Village

Apologies for the long delay, I've been super busy with family the whole weekend and don't have much time right now so I'm going to keep this brief. First off, thank you guys so so much for your feedback, it's been super amazing to read and I'm sorry I can't respond to everyone individually right now, I promise I'll do my best to do so in the future. On a different note, we're going to move forward with the first idea (army value modifier) on the test server for the rest of the tournament as it a very large majority of yes votes, the nerfed superiorities will be put on the backburner as, with modifications, a potential idea should we need something else in the future, and the partial superiorities thing will be dropped entirely for the foreseeable future. On yet another different note, I'd like to briefly touch on a few comments I saw about the design team doing lots of wars tweaks. At the moment, our attention is focused on fixing the upcoming war changes since we're in the middle of a tournament about them and they're due to be deployed to the live server in the very near future. However, new content is not forgotten and we're going to be working on finalizing perks and coming up with new pieces of content over the next few weeks. My goal is to be implementing new content at a rate where we can have a new update every month, and I'm very confident the design team, with the help of the community, will be able to dream up and refine more than enough ideas to make that a reality. Have a great night everyone!

We’re gonna make a post about beige stuff in a day or two, trying to take it one thing at a time so things don’t get lost. Also sorry for not replying to everything here, I’m not home today so haven’t been on my computer to do replies (doing this from my phone). I’m reading everything and will hopefully be able to post something later tonight. 🙂

Fair enough yeah 🤣. I think we'd rather go with the first idea, but I'll definitely remember this for the future or if we do decide to move forward with the nerfing one in some capacity.

That's a good point, I don't think we're gonna end up moving forward with the nerfing idea (the poll is a slaughter 🤣), but I'll be sure to remember this for any future discussions! Making both superiorities more relevant would be amazing, thanks for the feedback!

Hey everyone, I wanted to start this post with a huge thank you for everything Pre has done for the community. He’s been an important part of the game for years and his presence will be greatly missed. Good luck Pre! In other news, we’ve seen a lot of uproar around the upcoming superiority and beige changes (more information in the update post here https://forum.politicsandwar.com/index.php?/topic/35724-war-rewrite-test-server-tournament-and-loads-of-other-changes-june-2023-update/). As such, we’ve spent the past week and a bit discussing some potential modifications and replacement ideas for superiorities (a post about beige will come soon). I’ve detailed these below and we’d love to hear your own ideas and your feedback on these ideas in the comments below and in the poll above! Goal Before I outline our two ideas, I want to briefly set the stage for why we want to do these changes, to help inform your feedback and your own alternative ideas. The goal of these changes is twofold; to help provide lower tier nations a better opportunity to fight back and to lengthen the deciding portion of the war. Ideas As a note, the first idea is what we’d like to move forward with, however in the pursuit of transparency and discussion we’ve included the other ideas as possibilities should the first not work out. Once an idea has been decided upon, I’ll announce it and implement it on the test server and it’ll be live for testing for the last week of the tournament. Replacement Idea 1: Army value modifier Simply put, this idea aims to even the playing field across city counts and enable smaller nations to have a better ability to fight back by facing opponents with a proportionally smaller army value. This proposal is to take the calculated army value (for calculating attack success, not casualties) and raise it to the power of 3/4. I.e. If I have an army value of 1000, my army value is now 1000^(3/4) = 177, and my opponent’s army value goes from 800 to 150. For casualties, the kills for each unit will be calculated using the formula (the army values here are pre-adjustment to the power of 3/4) ((att army value + def army value) / (att army value ^ (3/4) + def army value ^ (3/4))) * (side army value ^ (3/4)). For example, to calculate attacker kills the side army value would be the attacker’s army value before being adjusted to the power of 3/4. This formula has the effect that it reduces attacker losses and increases defender losses when a smaller military is attacking a larger, and increases attacker losses while reducing defender losses when a larger military is attacking a smaller. Below we have some data about how this will affect attack odds and casualties: Current odds with some key components marked Odds under the new system https://www.desmos.com/calculator/2tyqeupxac This allows you to play around and mess with the army value used for calculating casualties https://www.desmos.com/calculator/r7n5aiucer This is calculating ship losses in the new system, with both upper and lower bounds Replacement Idea 2: Nerfed superiorities The second idea is very simple, nerf the effectiveness of enemy superiorities, thereby making it so superiorities are less of a deciding factor in war and that lower tier nations are not as adversely affected by the improved ability of the upper tier to gain and hold superiorities. This change does however make it harder for a lower tier nation to achieve and leverage a superiority, it’s a question of whether it’s worth the trade-off. For Ground Control, reduce the number of planes killed by tanks by 20%. For Air Superiority, make the reduction in tank army value based on the formula max(your_percentage_of_max_planes - (enemy_percentage_of_max_planes / 2), 0). So for example, if you hold the superiority and have 100% of your max planes while your opponent has 50% of your max planes, the modifier is 75%, meaning the army value of each tank is reduced by 20 * 0.75 = 15. Modification Idea 1: Only for larger nations In this idea, the new two phase superiorities only apply to nations with 10% more cities than their opponent (number subject to change after feedback). This means that the system functions as originally proposed for the larger nation, however for the smaller nation they move through the system in 2 phase increments instead of 1, so it only takes 1 IT to take the superiority and one other type of victory to remove it. The exception to this is when they reduce it across multiple wars, then it is only reduced by 1 phase. Conclusion Overall, we’d love your feedback, so please comment new ideas below and vote in the poll. Have a great day everyone!

