Cooperative competition
The cooperative competition is a tournament between farming cooperatives in which the members complete missions and collect reputation points for the cooperative's shared score. Without being in a cooperative you can't get into the competition at all, but once you're part of one, every reputation point you earn helps the whole group climb the rankings and reach better rewards. The competition has its own league system with promotion and relegation, and its own shop full of boosts that can speed up point collecting a lot.
The cooperative competition is worth it for anyone who is even a little bit active in their cooperative - the hard work reward goes to every member automatically, so even a smaller contribution from someone else helps you and the other way round. The ones who get the most out of it are cooperatives that organise their boost buying together and push as a team for promotion to a higher league, because the difference in rewards between leagues is noticeable.
You can't take part in the competition without a farming cooperative
The cooperative competition pits farming cooperatives against each other. To take part you have to be a member of a cooperative, whether you join an existing one or found your own.
During the competition you complete missions that earn you reputation points. All the reputation points collected by the individual members add up into the cooperative's total score, and that's what moves you up the league table. Your hard work is therefore never locked away in your own result alone - as soon as you or anyone else in the cooperative reaches the hard work reward, absolutely every member of the cooperative gets that reward automatically.
The leagues run from beginner all the way up to the global Champions League
Cooperatives are sorted into leagues by performance and in every round of the competition they move up or down according to where they finish.
| League | Best cooperatives | Worst cooperatives |
|---|---|---|
| Beginner | promotion to the bronze league | stay put (lowest league) |
| Bronze | promotion to the silver league | relegation to beginner |
| Silver | promotion to the gold league | relegation to bronze |
| Gold | the winner moves up to the global Champions League | relegation to silver |
| Champions League | hold their place, best rewards | relegation to gold |
The gold league also offers a choice of difficulty (normal, challenging, expert mode) - on a higher difficulty only part of the available reputation points from missions counts, so it works as a handicap for experienced cooperatives that want a tougher challenge. Each of these modes also has its own separate trophies for where you finish.
Rewards come in several forms
- Hard work reward - tied to the reputation point slider, and as soon as anyone in the cooperative earns it, all members get it automatically.
- Placement reward - paid out according to the cooperative's final position in its league.
- Member prize - an internal cooperative ranking that shows the 50 most active players of the competition and rewards the hardest-working members. If the cooperative has at least five members, the reward goes to its best player, and in large cooperatives of twenty members and up several of the best players are rewarded at once.
- Trophies - these stay as a permanent reminder of finishing in the top 1, top 5 or top 10 (top 35 in the Champions League) of a given league and serve as decorations.
The game itself gives an example of what such rewards can look like - with one gold league update the members of the two best cooperatives got an animated decoration, a shared tree additionally increased rewards, and the hard work rewards included gold mining permits, decorations or golden flower seeds. So the specific rewards change from season to season.
Boosts from the shop increase your reputation point gains
In the boost shop you can buy a boost that increases the amount of reputation points you get from missions - either for gold or for dollars, and either from your own account or from the cooperative's account (the cooperative leader can arrange that for everyone at once).
Several boosts work at the same time and their effects stack, but their durations don't. Boosts can only be bought while the competition is running, and the only players who benefit from them are those who were already members of the cooperative at the moment of activation - anyone who joins later won't get anything out of a boost that is already running.
The Champions League brings extra coins and buildings
The winner of the gold league from every server moves up into the global Champions League, where you then compete against the best cooperatives from all over the world - so you're representing your region. Because results from every country count towards the final score, the evaluation can take a while until the results from the remaining countries have been pulled in.
In the Champions League you collect Champions League coins (Champ Tokens), which you use to upgrade the current season's monument - there are spring, summer, autumn and winter versions of the coins and of the matching seasonal monuments. By taking part in the Champions League a cooperative can also unlock the champions factory, whose automatic production is fuelled by exactly the reputation points collected in the Champions League, so the factory's output gets better over time.
