Exalts

Then you must make your peace that it's possible the design team ceases to be. I can't claim to know what specific factors are making it difficult to do anything without a team lead although I get that some members of the team are being difficult. As tempting as it is to simply leave them out of the conversation if they are not interested in contributing, you and I both know it's not viable or realistic. Some authoritative figure may be needed, but I don't think you'll get Alex to cut on that matter, and I don't know if others like @Dr Rush have the authority to do anything about it either.

I strongly believe that in times of stagnancy, waiting for a messiah to bring you out of your dormancy is not the solution. I've already said as much in different channels, but it doesn't hurt to coin it again. What the design team needs is not necessarily an elected, official design team lead, what it needs is someone to step up and take the reins of the team, someone who can talk to both other members of the team, as well as the dev team. That person would have the undesirable albeit essential role of creating necessary discourse, hearing everyone's views, being able to separate personal bias from the task at hand, reaching agreement if not consensus (it seems in this case consensus is not an achievable objective), and discussing agreed upon changes with the dev team. It's a tall ordeal, it's not fun, it's a lot of time to sink into a voluntary project like the design team, but it is essential all the same. You would be very surprised how easily people rally behind others just because they're stepping up when no one else will, even if that person doesn't have the fancy official design team leader title. Be the change you want to see, or don't, you can hope for Alex to get out of hibernation and do something about it also. Don't be surprised if nothing changes if you choose to wait however. Edit: I realize that this whole "step up!" notion is being rejected as a whole, but really, when you've been appointed to the design team, the understanding was that Alex delegated the role of driving the design of the game to you. Similarly to the dev team, they've been delegated with the mandate of pushing updates to the game, that the design team wishes to push through. You don't need Alex, you don't need an official lead. This will fall on deaf ears from some I'm sure, but you've got two options here: do nothing pending Alex doing something about it, which we all know is not happening anytime soon; or be responsible and try to do something in spite of the circumstances. Are you truly okay waiting for someone who may never do anything about it? If Alex doesn't address this until mid-2024, is that truly okay with you?

I'd love to say that removing city timers up to c20 is a good thing, but the realist in me knows better. This would lead to players being held at low city counts to raid until they can build up to city 20 all at once, which is not ideal for player retention. It's probably a good thing, but I'm not sure whether the drawbacks outweigh the benefits.

Some positive, some negative: - Recklessness: Both you and your opponents suffer 25% additional casualties in attacks you initiate. - Warrior Culture: Your soldiers deal 25% more damage. Additionally, each daily reset, 10% of your population joins as soldiers, up to 20% of your maximum soldier count. However, your maximum tank count is reduced by 25%. - Renewable Energy Initiative: Wind power plants now provide power for up to 1000 infrastructure levels, but they now use 1.2 tons of aluminum per day (0.1/turn) for maintenance. - Briberies: Blockades no longer stop you from trading with the global market or your alliance bank, however 20% of everything you trade is shared evenly with your blockaders. - Triumphs: Whenever you win a war, you earn 200% of your next turn of income (expenses excluded) and your approval rating increases by 5%, however you lose 40% more loot upon getting defeated (from 10% base to 14%) - Public Enemy: Every $1,000,000 in bounties against your nation (rounded down) increases your gross income by 1% (up to 20%), however you will automatically set a bounty upon yourself of $1,000,000 every five daily resets. - Bunker Nation: You suffer 5% less infrastructure damage from attacks, but that damage is instead inflicted to your land. - Shared Burden: While your population is starving, you suffer 20% less casualties from all sources, but your gross revenue is decreased by an additional 33%. - Ocean of Men: You can recruit 20% more of each unit every daily reset, but your units inflict 10% less damage. - Tourism State: Your raw and manufactured resource production are decreased by 10%, but you earn 20% additional income from commerce when at peace, or 10% when at war. Only positive: - Quick Permits: Your city/project timers are reduced by 50% - Land Rents: You earn additional gross income equal to your land area every turn. If I have other ideas later, I'll edit this post. I've been here for over an hour now, I want out. Devs, do with these perks as you would. Change them, rename them, add dependencies, I'm just the idea guy, not the smart balancing guy. Cheers~ ☕

