Cherise

C40 vs C35 is not a one-sided battle. It's an extremely workable updeclare, comparable to C6 vs C7. I would actually consider it a sidedec, not an actual updeclare. For your range, it would be as if you had declared on a C28. The point is that while the number of kills for a single city remains constant, the agglomeration of cities controls damage stability. Let's say, for instance, 100 ships fight 50 ships. Ship fights, like ground fights, are symmetrical in the amount of damage dealt, but unlike ground fights, ship fights ignore population-based resistance, so it's an easier example. Ships deal between 8-12% of their count in damage, so let's say the 100 ships kill 10 ships, while the 50 ships kill 5 ships. So far, so good, right? But now it's 95 ships vs 40 ships, or 95% of previous damage output vs 80% of previous damage output. In a return fight, the formerly 100 ships have a strong chance to kill another 10 ships (50/50), while the 40 ships can expect to kill 4 ships instead of 5, a 20% reduction. Let us say, assume 12 MAP go in. 100 ships kill 10 ships on the first stab, 9 ships on the second stab, and 9 ships on the third stab. That's 28 ships killed. The 50 ships on the other hand, kill 5 ships on the first stab, 4 ships on the second stab, and 3 ships on the third stab. That's a total of 12 ships killed, vs 28 ships killed, or about 85% of what having 50% the number of ships should actually imply (12 vs 14). At the end of the exchange, the 100 ships guy has 88 ships left. The 50 ships guy has 22 ships left, or that the 50 ships guy has lost more than 50% of his ships, whereas the 100 ships guy has 88% of his ships. If we continue infinitely, ignoring rebuys, the 50 ships guy, in another 2 engagements, will have about 5 ships left, while the 100 ships guy will have 85% ships left. Another attack by the 100 ships guy finishes off the 50 ships guy, or in other words, the 50 ships only manage to kill 15 ships, while the 100 ships have killed 50 ships. That's very disproportionate to what a 2:1 ratio looks like on paper. This is why Lancaster's Square Law applies to PnW (even if we go to a salvo damage model, as a TKR player who really should have known better tried to obsfucate with). The 100 ships are not twice as powerful as the 50 ships, but four times more powerful than the 50 ships due to their greater damage stability. === As far as the game being too incompetent these days, I actually agree. The near-abolition of plane strat has dumbed down the fight. I still recall when, during Nova Riata vs Pantheon, I deployed a bunch of Pantheon members using Soldiers-Planes vs max-milled Nova Riata. We eventually overextended, after which Classic BK saved our asses once NR had been exposed with the infinite resources exploit, but NR's fighters were getting decimated, deplaned, and rendered non-operational despite fighting a nominally weaker force that had half their members. This actually formed a sort of trinity, because tanks were useful for certain applications, planes were useful for certain applications, and ships were useful for yet another set of applications. Tanks were used primarily as raiding tools and also to bulk score, in order to present a unified line and to prevent easy updeclares. The relative disutility of tanks in a conventional fight, likewise, provided an interesting meta in which tanks countered soldiers, planes countered tanks, and soldiers countered planes. Plane stratters were vulnerable to people conducting raiding ops against them (as they still are, except plane strat does very little these days), and presented exactly what you were asking for, a way to counter dogpiles. Now, if people went to max tanks to counter raiding ops against planestratters, as people are doing now, they bulked up score massively and made themselves vulnerable to downdeclares or planestrats. These days, everyone maxes tanks, but there's really no penalty because plane strat doesn't work anymore. === But, honestly, I think you're just enjoying the extent to which downdeclaring is broken right now, and you want to have the game changed so that whoever the upper tier controls the game. Or, in other words, we should just make it so that Wampus owns the game, or alternately everyone builds a Wampus and goes to straight PnW feudalism (tons of farms and a fighting caste). Numerical advantage is a fundamental aspect of the game; hell, you arguably won Roqpocalypse because of your numerical advantage (Alex listened to the masses). You are asking Alex right now to privilege the few (with way too many cities) over the many, and depending on how well the few donate / pay up, it might end up being the case. Since NPO has departed, I don't have any particular affixation against a game made up of Wampuses and farms. In fact, I'd think it'd be exciting to an extent because of the sheer douchebaggery we could expect (Schrute, Greene, etc) from these people who have been built up with the cash of the masses and the ideological bullshit we could expect from people who can abuse their "lessers" with pure downdeclares. I'm retired, the game, imo, is built around douchebaggery, and it wouldn't bother me.

