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Hollywood Productions 1 Hollywood Blvd Hollywood, CA 90028 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE August 5th, 2022 - Hollywood, CA - The halls echoed with the sound of his footsteps as the once revered Hollywood magnate Wizel Spielberg allowed himself one final tour of the Hollywood Productions studios. As he walked past empty offices and abandoned sets, Wizel reminisced upon the golden age of Hollywood Studios. The studio came to prominence with the instant success of its first film, Guns & Roses, followed by the blockbuster sequels Brawlywood and The Big $hort. Of late however, the studio hadn’t been faring as well as it once did. Critics reported that its recent pictures, The Battle of Los Angeles and The Knights Radiation, fell short of expectations, while pre-release viewers of the upcoming star-studded epic The Fault In Our Stars (working title) complained it felt derivative, with many heard commenting upon leaving test screenings across the country “I just feel like I’ve already seen this one before.” With such dismal pre-release reviews, The Fault In Our Stars was guaranteed to become a box-office flop. Having sunk all its capital into that movie’s budget, Hollywood Studios had no choice but to enter creditor protection. Studio management convened to look over the finances and decided the best route to profitability was to spin off certain assets and cut ties among some of its affiliated studios. After further discussions, it was decided that the newly spun-off Radiant Motion Picture Group, Grumpy Pictures, Guardian Films, The Oblivion Company, Immortals Cinema, Dank Meme Studios and [REDACTED] Films would sell off all their Hollywood assets with immediate effect. Public Relations Contacts: Grumpy Pictures Sweeeeet Ronny D Samwise Presidential Guardian Films Memph Synthesis JtTeE Vanek The Oblivion Company DtC Justice (Message for free money) Ockey1 Ockey2 Ockey3 Ockey4 Ockey5 Ockey6 Ockey7 Ockey8 Ockeynein Immortals Cinema Scratchy James the Volleyball Maks Maximillian Latsu Dank Meme Studios [REDACTED] Films O5-1: The Pilot O5-2: The Resurrected O5-3: Nine-tails O5-4: The Dreamer O5-5: The Spaceman Radiant Motion Picture Group Wizel, Chief Executive Officer Canbec, Executive Vice President BigMorf, Vice President - Public Relations Kyubnyan, Chief Technology Officer Lancelot, Chief Financial Officer WarriorSoul, Vice President - Corporate Security Modi, Vice President - Administrative Services TL;DR: TKR, BK, NW, Grumpy, Guardian, Oblivion and TI cut all ties amongst each other related to Hollywood sphere. Hollywood sphere comes to an end with immediate effect.

Sing along with us! In the spirit of friendship, mutual respect, and a desire for a new adventure, Name Withheld, Black Knights, and The Knights Radiant announce a new sphere, although the sphere theme and name is currently... withheld. Bye! Signed, Name Withheld The Knights Radiant Black Knights

Fog of war can be strategic if there are good ways to gain vision, i.e. making vision gaining a useful strategic decision. I dont think the current spy mechanics do that well. My suggestions, if you want a useful fog of war: Make gathered information shared - If you do a gather intelligence op, make it so that everyone in your alliance (or allied with your alliance) can see that information on the nation page. Reduce the cost of persisting vision - Currently if you get the spy count, the only reason it doesn't persist is because the game does not make any effort to allow it. Which is not a strategic decision, but just poor design which confuses and inhibits strategic decision making. - The cost of gaining vision is gather intel, but its the same for persisting it (i.e. gather intelligence again) which is too significant (e.g. compare to other strategy games, let's say you can build a structure to gain vision, it costs to build that structure but once you have it you don't need to keep building structures to have vision in that place) - if you have gathered intelligence, the information should stay up. - If your side has done a spy op, the results of that spy op should update the visible information (e.g. if the enemy has no spies, doing a kill spies op should update the visible spy count, or if you kill 10 spies, it should decrement the visible spy count) Other things to note: There currently isn't fog of war. The current mechanics just make it more difficult (not in a strategic decision making way, but in a tech/user interface way) which results in poor coordination and bad game balance. Given how many years it has taken for the greater than / less than odds to now be talked about, I don't feel confident that proper fog of war for spies can be added anytime soon. I think it would be more useful in a strategic sense to make spies public until that can be developed rather than persisting the pretend fog of war we have now. Edit: Expanding on updating enemy spy info - Any information to update/narrow the visible spy range of an enemy could be added - If an enemy gets caught doing a spy op against you - If your vision on the enemy says they have 30 spies one day, next day it could say 30-33 spies (or whatever their buy is) - If the success or failure of a spy op can narrow the range of enemy spies it could udate the info, so that there's no advantage to having 3rd party tools/automation. - Odds displayed could be based on your enemy spy info, not the exact spy count. e.g. if you know they have between 30-33 spies, it might say 70-75% success (or similar)

where is immortals, wonder what theyll do in the next 5 minutes

Thank god. I was sick of being allied to those filthy TKRers. They made me sick just being in the same room as them.

