Danzek

I think Thalmor sums it up perfectly, but yeah, I'm only speaking on my time playing the game, basically post NPOLT. I wasn't here back then, so I don't have a complete picture of things.

I mean, the main thing about minispheres is first to have mini spheres. Two spheres which are not mini and being much larger than the others and then on top of that having a NAP and MDP is the opposite. The point of minispheres is to create more opportunities and dynamics rather than for example; locking us into some bipolar political situation. Having spheres put aside grudges that locked us into repeating situations can be in service of creating new opportunities and dynamics. Again, the two larger spheres having an MDP and NAP does the opposite, it reduces opportunities, reduces possible dynamics and creates a situation of them, with 60% of the game whales, in a distinct position to the rest of the game. The Knights Radiant has been one of the biggest impediments and critics of minispheres. Notably with the formation and continuance of quack, then of hollywood, and now this. I'm sure you have to put up a front, but you're being incredibly disingenuous both with your definition of what minispheres are, and trying to lecture others on it.

idk man. The forums and public chats get get a bit toxic, and some people can be pretty boastful when they have the upper hand. It's really not a big deal, it happens every war, but having a sense of disempowerment isn't great I guess? /shrug

Just because you haven't seen anyone from your sphere call clock out, or telling others to go cry/seethe/cope/eat shit etc. (or refuse to beleive your eyes, idk) doesn't mean they haven't. Orbis just had the whole, "NAPs are bad we should stop having them after every global" discussions, Justinian? (iirc) from your sphere did a post about it? Anywho, general sentiment being that it leads to stagnation. And then you go and sign a NAP and an MDP with the other largest bloc without having even fought a war. A "temporary" treaty signed again the next time you perceive a threat is not temporary. Morf doesn't want to commit to this being a one time thing, ergo, it's not temporary. Not to mention that there's large pushback against even the hint of normalizing these kinds of treaties. > "unlike what is coming towards us." lmao

So, chaining Rose was a concession to T$ they wanted at the last minute. Your leadership knew this full well before this post by Keegoz, but then pretended it didn't so they could externalize all blame for their consolidation. There was no evidence or reason to believe clock would do it again. You're already the largest sphere, with 2v1 whale tier advantage over clock. Let's go over your "effectiveness of chaining into a demilitarized sphere". So what, spending hundreds of billions fighting another war is an effective way to reduce your infra? If infra shredding was so effective, everyone could just be selling it, hell, that'd be cheaper than fighting a global for it. And yeah, no doubt pulling a Rose isn't effective milcom strategy. Obviously you want to have your cake and eat it too. But your sphere had plenty of other alternatives that they didn't even try at before choosing to consolidate 60% of the game's whales against what probably was a non threat. Partial militarization is out, obviously, even though 2 buys from max in upper tier is likely sufficient. Because god forbit HW spend a cent on preparedness. Paying clock? Or hiring another alliance such as HoF, Circus etc instead of going full hegemon? Same issue, costs a shred of income. Spending some sort of influence or concession? Did your sphere even make the calculus that the reputational hit and blowback and from the MDP was less than what they'd lose to a lesser more palatable agreement? Essentially to achieve the same claimed goal of stopping clock from chaining? Trying to get accurate intel on clock's intentions? Effort. Blegh, why even do more FA with clock over their chaining when you can just do an end run around game threats by signing celestial. Your leaders say they want a fair fight, and then do everything possible to do the opposite and try to reframe a fully milled HW having a war of its choosing against a smaller sphere is fair.

I think it was pointed out by kev, but TKR chained from surfs up to hit Opus Dei in npo's last time and they stayed milled after the last ride, secretly formed HW and chained to blitz Rose in Guns & Roses. the notion that chaining is some new game breaking meta that needs to be shut down by the two biggest spheres is stupid.

Tanks, planes, ships aren't 3 days like soldiers fyi, so you'd still be able to get air superiority, ground control and a blockade. You mentioned your enemy has no dockyards, so you can just naval beige them faster, since they wont be able to get an IT on ground with a double buy (assuming you have military). Also, on a new 800 infra city, your enemy wont have the population to do a full buy. Anyway, just be in an alliance and get counters on your pirate friend, ezpz.

