[Wartime updates]

45 minutes ago, Bartholomew Roberts said:

How did I know the people actively trying to kill the game would complain about new updates in long-form posts?

Shocker. @Alex please keep pushing updates, war or otherwise. Every other game that exists simply looks upon updates as "how does this affect the meta" and adapts to it. Don't pander to people's political agendas by delaying your own vision.

Not sure how we're trying to kill the game. If the game = group of people who have an expectation of certain levels of infrastructure and they have to be met, then maybe. Actual updates would be welcome but this is just adding projects that benefit people with the most money/resources to spend. The idea is they will be resource sinks which can sometimes be well-intentioned but the implementation is odd. They aren't sinks where they're needed since it's a drop in the bucket for the people who have the means to buy them. The purchase costs should vary by how many cities you have. The metagame over the past 4 years has gravitated to a mentality where bigger is inherently better and this feeds into that mentalit. While there were outliers before Silent, it wasn't an encouraged model.

 

  

3 hours ago, Menhera said:

I don't think that is too much of a problem. The individual alliances already teach the players how to play the game aside from the basics. Many only do the tutorial for the 100'000$ in-game bonus. And i also believe since that won't be the last update, that a new one will come that benefits younger nations more. 

 

Most players don't join established alliances. Most established alliances don't want to feed all the newer players. Most alliances having limited funds to spend per new player don't want to take chances on someone who will leave to make their own alliance which is the model promoted. The tutorial doesn't teach you how to play the game properly and it requires using external mediums and many players are instantly turned off. The game itself needs increased appeal to work for casual mobile users rather than relying on offsites.

[Wartime updates]

15 minutes ago, namukara said:

Perhaps it's not about keeping long-term players in the game?

Think of how ridiculously long wars affect the newest players. We've literally had people join, and get hit by the other side 2 days later, while having no understanding of game politics. I'm sure your side will have had the same issue, although to a lesser extent as you own low tier at the moment. He's probably trying to increase new player retention by discouraging long, drawn out wars like this.

It is about keeping long-term players as that's what most of the complaints have been about.  The lack of tutorial upgrade should indicate that as well.

New players aren't affected by alliance wars more than random hits in peace time. The damage is minimal to them.  Immortals has barely been at war.  Most alliances in the war do not actively recruit. If you leave beige early even in peace time any random  person can declare on you since you're not in range of most alliancemates as a new nation. Alliance wars are actually quite good for new players as they can scavenge quite a lot. It's a treasure trove. There's way more of a draw to getting to endlessly raid all the abandoned nations since it takes months to get VMed/deleted.

[Wartime updates]

1 minute ago, Prefontaine said:

The cost change was suggested by an NPO member. My suggestion was to nerf tank costs. 

Oh I wasn't saying you suggested this particular one. I was citing that you said Alex wanted shorter wars. It's more if it's an intentional decision to affect alliance wars especially the current one via material costs without any accompanying change, then it will just have the impact of making people leery of fighting and just do very short spurts once a year.

[Wartime updates]

4 hours ago, Epi said:

Recently Sheepy added some (not all) of the space projects and increased the cost of soldiers and planes. 

Do you guys think he'll be introducing more changes during the war? Do you think its unfair to the warring parties? Or more unfair not to improve the game for those not fighting?

Expanding on the changes. Do you think they'll affect this war? And what impact will they have on the post war.

And on the space projects, are they a new must buy for mid tier or something only available for bored whales etc.

