Lu Xun

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?

An acquaintance directed me to: https://politicsandwar.com/world-graphs/graphID=17 There is definitely a mismatch between the data. I'm told it's likely a glitch, but who knows. Can we have confirmation that it's the money supply estimator on world map that's failing, not the money supply tracker?

lordpoo immediately messaged me and told me it's not him. I don't really care, something is amiss if there's all of a sudden a doubling of money supply when the primary cash source (infra) has been mostly depleted.

I'm noting right now that pre-war, when economic activity should have been greater than it is now, there was 600-800bn cash in game. Currently, there is 1.2 trillion cash in game, and that's with a devastated game economy. Are there any inlkings that certain parties are back to their old tricks?

I think the reason Alex is reluctant to screw with this is because this is cool. On the other hand, fake VM created lots of issues because people would keep on reporting to Alex that people found a way to declare and fight out of vacation mode. Give it a bit of time to see whether this is equally annoying, we spent a lot of effort creating the fake nation pages and assorted deception campaigns. Attacking out of beige, anyways, is a well-known tactic (force someone dumb to beige you, then attack right before they do so).

That sort of defeats the purpose, then, doesn't it? Also, my full damage stats against KERCHTOG are not being properly included right now, which would add up to about 3.4bn damage.

Well, pooball getting banned was advantageous to multiple entities in PnW. As a corollary, should we unban him because it was politically advantageous to multiple parties?

Yeah, agreed with this problem. One idea might be simply to have a cheaper, smaller project that randomly adds up to 50% to or subtracts 33% from your military count, recalculated at update. Less deliberate deception and more noise. I'd point out that the rise of big data systems in this game (NPO War Stats) and other automated tools make it tough for other alliances to compete. One way to get around it is to introduce noise to the data to reduce big data advantage.