Azaghul

Less arguing more propaganda.

Increasing their contribution to NS would be an easy balance change.

The current global war might even be over by then!

This thread was a lot better when it was focused on micros.

Do we really need to argue about CN history in this thread? Pretty much all of the 120 mill I've made off baseball was used to upgrade players or buy shit to help me blow up other people's shit. It's also possible to make millions a day trading resources. As I said earlier in this thread, I day traded resources as a smaller nation it boosted my income by at least 10-20% and it's part of the reason I'm in the whale tier now. Donating to get 10 credits every month yields 200 mill+ per month. In peace time that's a way better investment than baseball if we're looking at just time: I can make enough to buy 10 credits driving Uber/Lyft for 2-3 hours.

The copy/paste option for spy attack results is great. It should be added to all of the attack result pages. People often end up copy/pasting their attack results when coordinating with people.

I agree. One route that this could be done is that each one is a project and you can only have one of the four projects.

Overall I think this is great I'm not sure how I feel about raiding airfields. If that's unpopular it can be taken out as an option. Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater. I'd suggest separating out attacks that focus on infra vs attacks that focus on improvements. I'd also suggest one other attack type: 1) Guerrilla attack. Can't ever take away resistance. Zero or limited money/infra/improvement damage. Significantly change the combat formulas so that casualties generally end up roughly as 3-2 attacker-defender and attacker casualties max out at about 25% of attacking force.

For me personally: Competitive war > Loosing war > winning war. The suspense and planning of trying to fight a competitive war and gain the edge, of attacks and counters and counters to counters is great. I also enjoy loosing wars, finding the best ways to fight back and do the most damage to the enemy in a guerrilla style. Winning wars are generally the most boring for lack of targets. And when you do find targets you usually just beat them down quickly and that's it other than sitting on them and killing the concessional rebuy. I have more stamina than most players to keep fighting round after round. I enjoy having a diverse amount of things to do over time. I like war. I like different stages of war. I like building up my nation. I like the work of coordinating building and rebuilding and warfare on an alliance level. I like working with different types of people.

Raiding and trading can also "quintuple a nation's natural income" if they are active enough. One of the reasons I'm a whale now is that when I was a smaller nation I boosted my income significantly via trading. If someone is willing to invest at least an hour, probably more, to max out their games and make ~20 mill, I say let them. It's roughly the equivalent of selling a credit.

Baseball rewards activity and even has generated some degree of cooperation between warring alliances. I really don't see it as game breaking at all. What it's brought in is only a small fraction of total global economic output.

All the while spinning a narrative about how they are the little guy/victim.

The TLDR is that NPO were/are politically incompetent, alienated a bunch of former allies and weakened their own diplomatic position, and are now demanding that we give them money to compensate for that weakness and make peace "worth it" to them.

It's the principle of not giving into extortion and preventing the crap you are trying to pull from becoming the norm. Preventing it from becoming the norm is beneficial for everyone in the long term. 1) We don't have more cities overall, just more cities per player. Which in the long term is actually a disadvantage because we have a lot less growth potential to realize. For us, each additional city is far more expensive than yours. If you need something to "level the playing field", this is it. 2) A lot of that money was sunk into into high tier cities which have a low rate of return in terms of military and economic benefit relative to the cost. You're argument is based on a contradiction. If winning a war provides a big economic advantage, you don't need reps for this war to "level the playing field". If winning a war doesn't provide a big economic advantage, than your argument that the field isn't level because of past wars doesn't hold. 3) If our "economic advantage" was so important, you wouldn't have won this war or the last one.

Until you can see that there's more to the world than just dominating it statistically you're never going to get it. At this point this will end when enough more of your allies, those that actually care about having fun and the health of the broader community, realize how selfish and toxic you are and abandon you. It's funny that you think a war where we "lost horribly" can also be some kind of "favorable outcome". The idea that you somehow can't compete in peace time is an admission of your own political and economic incompetence. Incompetence doesn't give you the right to extort people.

The benefit is living in a world where wars aren't long tedious grinding affairs and where you shake hands at the end of a war rather than trying to extort people. Unfortunately it seems that it's impossible for NPO to care about anything but its own power. No concern for fair play or honor or the health of the overall community we are a part of.

Regardless of how careless Leo might have been with bot security, that doesn't excuse or justify using it to kick members. I'd like to think that we as a community can avoid malicious use of tools and forcing people to spend lots of time on security measures to prevent malicious use. A certain level of OOC trust and respect on this would benefit everyone.

1) I don't agree with removing the initial MAPS. The element of blitzes and gaining initiative ads tactics to what would otherwise be a pure numbers game. 2) I think moving to some kind of mechanic where you choose to move to beige/safe-mode/surrender whatever could make a lot of sense. I wouldn't tie it to not being at war because that allows for perpetual cycling. I'd propose mechanics be something like this: - You can't move to it if you have any active offensive wars. - You can't make any attacks or war declarations from it. - It lasts for 7 days. You can't leave it in fewer than 5 days. Benefits: - Gives people a chance to recover but can't be used to prevent being countered when launching offensive wars. - Allows people to get out of perpetual cycling. - Does offer some advantage to cycling because if they are cycled properly they lose 2 of the 7 days. - The 5 day minimum provides a sense of balance, it takes you out of the war for a while.

