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I think the design team is going to do some things with spies, I'm not sure exactly what at the moment. And evening the playing field really is the core reason, the crashing is actually more of the excuse. There's not really anything we can do about preventing people from simply scraping odds to get accurate counts, so the only real solution to even it out (which is what the design team and game in general want) is to make those counts freely available rather than gating it behind a tech and knowledge barrier. The plan in the longer term is to revamp the whole system to some degree and improve it all.

The page was previously for viewing alliance invites and bans, however that feature was an accidental casualty of the alliance positions update a while ago and hasn't yet been re-added so the page is useless now. I'm honestly not even sure why it still exists.

When the calls peak they do have a significant effect on the game, there's been a number of instances where the game has crashed due to massive numbers of calls. The primary reason however is the other part of that sentence, "to play on an even field." The server could continue to handle the spikes in traffic and the regular load, however there is no way for the game to provide spy odds without people using scraping to gain a competitive advantage and learn exact spy counts. As a temporary solution, spy counts are to be made public to allow everyone the ability to see and even the playing field.

Thanks for your feedback! We're looking at a beige modifier now.

No worries! Sorry I didn't make that more clear, I didn't want to give you guys a heartattack. Nothing in the high tier is going to change at all!

@ZimHigh tier raiding isn't being killed. The context for this post is in the previous threads and I neglected to summarize it here (sorry). In essence, this modifier ONLY applies to when people hit targets they are only able to hit due to the inactive nations war range thing we've discussed previously. The point of the modifier is to equalize income and ensure that a C15 isn't taking 5x the money out of a C3 and thereby completely exhausting the target and making low tier raiding pointless. Please read the clarification above, the entire existence of this post is based on hours of feedback and discussions with raiders in the community as we try to refine the changes and see if they're actually going to happen. As it stands right now, inactive nations under C15 can only be raided by other nations under C15 and they will have the above loot modifier in order to prevent loot exhaustion and a C15 taking 5x the money out of a C3 than a C3, thereby rending low tier raiding useless. The entire point of the modifier is to prevent that as well as gradually reduce raiding income to encourage people to move into a more farming-centric playstyle rather than raiding all the time. This isn't a nerf to raiding, this is a massive buff. I would love to put polls in the main game but as it stands that's not a game feature, so I'm stuck putting things on the forums and getting a minimal response. I'm trying my best to put forward changes that I think will be beneficial and get as much feedback as possible to fix them or just downright don't do them. As it stands, there's been a number of concerns brought up, and Keegoz outlined the big categories in the last post, all of which we've been working to solve with ideas from the community. Yes exactly, it'd only apply to the inactive raiding below C15. I would NEVER do a blanket nerf to raiding like that.

I don't think we were planning on it affecting beige loot, just ground attack loot and infrastructure damage since they're the one's proportional to city size, a modifier for beige loot would be good though, maybe mod / 3? 1.00 would mean it ends at the loot a C1 would get, the graph isn't representative of a straight modifier on loot, rather the city count of loot the nation would receive when declaring on an inactive nation they would otherwise not be able to declare on.

CLARIFICATION: THIS MODIFIER ONLY APPLIES FOR NATIONS HITTING TARGETS THAT THEY ARE ONLY ABLE TO HIT DUE TO THE EXPANDED INACTIVE RANGE CHANGES PROPOSED IN THE PREVIOUS THREADS. THIS DOES NOT APPLY TO ANYONE YOU WOULD BE ABLE TO HIT WITHIN YOUR NORMAL WAR RANGE. Hey everyone, we're back with the (hopefully) final new player changes thread! As mentioned in the last thread (found here! https://forum.politicsandwar.com/index.php?/topic/33757-game-development-discussion-second-new-player-thread/) we promised a loot modifier to help solve concerns about loot drying up and lack of an incentive to move on from raiding. To that end, the promised loot modifier is a piecewise function using the following formula (sorry about the formatting) mod = {3, 1 <= x < 3; 1.59 + (0.896^x)/0.5, 3 <= x <= 15} loot = (normal_loot_for_current_military / city_count) * mod Here's a Desmos link to view it as well: https://www.desmos.com/calculator/5kmvij4mki In essence, this boils down to the nation gaining the amount of loot corresponding to someone with maxed units at `mod` city count. I.e. a C10 has a modifier of 2.21, so when the C10 has max military they will gain the amount of loot of an equivalent C2.21. The idea here, is that loot at all levels is equalized down to a lower level (the C2-3 loot range), meaning loot will not dry up on a nation much, if at all, faster than normal. This also provides an incentive to raid less as city counts go up, since the modifier gets smaller and smaller the closer you get to C15 (and the associated upkeep costs will increase), this will reduce raiding income as the nation's regular income increases, making them less reliant on this feature and better adjusted to the main game as a whole. Poll Results As per the polls given in the last post, nations coming out of VM will have 24 hours (12 turns) of beige, and nations will be considered inactive for the purposes of the raiding modifier after 14 days of inactivity. If you have any questions, comments, concerns, feedback, ideas, or anything at all related to this please let us know below. We love feedback and are working hard to ensure concerns are resolved and feedback is taken into account throughout this process. Thank you guys so much for reading and providing feedback, have a wonderful day! DISCLAIMER: The proposal outlined above and in the previous posts is NOT final, this is the current modified state after numerous community discussions and polls, we're still looking for feedback to refine and improve it. If nothing needs to be addressed we will likely be moving forward with the proposal as it stands, if not there will be as many more posts as needed to refine this to be the best it possibly can be. P.S. I'm going to sleep soon so will respond to things in the morning

