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A Change in the Wind Snow was swirling around King Zygon. Even though he was squinting to keep the flakes out of his eyes, he still couldn’t see in front of him. He had no clue where he was other than he was north of the Wall, and no clue as to how he got there. It was cold, ridiculously cold, but that didn’t bother him. What did bother him was the feeling of being hunted, and knowing he was probably, for once, outmatched. He’d considered blowing his horn several times, but there was little chance someone would hear, and greater chance he would attract those hunting him. Still he trudged on through the ever-piling snow, trying to find some place to find shelter and rest. A change in the wind gave him pause. For a split second he thought he had heard something out there. He could, however, smell something. Death. Zygon quickened his pace, rushing through the woods now, trying to loosen his sword in its scabbard. Ice had formed where the blade and sheath met, almost as if some force were trying to ensure he couldn’t fight. With a crack, Zygon ripped the sword out, revealing a perfect blade of Valyrian steel. A screech pierced the air and he broke into a run. An unknown fear had taken hold, and the only avenue of escape was speed. He broke out from the woods and saw a hill not far off. Zygon ran across the small clearing and began, running up the hill. Over the panting of his breath the and breaking of snow, screeching and more running could be heard. Something was chasing him down and gaining. Once he made it to the top of the hill, he turned, sword at the ready. It was his worst nightmare come true. Wights, not one, several. For whatever reason they had paused at the bottom of the hill. Zygon looked around him and realized the top dropped off suddenly. He was on a cliff. He’d trapped himself. He looked down at the horn Cypher had given to him as a parting gift. It’d be a shame to die without using it at least once, even if no-one heard. The King in the North would die honorably and probably painfully, but at least he’d die tooting a good horn. He raised the horn to his lips, took a deep breath, and blew with all his might. * * * Memph’s head jerked up from the food he was preparing and cocked his head. “Did you boys hear that?” he asked looking around the campfire at each of the men with him. They all stopped what they were doing and listened. Over the wind the screams of wights could barely be heard. “They’re hunting something.” JtTeE said after a moment, “Hopefully some wildlings or something’ The sound of a horn blaring over the wind caused the men to jump to their feet. There was no way it could be a wildling getting hunted. As one they all turned and ran to their horses, riding towards the sound of the horn and the walkers. Upon exiting the woods, they saw a group of wights trudging up a hill towards a lone figure at the top. The figure was blowing a horn in one hand and a broadsword in the other, Memph didn’t slow his horse as he raced towards the line of undead, running them down with ferocity. Some of the wights had made it to the top of the hill and were attempting to surround the lone man, who dropped the horn and began to fight, cutting down the walkers. It looked almost easy, but it was clear just by the shear number of undead that the man would be quickly overtaken. Memph jumped off his horse before it had halted and joined the fray against the dead. He cut his way through the enclosing arc of dead towards the man and they stood back to back fighting off the dead. Other Guardians were fighting skirmishes of their own, but the majority of the wights were ever pressing against Zygon and Memph. Suddenly Memph was knocked off of his feet and fell to the ground. One of the foes that he had supposedly beaten had grabbed his legs and pulled him down. The wight crawled on him trying to rip his throat out. Memph punched and shoved but he couldn’t seem to repel it. He was going to die here, he just knew it. The wight screeched, nearly blasting his eardrums to bits. Then it fell limp on him, dead for sure now. He shoved its head aside to see the man he’d been fighting with had stabbed it through the chest, and luckily not through him as well. Zygon pulled his sword out and offered his hand to Memph to pull him up. Memph pushed the rest of the wight off of him before accepting the outstretched hand. Around them, the fight had finsihed, with bits of undead everywhere, but amazingly none of the living. In somber silence they piled the remains of the Walkers and burned them before mounting on horses and riding south. Memph broke the silence. “I’m Memph, this is JtTeE, and these others are the rest of our merry gang. We’re of Guardian, a group focused on security and well-being” Memph said gesturing around him before offering his hand to Zygon. “Who are you? Where are you from?” Zygon grasped his hand and smiled, “I’m King Zygon of House Stark. To tell you the truth I was getting a little worried, I hadn’t seen anyone the entire time I’ve been here” “Zygon eh? Your Bannermen have been tearing apart the Realm looking for you. How did you end up here of all places?” “I don’t know. One second, I was fighting off the Hordes of the Pacific and the next I was farther North than any had gone before. I’m lucky you found me.” “If it hadn’t been for that horn we would have never known you were here. Where did you get it anyway?” Zygon looked down at the horn, “It’s from an old friend of times gone by.” Memph glanced around at his men before responding. “You know, friends are always there for each other. The man that gave you that horn saved your life in a way. That’s something that friends do, and I think I speak for all of Guardian that if your countrymen are like yourself, we’d like to forge a new friendship with you and your House” Zygon smiled, “There’s always room for new friends in the Halls of Winterfell. If not there, then we will stand by you on the fields of battle as we have done today. Our enemies will break before us like wheat under the scythe.” “Guardian will do the same for you. Whenever the opportunity arises we’ll ride to battle with you and your men” Memph said “Then it looks like we have a deal.” Zygon said “Now let’s get to Winterfell, they’re probably waiting for me to get back to learn them some grammar.” “By the way Zygon, how did you manage to stab just that wight and not me?” Memph asked “Oh. Well. To be honest with you I just took a wild guess at it. I’m pretty lucky I suppose.” Zygon replied “I guess we both are then.” Memph said and the two men laughed. Upon arriving at Winterfell, Guardian and House Stark formalized their agreement in writing before partying so good that the entire world took a nap for 6 months. The End Guardian and House Stark officially enter an MDP

