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Everything posted by Sketchy
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If the letter of the law argument is stupid, why are people advocating for all these additional conditionals to NAPs? Naps used to be a very cut and dry process. Arguing over the details of naps was not a widespread problem for most of this games history. It's only become a problem because people have consistently tried to shift or change the norms that had been established for years. It's really simple people. Either naps are "Don't hit each other under any circumstances" or naps are conditional, in which case they need to be specific in order be enforceable. I have been making this argument for what feels like almost 2 years at this point. People are being selective. You cannot adhere to the concept of the "spirit of the nap" when the fabric of trust has already been eroded due to consistently moving the goalposts on what the normative expectations of that spirit even is. The reality is, there is now a great deal of ambiguity in what constitutes a nap break. This entire argument between both sides proves as much. If there isn't a consensus on the basic foundations of what a nap is, then the only way for naps to work is for the details to be outlined clearly. What's more, everyone was given a rather clear opportunity to re-establish a standard and rather than doing so, further continued to situationalise and inject ambiguity. Many alliances have actively avoided the topic of re-establishing a normative standard, and the only logical conclusion I can draw from that is they prefer the ambiguity because they believe it gives them space to make up the rules as they see fit. Things like this used to be something called a CB. Alliances used to do the proper thing, wait until the NAP period is over, and then roll the offending alliance. In this particular case, all evidence would suggest that EVH is perfectly capable of rolling TGH at a later date for this offense, and it's very probable TGH will have absolutely no way to stop you. Choosing to roll them during a nap, is a blatant testing of whether you can get away with a loose definition of said nap. NAPs are not typical treaties. They are not, actually, mutually consensual agreements, in the same way a mutual defense treaty is for example. NAPs are always signed in a tense political state between two parties that typically have no reason to trust each other. Almost always, there is a direct power imbalance that allows one party to dictate the specifics of that agreement, and one party is often pressured to sign it under duress. Because of that, NAPs are rarely based on trust, and clarity is required for both parties to consent and for those agreements to be upheld. Once upon a time, that clarity existed in the general meta that everyone understood and accepted. Now that people have injected ambiguity into that process, the only way naps can work is for the letter of the law approach. This could be rectified, if the alliances of the game came together, and established and agreed upon a new standard. But until that happens, and I find it unlikely that it will, the letter of the law approach is the only approach that can work. Luckily for you perhaps, it seems that even if a nap is breached, the enforcement mechanism for how that is dealt with is no longer agreed upon either. So I expect naps as a meta will continue to erode before shattering completely before long. It will become harder and harder to enforce a standard that doesn't benefit a large portion of alliances, when it's not even being enforced in a way that protects those alliances. NAPs currently only benefit people who are already in positions of strength.
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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
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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
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Well now that Rose has said Camelot should not be "politically isolate" it must be the case.
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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.
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Why would the strength need to be increased?
