Lu Xun

White peace implies no NAP. The alternate way to read the posting is that KERCHTOG is begging for peace.

In other words, why take advice from your enemy? There are, of course, BK incentives to peace out, but that'll only force another war on KERCHTOG post-war; i.e, no NAP, no nothing. Perhaps they'll launch the rehit exactly when you've rebuilt infra.

KERCHTOG made the same mistake IQ made in Trial of Tiers, in Trial of Tiers; IQ was attempting to win instead of merely run a defensive preempt. If KERCHTOG had kept Rose in reserve, Rose could have been sent out against T$NPO when the secret treaty was invoked. That would have provided better performance against the 2 million C2.8 in T$ NPO and even if KERCHTOG had lost one of the fronts, it would have created much more diplomatic flexibility instead of this genocidal war. KERCHTOG will deny that it was planning this war since Knightfall, but intelligence had this war tracked since Knightfall. The only people who possibly didn't see this coming was T$. Even BK arguably knew what was going on and was adaptive while it was being rolled. The BK getting rolled was part of the plan. In other words, the calculation came to: Option 1: Attempt to win a revenge war. Option 2: Attempting to maximize strategic potential by playing for the long game. Option 1 failed, which meant that KERCHTOG had to fall back to Option 2, but in a far weaker position wherein strategic options were narrowed out.

It's not impossible for single players to have such immense holdings, although it's improbable and there's quite a plethora of doubters with regards to EM / Moonshadow. Put another way, if a single player decided to liquidate their bank holdings and investments across multiple alliances, then put it into their nation and go into VM, would it be a violation against using VM to hide alliance banks? There's incentive to do so, definitely, as there's no guarantee that if you go into long-term VM, that the deposit banks you contracted with will still be there when you come back.

Hydroscarf achievement unlocked. The problem with control / lack of control is that the opposing force has the potential to adapt. For instance, a disaster in the lower-tiers? Import GPWC / Dragoon Dark Brotherhood. Incessant raiding of enemy mid and upper-tiers? There's anti-raiding protocols designed vs Arrgh. As is, BKNPO has 10:1 plane advantage. It's going to take a lot for them to lose it, and in the meanwhile, they have the position needed to adapt to attempts at insurgency. As always, peace is only achieved when both sides want peace. You're assuming you're creating an unacceptable strategic situation, but that's far from the case. One thing I pointed out to a certain party during Knightfall (no longer in the game, at least openly) is that what happens when, you decide to accept whatever terms are promised, then all of a sudden, these terms are retracted? And then you're stuck here for longer than your intended staying period.

Basically, the way I see it is that morale is terrible in Kerchtog, excepting a few people who are donig attrition runs from on high, and TKR, which is running the zero tier as alliance-scale raids. Meanwhile, trash talk is on-going from Kerchtog coalition, while their enemies were planning for an extended war. The most important factor, though, is that BKNPO has "control", i.e, they control the planes in every tier except sub 1k, and for the latter, they've pushed the contested zone down from 1.3k down to 1k or so in recent weeks. BKNPO can vary its combat tactics to adapt to the enemy, while KERCHTOG is starting from a very weak position. I've said before this war will last way longer than most anticipate; i.e, my projection is 120 days. We are currently about a week away from the 3 month point, and morale on both sides seems consonant with that. One thing Kerchtog has to consider is that they've been at war since a month before the BKNPO war started. If the war lasts to 4 months, they'll have been in war for 5 months while BKNPO will have been at war for only 4 months. If they take this war to 5 months, they'll have been at war for fully half a year.

There's a lot of protesters passionate about this whole thing. It's become an article of faith, even though, well, it resembles KERCHTOG's resistance (they're next to China, turning themselves into West Berlin doesn't work because they're way too close to China proper, and the Chinese government doesn't really care about their economy anymore; they've upgraded secret police since the Global Financial Crisis, were the RMB to appreciate to kill their PPP advantage, they'd end up with a larger economy than the United States, and they've gone from a booming [econ] strategy to a tech strategy).