I'd prefer to see a city cost increase for low tier, and a large discount exclusively for city 40+, that way the peasants can know their place

this is dumb mars, I know you hate me, and have falsely reported me/my bot in the past, and have a feeling you went out of your way to get others to as well we never really hashed things out unfortunately, though I'm not sure what I could say. it's just a game, you dont need to cultivate a grudge against me? spanky, man, seriously? I know things have been hostile for weeks. I still gotta talk to riddler about this. You accused me of couping you a couple weeks ago in public, didn't happen. And threatening to try getting me banned if you didn't get what you wanted, which I totally ignored - apparently this is what you meant and now you've have been nonstop throwing wild accusations around in public to see what would stick... what's with all the theatrics? (rhetorical, i've said this already, i'm just venting on the forums) if you have to ask, no, I didn't try to frame NPO - it was bluster, in private for those that don't know since it never really caught on, one of the NPO revisionist narratives was alex & me framing them, doesn't have to make sense none of this can be substantiated so I dont see the point, I guess you tarnish my reputation, thanks.

maybe I'm misremembering bio class Parasite an organism that lives in or on an organism of another species (its host) and benefits by deriving nutrients at the other's expense. but seems to me, a virus is not an organism (not a cell, or cells), it is not alive, and arguably does not derive nutrients (a virus reproduces by hijacking a cell, which is external). CDC - Parasites - About Parasites anyway, off topic, so... schrute bad, wtf = loot pinata

Virus, not a parasite. But I hear it was originally going to be named after a greek letter like Omicron, or Alpha and that the alliance is all multis. /s

Bots: Obviously useful. At the end of the day it's a tool, and it automates tedious aspects of finding targets and running an alliance. I keep hearing similar arguments, but imo gatekeeping piracy by saying its not real piracy or they shouldn't play if they use tools is dumb. People should be able to play however they want. The argument essentially boils down to "you shouldn't use a calculator to do math, or shouldn't depend on a car for getting places because reasons". Piracy is already niche. imo, you're gonna keep having difficulty appealing to casual players unless you put effort into making piracy more accessible to them. And there seems to be the false impression with raid tools. My experience is that members declare more wars, and have more time to spend on discord talking to each other when they aren't spending that time hunting for targets. The flipside of that would be having a coherent milcom gov giving people targets - as any major alliance will do in wartime. In Arrgh's case, that would be giving people raid targets. I think many alliances have gone the route of having members find their own raids/wars, and having raid tools because it's tedious having milcom gov do that manually, especially for a pirate alliance that wars/raids all the time. The notion tools are only for IA and that milcom has little use of for it, seems like a fairly braindead assessment. Profit: something something, "how ridiculously easy it actually is" "profitable piracy is a dead business" - seems contradictory. but k. I mean, to each their own, but having a strategy is generally why many people play and enjoy strategy games, and making profit is kinda an integral part of doing stuff in the game, like buying cities. Probably not much use in pointing out that one of the three pillars of piracy is profit (or plundering as it says on the Arrgh page). Rejecting that completely seems at the very least... odd. sorta like someone who's been stuck in a situation long enough that they've grown used to it, and tell themselves its actually better. I forget what that's called. Normal alliances have the potential to make profit raiding cut back because of various DNR / raiding restrictions. This is done to protect their precious infra. Arrgh doesn't have that, so theoretically having all these otherwise untouched targets you are allowed to raid should be a boon for raiding profit - and yet that opportunity is more or less squandered (looking at raid profit stats) High tier raiding is dead: Yes. Mechanics have changed. KT and mythic have left piracy. Other pirate alliances have cropped up though. imo, high tier raiding using the same outdated strategies is dead. Gotta adapt. I never had too much issue raiding in high tier, though I am fairly active. Kinda got in the way of running the offshore and all, so I'm not right now - but profit was never the issue. Also, this might be a big revelation to everyone in Arrgh, what with your entire alliance having a city revenue of $21m, but... you know you don't have to have a shit city build whilst raiding..? Infra gets damaged, but buildings do stay. Meaning you can double dip and make both a reduced city income AND raid income. Organization: Arrgh is all about anarchy. I get that's the playstyle you want, but the lack of coordination is a pretty big impedement to the KT-like mass raids the game likes to see. Obviously there's some middleground - especially if you want to appeal to more casual pirates, but I think going a pure anarchy route instead of finding a middleground wouldn't lead anywhere favorable. Training/Mentoring: Haven't heard much, so I'll assume Arrgh's academy and mentoring program is mostly non existent. e.g. half the alliance being inactives is a sign of a slacking IA gov: Things might be different if competence & mentoring was taken more seriously. Funding Wars: Amateurs talk tactics. Professionals talk logistics. or whatever the saying is. So.. looking at the stats, some members make profit, others don't. Overall its a wash though. Normal alliances fund wars by taxes & city revenue. A pirate alliance would thus likely want to fund wars through a war economy. Not having taxes, city revenue or a war economy, and embracing that fact.. k. Sailing low and avoiding conflict: Seems like a fairly condescending thing to say to the other pirate alliances, which have all participated in wars and have decent member participation when doing so. I suppose it's easier blaming external factors like game mechanics and what not, but imo there are other more apparent reasons.

