TORN CITY // GUIDE
Guide · practical war-day tactics
A hospitalised player can't be attacked by anyone until their hospital timer runs out. That single rule shapes almost all war-day tactics: the value of an attack depends heavily on when it lands, not just whether it succeeds. Hitting a target who's about to come out of hospital, right as they become attackable, is worth far more to a war effort than hitting the same target an hour early and having ten other faction members queue up behind you for a target that's already spoken for.
Worth knowing: for the first 60 seconds after leaving hospital, a player is protected from outsiders — it stops random mercenaries from sniping a target the instant they're free — but that protection doesn't apply to the faction actually at war with them (see the official Ranked War rules). So during a war, being ready the moment a timer hits zero still pays off; it's only third parties who are locked out.
The practical skill is simple to state and hard to do manually at scale: know who on the enemy roster is currently hospitalised, and when each of them is due out. A faction that tracks this in real time can spread its members across different targets as they come free, instead of everyone independently re-checking the same few names and colliding on the same target. This is the entire reason live hospital boards exist — the information is available in-game, it's just expensive to track by hand across a full enemy roster during an active war.
Chains reward attacking in quick succession, but a chain built on weak or already-hospitalised targets burns time without producing much war score. Efficient chaining during a war means queuing up targets who are (a) currently attackable and (b) winnable for the attacker, so each hit both extends the chain and moves the score. Losing track of either condition is the most common way a promising chain stalls out mid-war.
Whether a target is likely to be online matters almost as much as whether they're hospitalised — an online target can flee, heal, or fight back with allies; an offline one generally can't. Recent activity (logins, outgoing attacks, chain participation) is the best available proxy for "is this person actually at their keyboard right now," and factions that read it well waste fewer hits on targets who slip away mid-attack.
Individually, every member is guessing from the same incomplete picture. The value of coordination is turning many separate guesses into one shared, current picture: a target that's already been called by a teammate shouldn't get a second person queuing up behind them, and a target that just came out of hospital should get picked up immediately rather than sitting unattacked because nobody happened to be watching the clock. This is where a shared, live hospital and roster view earns its keep over everyone independently refreshing the in-game faction page.