Zevari

Honestly sounds like it could be a lot of fun, especially with the fact generals can be put into reserve. A few questions though, if you had all 3 generals in reserve could you take them all out at once or is the 1 day cooldown universal and not general specific. Additionally, the "Zombification" perk, how does that function if you revive a General who died/retired of old age? Will said general reset their age timer, just instantly die the next turn or just not be a valid target. (because if it only works on specifically generals who died in combat it becomes a tad less useful being tier 5)

Honestly my biggest issue with this poll is I didn't even notice it existed and by the time I had it was already closed ;-; Also I feel like the approach to these polls should be a little different. It would be worth splitting the options into "Do you want this to be changed; yes - no" and "If it was changed which option would you prefer", would save a lot of effort. In regards to balancing, doubling the up-declare range seems like a very heavy handed approach to a rather minor issue, especially when it creates a rather large amount of problems. For the city timer I am a tad skeptical of that feature since it will eliminate basically all tiering below c20 which is a rather large portion of the game. It feels like way to much focus is on getting everyone to c30+ instead of creating content for all tiers of the game.

I have no experience in banking in this game, but 11 billion in defaults seems ungodly high when you only had 7.8 billion initially invested. Is it really that normal to lose around 1.5x your starting funds to defaults?

What I would give to see a 4 way war, you lot should just come and declare war on everyone involved. Really make this shit chaotic

Honestly it seems pretty solid overall, honestly just needs some live server testing to see how it will work out at this point. I feel like the loot modifier needs to heavily affect beige, otherwise you won't really be stopping people from raiding way outside their tiers. A lot of inactives end up with a large supply of raws since those buildings will always produce (since they don't require power), hence a lot of targets are hit for that loot rather than the cash. (granted a lot of targets with high cash exist) So a somewhat similar system to the proposed GA loot should exist in my opinion.

1: I just realised how poorly I approached that. Building to 1000 infra is perfectly fine (you need it for the slots) but I believe its important to inform the players that you don't need to stay at 1000 infra, since I know many newbies are inclined to rebuild every little bit of damage they take, which is super costly in the long run. (It was late and I haven't down a low infra build in years xD) 2a: Honestly I don't think people care about "hand holding" or "railroading" under the explicit scenarios where the play can choose to skip the process. So yeah, a bit of hand holding for the first raid war wouldn't be to bad honestly. You could honestly just create a "stasis" nation with no defensive slot limits that gives you unlimited maps to let them learn different mechanics through experience. E.g the fastest ways to beige, how different superiority work etc. The only hard part here would be the fact you need to code in a "tutorial nation" that works like that. 2b: Well "farming" isn't just waiting, you have half a dozen different income methods like market flipping, reward ads, baseball, community run servers (like casinos, banks etc) This guide would basically be teaching players about the various methods that could be used to make money outside of raiding. Not to mention there are a LOT of different builds to raise the "efficiency" of a nation. 3: That's fair, I would maybe recommend making some or even all of it possible to skip then. (Since it should be relatively easy to navigate back to as you said in point 4) 5. Railroading is bad, I just feel like a lot of people have had tutorials ruined through forced menial and repetitive activities that teach you really basic stuff. A tutorial that takes longer than 5 minutes can really start to annoy people, especially if it's forcing them to do a relatively boring task. Now I don't know how this tutorial will look/function visibly, but it's important to consider how long you are forcing someone to engage with the tutorial.

It still works like the old system, just numbers are inflated. Currently new players can have a login bonus of up to 1mil for 60 days after they make their account. This means they are getting a 300% increase just like the normal player base. Additionally I believe there already is a revenue modifier for lower city counts, something like 100% ending at 10% on c10 so it's only extending that bonus to the c20 range basically a buff across the board except for c1 nations.

