Shakyr

#1/#2 Don't be so bloody lazy. He's already prefilled the maximum number of troops you can purchase. So you have to open a maximum of 4 pages and click 4 buttons. Little bit more work to decomm, but not much. #3 has been mentioned before, plenty of times. I even agree with it. But mentioning it again, like it's a beaut new idea you came up with? Yeah no, go away and think up something new. Or just don't post, if you can't think of something new.

The issue you have there is then people would just send their strongest nations out to create a single nation alliance. Or even top 2 or 3 nations. Only the top 48 alliances have a score more than the highest nation in the game. So do we tell the other 216 alliances 'As your alliance is tiny, we're not allowing you to keep more than $10 million in the bank'. You'd be better off implementing it by a formula based on 'Average Score' and 'Member Count'. The more members you have, the more you can store and the bigger the nations in the alliance, the more you can store. Personally, I prefer my original suggestion. Make people actually invest money and resources into improving their Alliance Bank. It will likely stop alliances being created for just a few weeks, to hide money. Sure, they could start a "Bank Alliance" and invest in it, but that alliance would quickly be known and come under heavy fire, along with the "Home Alliance". Also open up Alliance Bank records Alex, so we can track the money properly

I never see these wars as simply two armies facing each other on a field of grass. The defensive forces will almost always have fortifications that have been built up over time, so a vastly outnumbered force can still hold their own. The offensive force may have temporary fortifications to protect their camp, but those are never designed to hold against a superior force. So all I was saying is maybe portray it ingame, allow nations to build defensive fortifications. Then we can leave behind 1000 troops per city kinda deal, and have the rest of our forces out looting and pillaging. Of course, the other issue you run into is that should a player be able to use the same deployed force against multiple nations, in a single turn. Doesn't really make sense for soldiers and tanks (though aircraft can move pretty quickly), possibly navy too.

So you don't think if an invading army happens to pass a bunch of planes lying on the tarmac, they wouldn't blow them up? Or that an invading army wouldn't have a few SAMs, to take out low flying planes?

If he wanted to limit the number of alliances being created, he'd just announce a limit But yes, this is a way to control player actions, because some players cannot resist doing things they know they shouldn't, just because a loophole exists.

Yeah no. Not without other mechanics being added to supplement a "defence force" (like bunkers and such). And yes, I've had years of experience playing the other game (and winning wars), so I know exactly what you're talking about.

Go check user numbers, you'll find that Android has more users, plus it's easier to actually get apps in the app store. Apple is a complete !@#$ with regards to getting apps developed and deployed onto the app store Source: I've developed Android and iOS apps for work

I would have Ground Attacks destroy Aircraft regardless (as there will always be a chance of hitting aircraft sitting on the tarmac). Have the upper range be 3/2/1 by default and it gets increased if you have Ground Control. To somewhat counter planes, I'd add opposing Soldiers/Tanks for considering aircraft losses to airstrikes (except against Naval Ships) and add opposing Naval Ships for considering aircraft losses when targeting ships. As for Control in general, on thinking about it I'd actually increase opposing casualties and add 1 bonus resistance to attacks. - Ground Control: Increase opposing soldier/tank casualties (from Ground Attacks). Increase aircraft destroyed by attacks. Ground Attacks now eliminate 11 resistance. - Air Control: Increase opposing aircraft casualties (from Airstrikes). Increase casualties from specific Airstrikes (Soldiers/Tanks/Naval). Airstrikes now eliminate 13 resistance. - Sea Control: Increase opposing naval casualties (from Naval Attacks). Naval Attacks now eliminate 15 resistance. I'd also add in the following Naval actions: - Target Barracks: Picks a random city and a random number of barracks are shelled. Random number of soldiers are killed. Minor amounts of infrastructure damage, chance of Barracks being destroyed. Some potential enemy Naval Ship casualties. - Target Factories: Picks a random city and a random number of factories are shelled. Random number of tanks are destroyed. Minor amounts of infrastructure damage, chance of Factory being destroyed. Some potential enemy Naval Ship casualties. - Target Hangars: Picks a random city and a random number of hangars are shelled. Random number of planes are destroyed. Minor amounts of infrastructure damage, chance of Hangar being destroyed. Some potential enemy Naval Ship casualties. - Target Naval Ships: Directly engages enemy naval forces. No infrastructure damage done. - Target Infrastructure: Moderate to large amount of infrastructure damage. Some potential enemy Naval Ship casualties. Now if you have control, they are less able to defend from that area and it's harder for them to regain it directly. Instead, you have to indirectly lower their forces and regain control that way. I don't see 100,000 soldiers trying to board the ships. It would be a slaughter (on their part) and not exactly stealthy I'd personally just leave it to Espionage, with the concept of "boarding ships" and destroying them.

