Soxirella

IMO, even the best formula or suggestion for penalising no declaration of wars is a failure, since that'd take away from the "Politics" aspect of the game. In reality leaders of current and future potential alliances need to make some bold and risky decisions, if they want to engage in more "War" aspect of the game. If they don't, then you are going to be stuck in Peace mode for a long time. And that may or may not be a bad thing depending on how the leaders play. If they want to conserve pixel and stay on top in terms of score / infra / revenue, then it makes more sense to be diplomatic enough to not be at war or in a war where you can roll someone.

Technically speaking, he is probably running the config in a loop of some kind. So in PHP it may be something such as: foreach ($cities as $city) { $city->import($json_input); } He just needs to add a second box where we'd put: [city1,city2,city3] Then the code would change to... $city_list = [city1,city2,city3]; foreach ($city_list as $city) { $city->import($json_input); }

Instead of having just one button to import city config to all cities, can we have a checkbox where we can choose which cities to have the tool import the config to. So instead of running your code on a list of all cities, you'd run it on an array of chosen items.

Not sure whether this is intended, but when I logged in to check whether my nation was out of vacation yet on three previous days, it gave me the daily bonus. In addition, while I went on vacation with 300k daily, now it reset. (Also, the bug bounty rewards should probably also increase given current prices since 2015)

I do feel the approval rating stats has some potential, but it itself needs to be fixed before anything else can be thought of. As Sir Scarfalot said, the range is very wide and it's easy to lose it very easily. I originally had more than 100%, but went below zero within one war of our alliance being gang banged. Another gang banging later, I doubt if I ever will raise it above zero. The formula is flawed and it's very hard to regain approval. Also, it doesn't make sense to gain/lose approval as a result of war. In fact too many wars in a short time should result in a loss of approval. Think back to Bush and Afghan / Iraq wars. His approval rating had risen, if I am not mistaken, immediately after 9/11 and Afghan war declaration, but fell as the Iraq war dragged on. Conversely, if you are an oppressed nation fighting for your independence or something, then even if you loose, the country folks would still be behind their leader in hopes of eventual victory. So after a certain number of losses in a week/month, approval rating should not fall further. Someone may say here that the approval rating system is too minor for Alex's time, and alas, that is true as well.

In my CN alliance, when someone makes a great post, we just quote it as reinforcement or approval.

1) Alex, I feel most of your recent solutions, such as re-igniting the market and your suggestion to make it easier to buy cities, keeping everything else same, for new players are all quick and dirty fixes to delay the inevitable as opposed to a permanent solution. 2) It should definitely be made more difficult to buy city 35+ by increasing their cost, and there should be fewer cities at the top. 3) To introduce diminishing revenue at the top, increase the cost of maintaining a high population. Either make the formula for population have fewer people per city, the more the city count, or increase pollution cost exponentially with city count. This should then make your curve be more linear or exponential in the opposite direction. You could also make dissent impact population and make a higher city count have more dissent. 4) This last point is debatable, but consider negative growth through random events or player initiated actions. Examples: a) An earth quake can destroy infra and it can damage a fixed (randomised) percent of infra. So a nation with fewer infra (total) would loose relatively fewer than one with higher due to city count or just buying more than normal infra per city. This would redirect funds b) If a higher ranked player looses a war to a lower ranked, then make the higher ranked player have a fewer percentage of population (due to dissent/low morale) for a certain number of days, using a reducing multiplier. In other words, the first day after the war 30% of the population don't come to work and you loose tax income as a result. Then 29%, 28%, 27% every day.

While I upvoted and agree with your post in general, I strongly believe there is enough to do for new players in the game. Lack of meaningful daily actions are more a case for 15+ cities. Apart from the initial discovery of all the features of the game, and baseball team management (which seemed interesting when I first tried it), a nation can go crazy raiding inactives and growing rapidly. When I first started playing this game, I got to 8-9 cities without a single help from my alliance. Basically I declared five wars every other day (6 GA days), and amassed enough to be able to buy 8-9 cities on my own with zero input from alliance. Then from 10 - 15, I tried to trade, logging often to check for low prices and selling them high. I was able to earn considerable to get to my 10, 11, 12 cities relatively more easy, and my alliance leader was happy to give me a loan given my activity. I am not saying everyone should be and can be like that, but alliance leaders surely can do some hand-holding and guiding initially. I later wrote a guide on how I felt anyone can get to 10 cities without city loans, and if Alex is OK with me having a duplicate account to test that, I would love to do so, to prove it's easy to get to at least 5-10 cities. I believe most are quitting below five.

The suggestion puts the reason of newbies leaving entirely on the inability to buy new cities, which discounts other reasons such as more game features, more in-game strategy, natural loss of interest, real life commitments, etc. To justify reducing city cost on new player engagement, we'd first need to analyse player retention rate at the end of 2016 or something. In general, I rather have fewer cities in the game than more, and perhaps even make it more expensive for 35+ cities. Right now, more cities means more revenue during peace time and more military units during war. It does not add anything more in terms of a variety of game play or strategy and just becomes a simple numbers game where the one with a higher number out ranks one with a lower. It also makes rebuilding a pain. Sure we have the ability to import city improvement configs across all cities, but we may not want the same config for every city. In any event, we also have to buy infra manually. Making it more expensive to buy 35+ cities would in effect have the same result as lowering cost of current cities. Instead of increasing growth at the bottom, you slow down growth at the top making it relatively easier for people to catch up eventually. Alliances should instead concentrate on building a community and making people feel welcome, and give out loans to encourage people to stay back. If you are going to have a 100-150+ players alliance, it's obviously going to be difficult building a personal and team environment.

@Fraggle Be patient, our thoughts are with you.

