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Hi everyone, I just wanted to make a short post now that the year is mostly wrapped up. This year has been exciting for P&W, and we've seen a lot of growth. In February we introduced the Alliance Control Panel, making alliance management a little easier. In March, I screwed up and put everyone in the alliance Rose. Two weeks later, you all overloaded the server and caused it to crash because it couldn't handle the huge spike in activity. (We upgraded the server.) In May we introduced some Politics and War merchandise (Politics and Store.) It didn't last long, unfortunately, but I got a couple sweet P&W mugs. In June we upgraded the forum software to IPS4. In July we experienced the "Great Deflation" where I united the players of P&W in their disdain for me reduced resource production and changed commerce. Later, I redeemed myself by introducing the long sought alliance Tax Brackets. In August we celebrated P&W's 3 year anniversary. I also reduced the number of captchas players faced. In September we introduced the Credit subscription option. In October I introduced the verification system, allowing legitimate nations operated by separate persons to play cooperatively on the same network. This has been very helpful for schoolmates, coworkers, and families playing P&W together. Later in October I introduced in-game treaties and fixed up the Treaty Web. And just think month one of the P&W servers died (some sort of hardware failure) but luckily we had a backup taken immediately beforehand and the game was shortly back up-and-running again without a hitch. Along the way, we introduced P&W apps for iOS and Android. While these apps are not great (I am not app developer), they have brought in a huge number of new players. We've gone from about a steady 2,000 active players at the beginning of the year to sustaining 3,000-4,000 active players. Something like 30% of all new players come from the Android app alone. Here's a neat graph of the total number of nations and the active nation count (active within a week) over the course of the year. You'll note the spike in July correlated with the release of P&W on the App and Google Play Stores. Now I've got a few fun stats for you all: Nations Created in 2017 41,038 Alliances Created in 2017 312 Most Viewed Player Ad Most Clicked Player Ad Aggregate Soldier Casualty Count Game-Wide 2,280,521,215 Total Nukes Game-Wide 4,450 Total Nukes Launched in 2017 5,156 Total Number of Wars Won (Since we started keeping track) 6,705 Aggregate Steel Amount in Nations Game-Wide 41,020,000.49 Aggregate Steel Amount in Alliances Game-Wide 8,320,068.73 --- Lastly, I just want to say thank you to everyone who makes the P&W such a great and fun game. It really wouldn't be the same without a strong community behind it. I apologize that I have been less active than usual these past few months, many of you know that I'm in college and I had a particularly tough semester (this past one) which meant more time studying and less time than I would have liked working on Politics & War. However, going forward I should have more time to dedicate to the game, which means more improvements as we move forward. Thanks for playing Politics & War, and enjoy the holiday season. I wanted to note too that we're approaching 100,000 nations created in P&W's lifetime, which will be a huge and exciting milestone. It will also herald six digit nation IDs! Also I want to give a huge shoutout and thank you to all of the wonderful moderators, here on the forums, on the wiki, and Discord for their help. I couldn't do it with you. And thank you to everyone making reports, allowing us to catch cheaters and hold each other accountable for fair and fun gameplay.

Adding tax brackets in no way redeemed you for the screwing you gave low and mid tier nations with your resource and commerce changes.

Aggregate Steel Amount in Nations Game-Wide 41,020,000.49 Aggregate Steel Amount in Alliances Game-Wide 8,320,068.73 Hmmmm....Arrgh!

This thread needs one of my videos, in italian as usual so you don't get what they say click here

So many people have Santa Christmas avatars, but they fail to forget that Christmas is built on the labor of worker elves and gnomes. They are the unrecognized and forgotten backbone of Santa's village.

You are in an alliance with high taxes. I'm sure a $1 would make you ecstatic.

Out of those 100,000 nations created I'm probably half

All I got from this is that hades likes to protect cartoon prostitution.

Which month can we anticipate the disappearance of Politics & Snore?

it was an okay year if the great inflation did'nt happen it would have been better

Reading the summary here makes it look much more brighter than some players have painted the game and actions of Alex in the past, so there is that Hopefully next year will be even better.

Hey now, TKR robbed me last time with that guy who went on to betray them like a week later so getting robbed this time by their rivals or whatever is all quite meh. There is no need for an award anyway, everyone knows the Roz is the best.

For the record, making fun of micro's is so last year, the cool thing to do now is make fun of alliances that cant manage a top tier, which is about 95% of them.

Differences aside, Mensa was pretty dope.