Apologies, objectives came through after I built my nation up, so I've completely forgotten what each one was. The rest of my post still stands though.

Why not introduce alliance perks? Have people burn their cash and resources to "upgrade" their bank and lessen the amount that is looted, every upgrade. Actually, why not make the bank itself a perk, that costs a decent chunk of cash and steel to build (but not too out of reach of 3-4 new players). The bank at a base level could have to transport the gold physically and you could have "convoy capacity", "time til arrival" and "% lost due to bandits". Further perks could increase convoy capacity and decrease time til arrival and % lost to bandits. Final upgrade would be "electronic banking", which restores the current unlimited amounts, instant transfer, no loss that we currently get. But only to nations in your alliance or to other alliances that have "electronic banking" (otherwise it would have to go by convoy). Also limit alliance banks to be able to send only to other alliance banks or directly to nations within the alliance. That would significantly nerf gimmicks, as nations have to leave their current alliance, create a new alliance, spend the cash and resources to build the bank and then upgrade it. I'm thinking in excess of 100 mill plus resources, in order to max it all.

Why not add buying the second city to the tutorial and basically give it to nations for free, as it introduces the concept of cooldown timers for cities? Then ease in the next 3 cities with reduced cooldowns at 2 days, 3 days and then 5 days (and send them system notifications when the city cooldown timer expires). That would give a new nation 4 cities at the end of 5 days (Beige), if they have the money and the ability to get a 5th city 5 days after that. Within 30 days, they could be at 7 cities and pretty much self sufficient (providing they've learnt the relevant mechanics in the meantime).

My question in this case is, how does a nation fortify, if they have no military forces? 1 man may be able to hold off an army, but if they don't have even 1 man ...

Personally as a programmer, I'd rather JSON over XML, it's alot easier to work with and it compresses better. I also don't see what the difference would be, between a pull for an RSS feed and a pull for a JSON API call. Probably what really needs to happen is that certain bits of information are pre-calculated and "snapshotted", anywhere from once an hour to once a day, depending on the information and stored in a second database (along with the time they were snapshotted and any relevant values that make up the calculated values). It could even be dynamic in some cases, in that if someone loads a nation/alliance page, it does a quick check if the page has been snapshotted recently and if it hasn't been, takes a snapshot from the data that's been calculated already, to load the page. Might mean some pages take slightly longer to load, but people aren't likely to notice. The API can then run mostly off the second "snapshot" database and hopefully rarely dipping into the "real time" database. In addition, have all API requests linked to a user's nation (to track who is using the API). Alex can then track usage and if someone is then abusing the API (like if someone is accounting for 10-20% of all API calls), they can be messaged to explain and potentially either limited in some capacity or completely cut off.

Gross Monetary Income is a pain in the ass to calculate though And I can never 100% accurate, probably due to rounding errors (on my part or Alex's).

Not just Leader, but Heirs and Officers too (possibly new setting as to who can get via API). And I'd love this, as it'd solve the issue of having to get lazy people to report information Information I'd consider useful from a Nation: - Spies - Resources/Money from toolbar (possibly Credits too) - Gross Income/Expenses - Resource Production (including Manufacturing) - Resource Usage (including Manufacturing), before reductions from Alliance Taxes and Radiation are calculated I'd also like similar for an Alliance, to return: - Alliance Tax Rate (Resources/Money) - Current Alliance Bank (Resources/Money)

Personally what mostly bothers me about Fortify, is the fact that you "fortify" against one particular opponent, but it doesn't affect your other wars. You'd think if you "fortified" your cities against one enemy nation, it would have an effect on other wars.

