Woot

I couldn't choose what the best of the recent animated JoJo is, but Diamond is Unbreakable is definitely the worst.

10/10 war declaration.

TEst - 1.6bil net worth per member, highest in the game. Alpha - 650mil net worth per member, 4th highest in the game. No, John. You are the whales!

It's simple: TEst, Roz, and Arrgh should be Germany, Japan, and Italy. NPOsphere = Soviet Union and other communists Syndisphere = Allied powers. Partisan is Churchill, and Pre and Roq get to be Hitler and Stalin.

I think it's a random number between 0 and 1/3 * (Attacker score / defeated alliance score)).

Your entire problem is that the message for the oil refinery doesn't change to reflect the boost from the EGR. The correct numbers are on the projects page.

I think taking from inactives should be done through raids, not just adjusting a number on an alliance page to 100%. The first way is much more interesting.

Reserving this post so I can put the damn flags in it. Terminus Est: Mensa: Viridian Entente: (no alternate flags) Settlement Defense Front: The Knights Radiant: New Pacific Order: Rose: Guardian: (no alternate flags) Roz Wei: Acadia: Black Knights: Bonus image: the reason the TKR flag is 10/10

If we're redoing things, I think the imaged-based questions about flags, avatars, signatures, etc, should be done in a different format. The poll options should just be #1, #2, #3, etc, and then the post underneath the poll should have all the images displayed with corresponding numbers. Like this: That way people actually know what's on the poll - nobody can pick the best war flag or forum signature out of a list of names. You can see this in the high amount of abstain votes for all the image based questions, and all the people talking about how they have no idea what different alliances' war flags are, and so on. Imagine if those "best post" categories didn't even link the posts they were talking about - it's just ridiculous.

When I learned about the API I thought that maybe you made it to reduce load on the server. Before someone told me about it I was automatically loading entire normal pages from the main website and extracting what I wanted with xpath. And before I learned how to do that I was just opening up hundreds of pages a day and sorting through them manually for the vital tasks like finding raid targets or keeping track of military numbers.

I agree, I've been arguing this every time Alex talks about the average price. The buy and sell price are always separated by a big gap, there's 2 prices for everything. An "average" price that flips back and forth between those two is pretty useless. Also, when this change was implemented, I had 0 problems taking money from a couple of multis on the test server. I think the method I used was simply having the main nation put a public offer to buy food at 1mil each, and then having the multis accept those offers. So the current system doesn't seem airtight to me.

I bought $80m in credits today and I'll spend them all slowly levelling up my API key to an absurd level if that's what I have to do. Here's an example of some really simple data gathering for fun that took 1500 API requests during one day. That's nothing compared to the amount of requests I use when it actually matters, like loading everyone's military counts during a war. https://politicsandwar.com/forums/index.php?/topic/17384-some-stats-on-domestic-policies-and-by-proxy-player-ideology/

There were times in human history where simple things like indoor plumbing or a personal computer were seen as incredibly extravagant, unnecessary luxuries. But once they got cheap enough, people saw them as nice things worth working for. Do you want to throw that stuff away and live the idyllic life in a cabin in the woods? It's human nature to have ambition and want better things. You'll never get people to be satisfied with some arbitrary living standard you pick for them. Nobody would follow your ideas voluntarily and if you had the power to try to force it on them, people would overthrow you. Consider an extreme example. When do we decide that healthcare is 'good enough' and stop expanding the amount of labor and resources we pour into making healthcare better? As long as the healthcare keeps becoming better and more elaborate it's impossible to automate it all and never look back, so where's the line where we say screw it, our drugs and treatments and standard of care are as much as anybody needs, so everyone who works in the field can retire as soon as we automate the manual labor?