Alright THoF, Oblivion, Cataclysm, Gaurdian, and Grumpy im ready for the post

As a temporary fix? Sure make them public, but it would be nice to see a longer term solution that introduces more fog of war that can't be calculated

Prefontaine is horrible with polls. No explanation smh. Spy scraping/data mining is crashing the server pretty regularly, a LARGE portion of "why is the server so slow on a blitz when only 500 people are online?!" is from these scrapes. Spies very specifically. There's also the fact that established AA's know spy counts within a handful of queries - might as well let everyone see them imo.

While your at it, let’s go ahead and make everyone’s day change setting and holdings on their nation public as well. lol. The best spies are those who are hidden in plain sight!

Twas a pleasure, and onto better things!

Code the game better so people cant find the spies through scrapes.

Please, use, more, commas,

Guardian, Grumpy and Oblivion have decided upon completion of this last war, that we have accomplished everything worth accomplishing as members of Hollywood, Going forward we are creating a new bloc, to be referred to as GGO.

Looking forward to working with your crazy kids!

To my homies, much love❤️

It was one hell of a ride folks. Cya all on the other side.

Sheepy's code has a built in fog of war, you never know just what will break each new war.

Well, I guess it's time for firwof to crawl out of his sobbing corner this year to downvote without reading. I've argued with Alex in the past that the information should just be made public. There's many reasons this benefits everyone involved, though everyone will weigh them differently. So I'll lay them out in the order they come to mind instead of trying to organize them meaningfully. 1.) Balances the field for smaller alliances. Sure many people consider this a con, and I'm among them, but it's still a benefit for many alliances who do not have their own tech departments and therefore rely on sketchily coded bots that accidentally steal your entire bank, or restrict your access to them on a whim of the owner and their cronies. 2.) It makes already public information public in a controlled manor. Alex can do whatever he wishes to try and hide the spy formula, all it really takes is 1 person not selfishly using the code for themselves to just set up a public sheet for everyone in the game to see everyone elses spies, even if Alex implemented the 1k$ cost, I honestly just see this becoming the method of moving forward. All the major AAs just pool their funds into a central sheet, because funding a self-detrimental sheet is still better than having no information at all in wartime. 3.) Spies. Are. Worthless. (Sorry Rose, I know this is a personal attack). The vast majority of alliances, including top 10s can not coordinate the level of sophisticated strikes required to take advantage of a victorious spy war to turn a losing war into a stalemate. It took the collective efforts of more than half the game to accomplish this in any meaningful way. 4.) Just. Make. Spies. Public., God. > Can. You. Use. More. Periods. Please. - inb4 krampus

My thoughts exactly. Not sure why this wouldn't be the solution.

At this point all the big AAs have Excel sheets or Discord bots that can work out spies anyway, and free & open source bots are there for anyone else that can't code their own. If it's not realistic to stop the automation just make them public and save the poor server resources.

Yes. But just yours.

You gotta be kidding. Not only are we in a world where you display your exact military numbers to everybody, now we have to show exactly how many top secret spies we have. Next update can holdings and my password also be public?

There; I added some extras for you

Please, stop changing things post end, that are internal problems; isn’t it better, for all of us, if the actual causes of the problems are fixed, not covered, with, a bandaid?

So the actual problem is that people are using bots to figure out the spy totals and that is slowing the game down. That is some solid root cause analysis there. Ok dev team, go figure out how to fix that. How do the bots pull that data? Do they just refresh espionage screens over and over? if that is the case, just a quick thought, could you put a captcha that pops up every time you go to the spy screen, I think sheepy said something about charging 1000 dollars every time you go to the espionage screen?

What crack are you smoking and can I get some of it? If you are upset about hitting weak opponents you should speak to your leadership about it, as they generally only declare wars they know are layups. Weakened? Rose hadn't fought a war in about 6 months, and tS's last war was against us 4-5 months ago... We were either close to even or outgunned in every nation range besides i think 26-28 and 40+ going into this war. If by boring political move, you mean the match up just about the entire world wanted to see, then you are right. I guess its true what they say about opinions, they are like !@#$, everyone has one and they are full of shit.

