Memph

Well definitely with Mensa-Guardian vs VE, Guardian could not have done it without Mensa. But that's because Guardian is a small top tier (ish) alliance while Mensa is a larger mid-tier alliance. Since the two of us were fighting on pretty similar battlefronts at the same time, you could think of us as a single force. Initial losses when VE declared were pretty heavy on both sides, but then eventually things started to shift against VE. Mid-tier nations could shift from mostly doing defensive counters and hitting smaller nations to going on the offensive, and bigger nations that got nuke beiged could also safely come out and go offensive. I guess my point is that the current mechanics allow for a back and forth in wars. You can go from a stalemate situation or even one force having a slight edge, to the other force gaining the upper hand. Or you can have one side taking heavy losses at first, and then switch to a stalemate or having a slight edge against the former winners. As opposed to a situation where the side that initially has the upper hand continues to have the upper hand and hold onto it with ease.

It depends just how badly you and your allies were knocked down. If you're outnumbered in the upper tier but outnumber your opponents in the lower-mid tier then you can come back. If you're beaten in all tiers, not so much. With the Mensa/BK/Guardian vs VE front, the <1500 score nations mostly held out against VE and were able to push back. TBH even without BK, everything was pointing towards Guardian being able to recover anyways (Mensa never really lost much military), although BK certainly sped things up and saved us a lot of time and resources. I do think we would have been able to take down most of VE's top tier eventually. The cost and time to do so would have been relatively high, but in a situation like that, it did mean that VE was not in a position to ask for reps. If their top tier had been able to keep us pinned down more effectively, they would have had a stronger bargaining position. Same with Arrgh. If we had a stronger lower tier in the <1000 score range, their top tier would not have been able to recover. But we only outnumbered them in the top tier, so we only knocked down their top 30 nations or so while their bottom 40 controlled the lower tiers. We were winning at first, something along the lines of us knocking out their top 25-30 while they only had about 10-15 lower tier nations to knock out initially, but as their larger nations recovered they were able to take out many more nations.

I'm not entirely sure that's true. Most of the game's biggest wars (VE war being the main exception) were pretty even sided. Usually the winners had an advantage in a key tier, but not in another. Marionette War: UPN/DEIC could have potentially fought back at the lower tiers, especially since many of their nations had beige protection, but the war ended before that could happen. Proxy War: Guardian could have recovered somewhat and started pushing back against VE alongside Mensa after getting destroyed by VE's upper tier. Similarly Rose probably could have controlled the lower tiers against t$ although admittedly I haven't paid too close attention to that front. However, the war ended before that could happen. Octoberfest: TEst, SK and t$ got beaten down pretty bad and were starting to push back. UPN's lower tiers likely could've beaten their opponents and started to push back. 168 day war: UPN and Roz Wei would have had a good change to push back in the lower tiers if the war had lasted longer. The situation with Guardian, Mensa and VE was very similar to Proxy war, except that Guardian didn't get knocked down as bad and had better war chests for rebuilding. We went from a low of about 35% max military* to about 55% when the war ended and would have rebuilt most of our nations' military given a couple more days and pushed back against much of VE's upper tier (which we were already starting to do with Mensa - see SRD, Samwise, MoonPie, Gogo). Plus of course Arrgh/PP. *By that I mean the % of the max military score that comes from ground and air (i.e. not including ships, missiles and nukes which aren't that important).

Officially, yes, but in reality, not really. One tank can kill about 25x more soldiers than a soldier can. However, tanks kill a lot more than 25x as many tanks as soldiers can.

Nation 1: 12250 infra (875/city) 14 cities 183750 soldiers 17500 tanks 1260 aircraft 2 projects 1651.37 score Nation 2: 12000 infra (1500/city) 8 cities 120000 soldiers 10000 tanks 720 aircraft 10 ships 5 missiles 2 projects 1239.00 score Although for the most part, Arrgh seems to be raiding nations ranging from maybe 2-4 cities smaller to 1-2 cities bigger.

I guess it depends what you call decent though. At 1500 infra/city or so and max military, you do make a positive income, maybe 150-200k per city. But look at the costs - the cost of buying up that army, having a decent war chest for alliance wars, and a rebuilding fund for alliance wars, and all that would take maybe 3-4 months to save up for on that kind of income. Guardian (or Mensa's) last 4 wars were about 3 months apart, and that's not including the Arrgh/PP wars since those probably would not have happened if we had max military. So going that route, an alliance that wants a strong defence and still have wars ever now and then might never have a chance to buy new cities. That's why I think it would be reasonable to tweak the numbers a little. On the other hand, I have to admit it's nice to be able to recover from the first round of an alliance war without having to worry about nations with more cities than you and more infra/city than you redeclaring, so you have to consider that too. I still think making war slightly less destructive would be good. Right now an alliance that wins a war might still get set back by 1 month assuming it's not a complete curb stomp, and one that loses by about 2-3 months. Ideally, I think those should each be cut roughly by half. So maybe reduce the benefits of high infra levels and have better incomes at low infra levels, maybe allow nations to steal small amounts of infra on immense triumph ground attacks rather than only destroying, stuff like that, while also tweaking the score range a little.

