Any timed action -- repairing a ship, building a structure, running research -- can be sped up by your alliance. Tap the purple Help button on the timer and everyone in your alliance gets a notification; each member can send one help per request, and the cap on how many helps you can receive at once scales with your alliance's level. You can return the favor from the Alliance menu's Help All button, which clears every open request from your teammates in one tap. Separately, Alliance Contribution lets you donate resources toward your alliance's own level-ups from the same menu -- but if you leave mid level-up, whatever you had already put toward that level is removed from the alliance's total, so it isn't something to do on your way out the door. When any member buys a real-money pack, the alliance often gets an anonymous Alliance Gift chest as a bonus, on top of whatever the buyer received.
Every alliance can build exactly one Starbase, and it's the alliance's shared engine for buffs and research. To build it your alliance first needs Subspace Superconductors, which mostly come from bundles bought with Cardassian Loot -- and Cardassian Loot only drops from destroying Cardassian Stations, found in a fixed set of systems that gets tougher as you go (Myyric at level 27 up through Rudellia at level 50). Once built, an Admiral or Commodore relocates the Starbase onto a Plasma Storm, where the right Harvester (Magnetic Plasma Harvesters for Magnetic Plasma, for example) pulls in Plasma at a fixed rate until the Plasma Processor caps out and someone has to move it again. That harvested Plasma funds two things: Starbase modules, whose buffs apply to every member regardless of rank, and the Starbase Research Tree, which needs Assembly Medals and -- unusually -- stays unlocked on your account permanently even if you later leave the alliance. Alliance Reputation, separately, is what gates the higher research nodes; it's earned by hitting Cardassian Stations or buying specific Alliance Store bundles, and it resets to zero the moment you leave, no matter how long you'd been building it up.
Assaults are alliance-vs-alliance combat fought over Plasma. Any member over Ops 15 can launch one once the alliance has built the Command Control module and has its own Starbase sitting on a Plasma Storm, by spending Tactical Mandates (from the Alliance Altruism pack, the Alliance Unity Daily Goal, or the Offers tab). You have a 10-minute window to get ships into range -- being present when that timer runs out is what makes you a participant, and the system auto-picks your strongest eligible ship unless the Assault Leader overrides it. Win, and a cut of the defending alliance's unprotected Plasma transfers straight to your alliance's inventory, sized to how much Hull Health damage you dealt to the station rather than a flat amount. On defense, the Tachyon Detector (once built) automatically reveals attacking cloaked ships to your alliance without needing to be triggered -- though those ships stay untargetable by anyone outside the defending alliance. The other lever is simply undeploying the Starbase: it stops it being a valid Assault target, but it also stops Plasma harvesting and freezes construction until it's redeployed, and it can't be undeployed while an Assault against it is already pending.
Arena is STFC's structured PvP mode: three-player squads, formed from your alliance or, more recently, from any player on your server via Public Squads, matched against another squad of similar average Ops level and rating. Squad creation needs Ops 40+, matches run in a separate instanced system similar to an Incursion, and the whole mode is only open one day a week (with unlimited matches during that window). Inside a match you can field two ships at a time and swap freely, repairs are free on a normalized respawn-style timer, and a match ends at 10 minutes or 1000 Victory Points, whichever comes first -- with points weighted heavily toward completing Armadas as a team (killing a hostile Survey ship is worth 1 point; a completed Group Armada is worth 300) over picking off enemy players (5 points). Win or lose, you earn Arena Emblems, redeemable in the Terran Empire Faction Store; winning also raises your Arena Rating, losing costs some of it.