Correction, they're a new Greene tax farm.

Should I find him for you Redarmy? I'm somewhat ill-disposed right now, and I'd like someone to entertain you for me.

The biggest complaint I have about this war (and admit it, it's more reasonable than Hollywood's whining), is that Orbis no longer has a common enemy to fight after Grumpy's been sufficiently taken down. The unifying factor of everyone feeling threatened by Grumpy and Hollywood going out of its way to make itself unlikable is something we haven't had since NPO-IQ-OD. When Grumpy is sufficiently neutered, new targets will emerge and the regularly scheduled politics will emerge again.

Upvoted so I can get downvoted. The point of IC / OOC is just so we can say, despite being a !@#$ / Backstabbing !@#$ / Manipulative Bastard / Sadist in-game, I'm a perfectly nice guy/girl IRL. What you do anywhere reflects who you are. You might say it's just a contextual element of your personality, but it's still a part of your personality as a whole. To put it another way, if you go through Gary Brecher / John Nolan's the War Nerd, the Japanese are stereotyped as being completely savage in wartime, but overly polite in peacetime. The peacetime politeness does not mean that WW2 atrocities didn't happen, or that if you put them (at least the WW2 Japanese) in the same circumstances again, the same thing wouldn't happen. === As for the OP's sympathies, as I've pointed out, playing PnW is potentially a doxxing vulnerability 5-10 years on. The community has actively supported / tolerated Nazis, and if your comments regarding KT etc are dug out by a journalist (or a background checker), you may suffer IRL for that. Put another way, consider a MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online [b]Role Playing Game[/b]). There, the IC/OOC divide can be considered substantially stronger, because it's explicitly a "Role Playing Game". Even then, a reasonably-run MMORPG will ban or censor you for having accounts labeled "Hitler Did Nothing Wrong" or obvious !@#$ roleplays, because the corporate entity will be stigmatized for tolerating such things.

Also, oh nice, Skae is back. (Arrgh applicant, but not on Arrgh Discord).

I suppose it's stupid for assuming good will on your side, as opposed to assuming you weren't fundamentally genocidal. The other side's perspective was that they could not end the war because while your side was being effectively suppressed for the time being (Fark / TCW / Pantheon entering / switching sides did improve the pressure), it could not present itself a security guarantee for the post-war. Providing a massive reparation payment (Black Knights was attacked, after all) that would have shifted the strategic balance sufficiently (i.e, allowed NPO / BK / GoG to buy enough cities to have parity the war after that) would have been an alternative way of ending the war than the long-war IQ felt it needed or the eventual administrative action that ended the war. Remember, I did bother to criticize NPO etc for not selecting a reps policy to achieve the objective. Even if not all of the reps were going to be paid, substantial reps from individual players and alliances could have reduced the duration of the conflict. === As an aside, something like 800 billion represented the total amount of money supply in the game close to the termination of the war. If we consider a paired RSS quantity, that'd imply there were 1.6 trillion of liquid value. I no longer remember the exact calculations, but it was estimated that there was around 1-4 trillion in illiquid assets at the end of the war. I seem to recall 2 trillion being the estimate, with 4 trillion being an upper value. 600 billion transferred from one side to the other (i.e, crippling one side's rebuild, providing city growth to the other) would have been a sufficient basis to end the war without needing it to stretch on as long as it did.

You really should have just bribed NPO to go away last war. Likewise, NPO was dumb for not trying to extract massive reps. We really didn't need to go through the 8-9 months of that. Then again, having you guys dump 300-600 billion on NPO to get them to let you rebuild probably would have seen the same "MOLON LABE" crap we saw in the actual war.

It's that casualties are based on how many planes the opponent has that creates the percentages. For instance, a C10 hitting a C100, first, a team of 3 C10s will not be able to damage the C100 beyond the rebuy capability of the C100, and hence no actual damage will be dealt beyond war stats. Second, the C10s will see degradation of their combat capability as a function of the relative ratio between C100 and C10; vs a C20, on the other hand, the C10 will lose its planes much slower than suiciding into the C100s (and that's not even a tactical suicide, that's just pure suicide). As for percentages in general; it's more a way of thinking. You're trying to fathom a gameplay features difference, as opposed to qualitative difference, between C6s engaging C7s and C35s engaging C40s. On the qualitative level, it's definitely there, the C35s (usually) will be more experienced and know what they're doing, whereas the C7s will need to be babysat. There is also a subtle, but not really substantial difference, between C6s vs C7s and C35s vs C40s. The C40s in the latter case, especially at the start of the war, will have massive amounts of infra, meaning that partisan resistance as part of ground attacks is higher, but the partisan resistance aspect of ground attacks is really minimal and can be easily bypassed. Or, in other words, beyond the qualitative and mild gameplay factors, there's no real difference between a C6 hitting a C7 and a C35 hitting a C40. That's why I'm saying ratios and percentages.