Uh, not that I care, but who's the target audience for premium nuking services at city 4?

Simons used to be high gov in an alliance and connected to locutus - before they rerolled. The 1 shared network is likely that network from a while ago.

It's a very cheap project that provides better revenue than the other resource projects would to a new nation. No clue what people are expecting when they say it's useless, a $500k project that doubles their nation revenue? Of course with project slots being so limited, i'd much prefer something aimed at raiding / war.

Nations on beige (or gray) don't pay taxes, so if you can beige cycle an enemy, they wont be paying any taxes. Typically its the losing side that ends up being mass blockaded, so I don't know if this helps from a game balance perspective. Plenty of things in this game don't make irl sense, from nukes not killing any units and only 2 buildings, ships being 30 tons etc.

Edit: nvm, it got peaced. War link: https://politicsandwar.com/nation/war/timeline/war=1069556 I believe its against the rules to declare on someone in your own alliance, correct me if i'm wrong. 20m19s ago: Biohazard left Cataclysm | HEIR 09/15 02:17 am - Biohazard declared war on Seven Seas for the reason of "I'm real sorry man". 09/15 02:23 am - Biohazard applied to join the alliance Cataclysm. Something went wrong! You've received the following error(s): That nation, Seven Seas, is currently involved in 3/3 defensive wars. Please wait until at least one expires before declaring a new war.

These mechanical changes aren't solely beneficial to a losing nation. These all seem designed to make it a lot more difficult (or rather, impossible) to take someone's military down and keep it down, which'll make it much harder to defeat nations with more cities/military. It also reduces the games already simple strategy, since this would remove any kind of beige cycling. If that's the case, imo there should be other mechanisms so at least people with more coordination can be rewarded for their efforts. What i'd like to see: If you are kept blockaded and run out of resources, you should still have options for fighting, albeit in a diminished capacity It should be easier to break or bypass blockades The kinds of attacks a losing nation does should be buffed (without severely changing the dynamics for everything else) Ideas: - Allow buying and using soldiers without power, but they are weaker or the cap is much lower - Increase soldier tank kills, but also casualties to other soldiers - Some mechanism for receiving funds when blockaded (with some costs and limits associate with doing so) - Reduce navy rebuy to 3 days (maybe increase naval MAP usage and navy losses to air as a debuff for this?) - Have utter failures destroy some amount of infrastructure (though much less than a successful attack)

Your ally, TO, protecting dusty after he coups alliances, also very classy. Waffle House formed a few days ago, global was already happening.

So true. I also think its incredibly unfair we have a project for pirates, Pirates Economy, but none for farmers. Kinda unbalanced we don't have a project called farmers economy that reduces defensive slots

Couldn't you could have other brackets than the default? Was that back when you could tax grays? Because setting someone to/from applicant doesn't reset your seniority. Crazy. What's next, spies not havng score? Yep. Would allow for good 100/100 tax farms though.

dunno. It seems like a separate issue in that its a ponzi scheme only held up by the systemic issue of actually converting those stocks and cashing out. the cash from the original sale of the shares was embezzled on their other ventures / buying cities or whatever, or wasted it on dumb stuff like sending schrute's 1b offshore to 4 different people and paying off pirates