Ha! Silly little micro isnt even aware of the secret minimum bar of entry for an alliance to post a DoW on the Alliance Affairs board, losers!

The Knights of Scotland has successfully been founded! We've reached 11 members as of 8:30 pm EST 12/19/2017 Our charter: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VNddegwI9jaKurvWD2L9Ok62c7EZ8bfKoUULyiE85I4/edit?usp=sharing Our Discord: https://discord.gg/SsY8Ye4 Thank you to all who have joined and or supported and we hope to become a very successful alliance of Orbis. This alliance is almost a Guardians of Scotland 2.0 (for those of you who remember *wink* ) We are excited to begin our alliance and believe greatness awaits! Feel free to ask questions and or join us on Discord. The KoS would like to wish everyone a Merry Christmas, and a special thanks to our allies (UNA and DUO) as well as our generous protectors, Assassin Order. Merry Christmas!

Great game Alex. Love it.

How precisely do alliances bribe their own members and how can I get on this gravy train of bribery? As a deeply corrupt person always willing to sell myself to the highest bidder, I'm genuinely curious.

Get Schwifty This Christmas!

To be fair, I did put him in a shitty situation.

Shifty is good for your Metal Health though. @Josh-of-Clan-Mason become our apprentice (Thorin and I). We will teach you the ways. We will teach you the ways of memes and anti-communism that some would call unnatural.

I know how you feel man. Mine went up in flames and never rebuilt. We're thinking the owner wanted to cash in on insurance~ So many good times (AKA: bad decisions) at places like those.

What if I want to be sacked...

I'll just say: Watch those cookies Bezzers.

Who's Thantos? Anywho, congrats to jack3top on winning "Best Avatar". Dat avy is lit af, although I'm afraid it's plagiarism seen as several people have been using that avatar since way before him. So in all fairness guys like @Nexa should be considered joint winners. Also congrats to Seeker on starting a huge dumpster fire and therefore logically winning "Best Alliance Leader". \o/

The problem is, I think I agree with what you said, but I can't be sure because of your heavy Italian accent. Please help.

The issue isn't micros, but how the overwhelming majority of them are run. An alliance isn't something anyone can do, and one of the many things you need as an alliance leader is experience. One reason why most micros fail is a lack of experience from its high gov or leader. It's far wiser to just join one of the major alliances for experience for several months, watch and learn from their alliance gov, and if you work hard, you might even become a gov member yourself. Then perhaps you can get some friends to make your own micro. It's not too different from running a startup company; it's just smarter to stay as some bigger company for a few years before making your own. As far as I know, Queen M and durmij have both served as gov members in TKR and Rose respectively, which is why SGM was able to pass the early hurdles of starting a micro. However, no one in KoS has sufficient experience in running an alliance for themselves. I should mention that the majority of them were Esquire Templar dropouts or left ET themselves because they couldn't meet passing requirements or for some other reason. Josh was banned for attempting to poach, and Blake was apparently removed by AO. As far as I can see, KoS doesn't offer up anything unique as a micro, their IA and Econ are already a mess, with several of their nations not even building correctly (even their gov, excluding the people who weren't raided) and not on the same alliance color. Would you expect this kind of micro to succeed? All of them are low tier as well, so capital is an issue. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

People shit on micros so much because so many of them do so many stupid idiotic things. Like this thread.

It's not some random micro, it's a recreation of a failed micro. And a 1 man blitz is pretty pathetic by any standard. It certainly doesn't warrant a public declaration war. Do you seriously think a real alliance wouldn't get shat on for doing this too?

But that's the point of this forum

Haha, wow. What a badass. @Josh-of-Clan-Mason if your nation ever manages to get in my range (and I hope it does), don't feel safe. I'll teach you how to git gud.

i really tried my best not to read this thread and i gave in and i regret it. the only micro who’s announcements i’ll read are avansies

You beat me to it... I miss the good ol' days where trying to read SK scrolls made my eyes hurt. ;_; Congrats to both parties on the treaty, seems like a 3rd sphere is being born. Unfortunately since the scroll is pretty legible I'm afraid the treaty is invalid, but still well done! o7

Make me a mod. I'm already a forum bad guy.

Why the !@#$ are mods actively derailing threads? I demand Justice.

