http://www.earthempires.com/rules
"Spirit of the rules
Players should strive to play according to the spirit of the rules, especially on servers without clans. These servers are designed for individual play. To make the game fair for all players and accessible to new players, players in the primary, express, and tourney server should not engage in any outside of game organizing which gives them an advantage over what can be accomplished through normal, ingame diplomacy. Warnings will be issued to countries suspected of breaking this rule, and in extreme cases, the offending countries may be deleted."
There seems to be confusion about how this rule is applied on servers without clans. This rule was developed after players engaged in clan activity on servers without clans. On servers with clans, players are encouraged to grow their tags and work together. In addition, players are also aware of the risks of hitting a player in another tag. If players engage in clan activity on servers without clans, at best, some players will have an unfair advantage over others. At worst, players will leave after being killed off again and again. We do not want an environment where fair playing players are pushed out by whoever has the most friends or an environment where players are killed off for sport by bored people from another server.
Ingame allies exist to give your country bonuses throughout the game: not as a tool or an excuse to dominate the rest of the server. If you do your diplomacy country to country and treat your allies simply as their respective boosts, you are playing within the rules. If you have a small group and your motivation for playing is to help each other out, please play as a group on the Team server instead.
This is obviously a grey area and it creates more work for ingame moderators, but we feel that the "Spirt of the Rules" clause is essential for these servers. The following lists, while not exhaustive, will hopefully clear up any remaining confusion:
Examples of acceptable behaviors:
-Allying with friends.
-Asking for allies on the boards.
-Messaging your allies about good targets that you've found.
-Doing for profit market clearing.
-Trading a tech leech for some other kind of benefit.
-Getting involved in an ally's dispute only if the situation demands it and only as as last resort.
Examples of unacceptable behaviors:
-Playing solely to "help your allies" against other players.
-Purposefully putting a player into DR to protect them.
-Running a landfarm for another player.
-Repeatedly doing spy ops for another player.
-Doing group kill runs organized outside of the game.
-Doing group kill runs against players without cause.
-Doing market buyouts for another player.
-Posting spy ops and organizing on clan websites.
