[[Nuke Event] Total Drama Orbis - Round 1]

Have fun suckers 

 

[[DoE / Peace] Introducing… Tulip]

Tulip man bad

[[Anniversary] Man or Machine?]

First based micro in recent memory - nanos have no rights 

[Game Development: Military Update Part 2 - Military Research & Beige Buffs]

On 11/28/2024 at 10:11 AM, Majima Goro said:

Yes, I would be more in favor of a system which helps you while at war rather than when you are off war. 

The idea is that if you have already lost all your wars, you have enough time to rebuild as is. A faster rate of recruitment just means you get out faster. And if people were to just cycle you, then such an advantage has no significance. 

Rather, my proposal helps to "bait beige" or at best, turn the tides with a higher recruitment ratio. For example, a 50% faster recruitment rate would mean a c20 would have the same buying power as a c30, helping them buy and smack around harder, esp if they are fighting people at their city count or lower. 

 

 

 

Cycling has gotten harder with the ability to launch more nukes missiles, and the ID nerf. 
 

I think a beige boost during war incentivizes people to not beige you at all and expire their wars. It turns eating beige into a benefit and therefore, we’re gonna see a lot more slow, 5 day wars where people sit on maps to avoid the threat of giving boosted rebuy. 
 

on the flip side, this would make militarized raiding super fun lol bait beige with zero mil, deep downdec before beige and double buy to massive mil 

[Game Development: Military Update Part 2 - Military Research & Beige Buffs]

I like all the ideas. Glad to see the game is finally pivoting towards military updates. 
 

I think the cost should be entirely in cash. It can act as a sink to reduce the incentive to buy cities. 
 

I also think it should be prohibitively expensive for newer nations and so expensive that it forces alliances to make some serious growth considerations on whether more planes or a whole new city is the better investment at the c30-c50 level. Like the first 75 or so planes should be on par with buying c31 and the last 75 planes should be on par with buying c50. 
 

that exponential cost should also mean that it makes more sense to buy the first 1250 tanks far before it makes sense to buy the last 75 planes 

[Feedback - Updeclare Changes & Nuke Meta]

On the updec issue - I think 2.5x is high.

But If it’s 2x you can still hit the same guy, you just can’t do it with 50 avg infra, you build to 800 or whatever and get some soldiers for cheap score and voila. It costs money to do but I think its a fair price to nuke 3.5-4k+ infra whales instead of the normal 2.7-3k infra peasants.

The whales are irritated, but I think that’s more of a function of being in a turret meta than the score range issue. My bottom as a c40 is 4.5k score so I can hit up to 11,250. 800 infra and max soldiers puts me at 5.6k score and guess what? My max dec is 11,200. 
 

as long as nuking is the meta, I’ll pay the $20m rebuild cost to do $200m+ damage per round with my $7m nukes. 
 

 

To be clear- I agree with the spirit of 2.5x updec which is that whales shouldn’t get to easily sit out because they build to 4K infra and max mil.
 

I just think 2x solves that problem too. And if we really want to hit a 15k nation, just build some mech units then dec, decom, depo. The better way to solve their nuke issue is to fix military and get to a mil meta. Nobody is gonna 10 city updec if they’re actually trying to fight military. So people can choose strategies nuke turret 4K infra or build mil and 10 city downdec or whatever works. 

[Feedback - Updeclare Changes & Nuke Meta]

I think if you’re gonna increase nuke costs, it should be the cash value. Uranium isn’t a hurdle to building nukes for turrets, cash is. 

thoughts on $1.75m increase (plus rss) to $2m and 500 ura or just up to $2.5m?

I think another way to look at is where do we want the ROI on a nuke? Nuking 2.5k is $30m damage, 3k is $50m damage. Whats an appropriate cost to get that damage? With the 30% VDS, I think $10m per nuke is reasonable (up from about $7m now). This proposed bump still wouldnt get near that. 
 

Inflation is real, but infra costs the same. You’re really just paying for damage.  
 

 

on another note: 

With ads broken and baseball being super tedious and divorced from inflation, it would be nice to have a way to farm a modest amount of cash for people in blockade.  
 