The changes are problematic because 1. there was no tutorial overhaul/no UI overhaul/etc. The changes that only benefit established players were implemented. The model of discouraging endless growth that Statekraft would have had is missed here. 2. The issue is even if it's intentionally to affect things; there's just no basis as there is no alliance war mechanism in the game. Prefontaine said something along the lines of him wanting shorter wars, but there's no basis for doing it via material costs. The premise has also been that short wars are good for retention and this has never been the case as the losing sides earlier on would hemmorhage players regardless of war length, because losing a war isn't fun especially when you guaranteed to be at a competitive disadvantage, so shorter wars only benefit people who win or have greater reserves as they can increase the gap. If the desire was to normalize shorter wars, objective goals or some benefit to both parties would be different. Wars are mostly fueled by vendettas and personal enmity, so we can't really find any basis for material regulation to mean much as it simply benefits those better off. It just means whoever gets frustrated first or is poorer will be gone. This is mainly why I was saying there would have to be  a way to encourage cooperation and friendly competition between factions where people can excel in different metrics rather than enmity, which is currently encouraged by the way the system works as is. "I get to stay on top and keep these guys poor and I don't want them to ever be well off so we'll hit them when the time comes." The system as it stands encourages crippling opponents economically by hitting when vulnerable.

Some of them would be a must buy but the issue is that will just hurt people who have less stuff as is, and that's an unfortunate effect that adding new projects has is it doesn't really hurt people who have a lot.

[Peace]

1 hour ago, Noctis Anarch Caelum said:

Taking control of the upper tier I think is a nice edge toward victory, regardless of what happens in the micro tier. So whatever people think of TCW, better to have them on our side.?

You missed the point of the post which is the collusion while at war between TCW's bloc and Syndicate. Those are pretty much the same entity at this stage, so when Partisan declared on TCW nations with "fight me you coward" on the eve of TCW's betrayal of Covenant/co and barely had any units, sort of means something along with NP's wars to restore Syndicate units. We can also note the convenient connection between Boyce's sudden spurt of activity and  declaring offensives exclusively on TCW, getting beiged, and miraculously a TCW treaty coming out not too long after.

Also lol at Sphinx trying to pretend the small scale action by BK and Acadia is the same as his orchestrated effort.

 

  

9 hours ago, Sweeeeet Ronny D said:

i had the option to leave?

You're free to negotiate your own deal at any time or just operate separately like Horsecock is doing.

[Peace In Our Time]

On 1/21/2020 at 7:31 PM, Sir Scarfalot said:

Actually, I did. NPO blitzed their own allies plenty of times this war, directly attacked their allies in T$, you broke your NAP with TLE and with TI. That's four right there.

There's more than even that, so yes, you're constant pactbreakers.

When did we blitz our allies? tS cancelled and there were no wars on them before.

On the slotting thing in your other post. Your coalition is entirely reliant on slotfilling and beiging. Our side had a few people do it as a protest and it was punished relatively quickly for a small scale action. At this the A in Coalition A stands for Akuryo. Just don't forget that any resurgence for tS or anyone beiged here is just due to blindness and illegitimate. The issue is being addressed too late but that is the case. If people will cheat while the ref is snoozing how can they be trustworthy?

[Peace In Our Time]

Coalition B: "Our side has less liquidity."

Charles: "Should have blown it on more cities in NPO.

Coalition B: "it's not for NPO".

Charles: "This is a referendum on NPO tiering."

Coalition B: "The other side has had the ability to keep individuals out of wars whereas isolated upper tier wouldn't be  getting big returns on 3000 infra+"

Charles: "Should have spent more."

Coalition B: Most alliances on our side do not tier like that or have 100/100 nor have they had as much time with income levels. The highest liquid alliances barely fight or hadn't fought losing wars before.

Charles: "This is an admission of incompetence."

 

Best of luck tFed/Reg.

 

[A Call to Arms]

42 minutes ago, Cooper_ said:

Ok before this whole reps debacle continues, I think it’s important to note the point of reps isn’t to give some sort of economic advantage to the winner but rather to punish a losing side for what was seen as unfair play.  We’re talking about putting 50 billion in reps, @Do Not Fear Jazz you know I love you man but 30 ain’t much different, on a coalition that entered preemptively or was hit in the case of T$.  @Alexio15 has the logs on the validity of the CB, so we’re talking about rightful warfare here.  And for a time, coalition B won and accomplished its war goals which were to damage Chaos albeit on Chaos’ timeline versus rebuild.  

