[War timeline shows negative aluminum usage]

https://politicsandwar.com/nation/war/timeline/war=1828693

 

 

[Unpopular Suggestion Incoming]

Infrastructure and/or cities over a certain level (city 20? 2000 infra?) could require resources to build, instead of just cash.

[Development Team Update, January 2023.]

On 2/8/2023 at 9:48 PM, Ketya said:

You can simply make cities cost money and raws. Probably the easiest change to execute (coding-wise), doesn’t unnecessarily complicate the game and doesn’t really favor a tier over the other. If it doesn’t work, easy enough to revert too.

This. I'd also be in favor of starting it at say, city 20. After city 20 cities stop costing more cash but starting costing raws and/or manufacturing.

[Content Announcement: Smaller updated, larger update]

On 5/2/2022 at 4:58 PM, Prefontaine said:

Quality of Life:

• When a nation deletes during a war, part of that nations resources goes to those fighting it. 50% split among the nations fighting
• Make Leader name and Nation name consistent. You can have different names but all interaction (like bank trades) will go through use names. 
• Alliance (and shared market) trades get merged into the global trade screen and include a special indicator or color.
• Nations in alliances that have a treaty to your alliance will appear with an indicator or color on the market to show "ally" trades
• For the bulk import feature, have the default be to all cities but give the option to select which cities to import to. Cities may have differing infra levels/improvement slots, especially during war, or people may want different builds for different cities - but still across multiple cities - so allowing them to choose which cities the import applies to would make things easier.
• Allow for the "$" and commas to be ignored when inputting values and/or allow for k,m,b to be used to send cash/resources (i.e. 1m instead of 1000000 to send 1 million food).

Love all of these. Especially excited to see the alliance / shared market trades get merged into the global trade screen. I think it will do a lot make alliance trade offers more accessible, and used a lot more as a result.

[City Timers]

Strongly disagree. Making early/mid tier growth too easy also reduces the sense of accomplishment of building through those levels. 

[8/31/2021 - Monthly Update from Alex, August 2021]

On 8/31/2021 at 3:21 PM, Alex said:

Well, for those of you that don't know, I did start working with a part-time developer back last year named Payal

I misread this as "paypal" and was expecting it to be something about donations.

I appreciate all the work you put into this game! Don't beat yourself up about any coding mistakes people might criticize you for! Especially on the coding side, the best way to learn is to do. It's a lot easier to criticize than to actually be in the field trying to make something. If this wasn't a good game, you wouldn't have a dedicated base of thousands of players. It's super impressive that someone could make something like this in High School.

[Enabling dogpiled nations to mount some resistance]

I agree with everyone saying we just need to implement all wars ending in beige.

[QoL: Create Page to show all your Espionage Operations]

This would be great!

[Remove Base Score]

7 hours ago, BelgiumFury said:

There is a reason we have it, it has something to do with spy bot nations with 1 score or some stupid shit during NPOLT.

Wouldn't have the first city count for score (and not allowing you to have zero cities) solve this issue?

[Military Transfer Feature]

This could be interesting but would be really hard to make work in terms of balance.

[Game Development Thread - July]

Would the lottery treasures be new treasures or taken from the current pool of treasures? The lottery sounds fun to me.

Honestly I think admin should just go back to allowing treasures to be traded via in-game wars as long as the nation with the defending slot isn't in a separate alliance war. The infra lost from being beiged is a good balance to have to make the trade really worth it.

[Game Development Thread - July]

15 hours ago, Prefontaine said:

Lets do some Bombardment math. Lets take someone with 15 cities and 2k infra before the pirating began so they had 40 improvements in each city at the start giving a total of 600 improvements in their nation. 

Lets look at the extreme case of a war exclusively going for bombardments. You can launch 8 naval attacks in the war, 7 can be bombardment after the blockade. This war will kill 14 improvements, lets say you got lucky on the blockade and got an improvement there as well bringing it up to 15. 

Now looking at our pirate nation, lets say their running full military improvements and a back up nuke power plant which gives us a nice round 20 improvements locked up there, so half of their improvements cannot be killed by bombardment (minus that first lucky naval hit). Giving us 300 improvements that can be killed.

That's 22 full wars devoted exclusively to bombardments, over 7 rounds of defensive slotting before resource/commerce improvements have been removed. Mind you these attacks also need to be performed with 75% of the max ships, so the nation performing them is using lots of ammo (gas is reduced on bombardments) and expending a lot of cost in keeping that many ships. 

So in the most extreme case which all of your defensive slots are filled with bombardment exclusive attackers who get lucky on the first naval hit and kill another resource production/commerce it's going to be a while before all those are gone. 

 

Honestly I think bombardments as proposed are too weak, especially in the upper tiers.  Even if takes 50% less gas/muni, launching a naval attack at 75% of my at 35 cities at current market prices for gas/muni costs about 2.7 mill.  If each improvement slot is worth about 10-20k a day, two improvements is 20-40k lost income for a a day.  Even if you take off 300k for value of the improvements (generous), that's 60-120 days for the attack to cost the target more than it what it cost me to attack.

[Game Development Thread - July]

2 hours ago, Who Me said:

First, please proof read before you post as the highlighted sections make no sense.

Also, are you saying you are going to" fix" the lottery to keep rich alliances from winning too many treasures?

This is a terrible idea all the way around.

 

I think what he is referring to is the formula for the treasure bonus gives diminishing returns for each additional treasure.