Proposal: ability to store up to $500k in each bank. If it’s gets blown up it’s gone. If you decom it, you get the full $500k and the normal refund for building it. Or any other proposal to squirrel away some modest cash in your nation if you’re not gonna fix baseball or ads. 

[.]

inb4 offshore looted 

[[ROH] Hypocrisy Hall of Fame]

Remember that time Firwof's own alliance paid me to roll him? 

[[DoW] Commencing Orbital Bombardment]

33 minutes ago, Shock said:

 

 

We commit to make a conscious effort not to involve any protectorates in this war. They will not be included in any war sheets/commands and if any stray hits occur we will swiftly work to peace them out.

Oh, thank you so much for this. KT really appreciates your efforts to keep our humble protectorates out of your sights. We will definitely repay this thoughtful consideration in future wars 👍

[(DoW) $ynphoria]

Best DoW of the year award 

[The immortals are an Embarrassment.]

Based af post, I’ve been waiting to roll TI for so long. Everybody said it was an even war and I was like, it seems that way until you remember it’s TI over there 🤣

All I can ever remembering them do is dogpile or spam max navals immediately in round 1 during losing wars so they can stat pad damage before they roll over and die. And then post to their members about it like it’s some sort of accomplishment to buddy !@#$ the war effort by opening naval in mass against zero ships. 

I hope the age of TI dog 💩 MA is over. But I doubt it. They’ll probably just throw together another massive meat shield block, hide from globals, and roll some micros to regain morale. 
 

I don’t even really ever talk to TI ppl so the disdain isn’t personal. I think they’re probably solid everywhere except MA, how else could they be the biggest micro in the history of orbis for so long? 

[Change to Defensive War Slots]

I love it, it should just scale up infinitely so I can war the entire game, farm 300 days of beige and then go mega whale with 5k infra 

[[RoH] The House: One Day Promo]

first, milcom just that quick

[Turreting is Fine, And Here's Why]

15 hours ago, Kyubnyan said:

TBH you still can do much more net damage with optimal play and a bit of luck/skill issue from opponents with conventional units in a losing war given the apparent death of beige cycling. It has worked very well for me in the past. The only real "issue" with it is that it takes much more resources on your part to do that damage when it's much easier to just one ship and projectile turret. Increased updeclare ranges also change priorities since it's so much easier now to hit people with massive amounts of infra even while zeroed.

The optimal gameplay is just hoping the other side has idiots that don’t listen to orders or are inactive and you find a way to beige. You can deal net damage sure. But it’s gonna be less than the guy that drops a nuke or two on 3k+ infra and finds people with no ID to missile every day. And therein lies the problem. 
 

If you’re up against even half competent opponents the better net will come from turreting. What specifically are you doing that’s getting better net in a global than turreting? 

[Turreting is Fine, And Here's Why]

On 5/9/2024 at 12:41 PM, Hatebi said:

Normally I'm more of a "short and snappy tweet-style" poster, but I've been seeing quite a few people talking about the state of nukes and the possibility of a "nuke turret meta" and wanted to get all of my thoughts on the subject down in one place. As someone who's been turreting for over 2.5 years straight now, the discourse surrounding turreting has been the equivalent of watching someone repeatedly trying to mash a square peg into a round hole. 

There's two main concerns I hear people bring up whenever there's turret-related discourse. The first, and less seen, point is the fear of a "nuke turret alliance" that rolls around and rogues people during peace time. As cool as that'd be to witness, it's not something I expect to see on that large of a scale. There's numerous disincentives, most alliances aren't all that interested in condemning themselves to effectively fight a losing war, on their own, while everyone else is farming and growing, for an abnormally long period of time. Historically, people who have gone on nuke crusades, like HoF and CoA, have only done so for 3 to 7 weeks respectively. Go much longer and you start facing heavy member attrition. What fearmongers often forget is that vanishingly few people want to run off and throw nukes for half a year, especially outside of war season.  I feel like this one's a little obvious, but it's something I keep seeing brought up. 

The main point I've seen people make is that turreting has no counters. While I personally love it when people have this mindset and make no attempts whatsoever to impede me, it's sadly not the case. Numerous forms of counter play exists for all forms of turreting, alliances just can't be asked to put in the slightest amount of effort above what they know works against traditional raiders. 