This should be a thing now!

This looks like a cool idea! I've put it on our backburner as a nice QoL change to do sometime in the future.

I've marked down to take a look at some QoL stuff related to the note section later, however I don't want to outright remove the ability to write freeform notes so it'll likely be a select menu of defaults and an alliance setting or similar.

I'll take a look at ways to streamline that! Marked this post as planned as well.

I think that'd be super cool! However, we don't have the time or expertise to create an editor of that kind so it's not an option on the table at the moment, sorry.

I think different variants on the game would be super cool! However, at the moment we definitely don't have the resources to put into maintaining multiple versions of the game so this isn't really feasible or planned at the moment, sorry.

While this is an interesting idea, I'm not sure it'd work well in practice. As Jacob Knox said it'd result in disadvantages based on your account time zone and would also reveal that data to anyone watching (the military reset time zone is considered a private piece of information by the game).

Hey @Alistair Wilson, modernizing the game’s chat is something we’d love to do and something I’ve already got on my long term goals list. It won’t happen right now, but I’m hopeful we’ll be able to do it in the future!

I swear I remember doing this already. I’ve put it on my list to do and marked the post as planned.

Just looked through the code and tested it on the test server, it looks to line up perfectly with what the page says. If you have the Emergency Gasoline Reserves project then that will artificially and externally boost your gasoline production and usage by two, which will make it line up with what your revenue page says.

Like as of a few minutes after I posted my reply here 🤣

Kinda decided partway through to start replying to some things, so sorry if I missed lots of things! (As for general feedback for superiorities and stuff, I've taken most or all of it and forwarded it to the design team, we're discussing things now, and depending how things shake out we'll probably have some more changes for y'all soon ). We might in the future! At the moment it's just a fun thing that took two minutes to add. 🤣 We might go with the force peacing, and if any major conflicts are ongoing at that time we're going to delay the rollout. The idea is to make it painless and allow existing wars to finish, if something goes wrong with that we will likely reconsider and sort something out. I'll definitely consider it depending how things shake out, you should just be able to say "stay logged in" and be logged in for 60 days or something as long as you don't clear your cookies. It's not easy at all to disband an AA, you need to kick out every one of potentially dozens of members and then disband. As well, to actually disband with this, you need to input your alliance name and check a bunch of boxes so you can't just accidentally click on it. We're going to look at running some form of transfer tournament or just tiered betas of some kind to make things more representative in the future. At the moment this is all we've got sadly.