If you make the bonus decrease by 10% of the bonus per city after 10, then building new cities effectively makes your revenue not move, and I don't think that's a good thing. Instead, the game should further incentivize raiding. If you really want new nations to catch up, you could tweak the city cost formula instead. I'm no math genius, but here's propositions, if anything. Here's the current formula 50000*(x-1)^3+150000*x+75000 Under this formula, going from c1 to c10 costs $72,225,000, and c10 to c20 costs $1,419,750,000. Here's a proposed revised formula between cities 1 and 19 (included) (10000+x*2000)*(x-1)^3+150000*x+75000 Under this revised formula, going from c1 to c10 would cost $40,521,000, and c10 to c20 would cost $1,204,986,000. After c20, the cost would revert to the current city formula instead. For maximum ease of viewing, refer to this handy-dandy chart. (Red is current formula, green is proposed new formula) Crucially, you may notice that the city cost eventually catches up with the current formula, but getting the earlier cities is cheaper, and helps push nations to the mid-tier quicker. Now, a few things should be taken into consideration with this new formula. Not least of which being, how does this interface with the urban planning projects? Let's look at Urban Planning first ($50,000,000 discount per city, starting at c11). With this new formula, c12 would cost $33,725,000, or $32,038,750 with the Manifest Destiny domestic policy (or $31,195,625 with Government Support Agency). And now, Advanced Urban Planning ($100,000,000 discount per city, starting at c16). With this new formula, c17 would cost $144,225,000, or $137,013,750 with the Manifest Destiny domestic policy (or $133,408,125 with Government Support Agency) . We notice that in both cases, the discount is high enough that cities would hit a negative cost, which is not desirable. What I can propose to counter that is a minimum city unmodified cost of $225,000, or $213,750 with Manifest Destiny (or $208,125 with Government Support Agency), which is the cost of c2. Using Domestic Policy (boosted by Government Support Agency) and both Urban Planning projects the moment they become available, the minimum cost of getting to c20 would become $514,593,400, as opposed to the approximately $609,876,250 (Look, I did a lot of math, let me be lazy and just use the wiki's number and not recalculate for the 7.5% discount provided by GSA this time) that it does now. It would reduce the cost of going from c1 to c20 by 16%. Of course, that's only one proposed formula, it can be tweaked further, or differently if the idea is close to your heart. Anyway, enough math, more coffee. ☕

Here's some ramblings of a fool. I am not justifying the behaviour of the less savoury denizens of the forums, if they act like idiots they deserve to be treated as such, but I can put some theories as to why this has become increasingly common. Now, some people will always be inflamatory in those threads, and nothing you or anyone else does will change that. 1- Lack of transparency in decision-making This one should be self-explanatory. Ideas and changes are in the hands of the dev team, and I trust in their expertise, but that doesn't mean they are infallible. How ideas come to be, and the way they should be tackled is a community thing. No ten people can make good decisions for the rest of us and expect it to fit every shoe. In my very biased, incomplete opinion, problems that you think need addressing should be brought to the community first, and you should let them think of possible solutions. Not all ideas will be good, and not all good ideas will be feasible, or be equally good for everyone, so you have the discretion to keep or discard ideas, but this should ultimately make future changes less of a surprise attack, and it should give the community time to come up with adequate (or adequate enough) solutions on their own. This will also help mitigate my second point. 2- The dev team feels out of touch I'm making no accusation here, since we don't get to hear from the rest of the team. I've no doubt that @Prefontaine is the spokesperson for the ideas of the team, and unfortunately bears the load of the ridicule when an idea is unpopular, but the facts remain that proposed changes to existing systems, such as warfare or even spies, seem really deluded, excessively grandiose, or downright bad; and it certainly does not help that Prefontaine himself has effectively retired from the game. This by itself shouldn't be a surprise, once again, not even experts are infallible, but it is happening too frequently, and provoking further distrust in the team. The first point should help partially fix this problem. Transparency is key to carrying your point across, even to people who disagree. 3- Targetted stubborness (Aren't I eloquent...) I've been playing this game for almost 3 years, and although the elders here will still call me fresh meat, I think I've gotten a good hang of the game. In those three years, however, it feels like there's been half a dozen of spy change threads with the same exact key points outlined. And every time, they get shot down. This is more of a "me" gripe than a community thing, but it doesn't look too good. It looks like the dev team is trying to either sneak the change through, or repropose it until people either get tired of saying no, or until someway somehow people reconsider. Stop reproposing changes that people have already shot down, it makes it look like you have an agenda. Now, of course, remember that I'm only one person. This is my own idea of what's wrong based on my observations of the last three years and discussions with involved people of the community and of my former alliance. I am absolutely not infallible either, and I could be wrong here and there, so other people should correct me if they disagree with one or multiple of the points I've made. Either way, it was about time I said something about it. Cheers~ ☕

Counter-counter suggestion, I beat them back.

