The Importance of Claiming Territory

Claiming an ocean/s as your territory from the beginning can be extremely vital to the survival of your alliance. I've participated in many wars that started over the disagreement of terms of where the "boundary line" was. Claiming an entire ocean is a whole lot easier to do then to try and draw lines on a map to claim a certain area. That can get super messy, where as claiming an ocean is very straight forward as you have the map grid-lines to go by. Also, the game some how determines what ocean a city is in (apparently based on where the island is in relation to the ocean boundary line). In this case, you have two options. You go by a visible line. (the ocean line), or you go by what the server says as to what ocean a city is on (even though it might clearly be on the other side of the line). Make sure that it is very clear to all parties involved, and that everyone agrees to what kind of deciding factor your using (option 1 or 2)

Claiming Core Oceans - The is the most important part. Claiming your core ocean is like declaring where you, and only you can have cities. If other alliances have cities in that ocean, you should first use diplomacy to try and trade cities (perhaps you have some cities in their core ocean/s). If this doesn't work, you'll have to take them by force. If you've read my guide on "The Strategical Importance of Cities" (click here), you'll know that even 1 city in your core ocean = "safe zone" can have a devastating effect in the long run.

Keeping Your Cities in Potential Enemy Territory While Getting Them Out of Yours - The same effect happens when you have some cities in an enemy's "safe zone" as when they have some in yours. During the territory claiming, try your best to get them to give up all of their cities in your territory while trying to keep some in their territory. This can be tricky, but the benefits can be enormous as it can give you the advantage from the very beginning if a war breaks out. But, if the terms you agree on are 1 for 1, then this plan will not work unless you have more in their territory then they do in yours.

Below is a picture of the world Delos. My alliance is in Blue, our allies in Green, and our soon to be enemies in Yellow. As you can see, we didn't always stick to the straight ocean borders as we felt that that would get to messy as we split some oceans diagonally, so we just drew a line across it. (there was a little room for flexibility here unfortunately) As can also be seen, we didn't have our core oceans clean of everyone else. Luckily, we later merged with our allies (and their allies, which aren't shown here) and won the world together, but if this had not happened, we would have been in a world of hurt. As it is, we had 5 fronts to try and hold and at first, our war with Yellow did not go to well as we never forced them to give back their cities in our core oceans during the time we were at peace. Thus, we had many cities constantly threatened when this could have been avoided by taking actions against it by claiming sovereignty of our oceans months before.