Sketchy

I probably should clarify that's a modifier on the existing operation bonuses. So if a bonus is say, 2% food production, the final formula would be 2% * Operational Efficiency. It basically scales from thr top 20 average (the value used to determine city costs atm) Less cities than t20a = higher bonus More = lower bonus

I want to preface this post by stating that from what I have gathered from public posts and the recent gamewide poll, the design team is currently looking for ideas related to expanding the econ mechanics in the game. While there are definitely other areas of the game that could also use attention, I am proposing this idea with that in mind. Porting the entire concept to a forum post is going to be rather difficult as the design document I have written is 11 pages, so instead I'll simply link the google document for people to read. If anyone has any questions or potential issues let me know in the replies I suppose. Here is the link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1cZhQPgYb6MJifHP0NhVFlcAxSgW4s8RRUFOlAAczZJk/edit?usp=drivesdk

Well now that Rose has said Camelot should not be "politically isolate" it must be the case.

If everyone's military gets reduced, then it doesn't matter. The main change in strength would be that it condenses ranges, but that's a good thing. It certainly would not negatively impact a c40, who is more or less smack in the middle of the current meta war range.

Why would the strength need to be increased?

It...reduces them... for everyone. If anything at c40 you benefit from condensed ranges. Nitpicking over the actual number of units is silly, it doesn't matter. All that matters is the relative number.

Once the older population of the game gets through the early research, all of the currently inflated resources will go back down. Likely not to where they were before of course, as there is now a larger steady demand, but the main reason the market is so high is military research is the largest resource sink in the games history, added all at once. Alum will go up more relatively than others because it costs more, but Alum was by far the most inflated manu pre update anyway so it's more likely to just even things out.

Respectfully, you don't seem to understand what drives MMR, nor what the normal war cycle has been for the games history. MMR has nothing to do with people fighting more often. People raise and lower their MMR based on threat levels at the given moment, not based on how often they fight. The above suggestion is only shifting the peace/war cycle closer to where it has been for the majority of the games history. Wars every 3-4 months were the norm for most of the games history, and we didn't practice higher MMRs as a result. Everything else you have mentioned doesn't matter. You are acting like costs are an inherent negative and the development should be about minimising everyone's costs, which is again, ridiculous. Sitting and farming is doing more to kill the engagement of this game than anything else. If you want to align your playstyle to farming, you still can. There is nothing stopping a farming alliance from farming for 8 months, you'll just get less income. IF you aren't even playing competitively, engaging in the war system, then it doesn't even matter if you make less money, you are effectively playing a singleplayer game anyway. Only one of us is advocating for interacting with one mechanic at the expense of all others. I'm the longest running active econ manager in the games history, I am very familiar with econ and the playstyle. But the game is more than just econ, and the politics has become so warped around it that it's slowly but surely killed a lot of the most engaging and interesting content in the game.

Again, it's not likely to negatively impact anyone unless they've actively been avoiding conflict for over half a year. Otherwise it's basically completely business as usual. This isn't going to increase average MMR either. MMR meta is based on time to max mil, and typically 0250 is the meta because you can get near max with a double buy. I respectfully would not call sitting and farming for 12 months a playstyle. I'd call that not playing the game. The game development should be balanced and designed with the people playing the game in mind, not the people playing farmville in the corner by themselves. That mentality is doing more to "kill the game" than this would.

The way it is balanced in the op, unless people actively avoid conflict for over half a year, it's not going to impact much. Is the argument you are making here that the game development should avoid negatively impacting alliances that avoid fighting for 6 months to a year? That seems rather ridiculous. I don't think it makes sense to prolong wars for economic benefit in the suggested model. The amount of income you lose from simply being engaged in a conflict, is going to eliminate the bonus for staying at -30, without even counting the damage you'd continue to take. It will always be more profitable to end the war, rebuild and take the 90 days of peace. Upon reaching -30, you have bought yourself 3 months without any penalty, which is plenty of time to grow off.

Fair point yeah. I would do 8 cities then. That keeps it in line with the capacity upgrades which are 4 cities. Something like: Soldiers > 2000 per upgrade. Tanks > 100 per upgrade. Planes > 6 per upgrade. Ships > 1,2 per upgrade (rounded down)

Instead of a 0.5% rebuy, it should be a flat unit rebuy increase similar to that of the capacity upgrade. Essentially maxing a tree should give you +4 cities of rebuy. The way % would apply to rebuy, that's a larger buff for whales than it is for others. I like this and can't spot any immediate issues with it. Condensing the game a little would help future proof it a bit.

In the post it mentions defensives, so if you are getting slotted by nukes you'll lose plenty. I just checked our war against TKR, plenty of people on their side had few offensives but many many defensives, and those defensives would presumably all be attrition. I definitely imagine this would all need to be tested in the live server and tweaked later, but honestly I expect if anything this might be too effective. Ideally it should be balanced so you can wipe out 2-3months of stagnation in a single 2-4 week conflict imo. If you sit at peace for 9 months you probably should have to put in the extra work to get that back down to 0.

Only possible issue I can see with this is does it track at the time of war completion, or the time of declaration? If someone goes inactive after I hit them, I should still get the reduction. Additional Thoughts: You could also make it so fighting sub c10 targets doesn't reduce stagnation, and nations below c20 aren't effected by stagnation. Given how quickly nations can farm to c20 these days, it makes more sense not to penalize smaller nations and micros. Ultimately mid/upper/whale tier nations are the ones being farmed and are the ones driving whether wars happen. If you have a damage threshold and inactivity cap you don't need to make it per war type. Only reason to delineate between war types is to avoid abuse but if you tackle that with those metrics instead, then you don't need to. Which is better, because there are many viable strategic reasons why an alliance would use raid vs ordinary vs attrition in an actual global conflict.

It does say in the post that they'll need to complete the wars, which I took to mean beige rather than expiry, so no attacks wouldn't work. Still could be an issue of people farming nations though, but I can't imagine even Arrgh nations want to be eating beiges constantly for people. Might need to have some other additional metric considered as well, but scaling it to damages directly might be complicated given that damages scale based on nation size. It could perhaps be a damage threshold? You could tally the cities of both parties and then determine a minimum damage threshold based on that, and then you'd only reduce stagnation if that damage threshold was hit. It wouldn't even have to be super high, just enough for it to not be conveniently farmed.