leonissenbaum

The actual details of this NAP are somewhat relevant to if a NAP was broken, could the full NAP text be posted here?

Have you ever wondered what ended up happening to the club penguin iceberg? As it turns out, not everyone forgot about it.. (This is a submission for team snow birds. Specifically, weaponized assault penguins.)

The issue with calculating the cost with the projects right now specifically is that prices are very abnormal - 300+ ppu food on projects that require a million food is going to change things a lot, after all. UP/AUP/MP normally don't cost nearly as much as they do right now! The main point here, though, is that this doesn't really change the difficulty of getting to city 40. It's nearly impossible for players to get there now without either doing something unique or spending years, and it's nearly impossible after the changes, so there's no difference. The values after UP/AUP/MP costs, with regular costs, will likely have it so the new system is slightly more expensive, but it doesn't really matter if it's a bit off, for there to be catchup possible it needs to be FAR cheaper, not slightly cheaper or slightly more expensive. 40 cities is not a new player right now, yes, but if we want to make catchup meaningful, then we need to be able to make it so new players can realistically get there. The game is currently in a place where a city 30 barely has any impact on wars, making it a bit easier to get to city 30 won't resolve the issue of new players feeling like they aren't really able to contribute militarily, since after all, they'll be right! Without the ability for new players to get caught up to older players, all of the issues that these changes are for will persist - more and more consolidation, new players feeling less interested in the game and having less impact, and new players just not being able to contribute militarily for years at a time. I chose city 40 specifically because that's the point where, using the city 40 target, these changes reduce the price of the cities before projects (of course, no cities are ever reduced in price after projects). This is at some level an arbitrary point, of course, and other cities in the range could work as well, but it's certainly a city count with military impact, whereas something much lower like city 30 barely does. If we're making it easier for new players to get to city 30, but harder to get to city 40, I don't see how we're really helping them catch up at all. The moment they get close to being somewhat relevant, this system no longer benefits them. If we want to fix this issue without letting all of the new players get to city 40, then what we need is a war rework so that you can contribute a lot more meaningfully at lower cities. While this would likely result in a better game, it's my understanding that this isn't currently in the cards, sadly.

P&W absolutely needs catchup mechanics for new players if it wants to survive into the long-term. However, this isn't it. The removal of UP, AUP, and MP makes these changes net neutral to negative for the new player. Ignoring domestic policies and other modifiers and just looking at city cost, the cost to go from city 1 to city 40 is currently ~20.8B, ignoring the project costs. With these changes, the price actually goes up to ~21.8B. In fact, every single city in the game becomes more expensive (using the shifted c40 values), except for these three exact ranges: C6-11, C13-16, and C18-21. This doesn't tell the full story, of course, because nations having 3 more project slots does help, and having to buy UP/AUP/MP isn't free, but this certainly won't really help new players catch up. You can see the quick sheet I created with these calculations here, but this isn't a lowering of cost for new players and a raising of the cost for experienced players - this is just raising the cost for everyone. Helping people catch up to where the experienced alliances are really is a big deal for the health of the game - alliances of new players can grow to compete with older ones, and even old alliances that've fallen behind tiering might have a chance to catch up - but this solution doesn't do that. A proper solution to do this would focus on significantly reducing city cost below a specific percentage of the playerbase (for example, the top 20% as used here, though I'm not sure why that specific percentage was used), as well as reducing/removing city timers below that point (which admittedly may be unrealistic, because credits), which would allow alliances to boost up members to a base "relevant" tier, and new players making money on their own able to catch up a lot better regardless. While this specific implementation can't work regardless because it just.. doesn't really help new players, making cities more expensive in general has a major problem: it threatens the identity of many alliances. Grumpy, for example, would be crippled a year or two into a change like this. Letting unique alliances that focus on whales like grumpy exist is interesting! It blocks the game from just being mass member blob vs mass member blob, it lets a small group of powerful players exert that influence far further than otherwise possible, and it makes the politics of the game a lot more interesting. A city cap, hard or soft, kills this kinds of gameplay, which makes the game worse. What the game needs is the ability for new players to catch up - players having more cities than other players isn't an issue, but new players being unable to affect wars is, and that's solved by making new player cities cheaper, not by capping cities. There's also one specific point made that I think misses some context: In general, there are three things that increase the income per city: Infra, land, and projects. Projects absolutely are super whale-favored, and the current implementation of projects helps whales snowball massively - each economic project increases the income you get per city, and the more cities you have, the more those projects impact you - if a project increases your income by 50k per city, that's 2.5m total for a c50! Additionally, the more cities you have, the more projects you can get, which makes these compound. Every single project added is a whale buff, and if we want to slow down whales, a project rework would be good. However, that's not what's accounting for most of the numbers here. Land is just free money, but takes a lot of time to do. Whales are more likely to have land - after all, they're big and normally old, so an economic decision that takes 5 years to pay off may have very well paid off and got them more cities by now. However, this changes the additional profit of a new city by quite a bit: if you're dropping 250m or 500m on land for a new city for it to pay off years later, that city is net negative in terms of land investment for a long, long time! Infra is the primary factor for these numbers - the higher your city count, the safer people tend to feel going to high infra counts. However, this of course isn't free money - infra costs a huge amount of money, and it's temporary! Looking at the income from some lunatic who went to 5k infra without also looking at the cost of the 5k infra won't get you an accurate point of view, after all. It's rough to run numbers right now since, well, there's a massive global going on, but generally if you compare the amount of time it takes for gigawhales to get new cities compared to c30s or c40s, the gigawhales do end up taking quite a lot longer to make cities. Finally, unrelated to all of this: The first thee changes here are listed, but not justified. Why? They're quite obviously to stop treasure hunts, but are treasure hunts actually bad for the game? I don't see why they are: They encourage player engagement, can cause political friction, is one of the few things you can do in this game at peace time that isn't just log in and check if you have the money to build a city, and so on. What's the reason to stop treasure hunts? The final change is justified: "Just for some reasoning behind this. Colours are currently dominated by the major powers, with middle powers having to more or less exist on a colour with that majors consent. Adding more colours allows middle powers or rising major powers to be able to carve out their own colour." However, adding more colors like this seems more likely to just trivialize the entire color mechanic. To my understanding, the entire point of colors is to cause friction - if the color blocs are limited, and two alliances want one, but the color can't support two alliances, that causes friction and drama! It's no surprise that medium sized powers can't sit on a good color block on their own: that's the entire points of colors! If we add enough colors for everyone to get their own good colors, then what's the point of the mechanic when nobody has a reason to do politics over it? Also, for the sake of positivity, I should also add that the new treasures seem quite cool! More variety in the mechanics there is absolutely an improvement, and in this case, it leads to more cases where political friction can take place, which is great! QOL features like the template thing are also good!

