Azaghul

I agree that having rebuys available is a big advantage of coming out fresh. I think the problem here is trying to adapt this to work with two separate scenarios: The impact of initial blitzes vs the impact on someone trying to rebuild. One really good thing about the advantage of striking first is that it helps to balance out the political disadvantage of being the aggressor. It encourages preemptive strikes when tensions are high. If everyone builds up because of tensions but most of that is in reserve, that not only takes away the first strike advantage but turns it into a major disadvantage because counter-attacks will be more effective than initial attacks. I think there's merit to the idea in general but it needs to impact rebuilds without impacting first strikes. What you propose doesn't change that, but I think we could figure out something.

Point 2 is definitely the least important, though I'd be curious to know what you think is unbalanced about it. Point 3 is the most important. IMO one of the biggest problems with beige right now, and one of the biggest reasons people slot fill, is that it can be used to give you cover from being countered while you are still fighting your current wars, even if you are winning those wars.

I try to give Alex the benefit of the doubt as much as possible. Being a game admin is hard, people love to complain, and there almost always is a lot of knee-jerk opposition to change even when the changes are good. That being said, I share your frustration about beige just being removed without warning when there have been tons of suggestions over the years about how to fix it that don't seem to have been seriously considered.

NPO infiltrator confirmed.

I'd limit reserve military to 50% of the max capacity, which would allow you to build up to 50% and then get to 90-100% of units with a double buy. Allowing people to have 100% of their military in reserve would be too big of a nerf to blitzes. I agree that permablockades would still be an issue that would need to be addressed, but that doesn't make this suggestion a bad one to give people space to recover units.

Are you talking about point one? You can already beige someone attacking with only a few units to do minimal damage.

War slot filling is a problem but not having beige creates a much bigger problem. It needs to be changed or replaced, but not just eliminated. I proposed some changes here that I believe would fix most of the problems with it now:

I propose bringing back beige from loosing wars with 3 mechanics changes to balance it: In general, the point of these proposals is to keep beige as a mechanic that gives people space to get a reprieve and rebuild going into the next round of wars. The problem right now is that beige gives people an unfair advantage in the round of wars they are in when they are beiged. These changes reverse that, so that getting beiged puts you at a disadvantage in your current round of wars while maintaining the ability it gives you to rebuild and have a chance to fight effectively later. 1) The nation with the lowest resistance automatically loses when the war expires All wars end with either a peace agreement or beige, no expiring wars. 2) Minimum beige time I can think of two ways to do this: Either you can't leave beige unless you have less than 12 turns of beige left, or have a minimum beige time and each lost war adds 12 turns to it. This mechanic would reduce the unbalanced advantage beige nations have of being able to come out whenever they choose. With this change, you can use beige stacking as a tool to prevent someone from rejoining the war for a few days. 3) Nations on beige automatically accept peace offers from opponents This prevents people from using beige as a way to avoid being countered while they beat up on weaker opponents who can't do anything to stop them. It makes countering and beiging someone a viable tactic to relieve other people at war with that nation.

Not to dismiss everything else, but the tax issue can be solved by joining an alliance without a crippling tax rate.

At the end of the day it's Alex's game and alliance leaders are going to have their own biases.

Alliance trade offers need to be merged into global trade offers. I agree highlights would be helpful! I made the suggestion a couple of years ago and Alex said it was on his list but it hasn't happened yet.

If anything the RNG element needs to be buffed. Automatic wins/losses are boring. Uncertainties and probabilities make wars more interesting and dynamic.

One way to do this would be to drastically buff nuclear radiation. It'd also be relatively simple to implement. 1) Bump nuclear radiation from 200 pollution per nuke to 1000 pollution. 200 nuclear radiation translates to 10% disease / 10% of population. 1000 would be 50% of population. 2) You'd probably also want to up the clean up rate. 3 radiation per turn = 36 per day = 27.8 days to clean up from a nuke if it generates 1000 radiation. There could be a project to up that rate to 5 radiation per turn. 3) Significantly reduce infra damage from nukes to balance it out. 200/400/800 infra based on war type. 4) One mechanic for temporarily knocking out most improvements: A city loses power if it has more than 1000 in nuclear radiation. This would also present interesting choices in terms of nuking cities multiple times. Right now nukes are basically just super-powered missiles. Like most other attacks they focus on killing infra, they just don't require conventional dominance to use. I believe that doing something like this would make nukes more interesting and something significantly different from other kinds of attacks.

I like the fact that there is one area of warfare that takes a while to build back up from. It adds depth to the war system.

This would be a cool stat to have.

Give every alliance an API key with a number of allowed API queries equal to the allowed queries of it's members. Alternatively, allow members to "donate" their allowed API calls to the alliance or to another player. This would cut down on members of alliances sharing API keys with each other for alliance tools, and make it easier to build and use tools.

"parts of the new update be rolled back" =/= "the changes are bad"

It definitely should be scaled to city count. 1 mill is way too high at lower levels.

This. More decision making and specialization is a good thing. That doesn't happen when it's too easy to max out on everything.

Most of the changes are good. Some probably need tweaking. I wish the poll had more than two options. In general one reason Alex doesn't just poll the community and go with that is that there is almost always a knee jerk reaction against changes. Here and in real life, it's a lot easier to oppose change than support it and people who oppose change are usually going to be the most vocal. There's a psychological bias in favor of loss aversion.

Make a "test server" that starts with a copy of all nations as they are now.

The last player to have planes survive above the new limit should get a trophy.

For green technologies: "Upkeep from resource production is reduced by 10%" Is this only for raw resources or does it include manufactured resources?

What is going to happen with cities and nations that are now over the cap on planes, coal mines, or oil wells?

We've been talking a lot about aircraft and how to re-balance them. One of the big reasons that aircraft are overpowered is that you can effectively, in one attack, take out several hundred aircraft AND do a lot of damage to the other units of nation (soldiers/tanks/navy). You can effectively keep someone's air zeroed for free if you're also using air attacks against their other unit buys. In a blitz, once you have someone's air reduced to ~2/3rds of yours, you can eliminate the rest while attacking their other units with air strikes. Proposal: Eliminate any aircraft losses for the defender for any type of air attack except "attack planes". This would make it more costly in MAPS and victory points and resources to keep someone's planes zeroed.