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Edward I

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Everything posted by Edward I

  1. Frawley's got $6.25 billion net damage on his own, so I think Australia's going to be fine. Nuke the whales emus.
  2. It's been the same since we posted an actual DoW. Keshav and I have written multiple posts about it as well. Your inability or unwillingness to read things longer than several sentences is not our problem.
  3. Why are so many people casually opposed to centralized alliance economies? I'm sincerely curious to know. This would remove an entire style of play that's produced multiple vibrant alliance communities as well as a lot of IC politics and military and economic strategy. A similarly drastic and destructive "fix" would be to remove all looting altogether. Why should it matter if people who enjoy raiding can no longer do it, after all, if it provides a blunt "solution" to the problem at hand and you, personally, don't care about it? --- Capping resources isn't an inherently unworkable idea @Alex, but I think you'd need to adhere a couple of design principles if you're ever going to implement it: 1) Players should have a substantial degree of control over stockpile sizes. That means that soft caps or caps based on easily-purchasable assets like improvements and projects are better than hard caps, and somewhat better than city-based caps. (Cities are purchased relatively infrequently and are permanent, which means a nation's city count has more long-term ramifications than its improvements or projects.) In other words, rather than prescribing an upper limit on stockpile size, give players the power to do so, but associate meaningful opportunity costs with larger stockpile sizes. 2) There should be no preference for where resources are stored. That means that alliance banks should be just as cheap and efficient to store resources in as nations are. Whatever you might have envisioned it as, Politics & War is fundamentally a game played by groups, not by individuals. The actions of individual players matter, and some people prefer a more isolated, individualist experience than others, but ultimately the only thing P&W has to offer over other, more fleshed-out simulator games is the social, multiplayer experience. Nerfing alliance banking, and thus nerfing group-level econ, is a terrible idea because it directly undermines the best parts of the game. 3) Winner-take-all mechanics are bad. Anything that increases overall looting - capping alliance bank holdings and forcing resources onto beige-able nations, for instance - would probably constitute a mechanic that rewards winners at the expense of losers and perpetuate whatever advantages the winners already enjoy. The primary reason people create offshore banks isn't because they can, it's because looting, and bank looting in particular, is so costly that they must in order to remain competitive. 4) The overall effect should speed up the metagame, not slow it down. Stockpiling cash and resources boils down to an economic and military arms race. Making it harder to accumulate stockpiles, but not reducing the economic and military advantages that stockpiles confer, would only make players and alliances spend more time and effort building their stockpiles; it wouldn't spur people to reduce the sizes of their stockpiles. There might be other ways to accomplish this besides well-implemented caps on stockpile sizes. These design principles aren't really about offshore banking because cash and resource caps aren't a good way to counteract that. They could, however, be a way to address the unbounded nature of cash and resource stockpiles if you ever find a sensible way to implement them.
  4. Alliance caps are silly for the reasons Akuryo gave. Tying a basic game function (alliance taxes) to a game asset accessible only to large nations with lots of infrastructure (projects) is also silly. This is fundamentally a social game, and players should be encouraged to associate. Penalizing the two most common forms of association - alliance membership and centralized alliance economies - would be hugely detrimental to the game.
  5. I don't know, having to accept surrender terms does seem to be a hidden cost of winning wars these days.
  6. Ok, that was funny. Except for a couple of whales in VM, we have total or, in the case of the low tiers, near-total control over all score ranges. I don't see how that doesn't constitute a decisive victory by our standards. You're right, attrition can't decide wars decisively by purely mechanical means, but that's where peace agreements come in. The point of any peace treaty, no matter how conclusive the war in question, is to accomplish what the mechanics can't. In this case, part of what we want is an explicit announcement from all involved parties that Coalition B won the war. Some people see an admission of defeat as a term. I suppose it makes sense if surrendering effectively means reversing what the party line has been for the duration of the war, but I tend to blame the people doing the posturing for their own predicament.
  7. If we're turning this into some kind of contrived equation, the number we'd be looking for is the difference between some default and some proposed alternative. KERCHTOGG seems to think the default in all wars should be white peace, whereas we think the default should reflect the military outcome of the war. Giving you white peace would be a concession here, with some non-zero value associated with it, whereas KERCHTOGG admitting defeat and surrendering would have a value of zero as far as our accounting is concerned. And this isn't just forum fighting for its own sake. If we don't supply the gods with enough non-meme posts, the sun won't rise tomorrow.