Was there any particular reason why this isn't implemented both ways? (So anyone below c15 can hit inactives up to c15) It seems a tad unfair to reduce targets in the lower tiers because even with a decreased loot modifier larger nations will still raid the high loot targets, they don't care if they are getting half the loot a smaller nation would. I mean heck, look at how many people destroyed cities to be in range of that nation rose sent a ton of resources to by accident, if they could have hit for less loot but not needing to destroy any cities they would have any day of the week. Is it just me or are the majority of people who are against new player bonuses whales? They are perfectly happy for you to boost their daily bonus to 3mil+ but don't even think about giving those newbies a chance to catch up! Anything that gives newer players a chance to catch up to older but lazier nations is a good addition in my opinion. While this sounds cool I feel like it would be better suited as a type of event. Something like a raiding competition which would reward players based on loot, kills and damages. Would add some nice activity to the game (and give the devs an easy stress test for the servers when needed xD)

I'm going to run points as I read through the document so my ideas/reactions might be a bit all over the place, apologies in advanced. Instead of telling the player to build up to 1000 infra I feel like offering them a "split" decision, something like "at your size raiding is by far the most efficient and profitable method to help you grow, however if you are more inclined to grow slow but peacefully then building to around 1000 infra might be more desirable. Click on the following guide depending on how you intend to grow, however raiding is HIGHLY recommended as you will fall behind other players." The idea for this is to provide an option to players since many newbies enjoy roll playing a certain play style and 1000 infra is relatively bad for anybody who plans to raid, effectively wasting some of their limited early resources. The rest of the guide seems pretty solid, however I feel like it is a tad wordy (then again, those who don't want to read probably won't hang around here). I don't know if it was mentioned, but making this easily accessible (In such a way that specific parts of the tutorial can be found and browsed even after completion) would definitely be appreciated. Also in regards to the "railroad" I think that would honestly be a horrible idea, the one thing I know people hate the most in games is being forced into doing certain things repeatedly. If it isn't a new feature there is no need to give new pop-ups, reminders or guides in my opinion, plus so many people hang out around c3-5 for raiding that this "railroading" could actually become more annoying/detrimental than helpful. Tutorials are important, but you need to make sure user experience is also taken into account.

True, but updeclares also typically try to flip a war the larger target is in. For example you want to updeclare on the guys fighting your whales to try flip those wars, delaying the superiority makes it take longer to flip the war which is really the last thing you want. Also due to the way tiering works you normally do end up hitting around the 25% mark, which means you might end up with an equal tank value but become outnumber in troops still losing ground control. Also updeclares puts the nation at risk of being flipped themselves. 3 equal nations with half mil hitting them is more than enough to drag them down and ruin the updeclare, hence why it is such a time sensitive endeavor. Granted the points you make are entirely true. Yeah I choose to ignore the naval element since it was an additional idea that made up-declares even harder, I wanted to try point out the flaws with the core idea. (also I do agree exploring partial removals like Alzyr suggested it would help alleviate some of the pain)

My initial reaction to this was quite positive, but after thinking about it for a while I am having a lot of doubt on viability of this change, the two main factors for this are as follows; 1. Limited maps and resistance - I went over this in the previous thread so I'll keep it brief, but to obtain the full benefit of an IT I require 3 attacks, that's anything from 30-36 resistance (9-12 maps). This is nearly 1/3 of the entire war, and if they manage to break that IT? You need to do it all over again and waste even more maps. While this doesn't sound too bad it leads into my second issue. 2. Updeclares are extremely nerfed - The core part of an updeclare is quickly blitzing down their air so you can remove 50% of their tanks combat ability and not lose through GA spam (which would also destroy your planes). By delaying how long it takes to get that 50% tank reduction you are effectively limiting how high you can updeclare while buffing the ability to down declare. Updeclares are already quite difficult and expensive to commit to, and it also puts the nations at extreme risk of being countered and flipped. This part here NEEDS to be taken into heavy consideration by the devs. Especially since there is a possibility for slight bias (conscious or not) from the player feedback team who are largely high city count. Overall I actually like the idea, but the two points I mentioned could turn this from being a great change into quite a bad one.