At this point we have reached a state of the game where the difference between both the nation city count and the alliance city counts are, at best, large enough that it stifles the game's atmosphere. As a member of an alliance of over maybe 300, maybe 275, accepted taxcows in our history, the economics of the game have struggled to the point where alliances are discouraged from investing in new taxcows, hurting P&W's all over retention. When noob- I mean new players see people with 20+ cities, and realize that it takes literally little-to-no-brainpower to reach that level it hurts the levels of retention of said taxcows. City costs at the sub-20 level are simply too atrocious in their current state to assist newer taxcows in reaching that level, as shown by the numerous statistical number and pie graphs showing how most newer tax cows quit early on. If there was a radical cut in the sub 20 city prices, say, to 0 cost all the way up to 14 cities, it would enable ALL alliances to develop newer tax cows, and let them catch up to the normal cash cow player base, and increase retention across the board for all alliances in Orbis. This in effect would have no negative impact on older cash cows, who retain their cities they have literally just no-brain bought, but will help every alliance when developing newer tax cows. Everyone on Orbis benefits from increased retention of newer tax cows, and there isn't a benefit to it requiring literal little-to-no-brainpower to catch up to the established cash cow base.

Well yeah, the game's at face is just not interesting. It's slow, the graphics are rather boring. The game is only as fun as you make it. Assuming the player has never played a game like this, unless they magically stumble into an alliance discord with people willing to teach them how the game's mechanics works in a non-tedious manner, they will likely quit. If you want to boost player retention, make a better tutorial, have an admin pay people some credits in exchange for solid tutorial videos. You really think new players who quit the game will respond "man, if cities were cheaper, i'd have had sooooo much more fun in the game"? No. It's about the community that they surround themselves with, or lack thereof.

There are better ways to give new players a starting chance without inherently devaluing older players previously built cities, especially when many were built under an economy with a considerably lower level of cash floating around in the economy. Cutting the city timer up to 5 cities was one previous option that was employed. Increasing the starting daily bonus was another. Choosing an arbitrary limit of 20 cities (which is fairly high might I add, the majority of the playerbase is still well under that) to reduce costs is obviously going to unfairly advantage a specific portion of the playerbase. Considering this update is supposed to be targeted at retention, aka keeping new people around, there is no logical reason the price reduction would go up to 20 cities. Other proposals, like reducing the cost of infrastructure and land in the first X (lets say 5 or maybe 10) cities in any nation, by a flat amount like 20%, and further moving the city timer limit up to say 10 cities, would both have a more balanced effect on the game and target the actual new players.