@Adam IIIt already is, soldiers using munitions is now the default setting, when you hit attack again it prefills with your previous parameters, and you can use the "soldiers" and "tanks" parameters in the URL to set it going into it.

Hiya everyone! For anyone who doesn’t know me, I’m Village, one of the developers of the game. Over the past few months I’ve been working to get a number of updates finished up for you guys to enjoy, read on to learn more! Apology First off, I’d like to sincerely apologize for the recent incident with everyone’s beige turns. There was a small typo when implementing the new beige changes that resulted in the game trying to access an incorrect index, which in summary PHP took to mean that every nation had zero beige turns and so the game ran the corresponding code to change the everyone’s color and everything. Moving forward, the game is moving towards using static properties in the future and better type checking to catch these errors before they reach the live servers. Moving Forwards As this rollout takes place, the design team will be finalizing perks with the goal of a launch in July as well as working on ideas for improving the relevance and importance of lower tier nations in wars. On my end, my goal is to continue working on game updates, starting with some internal tooling, perks, the new tutorial, and miscellaneous other changes. In addition, I would like to make monthly updates the norm, with a monthly post summarizing/releasing changes from the previous month and explaining the path forwards over the next few months. Bug Bounty Program We are excited to announce that we are restarting our bug bounty program! Any future bugs reported on the live server or during a test server tournament are eligible for a reward according to the following criteria. Rules Only new bugs will be given a reward. First come first serve for rewards. If multiple people jointly report a major bug, with each having contributed to it, they get each get 75% of the reward each. Staff has complete discretion over which tier a bug falls into and to modify the reward amounts Server outages and other global issues are not eligble. Only available on the test server during tournaments. When reporting exploits the user must not have engaged in abusing them beyond proof of concept and have maintained reasonable secrecy in order to get their reward. Tiers Tier 4 (T4) - $2,000,000 - Minor typos, graphics issues. Tier 3 (T3) - $10,000,000 - Minor bugs (ex. not being able to rename cities). Tier 2 (T2) - $50,000,000 + Achievement - General exploits (ex. being able to peace out other player’s wars). Tier 1 (T1) - $100,000,000 + Achievement + Award - Serious exploits (ex. spawning resources), severe security vulnerabilities (ex. ability to login as another player, access to staff tools, XSS vulnerabilities), proof cases for long standing bugs (ex. MAP issues). Test Server Tournament https://test.politicsandwar.com To make sure that all the changes are properly tested, we will be hosting a test server tournament in the coming days. The plan is to start on Saturday at DC (2023-06-18 12:00:00 AM UTC) and end 22 days later at DC (2023-07-10 12:00:00 AM UTC). As an additional note, the test server will be disabled for three days after the end of the tournament so that we can determine winners and issue prizes. As a note, this is the test server, meaning it’s for testing changes. There will certainly be bugs during the tournament, and there are no guarantees that we will reimburse you for issues or that things will be fixed up immediately. Please treat the tournament lightly, it’s meant to be a bit of fun that helps test and break things before they hit the main game. As an additional note, as is normal, this means the test server will be reset tomorrow in preparation for the tournament. Prizes (winners determined based on stats at the end of the tournament) The bug bounty rewards above will apply for the duration of this tournament. #1 alliance by score will be allowed to permanently add a flag of their choice to the default flag dropdown on the test server (provided the flag does not violate the game rules). The alliance with the most treasures will be allowed to permanently add a flag of their choice to the default flag dropdown on the test server (provided the flag does not violate the game rules). The top 10 players by score will receive an achievement and award in the live server. The top 10 players with the most wars won will receive an achievement on the live server. Any player that declares a war on the test server will receive an achievement on the live server for doing so (to earn this, you must use the same email for your test server