Foundry and Sunfire Castle are the two server-level fights, and both reward preparation over reaction. Century Games documents the schedules and win conditions in full, so there is no reason to guess.
Foundry: the six-day run-up
The official schedule is three two-day phases before the fight:
- Voting (2 days) — every alliance member can vote for the battle time they prefer.
- Registration (2 days) — R4/R5 officers select the battle time based on the vote, and pick up to 30 combatants and 10 substitutes.
- Matchmaking (2 days) — the system assigns an opponent from the voted battle time and Alliance Power.
Then the Battle Phase lasts one hour, and — importantly — losses and injuries on the battlefield do not affect your original troops in the city. Foundry is the safe place to learn how your squads perform.
The entry requirement is a ranking, not a Furnace level
You will find "Furnace Lv. 16" quoted as the Foundry requirement all over the internet. It is wrong, and we had it wrong on this site until we checked. Century Games' note is explicit: your alliance must rank top 20 on the Alliance Power Leaderboard before the Voting Phase starts. The Lv. 16 figure belongs to Frostfire Mine, a different event entirely.
There is a second gate that catches individuals rather than alliances: only members who joined the alliance during the registration phase can participate. Join afterwards and you sit it out, no matter how strong you are. If you are recruiting for Foundry, recruit before registration closes.
Your vote is advisory
"Why is the event time different from what I voted for?" — because the voting result is not final; members above R4 have the final say. Worth saying out loud in alliance chat before the complaints start.
What Troop Power means here
In Foundry, Century Games states Troop Power mainly derives from the power of Chief Gear, Hero Gear, and Battle Tech. That is a narrower list than your city power. If you want to be worth a slot in the 30, those three tracks are where the investment shows up — not buildings, not gathering, not anything cosmetic.
Castle Battle: 3 hours to win, 6 hours to settle
The Sunfire Castle is, in the publisher's words, the most important building of a server. The condition: the first alliance to occupy it for 3 hours wins. If nobody manages that, then after 6 hours the alliance that occupied it longest wins.
Two hours before the Castle's Protection Shield expires, a storm hits the Alert Zone (the red zone). Any city sitting in the Alert Zone at that moment is teleported randomly by the storm. When the storm stops, you can teleport in. So teleporting early is not clever — it gets you scattered. Wait out the storm.
Two features shape the fight itself. The Ruin is the area around the Castle, and troops passing the Relic have their marching speed reduced significantly — which is why reinforcement timing matters more than reinforcement volume. The Turret lets attackers damage whoever holds the Castle, and the longer a turret is held, the shorter the intervals between its attacks. Hold the Castle and the turret together and the turret stops hitting you. Alliances that ignore turrets and mass on the Castle lose to alliances that take a turret first.
The President, and how points are scored
After occupying the Castle the alliance leader may name any member President, and has 10 hours to decide — after which the leader becomes President by default. The President assigns posts and grants stat bonuses server-wide through President Skills.
Personal points come from three places, all of them combat: killing enemy troops while fighting for the Castle and turrets; the power of your troops while occupying them (higher power, more points); and your own casualties, which are counted as points. That last one is the licence to commit — dying on the objective is not a wasted march here.
Sources: Foundry schedule and the top-20 requirement · Why is the event time different from my vote · Why can't I join although my alliance signed up · How Troop Power is calculated in Foundry · Castle Battle — 3-hour and 6-hour conditions, storm, Ruin, Turret · How to become the President · How personal points are obtained
Every rule above is Century Games' own wording from the official English help centre. Anything we added from play experience is labelled in the text.