Ladies and gentlemen, have you ever wondered what it means when people say things like "you need to be more dynamic" or "stop consolidating"? Never fear because today I'll explain just how you can be dynamic too using our flawless measurement system, The Roquentin Dynamic Alliance Measurement Index Here is how it works. Each alliance starts with a 50 in dynamic rating, the higher the dynamic rating you have, the more dynamic you are. This rating is continuously adjusted as alliances do any of the following things: Sign Treaties Non IQ alliance signs an IQ alliance: +10 Dynamic Rating IQ alliance signs an IQ alliance: +20 Dynamic Rating Non IQ alliance signs a Non IQ Alliance: -20 Dynamic Rating Cancel Treaties IQ alliance cancels a treaty with a Non IQ alliance: +20 Dynamic Rating IQ alliance cancels a treaty with an IQ alliance: +20 Dynamic Rating (or -20 Dynamic Rating if its convenient) Non IQ alliance cancels a treaty with an IQ alliance: -20 Dynamic Rating Non IQ alliance cancels a treaty with a Non IQ alliance: 0 Dynamic Rating Declare War Non IQ alliance declares war on an IQ alliance: -30 Dynamic Rating IQ alliance declares war on a Non IQ alliance: +5 Dynamic Rating (Would be +30 but IQ only preempts they swear) Non IQ alliance declares war on a Non IQ alliance: +50 Dynamic Rating And that is it. I hope this helps you and your friends to be as dynamic as possible.

Although I don’t particularly have an idea for an alliance right now, I’ll drop this post - hopefully it helps someone that wants to start an alliance I wrote up a huge wall of text a while back - part of which discussed this. I’ve seen one too many alliances fail, and the reason that that happens is usually not due to external factors (necessarily) but more due to internal issues the Government doesn’t know how to handle. So, I’ve listed down a couple of things you should have down before you go ahead and make an alliance: Know Yourself, Find your Identity: a. What’s the goal? b. What sets you apart from other alliances? c. What kind of players are you attracting? b. Experience, and your own strengths Limits? What are those? b. Some alliances set artificial upper limits to the number of members they will accept. I’ve micro-managed 50 member alliances in war, and almost never failed them, but above that? My micro management’s efficiency will start to fall. c. Government types are also necessary to building a proper alliance - iNCi from eRep followed a very primus inter pares method of operation, and it worked for them. It might not for you. Is your MilCom centralised or decentralised? (Shoutout to Rose here last war) d. Artificial score inflation, keeping inactives, tax farms - are you okay with this? IA wise: a. Community building mother!@#$er, can you do it? b. Raising, and maintenance of activity on boards/Discord c. Guides - hit me up if you want one, I have written most down. Econ: a. Micro level stuff - audits, maximising profit etc. b. Macro Econ plan - growth rings Corollary 1. Tier’ing, artificial city upper limits. Corollary 2. Optimal taxation - Kemal would be more knowledgable than me on this, but the principles of taxation are similar in game - if you cross a certain threshold in terms of monetary/resource income, you’re potentially incurring massive losses in other areas (activity, desire to stay in the alliance, individual growth) MilCom: I will defer to people like vanek and Senry’s opinion here (you should see these guys go man) but the general outline for MilCom remains similar. I think micro MilCom stuff is pretty explanatory, so let’s go to this: a. Is micro management a thing for you or no? b. Discord activity is imperative to winning. c. Is your micro section looking good? Guides, knowledge of war mechanics, etc. For Macro: Macro-MilCom FA: Oh boy, boy o boy. I could go on about this all day, but let’s go over one very simple rule: Often times it doesn’t matter what you do, what matters is how people perceive that action. Remember this. 1. Learn how to spin things your way (narratives) 2. Keep a diplomat team if you can, when I was FA I did practically all work by myself, because I could. Find what suits you, implement. 3. Treaty chess - !@#$ is that? Simply put, you need to be capable of planning long term - looking at the bigger picture is more important. Your treaties should be based on two primary things, for the major part: a. FA policy alignment and Friendships b. Suitable addition to fighting capability (offensive: complimenting your tiers by adding to the places you’re weak in | defensive: adding to similar tiers so you have more backup) Above all, don’t give up ever. If you do that, you’ve lost the game. Other Skills: 1. Math 2. Spreadsheets 3. Programming Learn. Use. Prosper. (ps: I wrote this all on mobile so there might be a crapload of mistakes xdxd)

Come to the apeside

I mean it's pretty much true in terms of recent memory in seriousness despite this being a joke topic. You've plunged into wars despite knowing they'd be losses. I'd say being willing to start stuff in spite of the odds is pretty big.

Roquentin disapproval: -300 Dynamic Rating

Of course not, winning 2 years in a row wouldn't be very dynamic.

I see you're already campaigning hard for next year.

Did you make cartoons of it though?