Altheus

Can see what you're getting at. If nothing else it would make allliance-wide raiding very attractive (and almost guarantee that neutrals become/stay extinct) People will have different views on that.

I think what you can do with treasures is held back by being allocated to nations rather than alliances. I understand the reasons, but any of the obvious fixes to stop their abuse (restricting them from being captured outside of colour sphere, only one per alliance) don't really work whilst their allocated to nations who don't automatically have the same colour sphere or continent as their alliance and can take their treasures with them when they move alliances. But if Alex did change treasures to be held back by alliances rather than nations then we'd need a system for determining when an alliance had beaten another alliance enough to have captured their treasure, which feels a bit artificial

Hmmm, that is a good point. At which point Claims start looking a lot like Treasures. Maybe the solution is to increase the importance and interaction of Treasures in regards to colour spheres. You have suggestions?

Same as before, economics feeds politics which feeds war. Fundamentally disagree that this isn't political. If an alliance is in opposition to another alliance because they have a claim they want then that's fundamentally political.

War comes from politics, if you can provide incentive to declare war for political reasons then you are increasing the chances of player driven wars. Don't make the mistake of treating war & politics as two separate things. ----- Although your point of the cost to benefit ratio of war vs. the colour bonus is very valid. As it stands it wouldn't be worth starting a war over. To fix we'd need to either make war less costly (outside the scope of this suggestion) or increase the benefit of the colour bonus so it is worth it.

@ Political Friction. There aren't a lot of dimensions to the political friction though other than being the king of the hill. It'd be good to add more aspects to the political game. @ Military Incentive. Yep, that's a real problem although it's out of the scope of this suggestion. Alliances-wide wars are very costly for the benefit they bring. Although you could say the same about any suggestion designed to add conflict. @ Uneven playing field. Well... yes, but unfairness can be a good source for conflict. You could say that it's not fair that all nations can't get nukes from day 1 but it doesn't stop it happening. It's a matter of working out what unfair things are good for a game by leaving ways in which they can be overcome. @ Beige nations. Nations can't stay on Beige and alliances can't choose to be Beige. Hence that's not an issue.

Of course membership count isn't the sole metric to display power, but that's missing what the idea is. A small, powerful alliance (because of nation strength, better allies etc.) could force/persuade/"claim share" with more numerous alliances to preserve their colour bonus, thereby providing the possibility of more politics and sometimes more war. Of course that'll cause friction between elite and mass member alliances but we want more of that right?

The fact that it needs defending is the actual point. If it's not defended it can be taken away by force, in the short term by knocking nations into beige and in the long term by stipulating no colour claims in peace terms.

One successful claim= colour bonus for 50 members. So 50, 100 & 150 member alliances would all hold an advantage over a 25 member alliance because they could all split their claims into chunks of 50 and still have twice the claim strength that a 25 member alliance would have. No denying that as they stand colour spheres (like alliance region, national religion etc.) are mainly just cosmetic, but that doesn't mean they have to stay that way if they can be used to improve the game, right? Actually, one big problem is that it's very harsh on newly formed alliances. Hence the idea of "claim sharing" treaties in-game (maybe protectorates could include claim sharing as part of their package?)

I don't think that's true. It would actually advantage alliances with membership numbers around the breakpoints (i.e. 50, 100, 150 etc.) and would disadvantage small, elite alliances who weren't close to having 50 members. That's because claims are based on membership numbers not nation strength. Well... the point of this suggestion is to make colour spheres relevant again, although to be straight I'm not against adding more reasons for conflict so additional reasons that are nothing to do with colour spheres could be complimentary.

