Sir Scarfalot

This can only happen if a lot of the most recent credit purchases were done for $0. I'm not putting this in game reports since I don't have a suspect but it clearly shows that someone is bypassing the purchase restrictions on a large scale. Maybe this exploit will finally be fixed once Sheepy can focus on the game like he's said he'll be able to?

The spy war in the 69dw was pretty firmly in our favor. It's not the usual way it goes but it is quite possible to happen.

And/or the losing side would spy the heck out of the winners, either way it gives the spy war more of a purpose. I'd be okay with it only if it WASN'T able to target power plants or military, but otherwise it's a solid idea.

Or, alternatively, they could pick up a far cheaper econ project and make money from manufacturing or even farming and see faster returns anyway, paying for their own new cities rather than relying on alliance grants that could be entirely lost due to inactivity/betrayal/banking. Or even better, pick up the military projects (IA, PB, maybe CCE MLP MLP MLP) with their, let's say 3 project slots at a 1500 infra build, and then raid for fun and potentially serious economic returns. Each of which are investments that can be gotten cheaper, pay off faster, and risk their alliance far far less than dropping about a bil on every c11 applicant that comes their way. It's a matter of risk management as much as it is efficient growth, and project slots are an opportunity cost: City planning means giving up a slot that could be used for IA, PB, manufacturing project, etc, so every calculation involving the planning project needs to take that into account. Or how people forget that there's cheaper, safer, and quicker ways to make money off project slots than city planning.

About Sauron... what is his motivation, exactly? Beyond his "will to dominate all life"? Even that's dubious since it's said purely by his enemies, so we really don't have any unbiased opinions to draw from. He gave the secret of ring-forging as a ploy to entrap the dominant species of Middle Earth to his will, but as far as I know he only did so because... it's his nature to do that? Something about Morgoth? Yeah, he definitely falls under the shit tier motivation category... but that said, he's far from a shit tier plot device. His characterization is quite tangential to the point, which is him being the looming threat controlling the more immediate and smelly threats with axes. (Though to be fair I'm sure the knights of Rohan weren't able to keep up the hygiene either, what with classical horse-based military logistics and all ) Unless there's a bunch of stuff in the Silmarillion about him that I haven't read yet, he's not a complex character, nor does he need to be. As for Voldemort, he pretty clearly understands that his followers' whole "pure blood" thing is stupid and wrong; his motivation is at best an obsessive and crippling phobia of death. The latter part is arguable, the former even he himself isn't sympathetic with though. (I don't think any of that was spoiler.) Tywin is flatly out for greed and pride; his family wouldn't need protection from their enemies if they weren't so arrogantly and militantly greedy for more than they already have. It's lust for power/influence/resources; defending against the people you're trying to rob doesn't make it a defensive motivation, it just makes their motivations defensive.

Well, other than things which are balanced around exponential cost increases; cities land and infra mustn't be lootable or people would circumvent the increased costs by "buying" through deliberate losing wars. Though you probably only meant resources anyway, I just felt it had to be specified here.

Or both at once, considering time travel is involved

Well, I'd have to say that while removing alliance bank looting would help me and my own personal gameplay style a great deal, it just isn't something I want to see. It would remove the creativity and challenges of setting up the offshore banks, protecting them, negotiating where to put them, the risks inherent in such resource consoldiation, etc. Offshoring is part of the game; the one thing that really could be improved is how micros that struggle to hit 1k score in any of their individual nations can't really create their little offshore havens. I can't think of a good solution to that which isn't either exploitable or terrible, though. That's true, but we can hardly have wars without risk; looting isn't something to discourage, especially when it can be managed carefully with activity and creativity.

Nooooo! This would conflict with my extremely specific and niche gameplay style and tactics and therefore I will disagree with it on that basis even if it is good for the game in general 😭

More nation awards? :3 We've already got leaderboards, but I do like where the idea is coming from. However, let's not forget how simple it is to grind warring stats without engaging in genuine PvP; if unlocking the projects is simply a matter of winning 100 wars then we'd see more than a few civil wars fought with single battleships and squadrons of 3 aircraft. Perhaps it can be tied more to unit kills and losses and/or the value of destroyed infrastructure, since those are far more genuine indicators of real PvP happening as opposed to cheekiness. Another way to do it would be something like "military tradition" that represents the experience and competence of your nations' military leaders, which goes up when engaged heavily in wars that involve large-scale engagements and losses and down when at peace for extended periods of time. As for what it does, well there's plenty of variables that it can adjust so we'd have to test it out. User experience, complicating the process of buying? Why would that be? We input the infrastructure we intend to build up to, and the game calculates the cost for us. Adding resources to the cost doesn't increase the amount of buttons we have to push or the number of input boxes we have to fill out, so I don't get that. Lemme know when you've put up the thread for resource upkeep though so I can properly tear into that bad idea, though.

Another game (admittedly one without much merit to warrant its consideration as a design example, but regardless) had a research system which provided bonuses at increasing costs. One of those bonuses was to launch a satellite at extremely high cost, and the entire bonus of it was that it gave every player in the game a notification that it happened. What I'm saying is, we could have a money sink that's completely stupid, like notifying everyone in the game that it's been done, and then that'd be a pretty good way to increase resource demand. Basically like keno but with resources, even faster bankruptcy, and a huge notification to everyone that someone's daft enough to do it

There's NOT an influx of cash, it's the opposite: a deflation of cash value and low resource prices due to a massive influx of *non* cash.

...I don't think I agree with that. What would you replace it with, anyway?

Speaking as a barbarian, Article 1 amuses me. It may be unfun to fight barbarians but it is fun to be one... also it's totally fun to fight barbarians, what are you on about?