Oblivion has no low-tiers, mind you. They're an almost completely solid C28 block. Also, as an aside, since Micchan thinks that it's better to lose than to win, does everyone now have a dogpile CB vs TKR now? Every war, we dogpile CB because TKR is so lovable and we want to make them happy by dogpiling them. Can you guys please stop? I resent the probable formation of a hegemony within 1-2 years, but you guys are just embarrassing. Can you please call in your PR agents from Knightfall? Those were good. This is terrible.

Is TKR really trying to convince people that being dogpiled by TKR is fun? That's some new levels of spin here. I approve.

Chaos vs KETOG was semi-fair / even until Nova Riata in the TKR order of battle imploded after Pooball was exposed for having generated massive resources with a timing glitch. Then Chaos started falling apart, it seems. The war also resembled GnR to an extent because of the downdec work conducted by KETOG, as well as Chaos' inability to effectively updeclare against KETOG.

Stop with the mendacity. Oblivion was being supported by Hollywood assets and WTF was generally hitting Hollywood, at least in the early stages. In actuality, WTF was likely being used to skirmish Oblivion pre-war (that it was untreatied and KT was ignoring it suggests it was bait for Oblivion), except that WTF was complete crap and dealing trickles of damage to Hollywood. The only thing in my mind that "resembles" a true war, fought for the sake of a war, with terrible odds might be: -KT vs Oasis. True, Oasis triggered the conflict itself, but KT wasn't backing down and would have turned Oasis into raider bait if Oasis hadn't done something about it. KT faced a force 4-5 times its size in terms of tiering-adjusted strength and managed to achieve positive war stats in the process. -NPO vs Chaos / KETOG. If you trust what Sphinx said in RON, if Guardian and Grumpy had sold infra and downdeclared into NPO, instead of functioning as logistics, the war outcome would have been substantially different. NPO, likewise, knew that it had bad odds on paper but went in anyways. We ended up with a war stretching more than 6 months as a consequence. The recent Guns and Roses might count, except that Oasis and Minc elements went in completely expecting that they had adequate forces. They likely did, but major !@#$-ups (the beige order, for one) resulted in an operational defeat.

I'm wondering how much of Cam knew this was going to happen (not Nexus specifically, but someone) and how many members were just blowing Epi. Anyways, can Cam get better war stats than TKR? The techniques have all been discussed. Whether Cam has the ability to implement is another question. I wouldn't be surprised if this ended with Camelot disbanding and the remainder of the bank being funneled into some Swiss bank account.