There isn’t a pretext for reps between the constant stalling and purposeful attrition coalition B has engaged in.  Rather, what this is, is a shameful corruption of yet another precedent by OD in how peace negotiations function.  Illegitimate CBs, breaking treaties, breaking NAPs wasn’t enough.  Every political institution we know is being exploited for the sake of realpolitik, and this is ironic given that NPO are the ones who espouse an ideology of working within a formalized framework.  If Polar got it’s bank hit, that is their fault no matter how much their FA gov might be great or want it back.  War better and play better.  Don’t utilize reps for something their not meant for because assuredly you’re setting a precedent that won’t be helpful for anyone, including you, in the future.

Its shameful really how desperate things have become.  Shame on everyone who wishes to instigate this dynamic and allow for reps to be a vehicle for personal piggybank, and I hope you don’t have to experience it as a taste of your own medicine.  

lol. Please dude. You've done so many bad things this war that we smell like roses in comparison at this point.

There is no such thing as an illegitimate CB. If we saw you as a threat to competitiveness by having an easy curbstomp then it was valid to not let you decisively crush one side.  You've focused on the proximal reason and we had enough reasons to believe TKR's tension with us would escalate. .  We didn't break the NAP Kitschie and Immortals decided the NAP was dead because of TMC. This was a thin pretext for them to justify breaking it and entering to help you or TCW. They acted in bad faith with regards to the NAP.  You complain so much about game health but an upwards transfer of wealth of that scale from a larger amount of people to one person is terrible for it. Given the viciousness and sanctioning of actual bank theft, tricking people to help you, rigging wars, and so on, it's hard to make this case at this point. Anyone who did anything wrong becomes a saint in your eyes as long as they screw us. You embraced EM when he broke his own deal. You canonized Gorge. This pattern just increases the need for these terms. You've justified everything on the basis of being hunted to extinction when your own aspirations for dominance are the true motive.

 

 

-----

 

 

[Peace In Our Time]

3 minutes ago, HeroofTime55 said:

"Our way is the most efficient system and also we need to demand 160 billion in 'reps' in order to even out growth" - Roquentin

Except I've never said we demanded reps or anything for ourselves as we are not an aggrieved party and the bond is a different story due to the liability. Now 160b would be crippling as opposed to the much lower sums included. We don't really have a reason however to just peace without the terms as it's a bad deal. It's not as if I controlled every alliance that was on our side in terms of whatever systems they had in place and not as if any of the extraneous circumstances that have nothing to do with their economic orientation somehow don't exist.

[A Call to Arms]

18 minutes ago, Sisyphus said:

 

It's like your PR guy has advised you to talk about how much you care about the health of the game but you keep relapsing everytime you come up against healthy competition. 

Made all the more absurd by the fact that you had the advantage and instead of promoting the health of the game you doubled down on isolating a few alliances you hate and somehow managed to further isolate yourself in the process.

"Healthy competition" lmao

This is healthy competition? A whole slew of people who see it as optimal to curbstomp less well off alliances?  People who choreograph wars to help people recover military? Everyone would have loved get out of jail free cards when you always won.

Our advantage wasn't really that great.  lol if you think gorge/sphinx/akuryo's actions recently were based "on health of the game" and not just individual self-interest/avarice. 

"it's harder to fight these guys, so I will literally backstab my side and try to rig the war in their favor." seriously?

[A Call to Arms]

Just now, Kevanovia said:

Leopold is the sole reason t$ came back to the forefront. They were dead before that. He is the savior Orbis deserves. He is greatest good that can inhabit a human body. Leopold is love. Leopold is life.

Substitute Akuryo/Sphinx and then it'll be accurate.

[A Call to Arms]

Just now, Prefonteen said:

Are you trying to convince me or yourself?

It's plain as day. Someone helps tS and tS springs into action. Is this the action of an alliance that is on the verge of extinction or somehow super crippled especially when taking into account its relative wealth? No.

[A Call to Arms]

Just now, Prefonteen said:

You mean like...what you are looking to do?