How am I making this political? If I were politically biased towards my own alliance, I'd say yes to this proposal. There's about 70% people below the sub-20 range in KT right now and many more in ET. Why make game easier? It's already easy as it is. You're spinning my words, growth and retention are connected, people simply need to get better at managing their growth besides hitting the "Sheepy, cities are too expensive" button.

Or here's another revolutionary idea: not brigade upvotes and virtue signal to Alex about retention when this has little to no effect on it, and instead learn how not to suck at Econ.

No thanks, A true civilized population needs a hierarchy. The ability to distinguish patricians and plebs clearly is vital and unfortunately for IQ, they are at the bottom of the pecking order. Keep IQ down.

If people in your alliance are quitting the game due to boredom, that's a direct result of an incompetent government. If your alliance does not create an economic system which creates an incentive to be active, your best and biggest members will leave, your taxes will rise, and you'll turn into a low-tier cess-pool pandering to the admin to benefit yourself rather than spending time adapting like prominent alliances are and should be.

Just saw this thread, not parsing through it so this might have already been said, but frick it. The issue has never been score and pixels, the issue has been the lack of meaningful daily actions. The issue will never be score and pixels, the issue will always be the lack of meaningful daily actions. There is next to nothing to do in this game for the average player on a day to day basis. How is lowering the cost of city 20 going to change the fact that most nations never make it beyond 2? This is naked politicking. The reasoning in the OP is simple projection, a new nation literally can not fathom city count because it takes so long to see it in action and actually feel the difference. Edit: Read it, the projection is running wild. Everyone dumping their feelings of inadequacy on noobs who literally often have to be walked through the tutorial again before the even get their nations functioning. Real solution, make it so players get to city 5 through the tutorial alone, while adding bot nations that attack them so they have to beat an opponent on their own. Also, make forming an alliance more expensive. Still too many sink holes of suck.

>Thread about player retention >The issue isn't about game boredom Yeah, no. If a new player is having fun, they will continue to play, regardless of their city count. This is a community issue, not an economic issue. So by trying to lower city costs in an attempt to raise player retention will do nothing and misses the point. So my argument has everything to do with the suggestion.

There are many more sides to retention rather than how fast you can spoon-feed someone cities. If you think retention only depends on someone's growth you're incredibly wrong. As I can see, your entire argument for the proposed change is to encourage retention across newer players, giving mass recruiting alliances a benefit while elites get nothing out of this. The whole appeal to going elite is that your current players have a good retention rate meaning they're enough to sustain growth and keep the community going. (Examples are TGH, Guardian, t$, CoS and many names down the list) For the sake of your education, in nation-sim games like this, retention ties very little to ones nation but tie a lot more to the community they're in and how often the alliance can keep them logging in. Retention for BK will never be the same as the retention of Rose, TKR, NPO etc. Every alliance has a different theme, community and econ/ia systems to keep players interested in playing in the alliance, but that doesn't mean the players aren't interested in the game, they're just not interested in your alliance. If the people joining BK are going inactive, the only thing you can do is engage them, no amount of cities you buy them will change that. Give them jobs, encourage and empower your community and make systems which encourage people to compete and login every day. By having a theme revolved around memes and ayy lmao, you're obviously going to have shit retention for players that aren't interested in any of that and simply cannot fit in, and some goes for TKR, Rose, NPO, TCW, doesn't matter. Weeb alliances have high retention with weeb players, people that like the stormlight archive have a great time in TKR, etc etc. You just dragged yourself out of a war where you need at least 20-30 days of high taxes to stimulate growth, nobody is going to enjoy that, of course they're going to look to either go elsewhere or if they're too attached to BK they'll simply stop playing. Your alliance has a closed recruitment policy atm meaning your community is slowing down, especially after so many mergers where you literally had to adapt at least a hundred players to a new community. There is no question to why your retention sucks, but the game has no fault in this, you only need to look in the mirror. I completely disagree that we need to lower city costs, in my experience as an IA head I find it increasingly difficult to teach new members how to fight when we're constantly encouraging people to build cities instead of warchests or focusing on raiding. The removal of city timers for the first 5 cities is fine, but when you get to 5-6 cities you can't raid anymore (unless you're Arrgh), meaning you need to switch to econ build and that's where members reduce their activity. Every member is active their first 5 cities because they have to actually play the game, as soon as they have to sit around they turn to the community to keep them entertained.