That's a lot of my mentality when approaching stuff like this, I personally believe anything that increases the general community activity and creates good/new reasons for conflicts is extremely important. A trend a lot of my suggestions have is some mechanic that allows nations to have points of conflict on the individual through to the collective levels. Plus for the sake of user retention having punishments that are harsh but allow for some leeway is important, I know a lot of people easily get burnt out from trying to maintain a daily log-in, let alone maximising reward ads, baseball etc. Allowing people to spend a little less time in the game on a daily basis will improve the overall lifespan of the game, most of it is on discord anyway so keeping them in these servers and communities is important. The only thing here I don't agree with is the focus in wars, personally I see profit as an extremely acceptable form of politics considering the environment we are in where war reps are extremely hated. This is kind of a distinction between alliance level politics and individual as well though, as a nation I want to go to war and bring back tangible results, as an alliance I want to ensure we meet our objectives (typically in the CB). It's individual vs collective. Odds are you guys already saw this but I wanted to shamelessly plug this suggestion anyway. It isn't amazing but I feel like it got a little buried under war declarations and bloc announcements when I posted it. (while it is kinda off topic it does relate back to user retention and providing more options to smaller nations/alliances which was mentioned a bit)

I'm going to break down my take into three main parts similar to how you posted. 1. Extended new player revenue bonus I think this one is a great option, as a newbie when I first joined I was pretty shit, but I really enjoyed tinkering with the bonus to maximise my national revenue while raiding. Having a bonus from c1 through c20 would work as a decent catchup and would have the additional affect of creating more diverse tiering. Right now the main clumps in city tiers are roughly c4, c10-11, c16, c20-c21 and 30+ these are basically decided by projects (UP, AUP or MP) or raiding. By adding a city bonus revenue it might geniunely be worth more to sit at a weird city counts like c17 to make use of that 30% revenue boost than to build a city that will only add at best ~5%-6% boost to your revenue. TL:DR - I'm all for it, using 200% from c1 through to c20 sounds quite interesting the more I think about it. (more diverse builds, tiers etc) 2. Increased login bonus. Going to further break this into two sections, newbie login bonus and general login bonus Newbies: Personally I think a 2x bonus for newbies works quite well, it gives a nice revenue boost and gives incentives for them to log in for an extended period of time, ideally it should be set up (in my opinion) so that new players take AT MOST 30 days of consistent login to reach the max bonus, but at minimum 10-15 days. This makes it more rewarding for them to actively login and build up a routine for playing the game. (this is assuming the new player bonus last 60 days) All: For the general bonus I think an increased amount would be interesting, however in my opinion the way it works should be something like this: Max bonus = 3mil Your bonus increase = 50k Failure to log in = 10% to 30% bonus loss E.g each day I log in I get 50k closer to the max bonus, taking 60 days to reach it (for newbies they would get 100k each day), if I was at 1mil and missed a log in I would lose 30% effectively resetting me to zero. (30% of the max which would be ~1mil removed). If I had hit the max bonus of 3mil I would only drop to 2mil on the first day I missed my login, 1mil on the second missed day and lose the entirety on the third. If the reduction was a lower percentage like 25% it would take 4 days to compleletly lose a max log-in bonus. This allows people a little bit of lee-way for missing a login while still harshly punishing them. 3. Raiding and inactive nations Great idea, but it should work like the new player bonus. E.g Starting from C1 you get a 100%/200% down/up declare bonus range, for each city after that 5/10% is removed from that bonus. This means a c1 would have an effective range of 125% down declare (can hit literally anything below) and a 275% updeclare. c5 would have 100% down declare, 225% updeclare c10 would have 75% downdeclare, 175% updeclare c15 would have 50% downdeclare, 125% updeclare c20 would have the normal ranges of 25% down and 75% up. The idea here is to allow this change to primarily benefit people below c10 while giving the sub 20s a bit more wiggle room when it comes to raiding. (This "buff" could either only work on inactive nations or just be a general change to how war ranges work, I wouldn't mind low tiers having more harpoon abilities would give them more power during wars) Inactivity should be based on 14 in my opinion, A week is quite short in the grand scheme of things since many things in life could screw you over there (such as power outage, hospital etc) but two weeks is long enough to remove 99% of reasons for not being able to log in once. Also the egg came first just not from a chicken as we know it