So he starts out by saying that he's not going to repeat the same luddite arguments that have been proved wrong since the industrial revolution, he says he's talking about something entirely new. Okay, I'm listening. Then he spends 90% of the video just listing off new and upcoming technologies and asking what will happen if they displace different jobs. Any moron could have done that with today's technology 100 years ago and been proven wrong. "Oh shit, tractors! Oh shit, electricity! Oh shit, industrial robots!" So ignoring his list of technologies, what's his real argument? His first big smoking gun seems to be an analogy about horses. I could file it away as another one of those arguments that could have been made 50 years ago to prove nobody would have jobs today, but I want to point out how ridiculous it is. Horses are a tool, they do absolutely nothing by themselves, they only multiply the productivity of human labor. Just because they're flesh and blood, CGP Grey is dumb enough to conflate them with humans. Replace every mention of "horse" with "typewriter" and see if he's making any really profound point. His other point seems to be that automation is happening not just to menial labor, but also intellectual labor too now. Wow! What a novel idea to hear about through the internet on my computer. So many scriveners and human calculators and switchboard operators are going to lose their jobs, I don't know how society will cope with this completely unprecedented kind of automation. Here's my crazy opinion: A productivity increase means that a worker can produce more stuff with their labor, and so productivity increases result, very generally speaking, in workers getting more stuff for their labor. Jobs are not a finite resource that get slowly chipped away at until they run out, demand for labor is always going to meet the supply at some price and the market will supply about as many jobs in the long run as there are willing workers. Combine these two things and you have the result - technology more or less improves things and makes us richer instead of collapsing the economy and starving us all. Hey, that's what common sense would tell you and it's what's happened for centuries. Automation can drive wages up and down in different sectors, temporarily put people out work, cause all sorts of legitimate worries for some people in the short term. But go look and see how many serious economists are talking about a job apocalypse where half the country is about to become unemployed. Oh, but that's right, economists are blind to this because they're ignorant about the fact that technology is happening. They lack the serious credentials that come with reading articles about new gadgets and jerking off to pictures of Elon Musk. Or maybe it's because they have jobs and respect and don't have to dream about a world where nobody expects them to do anything but collect a basic income check and watch anime. CGP grey is a hack that needs to stop broadcasting his stupid ideas as if they're expert knowledge. Humans Need Not Apply is worst video he's made by far.

Magic is real.

Rose signing Mensa as their only MDP. That sums up the year, doesn't it?

All I want to know is: what's the reason behind the resistance mechanic? Is it something you're intent on adding? It seems like it's designed to force winners to quickly put losers into beige instead of sitting on them until the war expires, giving them some respite and a chance to rebuild. But loot is also being doubled (and applies to all resources?), making beige hurt a lot more than before. It seems like the net effect would be wars taking longer and a lot of bank transfers and bank hiding.

It would become profitable to send the treasure up to the biggest whale you have, and have him go make an alliance with just him in it, getting the maximum bonus from it. If this method was combined with treasures generating simple cash instead of applying a percentage bonus, it would have no downsides.

The game has a political policy quiz. Some players might use it for roleplay or not take it seriously, but let's assume most people put in real views, or at least roleplay something on their half of politics. In that case, some data on it would be interesting. I gathered data on the top 1500 nations in the game (stopping at around 500 nation score.) Here are the numbers: Moderates may be inflated, because moderate is the default setting if the player never changes it. Of course, it's pretty common to get "moderate" on the quiz. Anybody who gets 'extreme' is probably joking or nuts. Here's data by alliance, with everyone in the game at the top. The main thing to criticize with these numbers is whether enough people actually fill it out with something resembling their real views, and whether the quiz is good enough to assign people an ideology with much accuracy..

Rip in pepperoni. If anyone is looking for a better way to use a credit, Bubblegum takes campaign donations.

This time it will be GEA.

Everyone expected Alex to do something about this, but I think he should give TI more than 10 days. I don't know how much they paid for the latest round of treasures they just purchased, but today they're worth a tiny fraction of what they were yesterday. Changes like that that could put billions of dollars down the drain seem a little unfair to suddenly spring on the game.

I'm just interested in pre-war strength, so anything you have on alliance score/members/military on September 9th or the closest date before that would be helpful.

Does anybody have any data on alliance scores and member counts from before the Silent War? It doesn't have to be right before the war happened, it could be from a month earlier.