In this game I feel like we spend alot of time complaining about changes that get made to the game, or things that break the game. While most of this criticism is fair, I feel like we should also take some time to acknowledge when you guys do good stuff. With that being said. In what is probably the greatest game change in quite some time, can I just send a hearty thank you to whoever came up with the idea to let use use k, m, b when depositing and sending stuff out from the bank. Holy shit is this 1k times easier than having to count out zeroes. (did you see what i did there?) Great job person that recommended this, and great job to Sheeps and his team for implementing it. Now if you could just undo that change that allows us to choose to use the nation name or the leader name when sending stuff out, that would be great.

Have fun you crazy whales

in my short time here, it was a blast being in this sphere with some really competent alliances/leaders. I wish everyone in HW success on their new paths as we split up.

It was fun y'all good luck to everyone.

Hollywood man… gone?

Enjoy the future, everyone!

Why not make everything private, add some mystery to blitzing? Kill military score and let everyone just hit blindly/ make it so Intel reveals troops. and get rid of chances on spy's. Irl nations don't always boost units why should we

This is yet another MA-related mechanic that has come under fire for being scuffed recently. Nowadays, most alliances can scrape how many spies and espionage odds. Making spies public just makes them more easily accessible to others. However, I believe the largest recurring issue continues to be how easily the server can be crashed. Making spy counts public may be a temporary solution to the current situation, but is not going to deter the servers from constantly crashing often. The real questions though to consider: How is this change going to affect future globals via the spy war? Or will a more efficient system replace it in the future?

Either make scrapping the count impossible or make spy counts public. I prefer the first option honestly. Though I agree the current system where ever single major alliance has access to spy counts via lagging the server needs to be fixed.

Just get rid of them. They’re basically loser weapons anyway.

Under the existing system, bots can already get your spy counts more often than once a turn if they so choose and it has not lead to insta-spying. The reason being if your nation only has one day's buy, your enemies can still successfully execute any spy op they want against you without having to spy them away. Best to let a nation get at least two days' buys of spies befote wasting a spy op to assassinate them. To be clear it's 1k times however many times a bot needs to pull odds to get your exact spy count. It's nothing that'd bankrupt any major alliance but it'd cost a few million to get a coalition's spy counts. Not just 1m.

Wouldn't it be more productive to address the ability to calculate spies? Making spies public may be a short term solution but isn't beneficial to the spy system in the long term.

Wait, you think fighting tBR is a hard war? You sad sad little fellow.

Here in The $yndicate we will always advocate for free trade! Market capitalization should take form in strategic timing and opportunistic products not limiting the economic freedom of our associates! The econ machine never stops(the real CB) and until we meet again on the battlefield Hollywood, we shall continue on seeing the margins and indexes increasing quarter after quarter. Dolla Dolla Billz Y'all

Feel free to keep embargoes on Kinns and Abracombre

I dont think this poll is useful. Units cost different amounts, they attack in different ways etc. For instance, soldiers cost $5 each, so they should always be weaker per unit than e.g. a plane which costs $4000 + 5 alu. If you wanted a balanced rock paper's scissors thing going, you'd have planes counter ground, ground counter ships, and ships counter planes (or similar). No matter how you "tweak" the casualty formulas, you won't be able to achieve this kind of balance, because it's a behavioral issue, not a weighting. Also, yes. Nukes/missiles need tp be buffed. Especially with the projects (id, vds), at higher city counts they become super irrelevant. Maybe nuke/missile buys can scale e.g. at 20 cities you can launch 4 missiles, and buy 4 each day, idk. (resistance / MAP would need to be tweaked for this to be workable)

You successfully detonated an explosive in Lyra, Andromeda, terrorizing civilians and destroying 1.67 infrastructure. dnn

We're working on it!