You know, let me put out my view on this general war. Hollywood deserved this rolling because of its really bad assault on Rose last war, wherein it obtained a tiering superiority and bulldozed both Rose and the people who came in to reverse the dogpile. Moreover, the winner of the last war was going to be the loser of the next war; i.e, if Rose had won the last war, it'd have likely been hit by Blackwater mid-war or by a combination of Blackwater and Hollywood the subsequent war. This would have been a result of a perceived Rose hegemony due to the specific outcome (i.e, the interventions were secret treaties and so on). The only way Rose could have won the previous war would have been to produce a decisive victory, and as a consequence of The Last Ride, Swamp was too shattered to provide the additional mass to overrun Hollywood. But, on the flip side, Hollywood winning despite a mild numerical inferiority WAS a major problem for Hollywood as well. The amount of force Hollywood faced implied that #1, that Hollywood had upper tier supremacy, and #2, that the game mechanics changes since Roqpocalypse meant that upper tier supremacy was potentially gamebreaking. The game in general felt that Hollywood had demonstrated that it was a tremendous threat; i.e, it had lost Guns and Roses by losing. Hollywood, in other words, had options available (just as Rose coalition had options available), and its choice of winning the previous war (and I still suspect Rose etc sabotaged their last war) resulted in its current and devastating loss. ==== As for more general remarks, the repeated rollings of Paragon, Paracovenant, then NPO and IQ obscured key facts about this game, simply because for you guys, Paragon, Paracovenant, and NPO were non-entities and non-people. War is not fun. No one is going to deliberately start a war they won't win (barring suspected "rigged" wars like Surf's Up). Unless !@#$-ups occur, wars WILL be dogpiles, because the defender won't really have much chance of successfully repelling the assault. The losers will lose their infra, some alliances on the losing side will collapse (see what's happening with Chocolate Castle right now), and even if the losers have the logistics for the infra-destruction to be a blip, they will not be able to play the game for the weeks to months the war will last. Or, in other words, as people have remarked regarding other games, "wars are against the rules of the game, just not enforced as such, because they're rarely fun for the losing side, and are effectively a way of driving them out of the game." If, say, we increase the counter-dogpile mechanics in the war, first, we increase the strength of harassment attacks (probable WTF, probable KT), which could ruin the game meta on its own (i.e, optimal warfighting protocol is now to send harassment units out), and second, we make the dogpiles even worse. As I've said before, no one will launch a war they do not expect to win; Hollywood did not launch vs Rose thinking that they had a substantial chance of losing, Rosynd did not attack Hollywood thinking that they didn't have the forces available to conduct resistance, and so on. ==== Then, you might ask, what are wars fundamentally about? They're about power. They're about achieving a strategic configuration for the post-war that's favorable to the initiating side, so much that they might be sufficient to eventually achieve a hegemony. While I've shown I've disagreed with your whinefest about how "unfair" this war is (to reiterate: all wars are unfair), I do agree that we are fast approaching a bipolar situation. Or, in other words, the minispheres concept was NEVER going to be stable; it was a facade (and the facade in itself could have been useful) and was eventually going to break down. And it's still your goddamn fault for the breakdown; if you had never attacked Rose the way you did, interventionist forces would never have had to intervene and demonstrate their own incompetence. Regarding this state of affairs, I am somewhat disappointed that minisphere system fell apart so soon, first, and that it is likely going to devolve into a bipolar arrangement as opposed to a tripolar arrangement (a tripolar system will degenerate into a bipolar arrangement eventually). But it was TKR-sphere, Hedgemoney, and collectively Hollywood's call that caused all of this.

I've done both updecs and downdecs. Last war, my updecs worked. Downdecs, your coalition wasn't working near its theoretical potential; I am better at downdeccing than you are and I suspect that might have been a factor limiting your war; i.e, a fear that your coalition would have figured out how to downdec efficiently as opposed to merely being effective against a relatively disorganized force. One important thing to consider with updecs / downdecs is that they're not actually measured in cities, no matter how dumb and innumerate people might be. They're measured in percentages. The hit by 35s amounted to roughly a 17% updeclare, which would be the same as a 6 city nation attacking a 7 city nation. Last war, the realistic requirement for updecs from safe ranges was 50%, not even 33%. Moreover, I think in my after-action report on the last war, one of the key recommendations was to attempt to avoid updec wars whenever possible. It's not simply that it's much harder these days than to simply score compress with no tanks and planestrat, but because high-city nations are more resource effective in terms of damage dealt for damage taken. Updeccing has always, even before the post-Roqpocalypse changes, been extremely costly and is a recipe for war stats suicide.

Then you lose half your planes to tank shock. Check.

Personally I think we should just change the mechanics so that Wampus can declare on any nation, that he can declare on any number of nations, and that no one can declare on him. Would be a fun meta. === To be explicit: GnR already proved that updeccing is extremely weak right now. Updeccing depends on dogpiles. Your proposed changes, by weakening updecs more, could finally shift the game beyond the C4 barrier where the optimal strategy is now to have a bunch of farms feeding Godzilla-type nations a la Wampus who duke it out in mass city-buying contests so they can get sufficient supremacy to downdec the rest of the game.

