Edward I

https://politicsandwar.com/nation/id=132805 I really doubt the first word is a typo.

A tentative welcome back to the realm of non-slot-fillers.

Ground units aren't unviable now and that's not what I said. There are three big ways to balance the game that I typically see referenced: 1) "Realism" - This gets roundly criticized every time it's brought because it's a pretty dumb way to conceive of gameplay. 2) Balance around individual nations - This seems to be what you and Pre both had in mind for your respective proposals. It's definitely a relevant consideration, but probably isn't the most important and certainly isn't sufficient on its own. 3) Balance around groups - The main meta of PW centers around the actions of groups, namely alliances and coalitions of alliances. Balancing the needs and strategies of these larger groups is of paramount importance when considering mechanical changes, and this is precisely where both your and Pre's proposals fall short. As others outlined extensively in the thread I linked, "balancing" planes by nerfing them would unbalance the game by neutering nations' (and alliances') ability to effectively updeclare. The nominally unbalanced role of aircraft isn't a good enough reason to nerf updeclares. That line of thinking is analogous to demands to make the game more "realistic": where that complaint fails to understand that the game isn't meant to be a realistic simulation, the "planes are overpowered" complaint fails to understand the importance, if not outright primacy, of group play compared to individual play.

Yeah, no. CN was harmed secondarily by people becoming apathetic and inactive (this trend long predated NPO's supposed destruction of the game), and primarily by crappy mechanics (tech in particular) as well as the rampant cheating incentivized by them and disregarded for years by CN's moderation (specifically multi rings farming tech). NPO was one of the loudest voices opposing that type of cheating and played a prominent role in the outcry which precipitated a change in moderation practices towards a harsher, more punitive line on tech spawned by multi nations. Incidentally, the player accusing us of cheating over there (despite there being no evidence to support that claim) signed NPO's demands to the CN mods.

The last time a suggestion to "balance" planes by allowing them to be attacked by ground units was made, the OP was probably the most downvoted post in the history of the forums. This suggestion isn't identical to it, but the glaring balance problems associated with it are similar enough that I think most of the objections to that suggestion apply here as well. I'm strongly opposed, and I suspect most of the replies to that suggestion would be as well.

This seems like a clunky mechanic that's more or less redundant with war policies. I'm not in favor. If it were to be implemented, the disruption to a nation's color from switching between beige and an original color would need to be addressed. There would also need to be a clear, user-friendly way of determining which nations on an alliance get the bonus. Finally, and for the umpteenth time, you cannot utilize static alliance affiliations when designing mechanics. There are no meaningful restrictions on joining, leaving or creating alliances, so trying to restrict the use of a mechanic by referencing a nation's alliance affiliation makes no sense. Also, again for the umpteenth time, large alliance memberships are not a balance issue. It is not "unfair" that mass member alliances have more players than small alliances.

That's incorrect. The total net profit from baseball is roughly $60 billion, yes, but that wasn't all generated yesterday. It's spent at the same average rate as all other money in the nations in which it is generated, which means that most of it has been spent already over long stretches of time. The relevant number to compare it with would be the total money generated by all other economic activity since baseball was added as a feature.

So? By this formulation, if these alliances split up and had smaller GDPs than [insert arbitrarily chosen alliance here] everything would be fine. Like I said earlier, baseball is played by nations, not alliances. It’s not a “balance problem” that some alliances have more members than other alliances.

Why does it matter how much baseball money was generated per alliance? Baseball games are played by nations, not alliances.

Ah, I see you're once again feigning illiteracy regarding non-chaining clauses. Regardless, you can rest easy now that we actually have an MDAP with BK. Your complaints have been received, and we believe this solution satisfies all of them.

Sounds about right. Just remember that the TKR hierarchy of treaties is ODoAP > NAP > MDP and things should make more sense going forward.

Another way to get basically the same thing would be a single checkbox to indicate that any cities above the specified infra level should stay as they are rather than sell infra down to the specified level. In other words, mass infra purchase becomes a "greater than or equal to" function instead of an "equal to" function.

Unless your community is based on getting your way all the time - by winning wars, by seeing your preferred rules for diplomacy and warfare implemented, or in other ways - then there's no way any outsider can destroy your community. No one is entitled to see any particular style of game play adopted game-wide. The "health of game in general" isn't defined or dictated by you. Although if you disagree, Changeup, I suppose you're right. We probably don't give a damn about your enjoyment if it's predicated on any of that stuff. To answer the OP's question, I'm enjoying the drama the camaraderie in NPO and Coalition B as a whole watching whale pixels burn demolishing some of the worst parts of the old metagame, and possibly laying the groundwork for something better to replace them

Death to the whales.