 People are saying they can't cope so we're willing to let the ones out that can't realistically and it isn't that big of a deal given the overall size of your coalition. I don't know how letting some alliances out after the side switch,  big interventions that were confused in motivation and further consolidation is a big deal. We didn't collaborate with anyone on Coal A's side to engineer some sort of rigged outcome. It wouldn't reduce the numbers to an insanely lopsided level by letting struggling alliances leave. I'm just not going to be responsible for people having issues with extended war if they won't take the individual outs offered now and in the past. We know you're in good shape, so it's not a killer.

This is a lot different compared to the start of "oh it's x's fault you're in this war. ditch them."

[A Call to Arms]

Just now, Prefonteen said:

I don't remember who said you were making things up but he had a point.

I wasn't. I was contacted by at least one person who mentioned that CoS was going under changes and that a decent amount of people would look to leave. SK having some shuffling was also known too. Soup had Medellin splintering off as well. It was known some bigger members would split off at some point.

[A Call to Arms]

2 minutes ago, Kevanovia said:

“Changes in Chaos” - I’m assuming this is in reference to Ripper/Thrax’s retirement. Or is there another rumor that all of Chaos is merging into TKR? Not a clue where that rumor came from last year, but I loved how quickly IQ embraced it.

Also: The irony of your last sentence is tasty.

A lot of people were planning to leave CoS and some other alliances or they'd just disband or restructure. The issue you guys have had were evident during surf's up and people were looking to make deals and get new locations.

It's not really tasty or ironic. Basically the premise you now operate on is if it hurts alliance x or y, virtually anything is permitted as in Black Sox/montreal Screwjobesque moves  and everyone is a hero even if they wanted to cripple you as long as they sell those alliances out. That's always been sort of the premise for the overall old school milieu.

 

[A Call to Arms]

2 hours ago, Alexio15 said:

Can I just point out that Chaos was going to be rolled by BK/TC after surfs you anyway. Had it not leaked Surfs up would have finished naturally and once TKR had rebuilt we would have hit then. Before you spin it don’t bother. I know because I was in the planning and have logs to back it. 

The logs show you being critical of Leo wanting to charge in, so if the plan was adjusted for the rebuild thing then that's something else . We can talk about the hypothetical yeah but there was also considerable changes happening within Chaos which would have likely occurred before the rebuild phases were complete. Had they happened Chaos may have not been on the radar that quickly. But yeah if the argument goes back to the CB being valid and TCW/COV/BK etc. deserving to get their get kicked in, then it's still inconsistent to have an about face about almost everyone except Leo and his reactions to people hating BK(killing the game etc.) even more for it. If it wasn't about the CB and it's just a huge vendetta against BK and everyone else is an angel even if they were going to do it, then that justifies my point that the war wasn't about the cb.

I'm not a fan of the paradigm where everything can be isolated to a few hated alliances for a big curbstomp and that's always seemingly been the goal around here. 

[Peace In Our Time]

22 minutes ago, Charles the Tyrant said:

 

1.  This point is relevant how?

2. how does a laissez faire alliance borrowing money from other laissez faire alliances counter the question of NPO's own growth suffering from its own internal decisions? Strawman much? There are people who were at City c8/10 during ToT whilst NPO were around c12/14 city average who are now at c24/26 whilst NPO is c18/21ish. That's a pretty large loss of potential revenue and productivity. Granted you can justify it by saying you amassed a huge stockpile resource which is now funding a large part of your coalition but that does not justify the argument that coal A's whales are large because they dodged wars and that is why NPO lacks a whale tier. You lack a whale tier because of your own inefficient econ system. I say inefficient not because of it being 100/100 taxes but because of your growth being deliberately held back due to NPO's decision to do so. With the amount of time NPO has been around with the collective wealth at its disposal, NPO has no excuse not to have a whale tier of its own.

This begging of 50 billion in reps which is being bandied about is nothing more than an indirect admission of NPO's poor economic management which is now on open display. A war is being prolonged for no other reason than ending it without reps will bankrupt NPO and their coalition.