  8. Date of Forum Ban: The last hour, apparently Reason for Ban: No matching nation Reason for Appeal: Updated my profile
  9. How many more threads will there be from supposedly disinterested third parties who altruistically point out that we can, in fact, stop fighting by mutual agreement? It's almost as if we've thought of that and decided not to.
  10. Are you suggesting a rule change here or a metagame norm? If people want to make it taboo for alliances to elect more than one of their members to a color senate, I think that would be a great source of controversy and an interesting addition to the metagame. If you're suggesting that the game rules or the moderation team impose limits on players forming alliances, it won't work. There isn't a good standard for what constitutes a "legitimate" or "independent" alliance affiliation, and any attempt to impose such a standard would be messy and untenable. This is the same reason why hiding a bank in a nation in VM is illegal, but offshore banks are completely legal. I'm glad to hear you like the basic premise. ? I've explained why this likely wouldn't be the case in prior posts in this thread. Any alliance or group of alliances that doesn't lock down a color could have all of its gains wiped out almost instantaneously if an unfriendly senator gets elected. That alone is a powerful disincentive against wanton domination. The necessary votes for locking down a color are substantial (between 3/4 and 7/8 of active, voting nations, depending on the number of senate seats); the costs in political power for enforcing a small or controversial majority's control would likely be quite high; there are more colors than there are coherent political groups (out-groups have options); and it will typically be more profitable, in terms of political power, for an out-group to simply move to a new color rather than fighting for control of one in which it is being marginalized or oppressed. It would be very difficult to deprive even a modestly-sized group of nations of color-based power.
  11. "Certain things" Interesting. What are these "certain things" about which you're so concerned on behalf of BK-sphere? What does "total victory" mean to you? BK has been pretty clear on the terms they want: admission of defeat, an NAP, and some meme terms. If KETOG's definition of "total defeat" is having to admit you've lost, then you have bigger problems than brave and beautiful BK. BK was the one who was hit in the first place, if you'll recall, so they didn't "allow" anything here. I think we've moved past denial and anger and on to bargaining now. That's good to see. KETOG and Chaos didn't give BK or NPO the benefit of the doubt regarding IQ. Prominent members of both started spouting paranoid conspiracy theories about IQ's continued, secret-but-obvious existence as soon as it dissolved. lol Your nation is in Empyrea, so yes, you're part of the KETOG sphere. You're right though, your arguments are fallacious on their own.
  12. Not a bad idea. I'm not sold on it, personally, because it would make trading far easier for large nations than for small nations, but if this gets implemented feel free add that to the project suggestions thread. One senate seat per alliance probably won't work. It doesn't make sense, at least to me, why a mass-member alliance should be limited to the same number of senators as a micro. Regardless, it would be a very easy restriction to circumvent: large alliances could make one-man satellite alliances and place their preferred senate candidates on them in the same way they already use offshore banks to prevent bank looting. The secret ballots law already covers anonymous voting - it's anonymous by default, although a simple majority of nations on a color can change that. Are you saying that the running vote tallies for each nation/senate candidate should be hidden as well?
  13. I watch that movie for Alan Rickman. The fact that it has Bruce Willis is just extra. There are two main issues here. First are the "solutions" themselves. It's not that I don't understand them, it's that don't I think there's a single understanding for most of them. I'm not going to endorse something that will get used as a vacuous talking point later on, especially since some of these aren't much more than vacuous talking points to begin with, even in their best-articulated formats. Second is the notion on which the question is implicitly based. I don't think it's reasonable to decide what the metagame will be in committee. I have no reason to respect whatever outcome the vote here produces, and I don't expect anyone else to respect it either if they feel they can achieve a better outcome through other means. Discussing the metagame can be quite productive, which is why I didn't bring this particular point up when it was still just a discussion. Pretending that a vote on anything less than a concrete, well-defined course of action is meaningful, though, is just silly.
  14. There are answers to all four questions which are so nebulous that they're essentially meaningless, but question 2 is particularly bad. None of the "solutions" is remotely enforceable and most of them are so ill-defined that I'm not even sure what's being suggested. (To see why, take the verb in each answer and tell me what a specific, consensus definition of it would be in this context.) Rather than claiming a false mandate from a fallaciously-constructed vote, include a "none of the above" option to see how many people disagree with the premise in the first place.