@Alex Probably a big ask, but do you have the statistics of how many nations delete at each city level? I'd guess based off of Sketchy's war stats thread the vast majority is at city 1 or 2, but dunno if you have more exact numbers over a larger period of time that could show where exactly players are leaving after sticking around past that initial creation. Right now I'm on Bourhann's side of the argument. The retention of new nations has always been a struggle for mass recruiting alliances. It's on the alliance themselves to keep players engaged - whether that be through an off site community worth sticking around for or frequent wars in game.

Low retention rates are part of the genre. Even well established games by dev studios with 3-D graphics tend to have relatively low retention rates. Look at Clash of Clans or Boom Beach. They have lots more in terms of content and even have graphics, yet their one week retention rate isn't even 40%. A game analyst who analyzed games like Temple Run said 5% after 30 days is great. Again, that is with games that an entire dev studio makes, not just Sheepy. One thing those games have that PaW doesn't is a steady stream of content. It was months between the last few wars. If you truly want increased retention, go for options to increase the frequency of wars.

We have given Ragnarok our 72 hour notice of cancellation and the reasons behind it were expressed privately. We wish them fun and good fortune for the rest of their days. Signed, King in the North: Zygon Hand of the King: Darth Revan Battle Master: Zygon Master of Coin: Darth Revan Three Eyed Raven: TSA Maester: My2Lemons 1

You have completely missed the point. Roq, the game doesn't have to change at all. There is no need to push changes onto the game because you can't adapt to it. The game system and lack of war have very little to no influence on the retention your alliance creates, you have to accept the fact that peace is a thing and you need to create systems that keep players active during it. If the only reason people played this game was war, Arrgh would have 2000 players. There is a far greater amount of players that simply like their community. TKR lost upwards of 20 members after the EMC split. @Buorhann, @Queen M can in detail tell you how we've failed to maintain retention as an alliance because of poor decisions in the past. We were in a far worse situation than you are right now. What is happening to IQ is no different. You have to move on and adapt to what is making you lose members, every alliance goes through this many times in it's history. What do you expect is going to happen if you maintain high taxes and do not give people a chance for promotion or advancement, even worse, keeping them at the same tier for a year. The thing that keeps them together is each other, not how often NPO goes to war. NPO, BK, Polaris and basically most IQ alliances in the past have elite governments built up from years of playing together and numerous mergers. If you want to keep your government and cabinet pure and elite, don't be surprised when people who want political advancement leave to go somewhere else given the chance. Even further, don't complain about not being able to retain members to 14 cities, when your whole strategy is to grant people to 14 cities without any input, involvement or effort required. It's simply embarrassing.

And my counter proposal does just that. If you shorten the amount of time it takes for you to grow to 10 cities, you by default shorten the amount of time it takes to grow to 12, 15 or even 20 longterm. You are talking about a "competitive level", when 10 cities is right around when nations start to become relevant to war statistics. This might not be as apparent in the current climate when a single political grouping holds the monopoly on that area. Reducing the cost of infrastructure, reduces the initial cost of investment to get a larger return, which inevitably accelerates growth of people sub 10 cities. The only difference is it doesn't happen at the expense of those with 11 or more cities. You right in the previous paragraph, criticized the length of time it takes to build cities without credits, and then in the next, dismissed the suggestion to extend the timer. Extending the timer would address the issue. As for the argument about smaller AAs, that is an invalid criticism. Smaller AAs make a choice to sacrifice potential growth for in many cases political autonomy, their own community, theme, or leadership goals/style. Evening out the disparity in growth between a small AA and a large AA is unfairly handicapping one type of alliance over another based on that alliances choices. And I assume we aren't talking about micros, because if anything, micros HURT player retention in this game, they don't help it. Smaller AAs can combat this by finding a solid protector and proving their value, and perhaps getting funding for their growth, or a meticulously planned econ program can help them to gain over the more stagnant older alliances who grow fairly slow compared to their potential. How long term should it realistically be? A better question is how short term should it realistically be. Since Leo hasn't actually provided any specific numbers, I can't know how easy he thinks getting to 20 cities should be. Regardless, as someone earlier in the thread pointed out, its possible to do it within a year. If this suggestion was truly targeted at improving growth and retention for new players, it would find ways to accelerate growth at the bottom, without unfairly disadvantaging those at the top, and without giving a clear advantage to people in a range that have been playing for a long time and have no retention issues (14-17). I see a lot of accusations of bias on both sides of this argument, but I'm still waiting on someone to address my point about why 20 cities is a reasonable cutoff, or provide some sort of revised proposal that addresses the fairly obvious flaws in the argument.