This is actually what I want, I'm just worried we will experience a situation similar to baseball or beige where (at least for me) public feedback wasn't well received. I would certainly love to have a rework, but the dev team should hold any coding until a fully fleshed out idea has been made with the general playerbase. That's what always make me quite conservative to many changes that get presented, it doesn't feel like there is much transparency. Maybe that's just my personal selfish desire who knows.

Yeah, I guess it either got drowned out or was a relatively bad suggestion 😅 (Sorry for the late response for some reason I wasn't given a notification)

Honestly the main reason I voted against this is purely because I feel like we have way to little resistance/maps to afford a change like this. If getting a superiority cost several attacks, then you wouldn't realise the benefits until a certain number of attacks have passed. I feel like you would need to rework how much damage a single attack does or how long a war lasts to make this work well. I would certainly like to need a more dynamic superiority but the balance wire we stand on here is very thin. Also would this affect naval superiorities? Ships are already in a bad spot, nerfing the ability to blockading by effectively delaying how long it takes to set up one would be quite bad.

I mean sure it does potentially provide access to information, but you do need to break this down a bit. Borg already stated above that self hosting is possible which already negates a decent amount of risk. Secondly the fact that half this argument is built off as you said "It can only parse messages" seems a tad flawed. Pretty much every bot needs to be able to read messages sent to it to provide a response in turn. You also need to look at the alliances using the bot, do they have access to a better alternative? Or are they unable to produce tech of that level. Are they even relevant enough to bother spying on? The only part I really agree on is the risk of offshoring but even then it's better than having it all looted (or investing in a business) Pretty sure you are referencing me here. I was talking about if Borg did offshoring manually those bank transactions would still be on record, might of been poorly worded oh well. 1 - If I'm being honest, I would quite enjoy an OPSEC breach of that scale. It would create a giant shitshow and i'm all for it. You kinda have a point here, but at the same time considering how common spies and leaks are in major alliances it wouldn't really be anything new besides the quantity of information. 2 - Is anyone accountable in this game? Whats the difference between joining a random alliance and depositing safe keepings to this? Both could just suddenly yoink the bank, if anything borg stands to lose more than any one person who holds an offshore for an alliance. Sure, you could say something along the lines of "oh but you know/trust/vetted the person in your alliance who handles the offshore". But you could do literally the same thing with borg, it isn't hard to message people in public or private on discord. For a new micro who isn't entirely sure on their gov it's a great option considering the reputation and credibility. 3 - Again, there is literally nothing you could do if the person running your alliance yoinked the bank. That's just how this game works. 4 - Yeah I agree with this point, it's a risk you need to evaluate. Everything has it's pros and cons but you can't apply a blanket answer to everything, shit don't work like that. (Also saying you can't mitigate or control the risk seems rather dumb, you can do a lot of things to minimise your risk) 5 - I know this part is hard to comprehend, but this game isn't just c20+ players with years of experience. There are a lot of newbies who play outside of major alliances, doing their own thing and finding their own enjoyment in the game. While the vocal part of the player base does it best to suppress them they do exist and many of those players don't have the experience, knowledge or understanding to run half the services borg provides. *Insert irony about calling others ignorant here* Thank you for listening to my TED Talk.