  15. Regulating player behavior outside the game with mechanics inside the game doesn't work. Alliance member limits won't work because large alliances will utilize multiple alliance affiliations. (NPO, for instance, did this in Project Terra when it exceeded the member caps there.) Coalition member limits won't work for the same reason. If you need more than eight alliances on your side, you make a second coalition that works in tandem with the first. Restricting wars between nations, alliances, and coalitions is silly. It would impact raiding in gamey ways. (Can an unaligned nation raid an alliance's inactives? Or would that nation need to make its own alliance affiliation first and start an alliance war?) Alliances and coalitions would be almost inherently unbalanced. (Why is a single, 100-member alliance fighting an 8-alliance coalition of micros "fair"? Or is "fairness" not what you're going for?) There are probably other issues I didn't think of in the first minute after I read this. Why would anyone set war goals higher than $1 worth of damages to achieve instant victory? More generally, what incentive does anyone ever have to be truthful about their war goals, especially when such goals often shift as wars progress? Something along these lines gets proposed multiple times a year, but no one ever seems to think through the consequences or balance issues.
  16. Seasonal changes in the player base likely explain a lot of this. Below are the links to the five regions of NationStates that all new nations spawn in if anyone wants to take a closer look at what @Dad posted. Notice the cyclical drop-offs in nation count every summer and every January. (The latter reflects people going inactive during the November and December holidays; a nation takes several weeks to delete once a player stops logging in.) --- Player attraction could likely be increased by consistent advertising (Alex advertised in the past but largely stopped as far as I know) and a better mobile app. Specifically, the better the app looks, the more likely someone is to create an account on it. Player retention could likely be increased by improving the mobile app. A persistent login and push notifications alone would probably make a huge difference. --- The strength of social strategy games like PW is the player interactions. Any mechanical changes made to increase the number of active players should aim to increase the amount, variety, and impact of player interactions. It's also a good idea to conceptualize the game as one played by groups rather than individuals. Updates should focus more on facilitating collective action than on changing how individual players build their nations.
  17. I don't claim it will make wars happen more regularly, or even that they'll be smaller. It's possible that would happen if this were implemented, but I have my doubts. Instead, the aim of the proposal is to give players more to do during peace time and to give them more ways of creating their own drama. The proposal would mainly encourage consensus-building within individual colors, and it gives little additional ability for groups to project power beyond their own colors. Since I don't think anyone believes there are even close to fourteen significant centers of political power right now, I don't see how this would engender much additional consensus-building. I doubt it would facilitate true hegemonies. (I'm also not sure what you mean by "16 sub-alliances.") A senate majority is a house of cards because even one hostile senator can destroy weeks or months of work towards accumulating political power on a color. The ability to unilaterally spend all of a color's political power effectively gives a single senator veto power over everything a majority of nations on any color might want to do. Some numbers: There are less than 3500 nations in the top 100 alliances, of which less than 3000 are in the top 50 alliances. That works out to about 215 - 250 politically-aligned nations per non-gray color, depending on where you draw the line. Since there would be 3-7 senators per color, a group would need, on average, between 30 nations (~215/7) and 80 nations (~250/3) to elect a single senator. And that's almost certainly an overestimate, firstly because 3000 to 3500 overstates how many active nations there are in the top alliances, and secondly because several colors are likely to have more than 215-250 active nations. That means that several colors would have less than 215-250 active nations, which makes electing a senator on those colors even easier. If you can't get a mid-sized alliance's worth of nations voting for a single candidate, then it's not a problem of being oppressed; it's a problem of making alliances (or groups of alliances) that are too small or disorganized to be effective in their own right. Remember also that spending political power on banning people left and right will tend to put a color at a competitive disadvantage. Those nations could have generated political power if they'd been included in whatever majority controls the color in question, and banning them costs political power in the first place. That's political power that could otherwise be spent on economic or military policies.