As a way of giving of giving more reasons for war and making colour spheres more relevant how about the following: Colour Sphere Claims: Having nations only being able to get their colour bonus if their alliance has put in a successful "claim" to their sphere, with claims being a limited asset. The number of claims could be number of nations in game/200 rounded down. Whilst 1 claim enables the biggest 50 nations of an alliance to claim their colour bonus, 2 claims enable 100, 3 claims enable 150 etc. etc. So even if everyone coordinated perfectly (never going to happen) at best only 1/4 of nations in the game could get a colour bonus at any one time. Claims could get divvied up amongst the colour spheres evenly with any fractions handed out to the biggest spheres in order of membership size. Claims would be won by size of alliance membership, with two complications: 1) any alliance can put in more than 1 claim, but doing so acts as a division of their membership number. So as way of example a 90 member alliance could put in 3 claims, which would in effect reduce their membership score to 30, but if they still won it would be worth 3 claims which would worth a colour bonus for 150 alliance members. 2) any alliance can put in 0 claims at all, effectively therefore being a Grey alliance. I could also see this being used as a particularly cutthroat peace term, likely to cause plenty of bad blood and therefore good to stoke more vendettas. One addition (although have mixed feelings about this) would be to create a new in-game treaty called colour sharing in which alliances have the option to pool membership numbers for claims or extend in-game protectorates to do the same. This might be in danger of inciting peace rather than war however ------ i.e. at time of writing they are 8251 nations, so 41 claims. That's 2 claims per colour + an extra one for each colour sphere other than Lime (due to currently being the smallest) When the game hits 8400 nations Lime would get it's 3 claim. As a hypothetical say Pink had 4 major alliances which consisted of A: 80 members, B: 60 members, C: 30 members and D: 20 members. If each alliance put in 1 claim each (which I suggest is the default in-game if not selected) then alliances A, B & C would each get a claim worth colour bonus for 50 members each. Alliance A notices however that it could do better and puts in two claims. That divides it's "claim strength" to 40, still enough to win so Alliance A now gets 2 claims (enough for all it's members) Alliance B still gets one and Alliance C has it's nose put out of joint by now having no claims at all. Lucky for Alliance C they've got big friends elsewhere on Orbis and so start a war against Alliance A for the express purpose of getting their claim back. Alliance C + friends win, but then get greedy and instead of forcing Alliance A to drop 1 claim via peace terms they tell them to drop all their claims. So now Alliance B, C & D get a claim each whilst Alliance A aren't claiming, which of course leaves Alliance B with a decision. Does it now stick in 2 claims and risk Alliance D's ire or just stick with the one claim to avoid Alliance A's fate? All hypothetical of course but hopefully it shows how the above might help promote conflict, war and politics over peace

1) Unless they're harmful for genuine out of character reasons forcibly disbanding communities isn't helpful, for the game or obviously for the community itself. It's even less helpful to force active players to not be in government. I'll therefore skip but will say that Viridian Entente is a more stylish name than Guardians of the Galaxy. 2) The Commonwealth and Guardian. Nothing personal, they just have high average scores and comparable number of nations 3) Alpha maybe? High average score, but Grumpy Old Bastards, Church of Spaceology, Spanish Armada etc. would make equal sense.

Why display a Sigma on your shield? If it just stands for (E)nclave you might have been better picking an Eta (H) or an Epsilon (E)

Ck2, nothing beats the murder, incest and just sheer depravity of CK2

Feels fresh. Good luck!

Maybe an alliance of knights that are good at sending people to sleep called the Night Night Knights

Greeks in Civ 4, although their special unit wasn't the best I just liked them for flavour

Knights Radiant, Teutonic Order, Black Knights, Nuclear Knights, Knights Templar, if TTK from a certain other world join we'll soon have nothing but knights

The alliances/guilds/factions etc. to join are probably more important than the actual game itself in text-based games. Although some games are better at opening themselves up to player-generated content than others. That aside, I miss Lunar Wars. Which just goes to show what a terrible thing nostalgia is, because it was really really broken.

Nation Name: Magna Graecia Nation Link: http://politicsandwar.com/nation/id=5512

West Bridgford just outside Nottingham in England