3. I know enough to see through you and your shabby leadership and that's enough for me.

1.It's relevant because you're attributing overall economic disparity to us when it existed before the war and a lot of the alliances that dropped out weren't particularly well off regardless of this stuff. We don't have whales because we don't want to spend a disproportionate amount on one person.  We're not talking about NPO at all. We're talking about overall sides.  If we had a whale tier it wouldn't outnumber the other side's. The biggest nations on the other side have other sources of revenue like bank loots and other stuff that are disproportionate. Again, we could turtle and nuke but that wouldn't be productive to our aims.

It's not because the money isn't for us. We're not asking you to fund us. The money is partially due to concern of roguing with the bond and foul play and other reps for actual misdeeds. It would never go to us because we weren't the offended parties. We're just reiterating the coalition's case. I would never ask for money directly for NPO.

It won't bankrupt our coalition at all. It's about comparative advantage.  it might if we got hit right after yeah, so that's a valid fear for some alliances. We don't want to end it before some goals are accomplished. They can either be accomplished via the terms or extended duration.

 

[Peace In Our Time]

11 minutes ago, Charles the Tyrant said:

Which war did the tiering system come into place at then and when did NPO first implement 100% taxes bearing in mind that 100% taxes would have been the first requirement necessary for tiering

And no they wouldn't have, take it from someone who spent years talking to them almost daily whilst being a member of the same alliance after they left NPO (NSO if you are interested) due to their opposition of what NPO was becoming. Were you even around back then?

Several other alliances have had tiering without it. 100% taxes were at the start and it wasn't tiered well(it was a different orientation) so we got killed by BK. We re-designed to fight BK as  BK was going to always hit us in wars if we were on opposite sides. It worked with BK too as we had to work together to fight bigger nations.

Plenty of alliances on our side don't have tiering and aren't super rich. 

Most alliances with really high amounts of cash relative to size are ones that don't fight much or had years or relatively minimal fighting. Your case is if we had outliers who'd get beat up and just nuke in wars that we'd be super rich, but they wouldn't have the luxury of the high infra needed or no war.

You'd have a better argument if you said we should have just raided everyone the entire time.

Anyway, I hope it helps to note that when individual members get overly invested in their nation size you end up with people like Gorge getting into trouble because he got too high on his growth or people who bail if their alliance takes too many hits, so I'm glad I never indulged in that.

[Friendly Unity Cooperation of Knightly Immortals Treaty]

7 hours ago, namukara said:

Are we the new EMC or the new IQ then?

So much for your talk about hegemonies and killing the game and such man. Time to look in the mirror buddy.

[A Call to Arms]

Not sure why people are talking about pre-war Chaos or N$O. Chaos was shaky evidently and N$O was just a joke tbh as entirely dysfunctional and reliant on one person. Hardly a sphere.

[A Call to Arms]

1 hour ago, Prefonteen said:

7 god damn billion roq. How do you justify this?

Yeah, sorry Partisan but when you guys canonize people like EM and Gorge, there's a troll toll. 

Anyway I'm spending it all on keno. I need to replicate EM's success. That's how I'm justifying it.(just kidding it's not for me)

 

[Boting talk]

2 minutes ago, BelgiumFury said:

 

 

 

 

Sigh

I assume most of you aren't in Rose, and if you are, you have some terrible terrible reading skills or want to make rose seem so bad / attack our member so much that facts don't matter.

I don't know what you think Zev did, but if you joined the community just once you'd see us joking every few days about how he did literally nothing, he did not automate anything, anyone who makes you believe so is simply lying. Zev was pretty darn inactive, praise @Valkorion Baratheon our lord and savior.

Next up, I am also happy to notice that your rose spies are pretty terrible/nonexistent, or you are lying on purpose again.

I am happy you think you know more than Rose members about what tools we have, I am happy our alliance informs you better than us about a "infra repurchaser" while keeping us in the dark when we could have used it in the past week. I hope we have a whole other slew of scripts that we don't know / don't use; way to go @Dynamic.

I hope you can, for at least the rest of this threat stick to proven facts, or bring reasonable proof to the table instead of making assumptions and attacking our members with information you just made, created out of thin air, DIY'ed just then.