  18. One of the larger issues with game mechanics as they exist is that they consist of very little besides economic growth and wars. We grow our nations to build warchests, and we spend our warchests to grow our nations and to fight wars that prevent other people from doing the same. Pretty much every past and present mechanic that nominally wasn't about war or economics effectively was: treasures and color stock bonuses, for example, both offer purely monetary benefits. The other reason why the metagame is basically an endless cycle of economic growth interrupted by global wars is that there's no sense separation between nations. Without a mechanical representation of place, everything happens in the same place, which is everyone's backyard by default. To fix this, we need mechanics that a) offers something to fight over besides economic growth or military supremacy (which, again, are two sides of the same coin) and b) gives players a degree of insulation from the effects of others' wars (the reason most wars turn global is because, right now, there isn't such insulation) This proposal will not fix everything, and I'd be shocked if it even came close. But, since it mostly consists of incentives for players to create more drama rather than more heavy-handed solutions, I'm guessing it will offer a significant opportunity for a change in the metagame with little change to the game's existing balance. It's deliberately presented in a modular format in case parts of it are good enough to implement and other parts aren't. If everyone likes Sections 1, 2 and 4 but not Section 3, that shouldn't stop Alex from implementing those sections. When the Commonwealth wins a world war without getting bailed out by America, then you can tell us how to spell. (Alex already spells "color" the American way, so it's a moot point.)
  19. That would cause all sorts of undesired side effects. Imagine how much it would cost to transfer money by trading someone 1 food for millions of dollars, for instance. It would also encourage gamey trading habits, like only transferring large sums of resources when market prices are low. That would screw up banking and trading during wars, when it's arguably most essential, and it would likely make trading in general happen cyclically. If it's cheaper to move resources when prices are lower (which indicates high willingness by resource owners to transfer them in the first place), it would likely create vicious and virtuous cycles in which trading leads to more trading, or a lack of trading self-perpetuates. Because food production isn't as dependent on resource slots as the production of other resources is (you need land for food), because food is so cheap to begin with, and because it's less essential than other resources (your nation will still function without food, it'll just have reduced revenues) I didn't think it made sense to exempt it. If this becomes a balance issue, the best solution is probably to give food a lower per-unit transport cost than the other resources. This would either be nearly meaningless or it would undermine the whole mechanic. If the gray per-unit fee (see above for why percentage fees are a bad idea) >= half the normal per-unit fee, it would make little sense to trade using gray because it would cost more to get resources from one non-gray color to another by going through traders based on gray. Unless you're suggesting it's better that a huge proportion of active nations semi-permanently reside gray, I don't think this is desirable. (Not to mention the strange effects this would have on alliance taxes, thereby hurting high-tax alliances relative to low-tax alliances.) If the gray per-unit fee < half the normal per-unit fee, then 2x the gray fee is the new effective inter-color transfer fee. It would make sense for traders and alliances to set up an entire offshore trading and banking infrastructure on gray to minimize bulk transfer/trading fees. I don't think it's a good idea to encourage this either. It's gamey and it would likely be somewhat confusing to new players. The first-strike advantage benefits more active groups, not necessarily smaller ones. Smaller groups are often more active than larger ones, true, but I've seen plenty of larger alliances or coalitions pull off effective blitzes. I don't pretend this will fix every issue with the war system. I only hope that it will give players a little more incentive to become politically and military independent from one another. If it doesn't, I don't think the difference in MAPs between using the Fortress war policy or not will be too detrimental to the war balance. 1) This only affects inter-color trades. Since most blockaded nations are aided economically by their own alliances, not allies on other colors, it's likely that any aid they receive will be an intra-color transfer and arrive immediately. 2) Providing more ways for winning nations to loot losing nations is probably not the best idea. Destroying the resources instead of stealing them is likely better for balance. 3) The basic idea isn't bad. It's very similar to the convoy policy in Section 4 of the proposal, so I think it could work if it turns out this is better-balanced than the version I proposed. That would require location changes still be restricted because nations could move between hemispheres at will to always enjoy the summer food production bonuses. They don't. Only the relative number of cities per alliance on each color matters, and that only determines rank. Rank is what actually gives each color political power. This means two things: 1) Alliances with few cities aren't an inherent liability. As long as most other colors have a similar number of micros, you're fine. 2) The amount of political power each color gets is partly determined in advance. The best color gets 20 political power per turn, and the five worst colors get 11. That's not a huge spread, especially when you consider that the other half of potential political power comes from the way nations vote, not which color they're on. The other benefit of this model is it encourages nations and alliances to spread out. It doesn't matter how much the #1 color beats the #2 color by in the rank formula; it will still only give them one extra political power per turn. Ditto for the #2 through #10 colors. It will probably make more sense for very large groups to populate multiple colors than to consolidate themselves on a single color. You're right, not sure how I didn't think to add that. I've edited it in. What about them? There isn't a way to force alliances to tier one way or another (most attempts to regulate how alliances work don't address the fact that players can change alliances unrestricted), but outright discouraging them from having low-score nations is silly, mechanically speaking. Like I said above, only the relative number of cities per alliance matters. This means micros and protectorates aren't necessarily liabilities, and number of cities per alliance doesn't tell you anything about the number of nations per alliance or their average scores. No need to apologize. These were good points to discuss.