I couldn't care less about locutus besides seeing funny war numbers get larger but that is a really bad take my guy. >reveals transferring funds If the offshore was run manually he would still see this information, this isn't private. Alliance to nation transactions are also easily traceable. >reveals military targeting Damn... As if having war declared on you or the mass militarisation of an alliance wouldn't give that information away anyway. (Although I guess this is the only point that holds some relevance.... If borg was in a major alliance or enjoyed leaking stuff like that assuming he could yoink it. But judging on how the past few globals have gone, that's really not relevant) >reveals inactivity Literally an inbuilt feature in the game on nations.... >reveals locating targets information ???? Now the bot can see information it was giving you? Or is this just point 2 rehashed again. Now I don't support using borg for tech/offshores IF you have the ability to make your own. But realistically many players are not skilled or knowledgeable enough to do that.

A recent topic on raising the bonus of colour blocs got me thinking about how much potential for political discourse and conflict this system could potentially create. So I started brainstorming questionable ideas on how to change the way these colour blocs work. My suggestion is to slightly tweak the way you control a bloc, the way their revenue is determined and how names are decided. Blocs are "controlled" by the largest/strongest alliance on said bloc, this means they can name and pick the colour (no duplicates) as they deem fit. If another bloc already has that colour said alliance wants? Then bad luck, guess you have to try declare war or buy it back. To give smaller alliances a chance, a system like "market sharing" or a new treaty will allow them to gather together their 'influence'. However, only one alliance in this 'coalition' could make decisions, making like a protectorate of trade. The base Blocs are assigned a pre-determined "growth" system, this is before alliances are actually in them. What this means is the top tier bloc would have the potential for a higher max income than 2nd, 2nd would have more than third and so on. This could be something like 10-25% more than the last, with the lowest blocs having the normal cap of 75k that we have now. The idea here is to give alliances a reason to "invade" higher quality blocs since it will directly boost their revenue and adds ways for alliances to push harder terms post war without being overly toxic. More power to the alliance controlling a bloc. The idea here is the alliance who "controls" the bloc can pick and choose which alliances actually get the bonus revenue. To prevent small alliances from being completely screwed, only the top 3-5 blocs in 'potential growth' get this power which the rest of the blocs would still have dominant alliances but less control over the bloc itself. Alliances who don't have a direct treaty (Protectorate, MDP etc) but are on the same bloc will cause severe penalties to the turn bonus. The idea here is to prevent whales from different alliances (Looking at you Green) from bundling together for maximum revenue. This is me mostly spitballing ideas, but I feel like a more dynamic system like this could bring some spice to the game. This would essentially create a "golden goose" where alliances need to determine whether that bonus revenue is worth the target on their back, and people that are rivals (Looking at you green colour bloc) would be less likely to work together since it means conceding power to an enemy. I know this has flaws such as the influence pirates have on screwing a bloc over, but honestly I think that adds to the fun and risks alliances should be taking.

Might want to re-read that chart, you got Australia and Asia mixed up.

Ideally you want to run the ideas through with people before you spend weeks/months coding them into the game. Last thing you want as a game dev is to spend ages making a new change and then having to scrape the time and effort put into it. That causes the game to stagnate hard (a problem we already have)

The primary reason the design team has most its members from large and relatively older alliances is because they want more experienced and well known players who relatively actively participate in the normal game. The last thing you want is someone completely isolated from the game and its mechanics making decisions on how it should work or what is best.

Mike, You might have come to the wrong place.... This is a forums for a game called politics and war, not necessarily a discussion platform for actual politics.

Might as well say this now. Don't get too invested into the test server, it regularly gets wiped for new tournaments and what not. (People don't give a shit about the test server outside of tournaments, all you are gonna get is meme replies from normal players.)

Oh that's cool, if it does actually function where any victory (phyrric, moderate or immense) gives you that 5% of all troops. (Although I still think that any failed attacks should reward the defender the 5% IF they have the project themselves. It would make the project a lot better in my eyes)