Counter-suggestion, also. Allow nations to opt out of spawning treasures. I don't want my enemies to negate my damage just because I got good RNG

I mean, I'm definitely not happy about it, but that doesn't mean it needs to be changed necessarily.

If that is the design philosophy that you and your team are pursuing, so be it. I feel this is going to lead to rather toxic changes to the war meta where alliance wars might become endurance races to the first person to finally get tired of back and forths, or might discourage future wars that aren't guaranteed stomps because of the possible risk of taking massive losses through the opponent's spite.

Would this still be a very good thing if you could do the same with tanks and aircraft too? I can't imagine the winning side in a war being very enthusiastic about their opponent printing a full army weekly without any recourse

I'm saying precisely the inverse. It allows for alliances LIKE ROSE to spy blitz you every 5 days, even if it has lost the spy war.

But is this truly a necessary change? 3 spy ops from 2 people with spy sat with average RNG on a target with max units will destroy approximately a single rebuy of that unit type. That's not enough to influence the direction of an alliance war on its own, requires 2 spy satellites, plus the coordination needed to make it happen, plus variables like success rates. While I'm here: Is this truly necessary? I think people on the non-Rose coalition have become acutely acquainted with the reality that, whether you win or lose the spy war, an alliance willing to dedicate time to coordinating spy ops as an alliance can still inflict damage while being spy-wiped. (For some metrics, I've been spy wiped all war and destroyed over 65k tanks this global war through spy ops alone as a c31) This is just giving more meat to already competent spy alliances, who already have an edge by virtue of understanding the mechanic more, or dedicating more manpower to it.

True and untrue. A single player can get spy-slotted for 450% damage currently. Now they'll get spy slotted for 300% damage. Unless you mean to say that damage is effectively unchanged, only scaled with spy counts, which is not how your original thread makes it appear.

Best of luck to everyone involved, I'll knock back a nice, warm coffee as pixels go up in flames!

Looking forward to a productive future with you! 🌹

Best of luck to everyone involved, make sure to bring your most creative war reasons to the table, I will praise creatiive ones among you 😄

You had me on beating Aqua. You're on 😁

Bestest of luck to all participants, I'm expecting creative war reasons, know that I'll silently (or not so silently) judge you if you don't

They'll have to glue you back together Kindly lead me to your treasury I'm just illegally dumping my uranium

Take no prisoners! No rest for the wicked They'll speak of this day for generations I could come up with more but I suck at this

The Quest for the Holy Ducky. I'll hear no objection.

The entire reasoning behind making the informed decision to grab an expensive project is that you can anticipate how long it would take for it to pay off. If the spy satellite gets degraded from where it currently is to where it'll be post-proposed changes, you're no longer making informed decisions, you're simply gambling.

I was about to go on a long explanation on why I think that nerfing a project that costs upwards of 700 millions (with space program) was a kick in the shins, but it seems the point was already raised. Either tune your numbers so spy sat doesn't get neutered, or refund spy sats to those who request it.

Nation ID: https://politicsandwar.com/nation/id=235000 Leader: Dwarve (at the time of this thread being open, liable to change in the future) Accusation: Using multiple accounts for the sake of sabotage Note that upon being caught red-handed, he has deleted one of his nations going under the following ID: https://politicsandwar.com/nation/id=209357 This is most likely not instigated by the Hanseatic League (alliance of the aforementioned deleted nation), but rogue acts. Whether data can be retrieved from deleted nations to prove the veracity of this claim is possible of not is beyond me, I'm sharing what information I have. And, extra bits of shady actions that, depending on whether it's possible to verify changes to one's nation and check on deleted nations, can be proven or are hearsay: - On August 4th 2020, the nation of Dwarven Mountain was a member of Rose, linked to the discord user Marus#8793. At the same time, the nation of Macoasta (now deleted) showed up using the same Discord user on PNW. - On August 5th 2020, Macoasta changes Discord user to Marus#[Some other discriminant] - On August 6th 2020, Macoasta was deleted, Dwarven Mountain is now noted to be using discord user Marus#8393. - On August 7th 2020, a new nation of Latte Country was created, under the same unique ID as Dwarven Mountain, and applies to The Commonwealth - On August 7th 2020, Latte Country is no longer linked to Dwarven Mountain - Same day, around 12:30 UTC, Dwarven Mountain got deleted Unique ID: https://politicsandwar.com/nation/unique/id=235000 Apologies if the form of the report is messy, I'm far from good at that kind of things. I can provide extra bits of info if prompted (I also now realize, too late sadly, that I posted this in Forum Reports rather than Game Reports... Please forgive me)