Suuuuuuuure. See, I peaced you out without any requests, I dropped a cash request, I let USSR hit me without retaliation despite the fact that Mao was holding a 30 million city (and that going after USSR would have been quite positive in terms of war stats). I tried to show good faith, and I basically told you: accept that I have grievances, accept that certain people in CU bear responsibility for their decisions, and provide one other non-monetary concession and we're through. CU has gone out of its way to aggravate and insult me. This is a very bad idea when you have a basically unstoppable raider who can constantly replenish off raiding yields (with basic raids) back toward an infinite nuke build. If you look at the Llojsa log I have, it's basically showing that, if, say, CU had paid the reps for the tanks destroyed (alongside some other infra damage), they would have been allowed to live quietly on their own. This was, what, quite early? And here's the smoking gun for CU's responsibility. I talked to peace elements in CU. They were telling me that the gov in CU were hardliners and wouldn't peace out, despite the fact that in one war alone vs a CU member, they lost 110 million worth of value (Net Negative Profit). I told them I'd hit the gov in a few days, after I was done totaling the major infra holders, but as a courtesy to them, I moved early. ==== And guess what? CU rank and file and junior gov obediently absorbed nuclear fire and tried to contain me the entire time. When the key gov figures were hit, on the other hand, the key gov ran into VM, and the merger happened quite quickly afterwards. ==== Of course I'm not denying that I bear responsibility for CU taking 1025 million in net negative profit over 30 days or so. But the responsibility also lies in CU gov, who selfishly let their members burn to indulge their own ego. And TBH, when I'm looking at you, with your lying (this is the reason you were declared on), I see this completely replicated. I'm not even sure what I want as a consequence as this war. I can keep it indefinitely if I need to do so, and one thing I considered was getting you as well to merge into a third alliance (perhaps USSR) and then calling it quits. Who knows. Let's see what happens with the damage output. ==== Oh, and full errata. Because of the efforts of USSR diplomats, I've tried to talk this crap out, and I'm not going to bring up USSR's dirty laundry, but yes, I did hit first against USSR, because USSR missed a deadline and made every indication that they were intending on violating a deal to satisfy the initial reps condition. No damage was dealt the initial round, talks with pleasant diplomats convinced me to let USSR beat me up without damaging them. I realize now that apparently you have to show strength with every new alliance you engage. Corporate Union taking 1025m because of their pride, because let's face it, Corporate Union's gov was willing to let their members burn for their pride) was not a sufficient show for others to try to be reasonable with me, as your logs indicate. ===== The last thing I'll say is this, avoiding diplomatic engagements with raiders is fairly stupid. If things can be settled diplomatically (and I've indicated my willingness to pay reps in the past; I've paid ~200 million reps to Rose for hitting them during the war, although that was in part an attempt to get BSKSplick to pay the 9 hugs he still owes me, I've paid TLE like 15 million iirc to get them to leave me alone so I could get involved in the last war, I've paid Aurora 20 million just to get them to give me back an offensive slot, etc), they should be. Stuff like, say, my little feud with CU, my engagement with CCW/USSR (I am not engaging USSR unless USSR gives me reason to do so, and I don't count the counters as counting), are very small parts of general "raider reasonableness". Greater examples might be the KT-Oasis war, wherein, while Oasis was relatively successful in containing KT, Oasis did take 5 billion more damage and 45 billion damage total in doing so, the Swamp-Arrgh war, where Swamp got beaten up and white peaced (achieving nothing), or even the Mythic-T$ war. Discrimination or taking a hard-line against raiders has a cost, and I look forward to inflicting such a cost upon you as well. We are part of the game ecosystem, we are strong, and we are here to stay. === So CU was never billed for the full cost of losses taken when CU refused to negotiate out the counter. Both you and CU tried to paint me as an extortionist, which is why I dropped the cash claims, but the cash claims never even went to the actual damage levels.

Yeah, it's the type of derangement that leads to nuking someone for months.

Because he's a micro leader. Being a moron is one of the job qualifications. "Hegemonies bully insurgencies. Insurgencies bully big alliances. Big alliances bully medium alliances. Medium alliances bully small alliances. Small alliances bully micros. Micros bully raiders."

Chain of events: I raid CU. I sue CU for peace, and mention I have an infinite nuke build. They (a micro) completely ignore the raid. I spend a week or so nuking them, tell them, pay up 100 million, but I'd prefer to blow up 1 billion anyways to prove the viability of the infinite nuke build. I get ignored. I end up nuking members out of their alliance and forcing them to merge, all the while they bullshit and come up with lies. One of the peace conditions is that the merged alliance would have to pay up the 100 million for ignoring my negotiation request. Then I get more lies from the new alliance leader. Or, in other words, medium alliances bully small alliances, small alliances bully micros, and micros bully raiders. I guess I've infinite nuked for 30 days, I'll probably be stuck doing it for a few months at least. This is being posted to show what conversing with Toutatis is like. Choice gem: Oh, this is deleted logs, where Toutatis claims that he plays hardball witH Tyrion / Rose. But of course, there's nothing there, so... Actual logs: quotes in Images: images in images: More Quotes: TLDR coming.

Stay Grumpy!

Wife beaters is mildly offensive, but I don't see how the nation name is inappropriate, as opposed to merely being tasteless.

The mandate isn't conjecture, though. That, IIRC, was in the GOONS recruitment thread.