From a public channel:

Officially a bank theft.

Also, the DB-NPO MDoAP has been upgraded again.

It took until early September to break the remnants of Grumpy, with Seb and Joe Baker selling infra and escaping to peace mode. There was substantial resistance below 1k or so for weeks. That's what remains contested.

This is just unnecessary and hilarious.

I've paid million of reps through baseball before. It's just a real hassle, but if you can get people to press buttons endlessly you can turn PnW into Cow Clicker 3.0.

=== TBH, pooball was a fool. All he had to do was to start an Orbis Baseball League and he'd have his hundreds of billions pronto.

At 60 games per minute, with an average yield of about $.02mn, that's $1.2 million per minute. Over 12 hours, this amounts to $864 million. Is this where the mysterious 600 billion extra cash came from? If you had two players doing 4 hours a day of baseball at 60 games per minute with max upgrades, you'd be able to generate 864 million in 3 days. It'd take 6000 man-days of 4 hours (24000 man hours) to generate 864 billion. Let's assume GPWC has 50 members who can do this, in 25 pairs. That reduces the total requirement into 960 hours. Split into 4 hours per day, it implies that GPWC can create 864 billion in about 8 months.

Well, NPO had to liven up the game given that most of KERCHTOG seems to be planning to Dolphinplan after the war is over. Gotta get some new nations to replace the deletions. That said, wasn't your line that "NPO and BK would never turn on each other?" Now it's "BK and NPO will turn on each other, are you scared?"

https://politicsandwar.com/nation/id=155172 https://politicsandwar.com/nation/id=160592

Pragmatically, TKR is still growing, and most member loss has been seen in the BKNPO coalition. Until TKR begins losing members catastrophically (to 99 or something), they're not ready to quit yet. Peace talks, FYI, are almost always political theater of some kind. The only time peace talks actually are substantial are when both sides are ready to talk terms. In Knightfall, both core coalitions were willing to stall out the war to achieve political ends, and only when both TKR and NPO were satisfied with their strategic objectives (buying time, weeding out unreliables, destroying as much of TKR membership as possible) did both sides peace out.

The ground calculator has been completely broken for quite some time. I forget which other of the calculators are also broken.

I was wondering how long it'd take before someone argues "the solution to deletions is to force the entirety of ex-IQ to delete". The thread seemed awfully civil, so I never snarked in this vein. Now?

Infrastructure / cities is conisdered to have some resistance value. Attacking someone with 50 soldiers, for instance, usually results in a defeat. This is why your alliance is so big on 1-ship, i.e, naval never needs to be attritioned by pure infra / cities.

What's the relevant numbers then? IIRC, there are roughly 8000-9000 nations in VM, implying an average nation holding by inactives of 40-50mn. That's very strange, from the point of view of an experienced raider, since most of the 8000-9000 would be quasi-deletes who got raided out and are quitting the game.

I do want to point out one reason this war is so bad is because the infra levels for max planes were reduced since last war. The population bonus buff means that older nations can keep on fighting for longer due to needing less infra to have population, and most nations can have max planes at lower infra levels than before. On the other hand, raising infrastructure costs for warfighting encourages Viet Arrgh-type fights, which, while interesting for the members involved, is just really really unbalanced. If a side can cause disproportionate damage with nukes while being militarily destroyed (there are alliances which have had recent experiences of this type), it just encourages balance of terror (i.e, you can't ever roll anyone, and hitman-style attacks with nuke rogues become way too damaging).

PnW was alive when wars were fun. CN sort of died when MK invented the "let's reduce all wars to nuke exchanges" protocol. The long war protocol in PnW has a similar effect; staying power is the most important thing, but most alliances don't have staying power and it's hard for alliances to develop staying power. On one hand, long wars create strategy and complexity for milcom, as milcom adapts different strategies and uses different protocols in fighting. On the other hand, long wars are horrible for most rank-and-file. How do we compromise this?