Investor Contact: Keram Media Contact: Tarroc Peace has been declared between all parties in the current war, effective this day change: 1: There will be a 3.5 month blanket NAP between all parties, to conclude on the day change from May 17th into May 18th. This also extends the NAP between the members of WELP and the members of ODOO. 2: All current wars will be peaced out. All alliances will make an announcement that everybody needs to click the 'peace' button. 3: Raiding is allowed below C10. Raiders may still be countered.

First off, glad to see more proper political texts on the forums! That being said, this specific one has some pretty glaring issues. These logs are extremely censored. While it's not always possible to share the full logs for everything, of course, censoring this much from this many logs makes it extremely easy to change the meaning of what's being said, and taking all of these logs at face value would be ridiculous. Image 5 for example hides out over half of the discussion. It's of course impossible to single out which specific images might have redactions used to change the context, but it'd be foolish to assume it's not done at all. These images are meant to try and disprove that you tried to form a coalition against us, but using these to disprove it is ridiculous. Looking at the dates, they were ~2 weeks before the end of the NAP, ~1 week before the end of the NAP, and.. after the NAP. It's unclear how this is meant to disprove the idea that you wanted to form a coalition against us but failed, but it doesn't. Telling WANA that you don't want to continually work against us is a nice gesture, but words are cheap. When you then proceed to continually work against us right after darkest hour, we don't have much reason to give you the benefit of the doubt. While it's fair that you weren't going to actually ally cypher (although it's interesting that this is one of the few claims that don't have image proof..), this is a nitpick. The problem we have is with you allying someone who's been extremely clear how they plan to be hostile towards us in the future, not with the details of if you're allying Cypher or not. This paints a picture of you wanting to ensure positive relations with t$ after allying singularity and preventing a revenge war. If this is true, you've had the perfect opportunity to mention it to us: After your 72 hours with eclipse were up, you reached out to Tarroc, and there was a discussion on if we wanted to hit you or not. You mentioned wanting to ally singularity post-war, posted 10 minutes later that may have changed the thought process "slightly", and then the chat remained silent. If you really wanted to stop singularity from doing a revenge war on us, then I have no idea why you wouldn't bring it up at the time. Finally, I'd like to note that, if you look at our actual DOW post, our primary CB against you is your intention to ally with singularity, who is clearly hostile to us. Tarroc provided additional grievances in DM's, but these are grievances we have with you, not the primary CB. Claiming that we "fabricated" this when it was just sent to you, not posted publicly, doesn't make any sense. What would be the point of fabricating grievances with you to only send it to you? And attacking these grievances won't disprove our CB, as our CB is about your intention to ally singularity.