Only if the pure econ nations have to reset their nations if they ever change their mind and decide to get a military.

Maybe the numbers need to be tweaked a little. I'm not sure it's appropriate to require nations to limit themselves to 1500 infra per city to take on Arrgh's 13-14 city nations. Maybe it would be more appropriate if they could get in range with 1800 infra/city or even 2000 infra/city. But even if you did that, it doesn't mean Arrgh won't be able to continue raiding. There are definitely alliances out there that could stand up to Arrgh if they built more military and coordinated properly. I don't expect NPO to get raided for example because they have a solid military and large number of nations around Arrgh's level. Even #10-20 ranked alliances could do things to deter Arrgh from raiding. Hide your money in the bank so Arrgh can't loot it, let them beige you, take out your funds from the bank, rebuild in beige and hit back. Even if you don't ultimately win it'll make it highly unprofitable for Arrgh and they'll probably stick to easier targets in the future. Arrgh's top nation probably have -$1m income. If they're only able to steal a few mil on the initial attacks at a cost of thousands of tanks, they'll leave you alone. Unless maybe you're one of a couple of nations in your alliance with a decent military and they need to take you down to raid the rest of the soft targets. If Arrgh is able to take on smaller 2nd page alliances, that doesn't mean the game is broken, after all, Arrgh is a 1st page alliance. It just means those smaller alliances need to find allies that are willing to help them out. For the bigger alliances, Arrgh has meant they've had to re-evaluate how much profit they make during peace-time... I don't necessarily see that as a problem, the big alliances should still be able to defend against Arrgh while making a positive income. It's just that they want to have high incomes and grow fast so they have smaller militaries. I don't think that making it so that nations with more typical (ex 1800) infra levels per city can hit Arrgh nations with equal # of cities is going to change the fact that some alliances just don't want to deal with Arrgh militarily. So now alliances that don't go to war as much (ex GPA, DEIC, Sparta, Pantheon) might not be able to outpace the growth of alliances that war more to the same extent. Either because they need to have a military, or because they have to pay protection money to Arrgh, or because they have to accept that getting raided every now and then is just the cost of doing business for alliances with weak militaries and weak allies. Also, for the alliances that do maintain large militaries, that creates an incentive to start more alliance wars. Now that they're paying all that military upkeep, might as well use your army for something... which IMO is a good part of the reason why the 168 day war happened.

You tease!

Sad to see nonetheless.

Congrats!

What is using the same misattributed quote as everyone else?

Regarding spies... Arrgh doesn't seem to screen new members so you can just join to see announcements and leave.

Ran the numbers a while back and Guardian did more to take down super-tier (16+ cities) nations on VE/Rose's side than anyone else. And relatively to the size of our top tier (14+ cities), we were also leaders in taking down top tier nations' militaries. That's despite being about 70-80% of the focus of VE's top tier (which outnumbered ours more than 3 to 1) on day 2 of the war.

Rose, UPN and VE also had 50k score leads on everyone else though.

And UPN wasn't the target.

Well Harrison Richardson's numbers show Rose decommissioning military from Jan 1 onwards to at least Jan 10. If Rose was going to avenge you for those (apparently minor?) raids, why were they demilitarizing? The main raids were Jan 17-19 it seems.

Probably a lot of decommissioning already by this point.

#3 per member after PP and Mensa. o/

How about getting nuked 12 times? Or 17 times? That's how many nukes our top nation ate.

They entered the war with a lot of military when it was already a lost cause and our side was running low on targets.

Alliances typically avoid wars they don't think they can win. I think a lot of alliances on Rose's side would have avoided this war if they thought they were going to lose.

You were out of range of us and then we managed to stay out of range of all of Arrgh after round 1. You guys put up a good fight though, kudos!

gg UPN

You'll have to elaborate on what exactly you think happened because I think you're remembering things wrong. Mensa members didn't have to ghost other alliances like Guardian to fight UPN or DEIC without a DoW because the Mensa AA was fighting DEIC and UPN without a DoW anyways.