If you really want to focus on damaging a nuke build, you've got multiple ways to go about it. The tried and true method still works, slot the turret in question with 3 raids and go to work. All you've got to do is switch your counters (and preferably whoever's been hit) over to Tactician. It takes virtually 0 effort on your part and costs essentially nothing to do, as a turret is not going to want to waste their bombs in raid type wars over the attrition types they've got active. Will you get the same instant gratification and visible damage of dragging a milled up high city raider down into the pits of Hades? No, but if you want to deal with someone who deals low, consistent damage, you're going to have to be okay with doing the same. 

But maybe you do want something a little more flashy? Something that'll hit a little heavier? Luckily for you, there's a second option that's been staring you in the face the entire time. While nukes are the main weapon of a turret, they're also it's biggest weakness. Now, most people will hear the idea of throwing nukes at someone with 500 infra and think you're either crazy or incompetent. The thing is, you're not nuking their infra, you're nuking their improvements. People have talked about the buffs nukes have received a lot, but a certain change seems to always slip by unnoticed: the buffed improvement destruction. A base nuke destroys 4 random improvements, while a guidance sat boosted nuke will level 5 of them. If you send in 3 counters in raid type wars, they'll be able to launch a total of 12 nukes while receiving minimal damage themselves. How many improvements is that in total? With guidance sat, 48 to 60 improvements in just one round of wars, depending on if the target has VDS or not. Even in the worst case scenario where none of your guys has guidance sat and the turret has VDS, you're still able to hit up to 36 improvements in a single round.

People who are sitting at 0 infra and have absolutely nothing to destroy are even easier. They're not producing anything at all and have to run off of a stockpile. This means they're permanently on a timer, both in their individual wars since they're only going to be carrying so much on them at a time and in the long run since they likely aren't replenishing very many of their resources by throwing nukes. Slot them with raid type wars on the Pirate policy and you can sap considerably amounts of their loot on-hand. Their lack of a nuke build makes them vulnerable to perma blockades, letting you completely shut them down if you can pull one off for long enough. 

Some people might say that slotting a turret and trying to spam nukes or get them in a perma blockade is too much effort. This is a totally fair opinion to have. As an alliance, it's your choice on how you want to deal with turrets. If your chosen method is "doing nothing in-game while complaining to everyone who'll listen and begging for them to be nerfed", so be it. I just think that's a little lame. 

Want to cap this off with a callout to @Buorhann specifically since he's been one of the main proponents of what I'm talking about. I tried to level with you in DMs, but you've been talking about this "nuke meta" constantly for weeks now. If you really think an alliance of nuke turrets running around and rogueing people left and right would be game breaking, why not show us? I think you know just as well as I do that you'd fracture your community and lose most of your guys after a few months all to do less damage than you could have done in a traditional war. If you believe in this so passionately, I'd love to see you put your money where your mouth is. 

@Hatebi I agree with all that. BUT, my position on the nuke turret meta has nothing to do with individual raiders. The “nuke turret meta” is what I call the optimal strategy for the losing side of a global war. What I’m talking about is the difference between the effectiveness of zero mil turrets vs militarized guerilla fighters. 

 

That’s not a good thing in my opinion. First, once all their infra is dead, nuke turreting is a way to claw back some net and the more effective it becomes the less incentive there is for a losing side to actually peace it and drag it out. It’s incredibly difficult for a sphere sized coalition to effectively shut down a sphere sized coalition of nuke turrets. Not just mechanically, but politically getting everyone on the same page to make it happen. I can see how politically, dragging out a war for more than 2 months is just not really that feasible, but if you have stubborn leadership that is ok with a prolonged war of attrition as long as their clawing back net, the new mechanics reward that. 
 

Second, the effectiveness of nuke turreting destroys militarized guerilla fighting as a viable option. Mostly because it’s better to break beige and drop 5 nukes then sit in beige for 5/6 days for rebuy/decom options while eating spy attacks just to launch a maximum of 14 grounds and then decom tanks or 7 navals and decom ships. It’s such a long wait to be effective with military. Thats not even counting the ability for an opponent to insta-slot you the second you break beige and wreck your mil before you can get some of those attacks off. 

