Lu Xun

The war is being dragged on for longer than most wars. The only major war that exceeds it in length is the hit on TGH-sphere, and we're just 2 days away from passing it.

@The Mad Titan This is only a suspicion, but part of the point of dragging out these war negotiations is to make sure everyone knows that declaring war on TKR-sphere is a pain in the ass; even if you win, you will be stuck fighting an Arrgh-type or VietTKR war for months after substantial combat operations are over, all while taking nukes. The problem is how well a coalition employing this strategy can hold out. At first, the members who leave will be garbage, EMC-type members. Next you get vacillators who fought it out for a while, but then decided they were bored of the game and weren't really contributing much anyways. But where this starts to hurt is when quality members begin to leave. I am basically a "pixels mean nothing" type of guy, but the third imposes substantial losses since the lifeblood of an alliance is its members and organization. Bleeding out bad blood isn't a problem, but when you start losing healthy members, you have a more serious problem than any of the damage SynDIQ has inflicted on a statistical basis. I think TKR-sphere has already bled off their EMCers, and is either bleeding vacillators or quality members right now, depending on who you ask. What's worse is the post-war losses, i.e, there will be some members who decide not to rebuild and decide to quit instead. I think TKR-sphere can hold out at least to breaking the DDR / "69" days war record, maybe to 3 months or more. But they are better off ending this before they reach the breaking point. I like TKR-sphere, I obviously don't want to see them get rerolled, but excess qualitative bleed isn't good either. @Apeman There was an ex-TCW nation that, I believe, deleted, but the gentleman or lady involved left TCW for TFP. That's sort of an individual surrender, but the nation was promptly attacked by SyndIQ assets after joining TFP. Re: Prefontaine: Angry screaming about how you're losing, my balls are bigger than yours, and that you should kneel down and obey isn't conducive to good peace negotiations. And to insightful people, it just makes the party doing so look bad, i.e, a party roused to anger is often impotent. The Mad Titan, at least, is talking about the real damage that TKR-sphere is taking, and is focusing on that. But then again, what I'm told is that Prefontaine isn't formally part of these negotiations.

TLDR Version: "Substantial" Updates -No Christmas truce. -BK complains that TKR-sphere blew off negotiations TKR-sphere itself had scheduled. Leaks: -If you're naive enough to believe that neither side is stalling, it's primarily the VM that's holding things up. -If you're not naive enough to believe that, TKR-sphere makes progress by nuking high infra nations for war stats, SynDIQ makes progress by getting TKR-sphere nations to go inactive and delete. You can count progress on the SynDIQ side by counting TKR member count; over the last two weeks, seems to be a loss of 10 members (including VM), some of whom were moved into the applicant AA. You can count progress on the TKR-sphere side by checking out NPO's war stats: https://npowned.net/pw-war-statistics/conflict/1

Oh hey, Prefontaine is publicly advertising his lack of manhood again.

lol Both sides are happy with the way this war's going. So much for seeing an early end to this war.

In real life militaries, people are put up for trial for desertion, and possibly shot. So are you suggesting that Typhon kidnap Papa-Stalin and shoot him? For what it's worth, Papa-Stalin is not receiving continuous declares by Typhon. He's been out of beige for a few days, and beyond the farewell party (shout-out to all the Umbrellaiures who remember Blood-In, Blood-Out) he hasn't been engaged.

Rumored stats have TKR exceeding NPO right now, mainly because they're out of infra and SynDIQ is not.

I guess everyone's committed to breaking DDR's record? Only 5 days of stalling by both sides to go!

10/10, would read again.

Part of the problem is, why even bother with the game when growth objectives are impossible? The game is already at the edge of a pure war-game, i.e, nation-building doesn't matter, etc. Allowing nukes is incredibly drastic, i.e, players simply won't go to war to protect their cities, and alliances that do go to war, get savaged and have to start over from scratch due to massive attritional damage.

Get Grammarly. Problem solved. I mean, for more advanced things like communications and rhetoric, Grammarly won't suffice, but I don't feel as though the advertised Orbis service has strong English skills either.

Make it so that cities are rebuilt based on the cost to the next city based on "active" cities, instead of the cost to the last city. Otherwise this easily becomes too punitive. We'd also have issues with people deliberately dropping score by arranging to have their cities nuked and missiled to zero infra, however.

I forget, we're way past the legalese and we all follow the Athenians at Melos; the strong do what they will, the weak do what they must, yada yada yada.

71.87 translates to 2 days, 23 hours, 52 minutes, and 12 seconds, just so everyone is clear on this.

Prefontaine attributes incompetence to design. I think both sides are happy with the way the war is going, and there are objectives to be achieved other than simply being able to rise back statistically at a brisk pace and get rerolled 6 months after. But, what do you expect from some guy that raided his own hegemony while his BFF in Synd was out of town, promptly got dogpiled for it, then went into vac-mode for a year?

Only have to hold out until December 29.

Congrats on peace!

If you really want to address whales, make cities progressively cheaper over time. This will make it easier for smaller nations to grow, while imposing an implicit whale tax on all whales to force them to buy additional cities just to stay where they are. It also helps whales in a way, in that it gives them something to do as the game gets older and gives whales better opportunities to compete with each other for head whale.

I think we hit the 60 days mark a couple of hours ago. Just got a few more days to go, and then, all time war length record! But I wouldn't mind Christmas peace at this point.

The problem with Grig Hold's accusation is that he's claiming that Papa - Stalin will be permawarred until Papa - Stalin quits. That is, somewhat excessive for a desertion. But we have yet to see whether it's true.

It's called Endgame. People want to grow to 30 cities or above, or there's nothing to do. They can just pool warchest indefinitely or make money indefinitely, but there's nothing left to build, and eventually they get bored and quit. A better way would be to add inflaton effects to cities, i.e, the cost of cities continuously decreases, so it becomes easier to reach 38 cities, but also easier to reach 40 or 50 cities.

Way to make it even more fun: after your city has a nuclear meltdown, you can now train mutants as soldiers. These are soldiers with anti-tank powers who can also take down planes and ships with their minds. You are capped on mutant-training by the number of cities you've had exploded by nuclear meltdowns, adding a bit more city-building strategy (how many mutants should I have?), as well as making low-tier nations really imbalanced because a ton of them deliberately blew up their cities for mutants.

@Pestilence AK's war dec is because Arrgh got too big; Arrgh as a small alliance can be easily-entertained, Arrgh as a large alliance raids too many people or hits inconvenient targets. As for the current state of battle:

All of this is legal. Some people decide to run their alliance like this, and this is what happens. I'll also point out that a single round of wars on a deserter is relatively light punishment. If it's PZI (permanent zero infrastructure) or eternal war, there are in-game remedies for that. Also, let me point out that Arrgh is actually Typhon's close friends, i.e, they're one of the few people Arrgh won't attack. It's interesting that, first, PS was accepted into Arrgh, when Typhon had a hate-on for him, and that Typhon attacked into the Arrgh AA. There must be an interesting story here. === I also want to point out that your nation link does not work, and I'd like to know if you're the actual Grig Hold. Given your description of Zephyr, it's surprising he hasn't booted you yet.

Depends. So far, it seems VG, AK, and Syndi seem interested in suppressing Arrgh. The size of the coalition being tasked to fight Arrgh means that damage is spread out. And as with the wider TKR war, damage doesn't have to come in the form of infra. Edit: Ahhh, Prefontaine just made good on his threat and attacked Afrika Korps from within Terminus Est. This'll be interesting.