On the sheet detailing project changes, can the old and new total price (with resources being converted to cash) at current (or pre-war) market values be included? It's hard to judge the price changes without knowing what they actually are.

Alliance of the Year: Eclipse Most Improved Alliance: Carthago Best New Merged Alliance: Legion Of Dawn Best Rookie Alliance: Pokimans Best Alliance for New Players: The Enterprise Most Likely to Succeed in 2024: The $yndicate Most Likely to be Rolled in 2024: The Fighting Pacifists Most Honorable Alliance: The Legion Best Fighting Alliance: Knights Templar Worst Fighting Alliance: Cypher Best Alliance Growth: Eclipse Best Foreign Affairs Team: The $yndicate Best Foreign Affairs Move: Guardian dropping House Stark Worst Foreign Affairs Move: House Stark Peace Demands Alliance with Best Propaganda: The $yndicate Most Missed Alliance: Treasure Island Biggest Alliance Decline in 2023: House Stark

Investor Contact: Keram Media Contact: Tarroc NASSAU, Bahamas, 2024-01-13: SYNDICATE, Inc., (NYSE:SCC) makes official its position on the hostile business practices of The Fighting Pacifists, a group which for a lengthy period of time has conducted its affairs in a manner counterproductive and dishonorable to the spirit and tradition of a free market, frequently seeking to sabotage or thwart the completely licit interests of the Syndicate and its associates. Business insiders and credible market analysts have recognized and exposed such utterly unprovoked attempts to execute schemes to bring down corporate share value and damage its market potential. That such group has made it clear that it is their intention to align themselves with singularly hostile competitors has left the board with no choice but to respond with appropriate countermeasures in the name of defending its commitment of continuously bringing value to its shareholders. The Syndicate declares war on the Fighting Pacifists. About SYNDICATE, Inc. SYNDICATE, Inc., based near Nassau, The Bahamas, is one of the world's leading gasoline, aluminum, steel and munitions distributors for a wide variety of peacekeeping and humanitarian activities. Through breakthrough strategies and external geopolitical conflicts, the company has increased their market share of the wheat market with plans to extend this leading going forward. Wholly owned SYNDICATE, Inc. subsidiary brands include: the Enterprise, which provides development and growth opportunities for multinational prodigies around the globe; The Firm, which provides legal and monetary council for the company; Requiem, which provides exclusive retirement packages to esteemed executives and government members; and our junior venture Pokimans, which is an investment into markets not previously explored by our conglomerate. For more information about SYNDICATE, Inc., and its activities, contact Tarroc, Chief Strategic Officer.

> Improved Reconissance: Gather intelligence also reveals a nation's selected perks. Taking this to mean that perks are private, that seems like another situation like with private spies where bots can gather information that's not possible to get for humans. If the last 30 missiles a nation used hit people with ID with none of them being blocked, they probably have the perk for that! A large portion of these perks can be found using similar techniques, or just aren't hidden at all. Making perks public seems best, especially considering it's not obvious why they should be private: you can look at the rest of a player's build, why not this?

These kinds of bonuses being dependent on nation age is going to incentivize people to just delete and re-create their nations when they get past 60 days (or 365 days?) if they're still raiding. To avoid this, having these kinds of bonuses be dependent on city count instead of nation age seems like it'd work much better. I might be missing it, but is what the new player boost actually does explained?

Before running the numbers on this, I'm wondering what exactly this loot modifier affects? Does it just affect ground attack loot, or does it also affect beige loot? if it also affects beige loot, then how?

Didn't notice this in my first reading, this is a great point, should be implemented in both directions.

A lot of the detail with the raiding changes rests on the loot modifier, and since there's no detail in this thread, it's hard to give proper feedback on that. A proper loot modifier is important, otherwise the income jump between c15 and c16 would be far too large, and would make people never want to go past c15 in most cases. Not much more to say on this, really depends on the details of the loot modifier. The rest of these changes all seem good for catchup, no problem with them.

We already slightly have that problem with deleting cities, true, but deleting your nation every now and then goes a lot further in my eyes, which I'm concerned about. I'm very concerned about the meta becoming "alright, your nation is too old, delete your nation now". I don't think that's the kind of attitude the mechanics should encourage. Beyond that, it still has roughly the same problem as before with higher city nations doing ground attacks and eating all of the money, though it's not nearly as extreme as the other options, since people can't just do it forever (unless making people delete their nations becomes meta).