That second part is my main concern. I want smart and effective military strategists to have the ability to deal more net than nuke turrets in a losing war. With the current buffs, I just don’t see how it’s possible. So losers are resigned to brainless turreting rather than trying to implement a difficult, risky, military strategy. I want losers to have multiple ways to lose and with the buff to turrets, guerilla warfare is dead. building and using military is expensive and there should be a reward (in the form of higher potential net damage than nuke turreting) available to players that make that investment and use their military intelligently. A losing side  should be able to pour money into building military and spending gas/muni for the chance at making inroads in conventional warfare by defeating the low tier with more low infra numbers and then climbing back up. Or at least squeezing solid net out of the military they have with flash attacks. And right now those options just doesn’t exist with the current mechanics. Thats why I say the nuke turret meta is here specifically in the context of how the losing side of global war conducts warfare. Military just isn’t a viable option right now and I think that’s very bad for the state of the game. 

 

[[Treaty] Why NAP when you can sleep?]

On 4/24/2024 at 11:14 PM, BettaChecka said:

You didn't see the backrooms lmao.

i didn't know wars were fought in the backrooms

[[Treaty] Why NAP when you can sleep?]

On 4/20/2024 at 4:17 PM, BettaChecka said:

One of your 2 major allies (TI), has fought for 1 day total in the past year and yet was still by far fighting the best out of your whole sphere.  Perhaps it is in your best interest to look inwards before projecting your salt out onto the world. Perhaps even go back to sticking what you are good at, baseball and perma stockpiling nukes. 

imagine thinking TI fought well or that you could gauge fighting after a day of conflict smh they went -8.5b and had a grand total of like 120 defensive wars, hardly something to write home about 

[In case you actually want to play the game]

I tried but I got denied womp womp 

[New Projects, Project Rebalancing, Revenue Rewrite, and Espionage Rewrite - March 2024 Update]

 

7 hours ago, Sweeeeet Ronny D said:

The issue I have is, even that increase is a drop in the hat.  Granted I am an outlier, but I have 3000 improvements in my nation.  killing 5 improvements destroys 0.16% of my improvements.

I think the fundamental problem is using nukes/missiles as the primary improvement destroyers. There is no way to balance the impact is has against small nations vs. big nations. 15 improvements (3 nukes) a day a ton for a c20 on 2k infra, it's nothing to a c50 with 3k infra. 

That goes back to @Buorhann's idea -and an idea that we've brought up many times in the past - but as @Keegoz says, have never come to a consensus on - which is improv degradation when you infra does not support that number of improvs or drastically increasing the ability for military attacks to destroy improvs. Generals will have some impact with some traits on their dev tree i think but that's still sporadic and unreliable to become the meta i would think. 

 

Here's another idea - Aircraft can target improvs - (3) for IT, (2) for MS, (1) for PV. 

 

After the general improv drops - we should reassess the new meta and we should absolutely revisit war balancing. Beige rework didn't work but that's only because there was a pointless beige cap of 5 days. But rapid military rebuilding in beige should be looked at because of the major buffs to nuke/missiles that discourage military fighting at all in a one-sided war. There should be a way to use military to gain some net with flash attacks in a way that can equal or surpass the damage that nuke/missile turrets do. This just isn't possible with the opportunity cost of a 6 day rebuild (extra day for rebuy). 

[New Projects, Project Rebalancing, Revenue Rewrite, and Espionage Rewrite - March 2024 Update]

Normally I’d be first in line for new military projects but the cost is kind of silly and these projects don’t really promote military game play, just the opposite. They promote no-military gameplay which I find boring. 
 

let me know when you get a project to build on Propaganda Bureau to build more MILITARY as a military project

Here’s an idea - a project that allows you to build twice the military while in beige. Speed up rebuild time so you can actually FIGHT wars 

 

[New Projects, Project Rebalancing, Revenue Rewrite, and Espionage Rewrite - March 2024 Update]

On 4/7/2024 at 12:14 PM, Buorhann said:

Just build your nation with Alum, Fuel, Ammo, and Uranium mines.  Jack it all up since there's no real Improvement destruction in the game.  Build all the nuke/missile projects.

