A chain that breaks doesn't just cost the milestone that was coming — it costs every hit needed to rebuild back up to where it was, at the slower, unbonused early rate. That asymmetry (rebuilding is slow, breaking is instant) is why experienced factions treat the chain timer as the single most important number on the screen during an active war.

How factions keep a chain alive across a whole war day

A chain doesn't require one person attacking constantly — it just requires someone to land a hit before the timer runs out, which is what makes it a team effort rather than an individual one. Common patterns:

• Chain watchers — one or more members whose job during an active push is purely to watch the timer and either hit something themselves or shout for someone else to, the moment it gets low.
• Staggering activity — rather than everyone attacking in a burst and then going quiet together, factions spread out who's active when, so there's close to continuous coverage across time zones and sleep schedules.
• Reserving easy hits — keeping a couple of low-risk, near-certain targets in reserve specifically to save the chain if the timer gets dangerously low and nothing else is available.
• Knowing who's free to hit right now — the practical bottleneck is almost never willingness, it's knowing which enemy targets are out of hospital and online at this exact moment. That's a timing problem, which is exactly what a live hospital board is built to solve — see hospital timing & chain strategy for the tactical side of this.

▶ See a live hospital board (demo)