I hope we can keep in touch. Farewell, and best of luck in life. ❤️

Sorry. I know this is no-discussion, but I feel that my transparency in this would help. > I'm guessing this is the point of Borg having control of so many nations, to circumvent restrictions, otherwise why isn't Borg just operating the bank themselves? I am doing this because people want to use my bank/alliance management tools. Its very convenient to do things through discord, especially since the game doesn't natively have a way to track and verify individual nation's deposits / loans / grants. I can't operate this myself, because I AM NOT IN THOSE ALLIANCES. There is no feasible way for a script running via my nation to perform the necessary bank or alliance actions. > Borg does have the login information in order to control the banking operations performed by these nations, otherwise how else would this be accomplished? The usernames and passwords are salted and encrypted in a database which is queried only via prepared statements. Unfortunately it can't hash the passwords since it needs to unencrypt it to perform the logins. > are these players entirely operating their nations via this management tool/script/bot and thus perpetually sharing an IP and user agent? No. The script is solely for bank/alliance management. > what operations this tool is performing and whether or not these operations are initiated by a human or potentially entirely automated? !EditAlliance - change alliance control panel settings !mail - send an ingame message !checkmail - check ingame messages and post to discord !modifytreaty - modifies a treaty ingame (e.g. cancel it) !sendtreaty - sends a treaty ingame !setrank - sets a nations rank !transfer - sends funds !grant - same as transfer, sends funds (but as a grant) !checkup (does IA audits - doesn't do anything ingame except scrape stuff from the alliance page) !taxbracketsheet - generates a sheet of player's tax rates !SetTaxRate - set a player's tax rate !SyncTaxes - fetches the tax logs and adds them to the database The checking / sending of ingame mail is automated. Everyone runs recruitment bots. > But can you tell the difference, or do the developers just have to give you the right answer when you enquire about it? Opening the game at a school, university, or even a mobile network (with a shared IP pool) can result in this (to name a few). You yourself have (incidentally) been on the same network as 7 other people in the past https://politicsandwar.com/index.php?id=178&nation_id=220948 Ultimately, the kind of information required to differentiate between legitimate usage is only something the game admin has access to. (i.e. Due to privacy laws like GDPR) > Are these nations always controlled from the same IP and user agent? Only the banking/alliance management tools via the bot occur on the same network. Their normal ingame activity will use their own network. > Do you permit anyone to handle wars for any of these accounts now I would assume that would not be permitted (though I guess up to alex how he wants to interpret the rules). Regardless, I do not want be controlling people's wars or playing the game for them. This is solely for bank/alliance management. > Can you tell what actions a player initiates and what might be entirely clever automation? Theoretically it should show up in network logs e.g. what IP address was used when the declare war page was requested. I would expect these network logs to be kept for 30 days before automatic deletion. I don't think there's an easy way to provably differentiate between what you define as "cleverly automated" and performed by a person. Alex could ask to be added as admin on all those alliance's discords maybe - though this is wholly irrelevant to the original report of multis. Plenty of alliances, including yours, have tools for the game - the only difference is that I am sharing. Its worth noting - besides 99a/space invaders - my alliance has no ingame ties with the other alliances (and I would assume, actively raids them). I am not compensated for the tools - though I suppose you would only have my/the alliance leader's word on that. > Doesn't your current approach just establish a really good arrangement for multi rings to operate under? these tools are things I've asked the game mods about. Alex has ways to verify whether e.g. a war declaration - occurred on the same network, by checking network logs. So no, its not a good way to avoid a ban if you have multis. Besides, the amount of effort, not just in making the tools for these alliances to use, but involving in a multi ring... the gov, all the people who have known each other for potentially years? I can give you a list of the discord's for the alliance gov/leaders you can talk to. So you can better understand the scope of the multi conspiracy you are accusing me of. imo, if someone wants to create a multi, I would imagine using a vpn, or tor would be a simpler approach.

Its banking / alliance management tools which I freely offer people in this game through locutus. These actions are triggered by respective gov members of those alliances using commands on discord. I'm confident network logs can corroborate that other ingame actions were not done on the same network. That trade is from before that account was using said tools (and thus on the same network) - so is irrelevant. Nations flagged on the same network are prevented from trading. @Alex would verifying be necessary to clear this up?