 

You can have 50/10 Improvement slots of self-sufficiency to do this because the Infra Cap means jack shit.  Then just go to town hitting all the whales and nations out there.  Fresh built nukes/missiles are protected from being spied on.  Just check in once a day, "Oh I got 12 MAPs? Nuke."  Go back to doing other things because no matter what your target does, they can't stop you.  Sure they can fast beige you with 5 Naval/3 Ground attacks, but they're eating at least 1 nuke and 2 missiles in that time frame.  If they mess up, that's 2 nukes + whatever missiles.  If they don't beige you, well, you just beiged them and loot the hell out of them.

And if you get beiged, that's more bonus income and the ability to resupply yourself if needed.  Lather, rinse, repeat.

 

This balance/game design team is stupid.
 

They already doubled the number of improvs destroyed by missile/nukes and now they’re adding another improv destroyed. If you don’t have VDS\ID then a missile can destroy 3 improvs and a nuke will take out 5 am I reading that right? That means a single player can destroy almost 20 improvs a day? Not in a single nation of course, but a single nation could lose 15 improvs from nukes a day if I understand these changes correctly, and nukes don’t kill mil improvs so it’s all passive income killed. 
 

The downside is the improv destruction comes from nukes/missiles and not from military so if you want to punish turrets you have to nuke/missile them back and eat the net loss. Thats seems backwards. I agree that the turret meta is not a great playstyle and this could lead to longer guerilla wars,  but it’s kind of a Pyrrhic victory because both parties are at war while the bystanders grow. 
 

I’ve been saying that we need ways for the losing side to fight back and deal solid net militarily but this meta is headed the opposite direction. There’s no point to sit in beige and spend 5 days doing no damage while you rebuild mil and eat spy attacks, just break immediately and continue to turret. It’s braindead and doesn’t reward advanced play styles. 
 

This COULD benefit micros by making the threat of nuke turrets much worse BUT what micros are gonna prioritize these projects over growth projects? None. So it makes no sense and won’t really help micros with smaller nations and limited project slots. Why not just remove the projects and just give us all the extra nuke/missile buffs? 

[This Nation has a Racist and Overly Sexual Nation Theme]

aren't you in vm? who let you post on the forums

[Game Development Discussion: Project & Commerce Update Proposal]

On 1/15/2024 at 10:26 PM, Keegoz said:

 

Specialized Police Training will receive a buff, making it a minor commerce project. As it stands, Specialized Police Training is a largely ineffective project, only useful at the highest amounts of infra for saving a single slot. The increase in cap on police stations is redundant, as the default cap is already higher than needed to eliminate all crime at even the highest infra levels.

• Instead of increasing the cap on Police Stations, SPT now increases base commerce in all cities by 4%. This will effectively replace a supermarket, saving all players who buy it a slot, rather than just people with extremely high infra levels.

 

I don't think the solution is to give it 4% passive, that's a massive change and would make it required. I think the solution is to change the crime calculation so you need two police stations above 2k infra. Along with that, you could make the population hit for crime % less severe so it's not as punishing when crime is present. That would make SPT a viable benefit much earlier and not make it a required project which would hurt smaller nations. 

[Game Development Discussion: Project & Commerce Update Proposal]

On 1/19/2024 at 4:48 PM, Keegoz said:

To get 100% commerce you need 1 subway, 5 banks, 4 malls, 3 stadiums when you have no projects. 13 slots all up.

Once you get ITC you need 16 slots for 115% (a reduction of 1 from what we currently have) and Telesat makes it 17 slots for 125% (a reduction of 2 slots).

I think you forgot about the subway being a commerce improvement?

but rn you only need 1 subway, 3 stadiums, 4 malls, and 4 banks for 12 slots to go 100. so it's harder for smaller nations to do commerce. and bigger nations are more likely to be able to spend the $120m on specialized police or ITC/Telesat. Not sure how this commerce change helps little nations. I agree with SRD, having 3% supermarkets punishes nations trying to max commerce at 125, nerfing stadiums hurts smaller nations. Passive commerce in projects hurts smaller nations.