Then if the argument is a lack of meaningful regular action is the cause of issues with retention, then the game would have to shift to less of an emphasis on growth and one where war is more a regular thing either by making growth less of a financial issue or by making war a lot less financially consequential. Other stuff like more player vs environment type situations(NPC nations to fight as objectives) would also help with retention. Over time as the average city count went up and the costs associated with warring went up, war became less frequent and there's no real denying it.

So the premise of BK's proposal is to significantly reduce the cost of cities below the 20 mark in order to help -all- alliances with player retention. Not sure why BK thinks it can speak for all alliances here on what would and wouldn't benefit them. The premise alone does not hold ground because it is plainly obvious how this would assist one particular side of the player base significantly more than the others. They say they aren't making it political but then they propose the change to benefit -new- players be to reduce city costs below the -20- city mark. How exactly does that benefit new players? A better implementation, if any is even necessary (which I am not convinced it is considering BK from a quick glance is one of the only established alliances that consistently bleeds members and this proposal being done by them and virtue signal liked by the rest of IQ) would be something that directly targets players within the first couple of days of them coming into the game, as opposed to something that will affect the majority of the game and specifically one corner of the world will essentially get a get-out-of-jail at 80% off card because they made terrible economic decisions over the past year or more. >don't make it political >proposes a very political change and has the nerve to tell everyone else not to respond in kind

The problem I see in shrinking the city cost sub-30 cities is the implications it could have on wars. This proposition is basically just a call to make everyone in IQ into whales to accommodate for the lack of skill within their players, citing it would help everyone else to give themselves the moral high ground. Making this an altruistic argument, or one of keeping players in, is overall a false dogma laid down by the IQ hegemon. Trust me, players don't stay in this game because they want to pixel farm, I would have left long ago because such a proposition is laughable. People stay because they love the community; it's fun to engage with your fellow Orbisians. Look, to propose that the growth factor among us minors is skewed in favor of whales and not us is a false statement. If you pursued growth in your alliance, you'd select your most competent members and supercharge them to a higher status, bringing up a few first than all together. Hell, if I recall correctly, you lot have ludicrous taxes on your base, that should have been enough capital to rebuild your top and middle brass, then bring up the shining stars among your lower rung. But to lobby Alex over lowering city costs to supercharge yourselves, then alluding to its many benefits while alluding briefly that somehow growth in this game is somehow too "prohibitive" is just absolutely devious, especially with your votemongering by flooding this forum with your bloc members. I see no reason why we should shift city prices from their status quo, and until you can change my mind, I stand by my argument. Though, I ought to give you guys credit for trying, this realpolitik move is obviously based off of historical events where the uplifting of poorer, larger groups led to the shadowing of the head honcho, like the United States and Britain, Germany and Britain, the Soviet Union and Germany, France and again Britain, China and Japan, and soon China and the United States. I'll finish this off with a quote from Lenin which should console you, "Half a century ago, Germany was a miserable, insignificant country, as far as capitalist strength was concerned, compared with the strength of England at that time. Japan was similarly insignificant compared with Russia. Is it 'conceivable' that in ten or twenty years' time the relative strength of the imperialist powers will have remained unchanged? Absolutely inconceivable."