dnn

yes no, it's literally $1m IRL money

FOR PEOPLE WHO JUST WANT THE QUIZ AND DON'T CARE ABOUT THE ANALYSIS: https://hidude45454.github.io/alliancepersonalityquiz/ The TL;DR: 13 questions to give you an estimate of your top 5 and bottom 5 most/least similar alliances, maybe useful for players looking to join an alliance! 4 of those questions are based on my rough assessment of each alliance, and 1 is based on low-tier raiding rates (will cover both in detail below), so feel free to exclude those questions if you want. This is only semi-scientific so please treat as primarily entertainment Alliances Counted: All the alliances that I contacted were in the top 50 or training alliances of alliances in the top 50 (I separated training aas from main aas). Alliances that got back to me on my questionnaire (thank you to the respondents!): Rose, The Knights Radiant, The Syndicate, The Immortals, Cataclysm, The Fighting Pacifists, Eclipse, The Commonwealth, Bourbon Street, Grumpy Old Bastards, Guardian, Aurora, Carthago, Terminus Est, Weebunism, The Hand of Fate, The Legion, The Wei, Black Knights, Soldiers of Liberty, Dark Brotherhood, House Stark, Waffle House, Camelot, Name Withheld, Order of the White Rose, The Dead Rabbits, United Purple Nations, The Enterprise, The Elites, Federated States of Orbis, Serpentis, The Armed Peacekeepers, Arrgh, Farkistan, Church Of Atom, Global Alliance & Treaty Organization, Polaris, Hogwarts, Unforgiven Legion, United Socialist Nations, Yarr, The Federation, Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, Respublica Romana, Genesis, Sanctuary, Morningstar, Oblivion, Apollo, Otaku Shougaku, The Mortals, Convent of Atom, The Circus, The Cosmonauts, Daedalus, The Hive Pending alliances: None at the moment! Declined alliances: Advanced Syndicalist Mechanics This is a running quiz, meaning I will constantly be adding/modifying alliances and alliance results, so if you would like your alliance featured or would like your alliance values changed please send me a message or DM (I will include any alliances regardless of rank!) If you would like your final alliance description to be changed, please contact me as well! Alliance responses will be kept confidential. Methodology: 13 questions were chosen based on general traits and descriptions you may recognize each specific alliance for, including around areas of basic info, structure, community, and competence. I will provide a description of each question/trait below! 7 of those questions were picked based on factual information from each alliance, and the other 6 were directly taken from questions sent to an IA gov member, close contact, or leader in each alliance: The structure of the quiz was directly inspired from The Official Knights Radiant Order Quiz (AKA: the thing you take to get into TKR) and tl;dr no quiz site on the market had a way to set up a quiz like this on their own site so I legit just coded it and made my own site rofl. (I hope it looks okay) Potential downsides: some people may prioritize certain traits more than others, and that wasn't accounted for, but that would probably take a lot of additional effort to factor in. I will do it if people request it enough though. Some people also may prefer a Likert scale over a 100-point scale, but too bad :serious: Question/Trait 1: Size How it was measured: Each alliance was given a score averaged from its score ranking and its membership count ranking to give equal weight to both (this was done pre-militarization), and this score was compared to all other values. Potential downsides: This is just a heuristic and not any official measurement. Since main aas/training aas/extensions were counted separately, there may be some fuzziness with membership/score counts possibly combining between them. Question/Trait 2: Age How it was measured: The age of the alliance was calculated and compared to the age of other alliances. Potential downsides: Different people may perceive what "old" and "new" are differently depending on stuff like how long they've been playing the game. Question/Trait 3: Competency [HIDUDE-BIASED] How it was measured: Each alliance was given a grade based on my assessment of their general war performance, and this grade was converted into a score. Potential downsides: My assessment is obviously biased in this aspect (although I think it's pretty good), and also the grade can't perfectly be converted into a score. Question/Trait 4: Profile [HIDUDE-BIASED] How it was measured: Each alliance was given an estimated value based on my assessment of how public or visible the alliance tries to be and/or is made so by the community. Potential downsides: Same as above, my perception of profile will be different than other people's. Question/Trait 5: Exclusitivity, Question/Trait 6: Maturity, Question/Trait 7: Technology, Question/Trait 8: RP, Question/Trait 9: Activity, Question/Trait 10: Community How it was measured: These were directly copied from the responses alliance representatives gave me. Potential downsides: Due to me keeping responses anonymous, alliances may not have had a perfect baseline to compare their responses to, and also may have felt the urge to inflate certain values to make themselves look more desirable, although I can't know to what degree. Still, I think people did the best job they could answering these. Question/Trait 11: War Rate [HIDUDE-BIASED] How it was measured: I counted the number of offensive wars each alliance has declared in the past two years and translated that into a rough assessment of how they prefer to fight. Potential downsides: Same as above, my perception of war will be different than other people's. Question/Trait 12: FA Leadership [HIDUDE-BIASED] How it was measured: I gave a value based on my assessment of each alliances' major/macro/micro