Not quite an event, but the suggestion has been made:

@Zygon this is one of those one-in-a-hundred threads where your usual posting style will actually make sense in context. Choose your gif wisely.

The rules should define what is and isn't slot-filling to the maximum extent possible. Significant "investigation" should be at a minimum because, ideally, rule-breaking should be disincentivized and readily apparent to begin with. The word of someone in a Discord message doesn't change what did or didn't happen in the game and should have no bearing on the moderation of said game in the first place. Unless Discord usage becomes mandatory to play PW, it should play no part in moderator interactions with players concerning actions in-game or on the forums. I'm not annoyed about an active admin; I'm annoyed about an administration that gives even the appearance partiality to players who use Discord over those who don't. The former group tends to be louder and more inclined towards lobbying Alex to begin with, and this only encourages lobbying him about moderation actions.

So moderation is haphazard and favors Discord-active players who've, presumably, interacted with Alex or the mods on Discord already and whose Discord handles are known to them. Great. I'm happy to hear that your confidence in the moderation team is based on a style that better resembles personal diplomacy than it does the impartial, even-handed, formulaic practices that should be in place.

The first weeks of wars are fun, yes. Changing small facets of them for the sake of calling them different isn't a good reason to change the politics that lead to them. The odds of change without a decisive end to this war are vanishingly small. The attitude towards Coalition B and NPO in particular has been one of overwhelming IC and OOC hostility from the moment we entered until now. We have no reason to believe the people who told us we'd be torched for "ruining" minispheres, or who think we're "breaking" the game for [insert action from last six months here] will have a change of heart after the war. So, rather than negotiating a hollow peace in the full, reasonable expectation that Coalition A will rebuild and come back to fight the same war stronger and more organized, we're content to continue fighting until we get a satisfactory one. If you want that dynamic to change, give us a reason to agree to peace that makes that outcome unlikely. You have an issue primarily with game mechanics then, not us. If decisive victories in wars were easier to obtain and longer wars were harder to sustain, there would be shorter wars. If both coalitions wanted to, for instance, collectively lobby Alex to implement meaningfully low soft caps on alliance and individual warchests, I imagine the implementation of such a mechanic would go a long way towards speeding up the war cycle. Unless and until a mechanic that limits the ability of alliances to wage protracted wars is implemented, though, the social side of the game will be constrained to happen at the pace of the mechanical side. Game mechanics, including the structural advantages they create in conjunction with player actions, are the basis for the politics of the world. You can't possibly "miss" the politics by talking about them; at worst, the discussion will be incomplete. And those wars were explicitly framed as fun, friendly, rivalry-free engagements. Soup's first war was billed as "community outreach." Surf's Up happened shortly thereafter; the belligerents were the same people who had spent so much time praising the ethos of wars like the Soup-Fark one; and they made it pretty clear that they thought Surf's Up was an example of that ethos to be emulated by others. If it was a war that had anything to do with rivalry or IC disputes, the combatants had a funny way of showing it. Obviously we've made some headway against the perennially superior upper tier forces arrayed against us and obviously they, in and of themselves, aren't an existential threat. Coupled with the attitudes of those nations' owners and of their alliances' leaders, though, yes, they are. If the almost sole use to which those nations are put is opposing NPO's spheres of influence, why should we treat them as anything but a perennial threat? If, absent substantial long-term planning and dedication on our part, their advantage spells perennial defeat for us in wars, why shouldn't we treat them as an existential threat? In fairness to you, some of the advantage that upper tier grouping enjoys are the products of glaring balance problems in the game's mechanics. However, that doesn't negate the social reasons for the problem - upper tier consolidation - and it doesn't change the fact that, without changes to the mechanics or a newfound willingness of upper tiers to fight one another, we have no way of dealing with problem besides going after the whales every war.

