Holton

Welcome and good luck!

The bolded piece is the actual suggestion. One thing that makes PnW great is the fact that age isn't the primary determinant factor in strength. A big problem in Cybernations was that nations who had a multi-year head start on tech buying would literally never be caught or were so far ahead it was infeasible to the point of inanity. Now obviously if you're old you hypothetically could have accumulated resources and money that give you an advantage over new nations and I think this is fair. Otherwise there's no point in long-term time investment. One thing I really like is the removal of the city timer for cities 2-5. That is an absolutely great idea and I think it will go a long way in enabling new members of the community to join and actually be relevant whereas it would've taken 30 days minimum to get that far. Now this is just a thought to take it a step further and obviously has some initial problems but the rough concept is this: Rather than removing the timer for the first 5 cities, code in a similar setting that follows the average city count of the community and rounds it to the nearest integer. So while the game grows the ability to jump right in continues to grow with it. This follows the logic set forth by the 5 cities rule in multiple ways. It encourages new members to join alliances (the lifeblood of these games) in order to accelerate growth. It allows new members of the community to jump into the fray without taking away the edge for the upper echelons of the game (ie - you can't insta-buy up to the largest nation in the game). Obviously the biggest problem right now is that more than half the game has 1 or 2 cities so the average might need to be taken from the top 50-60% instead of the entire game.

A Rose by any other name wouldn't smell as sweet as our alliance. Join Rose!

I think this attitude is due to a lack of competition that has resulted from the stagnant politics. Hopefully now that all other exterior threats have been effectively mitigated, the Syndisphere will begin to split up and politics can move out of the quagmire of their present state. The short-term payback from taxation is seen by the alliance as a whole benefit. Alliances provide the security in which economies can flourish. Without the competition to fuel the need for security, people begin to question why their money is going to other nations. The long-term is fairly obvious but the issue is that the concrete payback will only come after a long term period. Once everyone is decent sized, alliances can then afford (and advised) to refocus on making sure their upper tier continues to grow. It's like an inch worm. The smallest members grow to then fuel the larger, then the cycle repeats.

It's a rather fragile system to depend on, was my point. If you break down NPO against TKR or BK, the numbers remain similar. TKR more than gives up its numerical advantage entirely against NPO, so far as to give NPO the numbers advantage because they won't be able to reach them. BK is much closer to a 1:1 scenario but they're growing very fast. In another couple of months BK could very well begin to slowly grow further and further out of a 1:1 match up with NPO. NPO is probably one of the most clustered AA's in the game and it can be assumed that they're achieving their goal of being a dominant military force - within the tiers they purposefully inhabit. Just to continue the intellectual conversation - what happens in a war where both sides can't meaningfully impact the other? NPO can't reach the majority of Syndicate's membership and Syndicate's lower tier are too overwhelmed to present a resistance to NPO? I've seen arguments that the upper tier nation's income will simply balance out / overcome the smaller nations losses. But does the promise of a rebuild negate the fact that the lower tiers are effectively abandoned to their fate?

I would postulate that the value of NPO's economic model will vary widely based on what metrics you use to determine said value. Since we're using Syndicate as an example for an opposing system: Syndicate has a variation of ~100 score every 5 members after you get past the huge discrepancies in the highest score members. It appears that there is no artificial upper limit on how far members will grow. NPO has about half that variation every 5 members along with an apparent upper limit of ~2000 score. So even if we exclude political reasons and war results from affecting the data (which we shouldn't), Syndicate is growing apparently faster and better than NPO on the surface but Syndicate is also growing further apart. NPO has their entire membership residing in the middle/lower tier (with the vast majority being sub-2k score and about half being above 1k) Syndicate has a huge spread with the majority of their membership residing in the upper/middle tiers with the majority being above 2k and almost the entire alliance being above 1k. This means that Syndicate is forced to rely much more heavily on allies to fill in the gaps in an offensive war - or almost fight their wars for them entirely in the case of NPO... Conversely, should NPO seek to effectively battle the Syndicate - they would have to seek the aid of alliances that could effectively combat the 70% of Syndicate that would likely remain untouched in a 1v1. So again it would depend on your metric. The Syndicate is a self-titled "Dominance through Economics" model, NPO is a self-titled "military alliance". They both seem to be excelling in their self-imposed categories as far as I can tell.