Just to be clear, this suggestion is to limit alliance bank hiding, so that it is open to be looted if your players are beiged, as intended and coded in the current game mechanics, and which is a sore point raised by the winning side in all wars. That said, you can't say this is a bad idea, because it increases the risk of alliances loosing money, which is the intent. Also, alliances with individualist policies are more at risk cause, in the former the bank only gets looted on the last attack, but in the latter, a nation can be looted 10 times (8-9 if you consider naval blockade), if they don't deposit that amount into the bank. Also, in the current suggestion, instead of clicking a button to withdraw X amount of rebuild for a player, you will be clicking a button that extends X amount of credit to that same player. Whereas in the former action the money is out in the open to be raided, in the latter, the alliance bank is automatically credited for the spent amount.

No, I meant the sequence in a scenario where a combo attack involves one player using ground troops and the other using ships. If both had used ground troops, then the attack would be 150k of A plus 150k of B = one GA with 300k troops However, if two or more different types are used, then the code needs to execute either a GA first or Naval first. GA and Air attacks are interrelated, but Naval is independent, in that it can only do blockade for now. Hence, in a combo attack with 150k soldiers of A and 50 ships of B, soldiers should attack first and then ships, since there is only a millisecond gap between the two attacks. If however A attacks with 150k soldiers and B attacks with 300 planes, then the sequence depends on whether the opponent has ground control or not. If the opponent has ground control, then soldiers should go first to try to remove that, so that all the planes may be used. Else, the plane can go first, depending on what it is targeting. Perhaps it targets soldiers, and hence our soldiers going second would me a higher chance of win.

Actually, I take back what I said in the previous reply... even in my OP, I intended this to be only available in certain cases - "if the difference in military score or troops are greater than 50% or so" In addition, I meant for this to be used with any military type - so two or more groups of soldiers, planes, or ships. However, it'd be a great bonus, if we could also combine more than one military type. Let's say A has ground control on B and while B has many planes C has more tanks. Then in a combo attack between B and C v/s A, C's tank can first remove ground control of A on B and then B's full set of planes can do more damage. If the last point is implemented, then the sequence of attacks can be: 1) If soldiers/tanks are attacking and planes are not involved, then the former go first 2) Else soldiers/tanks or planes go first depending on score comparison between defender and attacker 3) Then the other go next 4) Planes go first, if there are no ground troops 5) Naval go last always There is no advantage to going first for ships, as of today.

15 down votes and only two who tried to find demerits (addressed)... pu$$ies FTW!!

Firstly, it is only one attack v/s two. In your scenario, it'd actually work against the two bigger players. Let's say the defender (180k) has reasonable money on hand. If there are two GAs, then the defender may loose 20k soldiers and perhaps 300k cash per attack. However, now that there is a combo attack, the defender may loose 30k soldiers and 300k cash, once. So, in either scenario, this works more for the player who has fewer troops... i.e. either get the ability to damage someone who you couldn't or lose fewer resources.

I see this suggestion has many upvotes and positive alternatives. So how do we get the boss to sign off on these suggestions? Do he acknowledge them?

Personally, I feel this is one of the ways in which a micro has any real chance of bringing down a whale and this idea encourages co-ordination, which is good too.

Are you saying that a 32 city nation can take on 10 14 city ones? Even if we say one big nation can handle two, then under current game mechanics, this still wouldn't work IMO. 531:882 = 1:1.66. Just like we can have 32 city v/s 14 city, it'd go all the way down to 25 city v/s 10 city, 15 city v/s 3 city, etc. The only time when a micro can win against a whale would be when two, may be three, micros are in a position to land four GAs together in the same turn, and one of those GAs end up in a victory. That'd mean that the whale would need to find a buddy to help defend him, cause even if they had more troops than any one of the micro aggressors, attacking them would make them loose more troops and be open to further GA defeats.

That won't work either. You are only going to dissuade micros from making an attempt to take down a whale. Also, in your last suggestion, technically a player with 300,000 troops can attack five (offensive limit) with just 3,000 troops. There are some games where this sort of an aggression is OK, not sure whether Alex would be Ok on this.

True! Whatever you may call it though, it still doesn't change the fact that this idea may most likely not work as intended. In addition, not everyone likes chaos and most prefer some order, and thus this idea may be worse for the game.

I don't mind this, but as long as current game mechanics remain, micros can never gain over whales... assuming other whales come to the rescue. The latter would always have more troop count.

Currently there is only one (score) category in the leader board for alliance bragging rights, and that's temporary and open to change. I suggest we add some more, including permanent stats. For starters, this can be just the Nation level leader board stats aggregated at alliance level. Following that, we can also have "highest level reached" stat for both nations and alliances. For example, Fraggle can have the "highest nukes reached" record at 360, until someone builds 361, even after either fraggle or the new guy uses it up. To avoid leader board stats only for the biggest, we can also have some qualitative stats such as destruction per member or something. Definitely would love to see "Value of infra destroyed" as a stat either at nation or alliance level.

Assuming you got a discount, that's just 4 nukes for 24 mil. I'd rather wait till the prices improve for the resources and buy one a day for four days.

You do realise that 5mn is a steal for a nuke right? At the time of this post, it costs 5.576mn to build one, including resources. And let's not forget maintenance cost.

I don't understand how is this bad for centralised economies? Or how this punishes anything?! There is only one difference in how money in bank is spent in the current system v/s this suggestion: Current: An alliance officer has to execute a withdrawal action for certain amount of money and resources to the person intending to spend it. Suggested: An alliance officer has to extend credit for certain amount of money and resources to the person intending to spend it, and the system automatically deducts the amount from the bank, when spent. It's a minor change of how the money leaves from the bank, and in both cases the same two person is involved.