Being allowed to evolve and actually evolving are two different things. Peace doesn't necessarily lead to an "evolution" in politics and, more often than not, it hasn't. There's nothing inherently good or bad about fighting multiple wars with or against similar coalitions. Ironically, change for its own sake here is the opposite of IC politics. If there isn't an animating IC reason - strategic, ideological, or social - to alter your alliance's diplomatic stance, then all that any change has done is to supplant IC politics with OOC notions. (Or, worse, with IC politics cynically disguised as OOC notions.) I find the game more interesting when it's driven by actual IC politics, not the OOC knockoff that so regularly passes for it and which you endorse here. Structural advantages are inherently part of the politics of the world. Game mechanics and their long-term ramifications are intimately related to diplomacy. If your politics aren't motivated by material, mechanical realities (including structural disparities), ideology, or a desire for social status and prestige, then they're not IC and they're not really politics. Structural advantages are the politics of the world to a large extent. That's been more untrue than not because there haven't been the type of comprehensive victories/defeats or mutually amenable settlements to past conflicts to engender that sort of change. The reason why IQ and Syndisphere/EMC were in a state of alternating cold and hot war for years is that neither side could comprehensively defeat the other and both sides believed that continuing the long-term rivalry was their best strategic option. If either had been able to crush the other, it's possible something different would have emerged, although that probably could only have happened if the victory had led to infighting among the victors. The ostensible settlement that ended the IQ-EMC rivalry wasn't a settlement so much as a half-baked papering over of the differences and disagreements between those two groups, and one which didn't have the universal trust or buy-in that its boosters claimed it did. That the zeitgeist of early 2019 looked almost exactly like the zeitgeist of EMC in 2017-18 - broad comity between most alliance leaderships, especially those of former EMC, and an explicit hope that NPO and BK would fight a pitched war against one another - should tell you pretty much all you need to know. A lot, but not all of it. A substantial portion of EMC's years of profit have gone into building larger warchests, probably in part because upper tier cities are more expensive. Furthermore, the parts that have gone into building more cities have still created a military advantage, regardless of the lower return rates. A nation with a significant advantage in cities is harder to fight no matter how expensive those cities were. Finally, it's not like NPO or other, relatively newer, relatively lower-tiered alliances had years of identical revenues to EMC that they spent more efficiently. Instead, they had years of lower revenues compared to EMC and had shorter periods in which to generate positive ROI for their infrastructure thanks to fighting more wars than EMC's upper tier. Very little of this would be a problem if PW's upper tier powerhouses made a habit of actually fighting one another. If warfare had, over the long run, imposed a cost on upper tier nations proportionally equivalent to the cost it imposed on mid tier nations, then your comment on game mechanics would be a lot more relevant to the discussion. It's obviously not irrelevant - former IQ alliances have (slowly and incompletely) closed the gap with former EMC alliances - but it hasn't outweighed the impact of alliance politics over the years. Sitting out one war would not have balanced out the de facto, years long policy numerous upper tier nations had of doing the same.

We have no right. Metagame rules are formulated by a combination of persuasion and force, not by right. However, no one has any right to have their preferred rules for warfare and diplomacy ratified by anyone else. Coalition A chose, piecemeal and over time, to ignore the desires and objections of the core of Coalition B. That's fine since we don't have a right to be listened to, but it did have consequences. You didn't persuade us and, because we're not micros or pixel huggers, you can't force us to acquiesce to your demands. We, on the other hand, may well force you to acquiesce to ours before this is over because, unlike you, we probably have the military muscle to finish the job. Maybe consider that the next time someone tells you they have a half-baked idea for a new metagame that they're sure no reasonable person could object to.

Peace is in your favor to the extent that it isn't synonymous with your coalition's comprehensive defeat. Roq's earlier quip about handing us $50 billion in exchange for immediate peace was to illustrate this. Unless there is a substantial adjustment of the vast, long-term economic disparities between the opposing coalitions, either in the form of an amenable peace agreement or continued war, we're not interested in ending this.

The burden of proof for slot filling is very high, it's easy to circumvent what restrictions do exist, and the mere incentive to slot fill (in the form of beige time) is problematic, including in Alex's view: It's definitely an issue because, including in the eyes of the moderation staff, the current reporting and moderation system is flawed and inadequate.

That doesn't fix the slot-filling issues, and it would actually exacerbate them. Under that formulation, instead of just the losing nation getting some free beige from a bunch of 1 ship attacks by a friendly "enemy," both friendly nations would get free beige.

Well, I think your current socially acceptable response options are: a) Alex needs to disband/delete [alliance of person at whom the statement is directed] b) yOu'Re LiTeRaLlY kILliNg ThE gAmE c) You're paranoid, [insert topic of discussion here] isn't real and/or never happened d) I'm a micro in need of validation, so I'm declaring war on you e) I don't like your alliance, so I hope someone steals your password and your alliance's back. For the Health of the GameTM. Hope that helped.