  20. @Charlie Traveler you're a genius. I've been listening to this on loop while I write a wall of text.
  21. We...didn't say that? Keshav said that NPO wasn't aware of anything more than you all were, not that anyone couldn't have guessed BK might want to hit Chaos. What NPO wasn't privy to were logistical details of a prospective BK hit against Chaos because, like Keshav also said, we didn't agree to one. A hunch that BK's dislike of Chaos might turn into an aggressive war against Chaos isn't the same as knowledge of an aggressive war. Is it possible that you projected your conceptions of politics onto NPO's word and actions? NPO has been pretty consistent in voicing its skepticism of minispheres as a concept since long before they were formed; I'm not sure why anyone would have thought NPO's attitudes towards them matched those of minispheres' loudest proponents. Our actions before and during this war have been consistent with our synthesis of dynamism and self-interest. Many of us are disappointed about how things turned out as well, but don't say we didn't give everyone else numerous chances to engage with us over our misgivings. I don't recall ever attempting to establish a hegemony, let alone coming anywhere close to it. Could you point me to where we've done so? What "word" did we go back on?
  22. Not sure if I should facetiously say the same thing about you, or take your having said it as an enhancement of the insult. ?
  23. What did you have in mind, if not something along these lines? It doesn't. Only the relative average city count (cities are correlated with member count) of alliances across different colors matters, and even then only indirectly. It also gives a lot of power to numerically inferior groups: Alliances with high average city counts get more political power per vote. It's possible to outvote them, but any senators elected in this way won't have much political power to bully them with. Senates are fragile. Electing even one senator hostile to a group that controls a color would allow you to use up 100% of that color's political power, either by banning the controlling group's nations or by sending the political power to a different color. To accomplish this you'd only need between 1/7 and 1/3 as many nations as the controlling group. Bullying people is deliberately expensive. Banning a nation from a color, for example, costs over 3x the amount of political power that nation would gain you if it was friendly and voted for a consensus candidate. And, if you use up all your political power using the banhammer, you'll have nothing left for economic policies. I'd say it's likelier that large alliances will have to canvass smaller ones for votes. The bottom five colors each get 11 political power per turn for every 20 the top color gets, and for any colors in between the disparity is even smaller. That makes it viable for people to spread out across fourteen colors rather than cluster together in the shadow of mass member alliances: control of even the worst colors gets you more than 50% of benefits of the best colors, and high voter turnout would close that gap even further. I wouldn't be surprised if at least one color became a haven for raiders, for example, thanks to the privateering policy, the protection having their own color would grant raiders, and Arrgh's generally high member count.
  24. Problem There is little sense of place or geography in Politics & War. All interactions between nations and alliances are immediate and unhindered by any kind of simulated separation. Furthermore, there is little to do in Politics & War for the typical player besides grow a nation and fight wars with that nation. This proposal offers a modest, partial remedy to both problems by treating colors as abstract representations of geographic places and by creating in-game, supra-alliance political structures corresponding to each Color Trade Bloc. Together, these changes should allow a greater degree of political isolation among alliances and provide a peacetime activity in which all players can participate. Summary of the changes There are four main areas of proposed changes: 1. Changes to how nations and alliances choose and switch their colors 2. Color-based changes to war mechanics 3. Color-based changes to trade mechanics 4. Color senates and policies Formatting guide Bold text indicates a change Normal text indicates a description of a change Red text indicates a comment on game balance Blue text identifies existing code that can likely be reused or repurposed for ease of implementation Section 1: Color changes Section 2: War changes Section 3: Trade and resource transfer changes Section 4: Color politics Feedback is appreciated. Thanks for reading.
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