account that you did for your main server account). Game Updates These updates represent a monumental amount of work done over the past few months by myself and the other members of the development, design, and quality assurance teams, so hats off to everyone, you’ve all been amazing! Rollout These changes will roll out in the week after the conclusion of the test server tournament. A handful of changes, namely the consumption changes, will be rolling out immediately to help move the game’s economy into a better position. IMPORTANT: To facilitate the rollout of the war changes, new war declarations will be shut down for 6 days before going live to ensure all wars are expired. If things go according to plan, that means war declarations and espionage operations will be shut down from 2023-07-06 12:00:00 AM UTC until 2023-07-12 12:00:00 AM UTC, with all updates going live at that point. War The entirety of the war components for the game have been rewritten from the ground up, that’s both the backend and frontend. Given the nature of these updates, there will most certainly be issues in its implementation, and the goal of the tournament is primarily to test these changes and catch any issues before they become apparent during a live server global war. Spy counts and exact spy odds have been made public. Nation score from cities has been returned to 100 score per city instead of 75 score. Superiorities in war have been changed to a two phase system, this only applies to air superiority and ground control, naval blockades remain unchanged. Immense Triumph If holding superiority (or no one has superiority), will increase by one phase to a maximum of 2 If not holding superiority, will decrease from 2 to 1, if at phase 1 will flip the owner of the superiority Will decrease opponent superiorities in ALL wars Other Victories Will reduce superiority by one phase until it hits zero for the current war Beige has been changed as noted below: Every player defeated in a defensive war results in 2.5 days (30 turns) of beige. Every player defeated in an offensive war results in 0.5 days (6 turns) of beige. All wars that end from expiration result in beige for the defending party. Beige accruals are capped at 5 days (60 turns). Beige accruals do not begin reducing down until all defensive wars end. Expired wars do not damage infrastructure or give loot like normal beige does. Spy attacks against missiles now have a 25% chance to destroy an additional missile. Nukes now kill four improvements per attack. 2 of these improvements can be any improvement. 2 of these improvements are any non-power plant, non-military improvement. In the effect 2 such improvements are not available, the remaining improvement destructions can target any improvement. Missiles can now kill two improvements per missile. Missile Launch Pad allows a nation to build two missiles per day. Iron Dome reduces the number of improvements destroyed by a missile by 1. The chance that Iron Dome blocks a missile is reduced from 50% to 30%. Vital Defense System reduces the number of non-power plant, non-military improvements destroyed by a nuke by 1. The chance that Vital Defense System blocks a nuke is increased from 20% to 25%. Military Salvage now uses steel/aluminum used by both sides when calculating the amount of resources to add. Treasures can only be lost through defensive wars. National Projects Added Bureau of Domestic Affairs: $20,000,000, 100,000 Food, 10,000 Aluminum, 10,000 Gasoline, 10,000 Steel, 10,000 Oil, 10,000 Coal, 10,000 Iron. Requires Government Support Agency. Reduces the timer for changing Domestic Policies to 1 turn. Added Advanced Pirate Economy: $50,000,000, 20,000 Aluminum, 40,000 Munitions, 20,000 Gasoline Requires Pirate Economy and that the nation has won or lost 100 combined wars. Adds an additional offensive war slot, 5% more loot from ground attacks, and a 1.1x modifier to loot from defeating a nation and the defeated nation’s alliance bank. Pirate Economy now provides a 5% bonus to loot from ground attacks. Added Surveillance Network: $300,000,000, 20,000 Aluminum, 20,000 Steel, 10,000 Uranium Requires Intelligence Agency and Advanced Urban Planning. Spy attacks against your nation are 10% less likely to succeed and the attacker is 10% more likely to be identified. Added Mars Landing: $200,000,000, 20,000 Oil, 20,000 Aluminum, 20,000 Munitions, 20,000 Steel, 20,000 Gasoline, 20,000 Uranium Requires Space Program and Moon Landing. Similar to Moon Landing, provides a unique achievement to the first player to build it as well as one to every other player who builds it. All players who complete it will be tracked on a leaderboard like the Moon Landing project. Nations will also gain a daily boost to their approval rating. Economic Changes These economic changes are going live with the posting of this announcement. Nuclear plant upkeep is doubled, going from 1.2 to 2.4 uranium per day. Food consumption per city, per day is changed to (((base_population)^2) / 125_000_000) + (((base_population) * (city_age_modifier) - base_population) / 850) Miscellaneous The game will now notify you when your verification is about to run out. The new player revenue bonus is extended to 100% at C1 then decreasing by 5% through to C20. Login bonus changes: These changes are amalgamated from the approved changes here https://forum.politicsandwar.com/index.php?