Yeah, which is 100% the way it should be in higher tier, but at the moment the meta isn't constructive or kind to new players, requiring weeks or raiding at C3 in order to advance in the alliance. While yes people could definitely join another alliance, but that simply doesn't happen and there's no real way for the game to suggest that to people. Plus, even those who are more engaged shouldn't need to stunt their growth at C3 simply so they can raid, they should still have the opportunity to grow and maintain an income, as their massive income increases they naturally make slightly less money raiding on the same (depending on the proposed modifier). That's the whole point, that new players aren't forced into that unhealthy meta anymore and rather can continue to grow, get more engaged in the game, and become invested, thus giving more new members to alliances and encouraging a better experience for all new players. The VM change is meant to help those who set a VM timer for two weeks but might not be online at that exact turn, rather than immediately being open to being jumped on and raided they have a short grace period to log in. That's an interesting idea, we'll definitely bring that up! Oooo! I like that idea! I'd love to get some competitions and other engaging things going on in-game. The income bonus? That's an interesting idea, would solve the city modifier balancing issue completely. The buff to login bonus is already based on nation age. Thanks again you guys!

I'm fully in support of capping it at C15, but there's not really a clean solution to doing so without a revenue drop off at some point or another, I don't think it makes sense for you to build a new city and somehow end up with 20% less revenue than before. (See the spreadsheet linked in the forum post for revenue graphs for each of the options in the last vote) True yeah, this isn't targeted at people who will continue to raid through their time growing (like Arrgh), rather at normal players who, due to the meta, are stuck raiding at C3 or C5 for weeks or months on end because their alliance wants them to raid to x hundreds of millions before they're allowed to progress further. Instead, they can continue to raid towards x hundreds of millions of dollars while being able to invest that money back into their nation along the away, making it a far more enjoyable experience. Even though that C3-5 meta will likely move to C15, we believe that it's better off there with a couple weeks of effort to get there rather than stuck down at C3 after only a day or two of "real" progress. No it's definitely not enough to go ahead and implement it, we have no intention of ramrodding anything through. But 50-50 is enough to create a follow up post to address the concerns of the 50% who voted no (which is what this post is intended as). See above. Also for the login bonus bit, the majority (about half) was in favor of no change to the new player modifier (2x), which is what we put above, and the majority (about 70%) was also in favor of some change to the daily increase, we picked a "middle ground" number for the change in daily increase. It's not meant to reduce diplomatic oopsies, it's meant to broaden the range and make the new player experience better. In the process it actually makes it more likely for diplomatic oopsies since there's now more nations raiding in the higher tiers where such oopsies are more likely to happen. I think more oopsies actually makes the game more fun and dynamic since it encourages smaller scale conflict and things. It's not really setting a precedent because it only affects the ones outside your current score range, it's simply setting a precedent of punishing extra mechanics and balancing things. Also the loot modifier scaling hasn't been worked out yet, but the goal is to scale it it in such a way so that it's still profitable as you rise in city count, but not so damaging to the target that there's simply no loot left. Yeah hold on, we got a new version of the theme so it did change but it should still be red I think, not orange??? Pretty much yeah, in the end the vote didn't really matter because after graphing the options there was only one that didn't result in your income actually decreasing when going from one city to the next and we didn't want that to be the case. If you guys have other options that work out better please let me know! Yeah, my thoughts exactly, the loot modifier thread should help sort things out. Thank you guys so much for the feedback!

Hey @whiskerzwhen you encountered the issue had you already played a number of games beforehand? The game updated baseball a little while ago to cap daily revenue at 2mil, meaning any revenue beyond that should not be credited to your account and shouldn't be recorded into the match history as well.

How wude! Jokes aside, that'd be a very easy thing to implement, without any bugs. It'd take like three minutes. Interesting idea for sure though, I'll be sure to bring it up!

Sorry for the late responses everyone, I was away over the weekend and didn't notice! Sorry!! A redo of the tutorial has been in the works for the past few months, hopefully there'll be a draft up for the community to view soon. I'm not involved in that project so I can't comment on specifics sorry. I 100% agree as well! I've got some ideas around UP/AUP/MP that I'm going to be proposing later on (would love other ideas!) and allowing people to be up to a higher city count and continue raiding also exposes them to projects earlier and gets that ball rolling. Also completely agree, hopefully the aforementioned new tutorial will help drive people to alliances and I have some stuff in my dev backlog to improve that process as well.

I'm not sure if the other members have, but I definitely haven't. I don't spend nearly enough time browsing the forum for suggestions, going to go through and compile a list of the things folks have suggested soon though! (Also those are some cool ideas for color blocs, I'm going to try to open some discussion about those soon and I'll be sure to bring up your ideas!)

Thank you for the feedback! I'll make sure it gets brought up and discussed. I definitely think the login bonus should be much more forgiving and I'm hopeful that we can make that happen!