The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that is it too low and we reach it. Emperor: The Royalist Shah: Penguin Satrap of Econ: Wulfharth Satrap of Diplomacy: Penguin Satrap of IA: Forgotpants https://politicsandwar.com/alliance/id=4823 https://discord.gg/An5zNBm the charter is work in progress

I hope this is going to come attached with some further cancellations, otherwise this is just more tying up the web.

o7 House Stark o7 Guardian #coupzygon

Daily Reminder to disband PnW and join NationStates

sorry pham but

The mircos' numbers have continued to rise ~•The Dawn of the Planet of the Micros•~ is now upon us, the age of the whale is coming to an end.

Ironically, this only further validates my argument, that there is no logical reason for the cutoff point to be 20 cities. 20 cities is a long term goal, its not something a new player will be realistically working towards. I offered a solution that would accelerate new player growth sub 10 cities and allow new players to get into the area where the majority of the active player base lies, faster, and it was shot down by the people pushing for this suggestion. Meanwhile no one has given any valid rationale for why 20 cities is a reasonable option for cutoff, nor have any other forms of retention improvement been suggested.

This will greatly devalue a lot of old player's sense of achivment, since it took them 3 years to get to 20 citys and then some nobody noob makes it there in 3 months thanks to boost he gets from alliance and cheaper prices.

Just because someone from BK suggests something doesn't make it automatically a bad idea to benefit them done entirely by sucking up to admin lmao. Grow up and lose the persecution complex KT. Anyway, I wouldn't be opposed to this on principle. As I recall, there was an adjustment to the cost of cities once before, a couple years back. (someone can go back and find a link I'm sure) It was done to address a similar issue, the increasing gap between the biggest nations and newer nations who weren't sticking around. So, there is precedent, which is probably why Alex isn't entirely opposed lol. Making cities marginally cheaper (as the formula Alex proposed would) is hardly gamebreaking and if it helps player retention, as the previous adjustment was aimed at, then why not. There are other options as well, but at the end of the day more people playing PnW is a good thing.

1. I don’t think that is exactly fair. Almost every alliance has poor player retention. 2. I don’t think this is fair either. For once I agree with Leo, none of the arguments against this have anything to do with the idea, just politics of the game. Of course this will help IQ, but it doesn’t necessarily mean we shouldn’t do it. @Alex would it be possible to give people who are in the gain now, a bonus for having cities. Maybe the difference between the city costs of then and now. You did something similar when you nerfed spies. Mentioning IQ and using KT as an example is literally making this about individual alliances.

I'm basically against this as it removes our excuse for not growing into the same tier as everyone else. We'll just get choked out at 20 cities.

Just throwing this out there, what if the timer to be able to build a new city was fluid? Aka you have a longer wait time per city.

Not to get off topic but this is really rich coming from you..... lmao.

A sad, but necessary loss. o/

I like Guardian. That’s all.

I disagree with city prices being nerfed. 1. Making cities cheaper will NOT actually have an affect on retention, might actually do the opposite. Many large players might actually end up quitting just because you are killing all the work and dedication they took by nerfing the hell out of city cost. 2. 20 cities is a crazy high amount and making it possible to achieve that in less than a year is just crazy, what about everyone that had to put cold hard dedication into this game? most whales take pride in being large through their dedication to the game and their sharp thinking on how to best set economy to max output. (maybe something like what Shifty recommended is more reasonable.). 3. There are nations with 10+ cities that aren't even 100 days old, this shows that its possible to make it to 20 cities within a year already if you push yourself to grow and think on your feet. 4. The way the economy currently works new players grow very quickly (daily login bonus, bonus for specialized resource production, higher prices for resources than in the past, alliances with such large banks that they can slap you up to 20 in just a couple of months, baseball "even though its just pocket change", among other things.) 5. just a little FYI, one of those players with 33 cities isn't even 3 years old. If he could make it to 33 cities in less than 3 years then why is it that you guys want to nerf cities even more? 6. If you actually want some more player retention then do something that makes the game more interesting (add more visual aspects to the game, add mini clips to battles, add more options for decorating your nation to make it more unique, add a leaderboard for all aspects of growth like land for example.) Basically there are many ways you can make this game a lot more interesting, but making everything cheaper isn't one of them.