status and how much they participated in FA discussions. Potential downsides: Same as above, my perception of FA presence will be different than other people's, especially since I obviously don't have a full picture here. Question/Trait 13: Raid Rate [LOW-TIER RAIDING] How it was measured: I wrote a script (pre-war) to measure every alliance's number of wars C10 and below for the past month, and counted the number of members C10 and under to get a number of wars declared per person: This rate was compared to other rates and given a value. Potential downsides: As you can see, a lot of big alliances have 0s, primarily because they don't have any members C10 or below. This is why I made the low-tier raiding question optional in my quiz. Percent Similarity Calculations: For all % similarities I displayed, I calculated the Euclidean distance between a user's responses and the responses of each alliance, and divided by the max possible Euclidean distance to get a "dissimilarity" score, which I could convert into a similarity percentage. (Not the most scientific way of doing it, but there are a bunch of different methods of doing it too that I considered not applicable, although feel free to suggest another way of doing it) Alliance Comparison: I decided to take my data one step further and compare alliances with each other to see the most similar and least alliances to each alliance. In order to do this, I also created separate categories of classification for comparison: General: includes all alliance traits. Alliance Structure: how an alliance's government is set up and how the alliance runs in general. For example, democracies may run differently than dictatorships, and older alliances may run different than newer ones. Includes traits #1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, and 13. Impact: how much of an impact an alliance strives to have on the game as a whole. More impactful alliances generally seek to have a greater public image or FA sector and/or can punch above their weight during war. Includes traits #1, 3, 4, 9, 11, 12, and 13. Community: what type of community each alliance has. Based on the responses I got from representatives. Includes traits #5, 6, 8, 9, and 10. Competence: the military or political ability of each alliance. Includes traits #3, 4, 5, 9, and 11. Seniority: the age and experience of each alliance. For example, more senior alliances are older in age (duh), may have more mature members, and focus more on non-PnW discussion, and vice versa for newer alliances. Includes traits #2, 6, and 10. You can see how each alliance stacked up here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FerD_fKtu-5kdxDGlTYRo23eAWmyM2VdS09mFsW-LaQ/edit#gid=822663440 Grouping Alliances: Finally, I decided to group all alliances as a whole for fun. This was done through a process called dimensionality reduction so that I could reduce a 13d question space into a 2d space easily interpretable by humans. First, I processed question data and performed PCA on it. The tl;dr of what PCA does is it uses your original responses as "weights" in order to determine a combined set of important generalized features of each alliance. Here is a percentage graph of how significant each feature was in the final calculation: And here's how each question "weight" or factored into each of the first three features: Finally, in order to arrange all the alliances into identifiable groups, I picked an optimal number of groupings to use by processing the data using an elbow method for clustering: Using that, I decided to create about 4 separate groups. Using the chart generated from PCA, I clustered into 4 groups using K-means clustering in order to get this final chart: Here, you can see some interesting results and kind of see how each alliance got grouped, even though some questions may not have covered those traits directly! Light Blue: this seems to be a grouping of generally higher-tier or more exclusive older alliances. Pink: this seems to be a grouping of mostly lower-tier or mid-tier alliances that I can only graciously describe as "mid" lmao. Most of them belong to Backrooms/Johnsons/HM. Dark Blue: this seems to be a grouping of mostly lower-tier alliances that are either fairly new/low-profile or training alliances. Red: this seems to be a grouping of mostly mid-tier alliances that often have long histories or who are fairly established and well-known in-game. Final Thoughts I certainly learned a lot from this entire process, both from the coding aspect and finding out more about each alliance! Thanks to all the people who read through the entire way, and I hope results are to people's liking Again, please contact me if you would like your alliance values added or changed! Changelog 5/22/22: -Fixed descriptions for WH, TI, TEst, and USN -Obfuscated code -Added shareable embed/image options for Discord or Slack -Added Hive 5/23/22: -Fixed description for R&R

Announcement from the Church of Atom The Church is declaring victory after Papal intelligence services confirmed that Hollestial has indeed disbanded. Our primary objective has been achieved. We will continue a limited special military operation against TKR as they have wide swaths of infrastructure that need to be deinfratized. We thank the community for all it's support and will continue to work to make Orbis a better place!

You know something has gone horribly wrong when: HoF and tS are blitzing together Rose and Jaden are agreeing with each other Camelot and Carthago upvote the same post Akuryo and Firwof share the same sentiment HW and Rose are staying out of it I can only wish you all the best of luck!

Sorry but it absolutely rules that there are little micros doing shit like this all the time No protectors, no top 50 involvement, just vibes