Alex

How did you guys complete the tutorial, and when? There was a bug where you wouldn't get the money if you bought the 1,000 soldiers out of turn. I thought I had it fixed, however. I'll update both your nations to give you the missing $100,000 and then I'll double check my fix.

Economic policies affect your tax rate and average income, social policies are just for show. If you combine the economic policies and social policies you do get a sort of "political compass".

I was just thinking about ways to expand the "politics" aspect of the game. This is an idea that occured to me: Let's group nations by continent. Each continent will have a "Continental Congress" composed of 5 members, which would be elected by the nations on that continent. They would have the power to post some sort of continental announcements that would be pushed out to all nations on the same continent, and also have the ability to impose trade sanctions on nations, alliances, or other continents. Any sort of sanction would require 3/5 approval of the members of the congress. Elections would be held every 2 weeks perhaps. This would add another element to the game that wouldn't necessarily revolve around alliances, and would add a lot to the idea of "trade warfare". Feedback?

Forewarning: I didn't read this whole thread and only wanted to throw my 2c in on a couple of posts here, which I've quoted. Also, don't hate me if I disagree with you. Reminds me of the US Civil War. The south was better trained, Lee was a better general, but Grant had more troops and was willing to let them die. You should check out the Hegemonic Stability Theory - It's a really interesting idea. Basically it states that the reason other nations don't spend so much on military is because they don't have to -- we do it for them. We are the "police" who keep everyone from fighting each other. Theoretically, if we cut our spending and let everyone try and take care of themselves there would be a lot more conflicts. So long as one nation has a big enough military that no one else can mess with them, they set the 'rules', and we can pretty much force everyone to play nice with each other (granted I'm not talking World Peace here, we still have conflicts, but we haven't seen a WW3 yet since we've been the dominating superpower). In my opinion we need to be the giant presence we are around the world - without us things could be a lot worse.

It's an easy thing for me to fix, I just wasn't sure what you'd rather have. The resources vary between north and south america.

There is a limit - You will only be able to get one "bonus" donation per month, regardless of the amount you pay.

Honestly, I'm not too fond of the % bonus idea for donations. It sounds fair for every player, because they get the same % bonus, but it seems to me the little players would rather pay $15 for a donation to a very large nation, who might reap an extra $100m over X weeks instead of their own nation who might reap $1m over X weeks, and then have the big nation just cut them some of that money. This wouldn't really be "fair", people would be able to abuse the system. I think hard donation amounts ($1m, $3m, whatever) are fairer all around, and the city reset timer donation option is something more appealing to a big nation. As for really expensive donation options, I have no problem with them being available ($50 donation, $75 donation, whatever) as long as they're not really much better than a cheaper price ($25 or $35). If someone is wealthy and wants a few extra million and is willing to pay an extra $25, I have no problem with it.

Yes, I added checks to see if you had already met the requirements for each step, and if you had it would advance you to the next one. You have to refresh the page, though. Refresh the page.

I don't have access to the servers or anything, but as far as I know things are working fine. I haven't experienced any issues myself. Vincentsum8 reported that he gained resources but not money, which means the script had to have ran. I suspect it may have just been a user error not a script error.

It's not a way around a restriction, if you're level 30 you can found an alliance. Should we force players to stay in alliances they've founded? I don't think so.

It's important because otherwise you could buy a whole bunch of troops, do a couple attacks, and then sell them off before you ever had to pay upkeep or feed them, etc.

It's a matter of coordinates, I had to set the boundaries around each continent as "boxes". If you want your nation to be considered in North America I can change it for you manually.

I've updated the tutorial a bit so you can advance through pretty much all the steps (it's possible I missed one or two, in which case you should let me know) even if you didn't follow the steps exactly. So long as you meet the requirements it should advance you (you might have to refresh the page in some instances).

Being penalized for cheating is not based so much on activity from the same network, it's based on suspicious activity. Things like sending all your money away, fighting against the same opponents, etc. Now these things on there own may not necessarily be grounds for cheating, as it's important for players to work together. But it's a big red flag when a new nation is made and sends all it's money away in the first 15 minutes and then never logs in again. In a circumstance like that, it doesn't really matter what network that nation logged in from, it's still cheating regardless.

You can't "field a military without paying it's upkeep", you trigger a debt boolean that wreaks all sorts of havoc on your nation if you don't pay your bills. Probably not too many, but I'm sure a few would. --- Revising the donation options is not a bad idea, and perhaps adding more options would be a good thing. Perhaps: $15 - $1,500,000 added to your nation (available in September) $25 - $3,000,000 added to your nation (available in October) $25 - Reset City/Project Timer (available in September) $35 - $6,000,000 added to your nation (available in November) $45 - $12,000,000 added to your nation (available in December) Would something like this be more fair?

There's no reason it shouldn't work at that time, it's set to simply run every 2 hours.

Your new login and display name is "Vlad the Implier"

Normally, you would request a name change in the Mod Requests forum, but I'll go ahead and just do it for you now.

This would probably be better, 30 minutes turns for 4x the speed, although I'm not sure if a 3 month gameplay is necessary. Maybe 2 months, I suppose it doesn't really matter.

The 30 score limit is more or less an arbitrary thing anyway to ensure we don't have all sorts of players joining the game, creating an alliance with just themselves, and quitting shortly thereafter. All of those "one man alliances" affect game mechanics, such as the color stock bonus, and I'd like to see as little of that sort of manipulation as possible.

Right, and this is one of the reasons why I'm not even letting people donate for those bonuses this first month. I am against any sort of subscription to pay the game, because many players don't even have credit cards or a method of payment. The game is free to play for all, and we should be able to raise more than enough money to support it through donations and advertising. The fact that the game is more fun with more players means we should encourage more people to play (by not charging them to do so) which will in turn make the game more fun for everyone else, and make them more willing to donate.

I'm working on making it more like this. No, you need to buy 100 infrastructure to advance to the next step.

I completely agree that a pay to win game is not what we want here. It's why I haven't pushed to monetize the game thus far, and even at this point the donation options I mentioned are not available yet (won't be available until September). I tried to do my best to come up with a fair balance between in-game bonus and monetary cost. Advertisements help, but until we have over a thousand active players the amount of money earned is minuscule, around a dollar or two per day. The donation options I brainstormed I thought would be fair because the cash bonus is helpful for new players, and the city reset timer is helpful for older players. However, I'm totally open to changing donation options to something more fair and balanced -- perhaps you could help me brainstorm ideas? What kind of bonuses would you guys like to see for donations aside from just cash or a city reset timer? Reagan mentioned some sort of bonus, I suppose a donation for a "10 day 10% income bonus" or something would be feasible as well and perhaps not so 'gamebreaking'. Feedback?

What part of it would be cheating?

You're welcome.