Creating a Forum Format

One of the most important aspects of a well run alliance. It can make or break an alliance in the midst of a major war. Communication is what matters most. If the forums aren't set up in a way that is understandable and user friendly, people are a whole lot less likely to work together and work as a team. Team work is the only way wars are won in Grepolis. No one person has ever won a war completely single-handed-ly. Below is the set-up that I've used and was taught since I started playing and it has seemed to have been effective and user friendly to most players. (from the feedback that we've received)

Important to Note: Tabs shared with other alliances cannot have threads moved to or from them by either party.

SUPPORT - Anything having to do with being attacked and the reports from such. Threads here have a city name that is under attack and current info about it (what ocean, name of city under attack - how  many attacks, CS launched, under siege) i.e. O54 - XYZ - CS Lands at 20:35:01. Also, at the top and marked important is the thread for posting attacks on your tripwires in other people's cities. This shows participation and that you have indeed taken steps to help secure your island.

General (Gen.) - Announcements & a list of leaders and who to contact when went here. Nice to have an area that was uncluttered so that there could be no missing it.

Offense - Threads under this tab have an enemy city name in the title along with a landing time or where in the process the claimant is. (what ocean - spying, clearing, CS launched, CS landed) i.e. O54 - XYZ - CS Lands at 20:35:01. Also kept a thread marked important at the top for putting random reports of attacking the enemy.

Intel - Click here & here to read my guides to recording intel on the forum. Depends on how you want to organize it as to how many tabs you have for it and such.

Guides - Leaders are generally the ones that post here, posting links to guides or templates for specific forum posts. (For posting in the support tab or for announcing that your CS is launched at an enemy city)

The Pub - Anything and everything that didn't go in any of the other tabs. May members used this area for joke telling (in a thread devoted to it) and for fantasy football. I mainly view this tab as a HUGE distraction, but I can see that a place to let down can be good for morale and so people don't burn out by being constantly overwhelmed by just pure grepolis.

Archive (Arch.)- After a while, in the alliances I was in, we found that we needed a thread devoted to any old post as we liked to safe the information in them. Who did what, who helped and with what. Also helped to show who was the most active and a team player. Since there isn't a limit that I know of as to how many threads can be under this thread, we dumped most anything that was outdated in here.

Leaders (Ldrs) - Hidden - Where what we called the "council" met and discussed the pressed matters that was currently facing the alliance. We had a thread in here that was devoted to Recruiting and if any leader had a suggestion or a recommendation it should be put there with anything that we knew about the player in question and we would all discuss it. Here was also where we discussed our next move as alliance and prospective allies and enemies. If we ever had a spy in this area we would have been royally messed up, so only a chosen few were ever aloud access. (before my retirement, we spent more type in the skype leadership room talking than we did here as it was faster and much smoother)

Leaders Archive (Ldrs Arch.) - Hidden - Like Archive, anything from the Leadership tab went here after it was outdated. But only those that could see that tab could see this one. Being able to go back and look at old stuff was a huge benefit on several different occasions.

World Wonders (W.W.) - Hidden until about 2 months before - Before WW age rolls around, the leaders got together 2-3 months before and decided on the 7 islands that we would used for building our WW's on. This tab, which was released for everyone in the alliance to see about 2 months before WW age starts gives them all heads up, information as to what we need where, and instructions as to what to do with their own cities in preperation. (Build you market up in each and build Merchant in many of them) The aspects of this tab change over time, but the idea behind it stays primarily the same.

WW Islands - (Made after the one above and released at the same time as it or close to it) - Here we had a thread devoted to each island with a link to each at the top of each thread. Anything to do with an island was put under its specific thread. Whether that be trips going off, requests for resources from players (to build up their walls and such) or for reports of attacks on them. Announcements as to what WW/s to send resources to where Mass Mailed out, but they were also edited in to the title for each island (send, hold, accelerate, done!) This proved to be quite effective and in the last WW race our alliance very quickly pulled ahead of our opponents. It proved quite capable of dealing with 160 players all helping and sending to the WW's. Would definitely use the same thing again if I ever played again.

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Targets (Or known as Ops) - This thread constantly "changed". To the regular member it might like the same one, but we generally had 2 or 3 that were hidden and that we were working on behind the scenes only to be released when we were ready to launch the Op. This/these tabs had all the information that we had on the target cities and what our goal was and in what time frame. This is where team work was formed and how it played. If no one stepped up to provide a CS for a city then we went on to the next one. We always tried to have a plan before attacking a city so as not to just attack it, but to make sure we gained something by our losses. Did we gain the city? Even if they broke the siege we put on it, what was the ratio of our loses to theirs? Did we take out all of their LS in that area?
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In the past there have been people that have complained that there is to many tabs and to much to read, and in-as-much as that might be true in some cases, if you are fairly active, and just keep up on what is in your area or what is marked as important, it isn't that bad as some make it out to be.

It Delos, because of how many oceans we covered (9 to be exact), we split the Offense tab into 2 tabs. West & East. And then in the description specified which oceans that included. Then, there was a thread for each ocean that that area covered. Anything that had to do with that ocean and offense went there. It lost a bit of the teamwork, but because we were so spread out we had to just PM or skype those who were close and might be able to help and just form our own little groups on our own if we were going to go after a big target.

This is no wise the "best" set up, but it is what we found to work for us and we made several changes in set-up over time as we found some things that worked better than what we had or vice-versa.