Yeah it would have to return back either a summary of AP for all wars, or just picks a random war (see my espionage thoughts post) and returns the AP for that specific war, eg "The nation of Blue Ridge has x resources, y money and has z AP in their war with the nation of Green Ridge." Might make things a bit more interesting, if you didn't always get all the information you wanted, from a Gather Intel

Yeah being able to completely block or lessen how much someone could fortify, would make a good espionage op ^^

While I agree with both suggestions, personally I'd go with have the Resistance granted by Fortify decay with each successive Immense Triumph (by the other nation). The decay shouldn't be enough to completely negate the strategy, but enough that just sitting there with Turtle active, is not a long term viable strategy across an entire war. Also nukes should completely eliminate any Resistance added by a single Fortify action (due to the shock to the moral of military and population). Something along the lines of an addition to the war timeline saying "The fortifications crumble from the Immense Triumph and a further 5 Resistance is eliminated." or "The fortifications are destroyed from the Immense Triumph and a further 5 Resistance is lost. The nation of Blue Ridge is no longer fortified." The latter being if you've removed the last of the Resistance gained from Fortify and there is no more Fortify actions to remove. Using those numbers, it would take 2 Immense Triumphs (6 MAPs or 12 hours, for Ground; 8 MAPs or 16 hours for Air/Navy) to eliminate the bonus Resistance from a single Fortify. That would still mean they could Fortify at least twice in that time, but it would be at least allow for successive wins to wear away at the bonus Resistance. I'd also drop the infrastructure damage from a loss to 5%, so losing a war isn't something that should be avoided at all costs (which it pretty much currently is). 10% for each city is just insane and basically further encourages larger nations to Fortify and Turtle. Something along the lines of an addition to the war timeline saying "The fortifications se

The topic about enemy MAPs got me thinking and Espionage could do with an overhaul in the long term. These are just random thoughts, some connected, some not and I'm not saying all should be implemented. - Give Espionage it's own dedicated area for operations. This would include a section for recruiting spies, an operations centre where you could search for nations to spy and send spies out and a records area keeping a history of operations and the results (including Gather Intel). - Allow recruitment of different types of spies, for example Saboteurs and Assassins, but still keep the overall cap on spies. - Add in the option to assassinate enemy generals, which if successful could have a few different effects (like -10% infra damage for Planes as the pilots have low moral, -5% Soliders lost to desertion, etc). - Give Espionage operations various success levels. A less successful Gather Intel might return back just how many resources they have. Sabotage for military units might kill less. Nukes or missiles could fail to destroy one, but might damage components, giving a single nuke/missile a higher chance of missing the target for the next 24 hours. - Expand Gather Intel to more options, including Current MAPs, Financials (Gross/Net Income, Tax Rate, Expenses) and Daily Rebuy Limits. - Limit Gather Intel to target specific areas (Military, Financials, Resources, etc) - Add time limits to spy operations (dependent on enemy spies, how many spies are sent, difficulty of the job, etc), delay the results until after they've returned (at which point the spies would "rest" for x time) and remove the daily outgoing spy limit. So you could send 20 spies out, that might not give results for 1 hour, send 30 spies and get the results in half hour. Then after the operation, those spies are then resting for 6 hours, before they can be sent out again. - Remove daily incoming spy limits and instead while the spies are "active", add them to the pool of "enemy spies" for calculating success odds and time of operation (as spies from other nations don't work well together). This means that as people send more spies into a single nation, the operations will be less successful and take longer. - Linked to the above thought, add temporary and stacking increases to the detection chance for consecutive Sabotage operations (by any nation), due to them being on alert. This will stop people from repeatedly targeting nukes (as the odds might go from 10% chance to be caught to 50% to 95%, for example).

I personally wouldn't want to know outright how many AP they have, without any work involved at all. I have found it useful for planning purposes though (but I calculate and track it myself, by hand), with the new war mechanics. At least add it to gather intel, instead of giving away a piece of vital planning information for free.

Fixed that one for you

^ See above, that was from my notifications. Also on a similar note, I noticed the entry on the War Timeline doesn't say what improvements were destroyed.

Thanks for the quick turnaround

Simple changes. Can we please have the amount of Resistance lost added to the War Log entries? Can we also please have Fortify actions added to the War Timeline?