Better idea: Reduce sub 2 city costs. It's so hard these days to afford cities, give the lil guys a chance Alternatively reduce the costs of city 1, that should help player retention

All you're doing now is proving their point about it taking a ridiculous amount of time. Think about it, you've been around for a year and half, and you're just getting to City 16. That's 1 city, every 35... 40 days? Not many new players will wait through that, and, in fact, at that current rate, you may very well hit city 20 right around your 'two year anniversary' as it were. Two years, to get to what is considered high tier in this game. Comparatively to other, free to play games out there, that's insane. Fair enough, this a niche genre and drawing comparisons by things within that genre is next to impossible, but here's a thing. There's a game called World of Tanks, now it also has an issue with player retention. The thing with WoT is, you can get to what's considered high tiers, within 3 months if you just play casually. Actually, if you spend more time than that, you can reach top tier in the game before even that. Not everyone necessarily want 20 cities, but alot of people would. The investment across the board, to get to 'high tier gameplay' in PW, compared to anything else, is absurd. Two years is approximately 1/11.5 of my currently lived lifespan. World of Tanks, and other games, can people dragging behind it for years and years, even after they reach the top tier and got nothing else to do it. Not small, niche, dedicated bases like PW has, either. Big ones. You can argue that you don't want progression to be that fast for a variety of reasons. Obviously someone getting to city 25 in 3 months would be unacceptable. On the other hand, taking 8x long to only end up 80% of the way there if you're lucky is absolutely preposterous, new players going in to a game don't daydream about what it's like in the middle of the pack. They daydream about leading the pack, and when your requirements for that is asking for years, in your case, it'll be nearly 2 unless it speeds up, just to get "Ahead of most" let alone to the front? It's not the only factor stopping retention or growth, not by a long shot. To pretend it does not matter is a farce. Not many people, even interested in this game, in nationsims, will stick around for that. About a week or so ago, a friend who fits that description, who i invited to the game, got into ADM, got them started with guides and all that, they deleted and left. This is somebody who is actually interested in this niche. Things take too long and go too slowly for the majority of people, even nerds who play every nation sim ever.

"Why are you making it political?" For the love of god, can we please cut the sh*t @IQ. You're really going to come out here, suggesting a decrease in city costs for "nations below 20 cities" and try and tell people its a non-bias suggestion and for the benefit of the game and not yourselves? I mean, you're entirely allowed to make a suggestion, even if it is terrible, unfair and won't help the issue you're framing it's all about. But please don't pretend that the suggestion isn't for your own benefit. This suggestion, is not going to help the whole thing you're making it about. Player retention in this game is because 99% of new nations join micros or don't join alliances at all. If BK or other established alliances have trouble with retention that is the failure of their government to keep their community interested in the game. BK has been leaking members like a bastard, so much to the point where you've had to merge three alliances into yourselves to maintain relevancy or an alliance at all. @Alex This suggestion is unfair to the hundreds who've worked and successfully learned the econ system. This is a bias suggestion from the leader of an alliance with the largest group of players, below 20 cities(shocker). It doesn't help the retention issue.

pot something something kettle Sorry, we members of the meme-machine cesspool of Admin pandering, inactivity, and incompetency have embraced the good ideals of equality laid out by our very own Black Knights Worker's Party. In our gommunist utopia, nobody will work a day and we'll all live like Kings! I don't always agree with Leo, but please don't attribute intent to his posts. I'm sure it's easy to make a case if you could just wave your hand and make his argument disappear, but that would be being dishonest, no? The suggestion may be a horrible one and the altruism argument may be a bit over-beaten, but with Sheepy expressing interest I see no compelling reasons against the theme of the proposal—maybe tweaking the numbers a bit since Sheepy is terribad and overshoots everything. Looking for an argument favoring the change outside of retention isn't too hard, either: Less money spent on cities means more money potentially spent on war—and we all love war. Maybe the community is terrible. I sure think so. However, while Sheepy can't force the community to be engaging for new players, he can certainly band-aid the mechanics of his dysfunctional game. Rather than using "muh IQ incompetence" as a blanket argument against change, why should this change not be implemented? Is it not fair, does it not have the intended effect, etc? The community was generally for reducing the impact of global radiation and for reverting Sheepy's deflation update because they disadvantaged newer players. Maybe there's a better method of doing so, but the fact that Leo made the post isn't an argument. no u