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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)
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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[Announcement] Spectre Foreign Affairs Policy Change
Sketchy replied to ToxicPepper's topic in Alliance Affairs
Why are you spying the poor disenfranchised youth Velyni? -
HAHAHAHA good luck with that bud You broke the last one Everyone else needs guarantees not you lmfao
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The Moment You’ve All Been Waiting For (Or Not)
Sketchy replied to George's topic in Alliance Affairs
Defaulting on a loan debt would not be grounds to void a NAP. Rose wouldn't have been able to use it as justification to break NAP, anymore than Camelot can use this fake loan buying scheme as a justification to break a nap against TFP. Also, the idea that an offshore, which is typically controlled by government members or people with trust within the alliance, doesn't fall under Rose is ridiculous. If Epi was so certain Rose was intending to break the nap with some ridiculous loan scheme that no major alliance would look at and say Rose had a case, why did Epi hit TFP and claim it was part of the event, instead of hitting Rose. Because he's trying to find any angle to justify what's he's done and each time one is thoroughly debunked he has to conjure a new excuse.- 43 replies
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The Moment You’ve All Been Waiting For (Or Not)
Sketchy replied to George's topic in Alliance Affairs
I take full credit for badgering him for hours until he finally cracked and unwittingly admitted he can't prove anything. Reminder: He broke the NAP and hit TFP. None of these claims ever mattered anyway.- 43 replies
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DoW Fir vs the World (The Soup was a Lie)
Sketchy replied to Firwof Kromwell's topic in Orbis Central
Apparently, old friend, you're stuck in a loop—because we've already gone over this in DMs, and now again here. I even asked you directly what path you thought I should take, and in the end, I chose the one I was being pushed toward anyway: to carve my own trail, half indifferent to the crowd watching. To your credit, you did advise me to steer clear of diplomatic and public affairs. I’ll give you that. But I couldn’t ignore the pull to speak up—not when it involved old friends, not with Cam and Buck both in the picture. I'm sharing what I believe to be true, cutting through the noise you so often warned about. But here’s the thing: your past advice now stands in contradiction to your current stance. Your words are colliding with themselves. That’s not on me. Why assume we’re not civil? It’s entirely possible—and in this case, true—that we’ve simply agreed to disagree on a warm, familiar note. I still consider him a friend, disagreement or not. He’s offered both concern and critique, which I genuinely appreciate. Funny how quickly people leap to conflict before even reading the signs. Whatever happened to showing a little human compassion despite differing views? But hey—keep it coming, schmuckems 💋 The saltier you get, the more entertained I am. Ah, I see—we’re not allowed to maintain friendships with people we occasionally disagree with. Got it. Apparently, resolving conflicts and extending grace is off the table now. Noted, and added to my mental checklist. I got you, homie—101%. 😉 P.S. Seems like other people’s shortcomings are now my responsibility, too. Duly noted. -
DoW Fir vs the World (The Soup was a Lie)
Sketchy replied to Firwof Kromwell's topic in Orbis Central
May I advise you put your posts into chapgpt and say "make this smarter". Here let me do it for you: Here’s a refined and more articulate version of your post that keeps the fiery tone while making it clearer and more polished: Well, hello there. Let’s be honest—it’s no surprise to anyone that your statements are far from accurate. After what SIN pulled in the last war, both in-game and on the forums, it was an unmitigated disaster, plain and simple. Everyone knows that, and anyone pretending otherwise is just fooling themselves. SIN held most of the merger potential at the outset—no shock there, given that it was the final stop for everyone spinning out from Soup. You’re trying to paint it otherwise, but the truth is obvious, and you know it. Especially after the last war, when you tried so hard to convince people to do your bidding—epic flop. Your words have been well documented across the forums since then. Let’s not forget that Rose and TFP’s involvement was hardly random, either. TFP and TI have a long history of teaming up, often through backchannel deals with no paper trail. And Oblivion? Still defending Rose-aligned targets, even across different spheres, through spy work and mercenary operations—everyone knows it. They’ve been playing this game in the shadows for years. So let’s talk about this year. Isn’t it suspicious how all these alliances—supposedly separated by treaty—still manage to pull the same strings from the backrooms? There’s more than just Cam’s connections to IQ alliances from the NPOLT era—many of them still hold the same post-war dispositions when you talk to them now, even as recently as a few days ago. Why single out one group when BK and others still cling to the same core values? And let’s be real—any alliance I mentioned here can be easily checked. Their words, actions, and even Discord logs are right there at our fingertips. With that much evidence built up over the years, how can I not let people chase their own curiosities and push their own resolves? There’s no need for espionage or mercenary proxies when the truth is already this plain to see. Let me know if you’d like to tweak the tone or emphasize any particular part! It still reads like nonsensical crack addict stream of consciousness drivel but at least I can understand it lmfao. -
DoW Fir vs the World (The Soup was a Lie)
Sketchy replied to Firwof Kromwell's topic in Orbis Central
Bro I have been trying to get included in a conspiracy theory all week but instead of getting Epi I get discount Epi. Like 80% of the people in this list are literally currently in Singularity. A bunch of them have quit. I wish I could argue with you over this but it's actually so mentally deranged it defeats itself lololol