A CvC is seven days long and its scoreboard has no faction names on it. Three cities are matched, each one full of factions, and at the end one city has won. This is the only event in the game where doing well personally, and doing well as a faction, can both happen while the thing that was being measured goes the other way.
- Seven days, and the last one is an MD.
- Three cities compete. Everyone in yours is on your side.
- Each day the three cities are ranked: 1st takes 3 flags and a 5% buff, 2nd takes 2 and 3%, 3rd takes 1 and 1%.
- Flags and buffs add up across the seven days. They are not reset.
- The MD is about city halls: take the other cities' CHs, and hold our own. Each CH is worth 6 flags. An RC pays you, not the city.
- Every member has to do well on every day, not just the last.
Seven phases, and the last one is a Massacre Day
A CvC runs in seven phases, one per day, and the seventh is an MD — the same kind of day that closes every GW event, and the same expectation: it is where the kills are, and where the week is decided.
If you know how an MD works from the GW, you already know how this one works. What is new is the task described in rule 03.
The city wins, not the faction — and that is not a detail
Three cities are in it, each with several factions inside. Factions in the same city do not compete with each other; they compete with the factions of the other two cities. At the end, a city has won.
So a strong week from this faction on its own is not the scoreboard. What the numbers measure is our contribution to the city, which is a different question and sometimes has a different answer. The way city 680 is built is in One city, many factions.
The MD is about city halls — theirs and ours
This is what a CvC is actually for, and it is worth saying before anything else about the last day: take the city halls of the other two cities, and do not let anyone take ours. Everything else on that day is arranged around those two sentences.
Both halves count, and the second one is the half people forget. A CH we lose at home costs us what a CH we took abroad won — so a member sitting on defence is not sitting out. There is no version of this day where attacking is the real job and defending is the spare one.
CH and RC are not the same currency, and this is the part to get right:
- CH — city hall. 6 flags to the city, each one.
- RC — royal club. Individual points to you. No flags.
Read that again, because it is not a difference of size. An RC is not a smaller CH — it pays a different person. Spend the MD on RCs and you can finish high on the member ranking without having moved the city's board at all.
Which is not an argument for never touching one. It is an argument for knowing which of the two you are doing, and why, before you march.
How it gets organised — which CH, in what order, who stays home — arrives from the R4s on the day. It is not something to improvise on your own.
All seven days count, and they count from everybody
There is no day off in the middle of a CvC. The city's total is the sum of what every member of every faction in it did, on each of the seven days — which means a quiet Wednesday from enough people is a lost Sunday.
The floors that apply to you are the ones in The events you cannot skip. Nothing in a CvC lowers them.
A CvC can change who you are allowed to hit
Agreements made in peacetime are frequently written to end when a CvC opens, because the faction across the road may now be scoring for a different city. That is normal and it is not a betrayal by anybody.
The practical consequence is one habit: when a CvC starts, read the list again before your first hit. Where the list lives and why it is not printed in this book is in Who we do not hit.
How a day is scored: three flags, two flags, one flag
At the end of each of the seven days the three cities are put in order by the points their members scored that day. The order pays out twice, in two different currencies:
- 1st — 3 flags and a 5% buff
- 2nd — 2 flags and a 3% buff
- 3rd — 1 flag and a 1% buff
Nobody gets nothing. Third place still takes a flag and still takes a buff, which is the part people get wrong: a day you thought was lost still paid, and a day you thought was safe paid the other two as well.
The running totals are on the CvC page, in the three cards at the top, with the number of days they were summed from written underneath the heading. A total without that count is a number nobody can check.
The buff accumulates — which is why day 1 is not a warm-up
Flags and buffs add up over the seven days and are never reset. A city that takes first place on Monday does not merely bank 3 flags; it spends the rest of the week fighting with 5% more than it had, and every day it keeps winning it adds more on top.
Read that from both ends. Winning early compounds: the buff you won on day 1 is working for you on days 2 through 7. Losing early compounds too, and it compounds against you while you are trying to catch up — which is the hardest moment to be the weaker city.
This is the whole answer to "does one quiet Tuesday matter". It matters twice: the points you did not score, and the buff the other city is carrying because of it.
Seven days of everybody, not one day of somebody