The game has a mechanic for newer players to catch up. There are diminishing returns for larger players, so most alliances have their larger players invest in smaller ones. Look at how long it takes a new player to reach city 10 compared to how long it took the first few players to. It is pretty flagrant for BK to suggest this in terms of the current ingame meta. It doesn't exactly surprise me, because a lot of people in IQ did the same thing trying to get Alex to change infra costs, but it's still pretty wretched.

There's only a small percentage of players in the upper tiers, and with the score system being what it is, those players can only directly engage in battle with other upper tier players. 'Being in the high tiers' is not at all equivalent to 'being more involved in the game' or 'being able to make meaningful contributions'.

This is a terrible idea. It's basically a fix for shitty econ management by AAs. Git gud scrubs. The solution to the slow growth problem is to join an alliance whose econ people know what they're doing. I've been here for eighteen months and I'm at 15 cities, going on city 16 because I joined an AA who know what they're doing. But sure blame the game mechanics for your inadequacies.

My nation is not even a year old and I have 17 cities. It's taking years to get to 20+ cities? Maybe if you don't actively pursure more cities, yes. Dramatically reducing the cost of cities to benefit those alliances that simply haven't put as much resources and work into growing their member's nations over the time and therefore punishing those who did? No, thanks.

So is this about alliance politics or player retention? Sketchy's idea is by far the best here, as it directly targets new player's growth. If an alliance pre-selects nations based on their cities, that's on them and their decision making. The fact that the initial idea was targeted to go up to 20 cities tells me that this is based on alliance politics (Yours) more so than new player retention. Most people are aware that BK has suffered from retaining players, its one of the reasons why the merges occurred to help clot that wound. BK/NPO are also known to strategically place nations at 14 cities, that this was done on purpose. Problem is with your initial idea is that many other alliances, some older than BK, some around the same age of BK, and some newer than BK - all have had growth in their nations just fine under the current economic system. I agree on the idea of retaining players, but the execution of the message makes me highly suspicious. Changing the system to cater to sub-20 city nations would be a massive slap to the current players who grew through this. That's why I like Sketchy's idea because it targets the first 10 cities, which is plenty enough to get a player situated in the current environment. --------------- The other issue I have with this particular request is the fact people assume it would retain players. I disagree with that entirely. It'll help them grow, sure, but if retention is something you want - that's entirely on the alliances themselves (All of us, as a community). Most new players will decide whether the game is worth while to invest time in or not within their first 5 cities of growth. Making it easier for them to climb to 10 cities won't make or break that decision. They'll see how slow this game progresses in general, the lack of community involvement, or the limited efforts they have unless the alliance they're in is at war (War is literally the only thing in this game that involves everybody). If they enjoy a community of players, they'll stick around regardless of how slow things are. We, as leaders in the game, just need to make sure they know the expectation of the game and keep up with them throughout the weeks/months of playing. Sidenote: I'm not entirely opposed to this. I agree that something should be done to help new players keep up with the older ones. I disagree with the "up to 20" cities bit, but I certainly won't turn it away either as I'll directly benefit from it myself too. Again though, Sketchy's idea actually targets new players where politics isn't involved, and it would massively help those micro alliances.

I have a better Idea what if we remove all nations that aren't fallout based from the game?

Ngl I did check the alliance to see if it was Islamic, but the Sassanids pre-date Islam by a decent margin. In fact, Muslim conquest contributed to the collapse of the Sassanid Empire. Y'all are good.

Congrats on your foundation. I see this is based on the Sassanid Persian Dynasty. For those that don't know, the religion at that time wasn't Islamic, but was instead Zoroastrianism. So, unfortunately, KT cannot use Islam CB. 3: