Shiho Nishizumi

@Alexhas this been addressed?

It's pointless to devote a certain amount of time and effort into a feature that isn't expected to see much, if any use, in contrast to devoting that that same amount of time and effort into more significant/worthwhile updates, such as the recent update and the Alliance QoL thing. It's simply a matter of investment vs return, and the latter options offer far better returns for the investment involved. As such, I'd be encouraging a greater emphasis to be placed on the latter two. This is inconsequential enough to where it could very well just be added directly as changes to the improvements themselves. Which would allow far more people to make use of them if they were so inclined.

You couldn't pin down someone forever on the old system either, due to the resistance mechanic. If it was possible to forever pin someone,, the last war wouldn't have gone for eight months for the simple reason that there wouldn't have been a way to present any resistance. It's not anyone's problem that you were simply ignorant to this fact. No, it wasn't. And yes, hitting people with less cities when 0'd yourself was a valid strategy; note that you yourself were 0'd, and the other person had military; often maxed to even be in range in the first place (the alternative being ridiculously padded with infra, in which case that's their fault). And as soon as you bought military yourself, you put yourself in range of larger people that they themselves had military to put you down. It's nowhere near as a foolproof and unbalanced matter as you're making it sound, and wasn't too difficult to respond/address if the defender's milcom was reasonably competent, and the counters did their due diligence. That your response's substance is "well let's gut this entirely (and frick up other things as well) because it was a circumstantial issue at best" exemplifies the approach taken, and the disastrous result thereof. Clearly you yourself were not, given that you failed to notice all the other issues Justin and myself highlighted. And if you were, it shows your ignorance in regards to the war system; which is unsurprising, as you haven't seriously fought since 2018, when you sent your AA to die in a futile banzai spearhead.

Your armchair theory doesn't hold water, when compared with the results at hand (as hinted by Justin). And they certainly will not in an actual war context, when you have the target itself counter attacking and rebuying, counters coming in, etc etc. You focused on a singular problem, and chose to smack it with a hammer irrespective of how the cracks affected the entire structure. Just as an example, wars being way grindier and resource intensive (in part because costs such as gas/muns usage weren't altered), means that upstarts/new players will have a much harder time competing with old alliances, due to the simple fact that the latter have had more time to stockpile. And these fights will be fights of attrition for the simple reason that you can't really zero someone, let alone pin them, if they have the resources to spend. Wars being these resource intensive also dissuade alliances from warring in the first place, as there's much more at stake. All of this contributes towards stagnancy. And if you do get 0'd because you went broke on, example, steel; you can't even fight back anywhere near as well as you could under the old system, due to cities being the main NS contributor. You'll be in range of people with similar city counts as you, who are nonetheless maxed (provided similar infra counts). So congratulations on stripping those people from any tools for fighting back, other than nuke turreting. Were these factors considered at all? No. Again, that GC still limits the amount of aircraft deployed, that Air Superiority has no effect, tank K:D being 1:1 on IT's; all of these are indications that barely if any testing at all was done (because otherwise, people would've spotted it and told Alex about it), and most likely you lot just did some maths, went like "Yep, this checks out", and went with that; and failed to implement it properly while at that. Again, this sort of stuff doesn't work because you completely ignored a ton of circumstantial factors that simply can't be mathed (or simulated properly on test server, for that matter). Oh and as a little aside; on top of what Durmij said, it also takes effort to properly plan and pull off a good blitz. It's only natural for a substantial advantage to be the trade off for both the cost and effort involved in it.

The past two globals are case example of it not being such. NPOLT I needn't elaborate. Surf's Up largely came down to how NR et all hit. If they had hit the overextended people rather than easy pads, that war would've not gone the way it did. But yes, this is Alex coming up with 50000 different changes that addressed XYZ complaints (many of which were very specific/situational) that he couldn't be fricked to test (as is becoming increasingly apparent to me), either individually or as a bundle, and pushed to go live haphazardly for no good reason other than to claim he's doing something. I suppose that having a huge changelog looks more impressive than having just one or two lines.

Aircraft casualties from these GA's are also not listed on the war timeline, or statistics. Also... https://politicsandwar.com/nation/war/timeline/war=656061 Nice update @Alex. Totes not half baked.

Naturally, the guy who was party to losing 1/2 billion to a single raider thinks that this is good.

I told it to Frawley back in the day when he made the realism argument, and I'll tell it to you now. Arguing based on real life logic is asinine, when you have so many factors in this game that throw realism right out of the window. Such as being able to basically double your population overnight, loot being able to be delivered through a blockade via a beige you got with a missile/nuke (even if you had no other conventional force whatsoever), being able to play baseball with nations on opposing warring alliances through blockades, etc. Does realism only matter for X but not for Y? Make up your mind. Furthermore, real life is very often inherently unbalanced. It is preferable to have as many stacked advantages as possible. For instance, one of the changes you made here was to make tiering more rigid by inflating city NS and devaluating military score. The purpose of this, per you, was to minimize the amount of ludicrous downdeclares which led to an unbalanced match up due to the downdeclaring nation potentially having a greater than 2:1 ratio in city count, compared to the defender. All well and good. That sure as shit doesn't make any real life sense. Do you think that, for instance, the Soviets cared that they outnumbered the Finnish by magnitudes of hundreds, specifically in terms of materiel such as tanks and aircraft (the former, ironically enough, being one of the main things that inflated NS previous to the changes)? Of course not. They rolled into Finland anyways, because that's what "real life sense" actually is. It's about making things as unbalanced as possible in order to gain as much of an advantage as possible. The focus gameplay should be one of making things actually balanced, rather than try to justify them on "real life sense"/realism. The latter can be a thing if it enhances it, rather than just be added for the sake of it. Rather than implementing various small changes to see how things changed, you simply read "Planes OP" and "Tanks UP" and went balls to the wall with nerfing one and buffing the other, not caring for how these interacted in conjunction. That's not how balancing should be done. It should be done by taking baby steps to see how it affects the overall dynamic. Honestly, it's possible that it'd have been mostly fine if you had just made it so that tanks could kill planes per GA (albeit not at these rates). But the way you implemented it, you just threw it the opposite direction. The silver lining is that there's still a fair bit of time to test things out in order to balance it properly.

Just name it League of Nations, since it'd be about as effective as the real thing.

"Get off of alum so there's less of a supply so I can make more money from my production."

A fair few people writing checks that are both way over their paygrade, and that they won't be the ones needing to answer for when they get collected.

Pocket change bribery doesn't change the fact that rules were broken, and that some parties got considerable advantages through pay to win (and the other half which made RL money out of it).

They took the amnesties because they had their hand forced by the first report (Nokia's) in the first place, and didn't really contribute much, since much of the gig was related to parties that were already banned, or had already quit (though, I wouldn't mind seeing them perma banned for good measure). They didn't act out of some moral conviction (perhaps except Nokia, since it seems like he opened the lid on this and wasn't made any promises of clemency, given Alex's original intent was to ban them both), but just to cover their rear, especially EM, whom was literally told "well I already got this doc ready and am ready to ban you over this" before giving in. So, rather than setting a precedent of punishing people who help you catch cheaters, you're setting a precedent whereby cheaters can do their thing, (bregrugindly) repent, and then get to keep what they got via their rackets. The latter's worse by a considerable margin. Cheating and confessing over it should result on a lightened sentence (if it is to be lightered at all, rather than just be commuted from a perma ban to a nation reset), not a complete pardon. The latter means that you get away with what you've done completely unscathed, which, again, isn't a precedent you want to be placing. It effectively encourages cheating, as there are disproportionate benefits to be had at no real cost. As Keegoz and Schrim said, it's not really amusing to people who play by the rules to see people so blatantly break/bend them, be unapologetic/uncooperative about it (at least at first), and then just get a bit of a wrist slap if not a complete pass over it.

https://politicsandwar.com/nation/war/timeline/war=630723 cost the defender 38.6m in unit value, the attacker 18.86m. Not including soldiers (which is roughly comparable) and looted cash (which favors the defender). Price of steel being at 4046 PPU and alum at 3506 PPU respectively. Theoretical infra lost (based from 2.1k infra since that's what the NS and his builds suggest) valued about 51m (no discounts) for the attacker. Defender lost some but I'll assume it's just like 5m or something of the sort. https://politicsandwar.com/nation/war/timeline/war=630730 cost the defender 37.8m in that same value, while attacker lost 20.8m. Infra lost (based from 1990 infra based on same parameters) valued at 40m. Defender also didn't suffer that many losses in that respect. Doesn't include beige loot values. That also obviously adds extra. What were mathematically unsound trades (especially given the circumstances) are apparently fine trades now. Then again, I'm not surprised he'd think that when he thinks that bringing up the Test server is meant to mean anything.

Realism isn't an argument in a game where you can triple your population overnight, baseball through blockades, immediately strike someone on the opposite end of the world, etc. And you cite Iraq (because I presume Highway of Death). I can just cite Vietnam where the U.S. literally dropped thrice as much as they had dropped during WW2 on it's entirety, and yet still lost over 3k planes (not aircraft in total, just planes), 90% of those casualties coming from ground AA fire and SAM's (not present at all in game). Include all flying crafts and that goes up to the five digit range. With the N. Vietnamese themselves only losing low three digit aircraft counts. Aircraft in WW2 also displayed their limitation in instances like Iwo Jima, where the heavily dug in troops were able to out trade (in terms of casualties) their attackers which enjoyed a 3-1 advantage in terms of grunts, and near if not total air and naval supremacy. This isn't represented in game. Also, during the outset of the Battle of the Bulge, where weather (also not represented here) severely impaired their operational capacity. Not to mention the entirety of the Winter War, where the geography and dense forestry also limited their capabilities (too, not represented here). Rather than outright killing power, the main benefit from air power on tanks in those early instances, was one of psychological stress and disruption on the enemy organization. Both of these matter greatly in real life, but neither are a factor in game.