TORN CITY // GUIDE
Guide · resource management for attacking
Energy is what you spend on actions inside the city — the gym, working a job, running organised crimes. Nerve is what you spend specifically to attack another player. They fill on their own over time, each on its own regeneration rate, and both cap out at a maximum that depends on your account's perks and upgrades. The distinction matters because it's entirely possible to be completely out of energy and still be a fully war-ready attacker, or vice versa — they don't gate each other. Full mechanical detail is on the official Nerve wiki page and Energy wiki page.
Every attack costs nerve, so how many times you can hit today is fundamentally limited by how much nerve you have and how fast it refills — not by energy, and not by willingness. A member who's maxed on energy but empty on nerve can't contribute another hit until the bar climbs back up or they spend a resource to top it off. That's why experienced factions think about nerve the way a driver thinks about fuel on a long trip: it's the resource you plan a war day around, not something you top up as an afterthought.
Nerve refill rate is slow relative to how quickly a determined attacker burns through it during an active chain push, which is exactly why timing matters — see hospital timing & chain strategy for how factions coordinate around limited, regenerating resources like this across a whole roster.
Players who want to attack more than their natural nerve regen allows generally do it one of two ways: consumables that refill nerve directly (with real risk and addiction mechanics attached to heavy use — this is not something to lean on casually), or simply pacing attacks to the bar's natural refill speed and accepting a lower hit rate. Which approach a given member uses is a personal risk decision, but a faction gearing up for a war generally wants members thinking about their nerve economy before the war starts, not scrambling mid-fight.
Energy doesn't gate attacking, but it gates the training that determines how strong an attacker you are in the first place: gym sessions that build the battlestats behind every hit's Fair Fight value (see Fair Fight explained) run on energy, not nerve. A member who never trains because they're always spending energy elsewhere shows up to war day with the same nerve bar as everyone else, but a weaker punch behind every hit. Long-term war readiness is really an energy problem; day-of war readiness is a nerve problem — factions that do well tend to manage both on different timescales rather than treating them as the same thing.