In this case you're preventing the politics that lead to them from occurring as well. If your diplomacy is so bad that you have made irreconcilable enemies out of enough people that you can't put together a winning coalition again, that's on you. There are plenty of people with mixed opinions on NPO... though fewer and fewer as you drive more people to be against you. Refusing to end this war because you've already lost the next one from diplomatic incompetence is like a little kid threatening to knock over the chess board over because they can't win. All you've largely managed to accomplish with it so far is to alienate a lot of former friends and weaken your diplomatic position further. Mechanics is definitely a contributing factor... and I've argued for some of those very changes. But that doesn't resolve the community of any responsibility. They interplay with each other. I've never denied that game mechanics play a role. I pointed out that Roquentin was completely ignoring the politics side and ONLY talking about game mechanics. Framed by some that way. It doesn't mean there wasn't any in-game rivalry or grudges to help drive it. 1) The people in question have never been and never will be enough by themselves to defeat NPO. There are many more "swing" alliances. You managed to overcome your opposition the last two wars, politically by getting allies that could help in the upper middle and upper tier, and militarily by using a larger number of middle and upper middle tier nations. If the threat of "perennial defeat" were real you could not have won the last two wars. 2) There is always a large probability of hostile leaders and alliances becoming distracted by other threats, rivalries, and grudges. 3) The game mechanics continue to stifle upper tier growth relative to the middle tier growth, in a way that more than balances out any warchest advantages. 4) Again, whether you recognize the reasons as legitimate or not, those upper tier alliances were fighting each other before this war.

If anything, it's NPO's continued actions THIS WAR that threatens to create the conditions they proclaim to be so worried about. With any other rivalry or grudge, alliances like TKR or TCW can generally expect to have a reasonable war and then peace out and move on. It's not going to turn into some ridiculous long term war. Maybe more than war, but with breaks for politicking and coalition building and getting over war weariness in between them. This threat of unending war is new. NPO has become its own worst enemy by establishing the type of war we are seeing now as a potential precedent that everyone is going to have to worry about and plan against. The longer they keep this going, the deeper they dig that hole and give people reason to unite against them to prevent it from happening again. Roquentin refuses to see it and honestly, I'm not sure if he's capable of seeing it. I'm inclined to hope there are people in NPO and in their coalition who do see it and will eventually force some sensible resolution.

While there have been similar coalitions, similar is not the same. Different alliances drop in and out. And there also is more variety in terms of strategies going in in how alliances come in, initial deployments, etc. The first couple of weeks of a war are the most exciting as things shake out even if it's a similar coalition to the previous war. And while it doesn't always change, it at least has the CHANCE to change. A much greater chance than if there are fewer war-peace cycles. I'm not arguing against IC politics driving that change. I'm saying that shorter war-peace cycles generally speeds up how fast IC politics play out. How does this address what I said? Elements of IQ and Syndisphere/EMC still have a rivalry of sorts. Others switched sides and switched around. Which is why alliances that formally fought NPO/BK like Syndisphere fought with you last war and this war. Many of the alliances you say had a broad comity against you were literally fighting each other before the leaks of BK planning to attack them during rebuilding. 1) Yes, upper tier nations are harder to fight. And EMC had greater revenues to work with. But my point is that game mechanics mean that greater revenues haven't translated into a proportional amount of greater military power because of disproportionate city costs. More cities per player can be and often has been balanced out by having more players. 2) Sitting out one war wouldn't have made up the gap in terms of high tier cities, but it would have gone a very long way towards catching up or even getting ahead on warchests. To the tune of hundreds of billions. 3) You didn't address the most important point: NPO has been on the winning side the last two wars. Politics, alliances switching sides, and up-declaring have more than cancelled out the "structural advantages" your opponents have had. The idea that those "structural advantages" pose some kind of existential threat that make peace untenable for you if they aren't eliminated is pure paranoia. If they were so insurmountable, you wouldn't have been able to overcome them. The fact that you have been able to overcome them two wars in a row proves that they aren't the giant boogeymen that you are making them out to be.

Two more reasons why the "structural advantages" argument against peace is idiotic: 1) A lot of the extra money EMC members made went into high level cities that have a far lower rate of return in terms of military capability than the cities mid tier nations buy. Game mechanics do an effective job of preventing runaway exponential growth from giving anyone an insurmountable lead in terms of military power. For the cost to build one nation from city 20 to city 30, you can build 3 new nations all the way up to city 20. Those three nations with 20 cities each are worth far more militarily to an alliance than those extra 10 cities for that 30 city nation. 2) A lot of the "peace dividend" from "relatively easy wars" could simply have been balanced by NPO and co sitting out a war while everyone else fought. And theoretically still could if NPO sits out the next one.

Everything Roq says goes back to looking at what Frawley (NPO gov!) said so succinctly earlier: The game is more interesting when the game it is allowed to evolve. Peace allows for the political cycle to begin again, new coalitions to form. Fighting different kinds of wars with different allies and different enemies every few months, as opposed to less than one war cycle per year, makes the game more interesting for most players. This is the "moral" basis for having shorter wars. You fight it out and you shake hands and you move on. All this talk of "structural advantages" misses the POLITICS part of this world. Hell many of the alliances Roq believe some kind of insurmountable lead were busy spending lots of resources fighting each other when BK and then NPO entered the picture. Roq was worried about EMC having structural advantages? Politics had divided EMC and NPO had major elements of EMC on their side in both Knightfall and then this war. NPO was on the winning side in Knightfall and was/is in this war. The idea that NPO would have been in an insurmountable disadvantage going into future wars is disproven by the fact that they weren't at an insurmountable disadvantage in either the last war or this war. The politics of these kinds of worlds is that even if people strongly dislike each other, after a while new rivalries and grudges form and people that would have never worked with each other before end up coming together to take on some common foe. Newer grudges end up taking precedence.

I'm also getting errors.

Sorry to see this happen and I hope whoever did it gets caught.