[Game Development - February 2021]

Bombardment as currently proposed is useless.  Killing 1-2 resource/civic improvements is very, very small.  At 35 cities @ 3200 infra I'd go into a war with about 1640 resource/civic improvements after military/power.  Even a 20 city nation @ 2500 infra will go into a war with about 600 resource/civic improvements.  If each improvement is worth 10-20k in profitability per day (maybe up to 30k, but we're talking averages), loosing two improvements is about 1 mill in income over a month.  It would take many months to pay for the gas/munitions even with the 50% reduction.

It should scale up with how many ships are used, which also serves as a good replacement for the "75% of max capacity" mechanic. 1 improvement for every 50 or 100 ships used.  This has the added advantage of making it meaningful for the upper tiers without being overpowered in the lower tiers.  The more cities you have, the more improvements you have, the less each improvement is worth to you, and the more the attack costs.

[Post-War Mechanics ideas.]

I like all of these changes.

I'm a little leery of having beige change how spies work, I kind of like the fact that the two arenas (spies vs conventional fighting) are somewhat separate.

On that note, a quality of life change would be to warn/prevent someone from doing a spy attack against a unit they aren't eligible to attack. This could also be done for spying a nuke someone has bought that day.

[The Hollywood/Roasis War has concluded]

Fun war everyone!

[Remove City Timer Reset for Cities 11-15]

On 6/14/2021 at 9:59 PM, Cherise said:

 

On the other hand, you're proposing to delay growth by getting rid of the existing 1-10 zero timer function. In reality, for most players, growth is not a function of the city timer but rather a function of their resource availability. This allows players to get recruited into alliances, and also poses interesting challenges for alliances; i.e, do we bulk the player up to C10 now, or do we do a testing period to see whether if they'll stay? If we do a testing period, how long should it be and how should the tests be constructed?

 

In reality, if you remove the timer for C10-15 city buys, most players won't actually be able to fully exploit this, barring some exceptional raiders. Instead, it's more an option for existing alliances with stockpiles to expand members and rapidly fund newbies to C15, where they're all of a sudden economically and militarily relevant (albeit to a much lesser degree).

As you say, the delay isn't the main limiting factor for most people, so what I'm proposing wouldn't delay growth that much. The delays would be very short at the low level, 1-5 days between cities.  22 days total to get to city 10.  72.5 days to get from City 10 to City 20.  94.5 days to get to city 20, effectively the same as with the current timer.

My main point is that I think the game is better, rewards more activity, and makes buying a city feel like more of an accomplishment when there is SOME delay between cities. It doesn't need to be a long delay, and I agree with the sentiment that 10 days is too long at lower levels.

I could also go for something like a 1 day timer for cities 1-10, 5 days for cities 11-20, 10 days for 20+ cities. I just don't like the all or nothing approach of having no delay and then jumping straight to a 10 day delay.

[Remove City Timer Reset for Cities 11-15]

The ability to instantly buy a bunch of cities at once cheapens their value and makes their purchase feel like much less of an accomplishment.

I think some kind of dynamic limit based on what city number is bought would make more sense.  Something like the number of turns for the timer = city bought *6, half a day per city.  City 10 would have a 5 day timer, City 10 a 10 day timer, City 30 a 15 day timer, etc.  Also would give new players something to do a number of times throughout the day over their first few days.

[City/Project Timer are different]

Same here.  City timer says 71 turns, Project timer  says 70 turns.  I built a project 50 turns ago.

[Just Remove 'Em]

If you don't like bounties no one is forcing you to use them.  I don't use them, but I see no reason to get rid of the system for those that do use them.

[Commodities]

One thought: Have some commodities with high benefits but also highs costs that are only imposed on the producing nation.

I think this could produce an interesting dynamic where smaller nations, for whom the "high costs" will be relatively modest in the context of a small nation, produce the commodities and sell the trade connections to larger nations, who probably would end up paying them something between the cost to the small nation and what the cost would be if they produced the commodity.

On the flip side you could have a commodity that requires an expensive project to produce, but that provides a significant benefit only for smaller nations.  A commodity that requires 20 cities to produce but reduces the cost of cities 1-10 by 10%, for example.

[Commodities]

I like this idea in general.  It's debatable how much it adds, but it definitely doesn't hurt.

I definitely foresee some not being used at all, while others being used by everyone.  It might be interesting to add some type of element where the less common a resource is, the more of a bonus it provides.

I would also like to see some commodities that impact resource production other than just food.

[Spy attack damage formulas]

Are the spy attack damage formulas posted somewhere?  I can't find them.

[Feedback from war: Missiles/Nukes]

Cut infra damage from nukes dramatically, say 500 infra per attack.

Instead, nukes mostly target military.  A successful nuke destroys 50% of any type of unit (the attacker chooses which unit it targets).

Reasons:
1) Requires coordination with other players to use to maximum effect.  One player nukes, other players follow up with attacks based on that type of unit.
2) This change would make nukes more dynamic, not just a substitute for conventional attacks like they are now.  
3) Good balance in that it gives players more opportunities to fight back conventionally against specific types of units without eliminating the winning side generally having the edge in most categories of military.

I'd also consider drastically increasing the impact of radiation.  Maybe resource and military improvements don't function in a city until all radiation the dissipates.

[The Great Aluminium Conference of 2020 (Plane resource cost change)]

An unbalanced market isn't necessarily a bad thing.  Having some imbalances between costs of military units is a good thing, it creates room for different units in different ways and a larger variety of strategies and tactics, all things that make the game more interesting.