-Belgium

We're not attacking you. We're just saying you use tools too. Take it easy. I'm pretty sure akuryo has mentioned the infra rebuy thing too. I can go find it for you. Zevfer definitely made it.

[Peace In Our Time]

idk why people bother responding to Charles at this point. 

1. NPO isn't its entire sphere.

2.  laissez faire alliances borrow money as well. tS borrowed a frickton from Orion. Rose borrowed a ton from horizon and others for their wo thing.

3. he doesn't know anything.

[A Call to Arms]

1 hour ago, Sisyphus said:

CoA has resolve. Are you surprised? Because I'm not particularly surprised by that. 

OWR/Carthago left when Coalition B's plan was maintain the war and attrition our enemies into nonexistence* (I'm sure you meant to be more subtle "publically" but all the leaks prove deliberate intent)

Without getting too deep into paragraph three, because I don't want to speak for Sphinx. All I can say is "we started a war, but didn't want to end up with liabilities when it was concluded" is pretty fricking whimsical and one of those situations where thinking before jumping might have helped quite a lot. 

I know all about CoA's "resolve" and it comes down to still seeing tS as the more lucrative opportunity. 

Wrong. At the time we were willing to settle on surrender/NAP/some of the less controversial terms if they agreed to those off the bat. The tS escalation and the other stuff that happened after Carthago/OWR pulled out changed the tempo to needing a longer war.

It's not whimsical at all.  There's a liability either way. Before the war, it wasn't know how antagonistic tS was. It's about mitigating liabiltiies. So he saw a way out by being less hated than BK/NPO and his alliance doesn't like long wars. When his leak caused the war to happen in a disastrous fashion, you see the issue here?

So your proposition ends up being: Sphinx and Leo should have gotten killed and that it was bad for me to do anything.

I don't see it as the wrong move to help since they didn't have the vast sums tS does and they wouldn't have held up as a sphere due to the relative fragility and I don't but he became blinded by other things like people complaining and his own goals for accumulation. If we work with someone, I don't expect them to throw us under the bus to the people who get angry after we worked together for mutual benefit. That's pretty simple.

1 hour ago, Filmore said:

To add onto this, there's also the Coalition B logs we have that show Under talking about purposefully stalling peace negotiations in order to extend the war. 

I still have that file somewhere if you need a refresher @Roquentin

Yeah due to damage because tS was sill in tact.

I don't see why we'd let tS get away with much less damage than everyone else. Might as well just say "hey we want you to never have a scratch". tS pulled out,  tS antagonized the shit out of us, tS protected Sanreizan tS protcted boyce, tS Ssigned Carthago/OWR. You might as well just ask Alex to give them a game shark for PW.(not that the akuryo/tcw stuff isn't basically it.)

1 hour ago, James II said:

We have been trying to surrender from day one.

As for negotiations. You sent certain folks to 'troll' you set very odd timelines, and when we asked to negotiate down reps you said "No, these numbers on non-negotiable" You didn't negotiate at all. The only proactive thing you did was add more terms as negotiations proceeded.

No you haven't. You hit thinking you'd win. 

[A Call to Arms]

1 minute ago, James II said:

We were soundly defeated, and not allowed to surrender.

I don't think them leaving a side that had sound victory, for a side that could do nothing more than log in makes them pixel huggers. It's this exact attitude right here, that has put you in the position you're in now. Your arrogance is uncanny, and your lack of humility in victory is telling.

You didn't want to agree to the conditions of surrender and CoA to this date has not wanted to pul out.

Who left a side with a sound victory? OWR/Carthago left when the Coal A  plan was attrition us to defeat.

If you're talking about TCW then, we explained our rationale that peacing without concessions or quickly would be a huge liability to us due to the size of the opposing coalition. TCW's leader understood it to a certain point. He had his own reasons for wanting to pull out or end it, but he was always pleaded with about the rationale. That's not me being arrogant. If  we were arrogant,  there wouldn't even be a bond. The people who have tried to help you now are doing it because they see it as the winning play and easier.