/topic/33757-game-development-discussion-second-new-player-thread/ as well as the more recent ideas here [https://forum.politicsandwar.com/index.php?/topic/35717-log-in-bonus-increases/.](https://forum.politicsandwar.com/index.php?/topic/35717-proposed-log-in-bonus-increases/) Login bonus daily increase changed to $500,000. Login bonus maximum amount increased to $2,000,000. When you miss a day, you go down two steps not down to zero. New players earn 2x the max login bonus (no chance from existing functionality), making their maximum bonus $4,000,000 with a $1,000,000 daily increase. Nations leaving Vacation Mode will automatically be given 1 day (12 turns) of beige. Players will be sent an email to verify their IP address when logging in from a new IP. Completing a bounty while blockaded will place the money into an escrow account that will be emptied onto your nation once you are no longer blockaded. When a nation deletes with active defensive wars, 50% of its resources will be split between the attackers. A new withdrawal confirmation modal to protect against mistaken transfers. A new alliance disband button to allow easier alliance disbandment (this has a number of checks to prevent against erroneous or mistaken use). Add a editor parameter to the nation and alliance edit pages to allow disabling the WYSIWYG editor for custom HTML descriptions (&editor=raw in the URL) API Changes These changes will be likely be deployed after the test server tournament, however they may be launched earlier. Further updates will be provided in the Politics and Development server (https://discord.gg/Rrq56nMYSK). API v1/v2 are being deprecated. They will have a six month deprecation period then after that they may be deleted or have their functionality reduced at our discretion. I strongly recommend upgrading your code to use API v3 moving forwards. The send-message endpoint is an exception to this deprecation and will continue to function indefinitely. Massive shoutout to Putmir for this, API v3 now has mutations for accepting personal trades and managing alliance positions. Also, tax bracket and treaty mutations were released a while ago although never announced very well. Again massive shoutout to Putmir, the game now has functionality to facilitate the creation of scoped API keys (i.e. API keys that only have access to specific pieces of information). These scoped keys will not work for API v1 or v2 but will allow users to protect themselves and limit what actions and information developers are able to work with when creating bots or scripts. All existing API keys will have all scopes and new nations will no longer be created with an API key. Massive shoutout to Mateus for this, API subscriptions now support backtracking, meaning if you lose connection, once you reconnect your channel will receive events back to the last 10 minutes. To manually trigger this process, the client may make a GET request to /subscriptions/v1/rollback endpoint with two URL parameters being the timestamp (in milliseconds and up to 10 minutes before the present time) to roll back to and the channel to roll back. Events will then be sent back to that time. The API will also be getting a number of new fields to correspond to the war changes and new projects. And again to Putmir, anew query roughly equivalent to the tradeprice query from API v1. Conclusion Hope you guys are as excited for this as I am, have a great day everyone!

Sorry for the long delay, I don't check the forums much (really need to), I looked up the time and it was at :35, meaning 5 seconds after snorlax times out so doesn't look like anything fishy went on there.

Do you have a war ID or anything I can use to actually look it up? Also, for turn changes the game only stops from :50 to :30, for DC it's much longer. Odds are they either attacked after the snorlax ended or they got lucky and the game was slow enough the request passed the snorlax then didn't complete until :00 happened.

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.