Corvidae

Both of these are doubling the usage of the most commonly used power plants, I like the concept we're going for but I think smaller tweaks would be in order here. So the question here is: Do you want to drive prices on the market up from multiple directions all at once? Cities costing resources, power plants consuming more, population eating more food, food production being reduced, manufacturing costs more, etc. It all seems like a lot, and I would again caution against drastic changes like this. Maybe do one for a month or two, then introduce the next. Conceptually I don't see this as a bad change, but compounding with the other changes I could see potential for disaster. Generally speaking, it's not an elegant suggestion but why don't you make this particular change only kick in after c30? Slow whales down a bit. Solid change. Good in concept but bad in the meta context. Whales are a huge unbalanced problem right now, increasing city costs that current whales will never pay will inflame the problem in my opinion. I'm not sure what the "reduced by 2.5% for cash" means. City output is decreasing? Or city cash cost is decreasing? I'd like to see a more transparent breakdown of whether this is a net increase or decrease in city cost either way. I like the concept but again the proposed red line formula looks like a drastic increase. The green line may be better to start with and then if-needed increase again. Overall cool to see the team tackling econ tweaks. Can't wait to see how it pans out.

I definitely feel this same frustration, as do many PnW players I think. As the game encroaches on a full decade old and many older players are well past a city count that will ever ROI the cost, I think many of us expected to see more content continue to flow. However, I think there are a few problems at the organizational level within PnW that are causing a chain-reaction of frustration down the line. 1. Over-reliance on a handful of volunteers who are, at-best, received as controversial by the wider community. Specifically: DrRush, Prefontaine, and their teams. As someone who has been extremely involved in said volunteering, I feel uniquely qualified to say that the systems aren't working, and turnover or outright dissolution (in the case of the dev/design team) is sorely needed. I highly appreciate the effort put in by everyone who has been involved, but somewhere along the way it stopped working. 2. A disjointed approach to how things are presented and disconnection from the playerbase - I want to be very clear when I say this: All the teams are putting in work. Moderation teams in-game, on discord, on the forums, and even on reddit, the dev/design team, and the actual people coding like Alex/Village are all pulling some kind of weight. This is not a dead game by any means. The problem comes in with how information is presented to the playerbase. Oftentimes posted into a discord server that most of the active playerbase avoids, put on forums that again many active players no longer check, or lost in some random chat somewhere on RON. If a player isn't actively looking for news and updates, it's way too easy to miss. There is a lot more depth to go into with the problems surrounding the development cycle of PnW, but I think these two problems are the roots of the rotten tree and no tweaks to the branches will fix the issue unless you first fix the foundation. My suggestion, as always, is to revamp the PnW discord into a community hub instead of an afterthought. Get the playerbase all in one place, go look into other big game's community discords if you want inspiration and, as always, I'm here to help if asked. Once a community hub is in place, then we can start making progress on development that doesn't constantly generate controversy and community outrage. Shout out to @Village for his hard work coding and re-coding the game and really pushing forward things this past year or so.

Northern Lights... I feel like there's a name for those.

I love how this treaty is presented. Now the inevitable question: What's the secret clause(s)?

I'm taking all posts from you as high gov leaks from now on, given your record. Serious take: I don't see an alternative to this move unless Grumpy wanted to disband, join a group like Midgard, or stay pseudo-paperless forever. As much as I love paperless, I know people won't be doing that. Forming a smaller or new sphere made them a target, joining Rose or Fortuna would only solidify either's advantage and be political suicide for all involved, this was the right move for the time.

Fair but do you want game mechanics where the intent is to trick players into screwing themselves over?

yeah that's fine too

I think this was a recent change but not sure, but remove blockades stopping the collection of bounties. Raiders are the main groups going after bounties both in-game mechanically and out-of-game via player-made deals, raiding often is done by the skin of your teeth especially when you consider 3 people countering you plus the one or more nations you may be offensively engaging. It's incredibly easy to flip someone 4v1 and blockade them, basically leaving bounty collection down to oversight or chance that they choose to not blockade you for whatever reason. My understanding is that this change was made due to the idea or the action of someone exploiting bounties and giving blockaded people money in niche situations where they are too weak to counter and break a blockade, but simultaneously winning at least one of their wars. Seems like an incredibly niche scenario to break an entire feature over, but I maybe there were just huge exploits happening idk. Proposed change: Remove blockade's impact on bounty collection. Allow bounties to be collected regardless of blockades as long as the bounty existed prior to the war being declared. This allows bounties to be utilized fully in-game, and collected by the main group that will be going after them: raiders. I'd also like to use this thread to pitch another change to bounties: Damages. Allow a player to set a bounty for pre-set thresholds of damages up to $100m (based on value of infra destroyed and money stolen combined). This form of bounty I feel is more flexible than a single nuclear bounty but not as committed as an attrition bounty. You can often do big damages on a nuke run without winning the war, for example, but people want a bit more for their money than a single nuke. Just a thought.

The satire was so good that I think Prefontaine will take this post seriously

The game is really struggling with how to handle whales, and basically has for as long as whales have existed. So the question is how to make the game fun for these long-playing players while also keeping things balanced? My idea would be to introduce specific mechanics that are designed to eat up additional resources as the player grows. My first pitched idea for this: Every 10 cities you can buy an additional nuclear weapon. C20 = 2 nukes, c30 = 3 nukes etc. The idea here being that it's fun to be a nuclear menace, but the more nukes flying through the upper tier means more radiation to eat up food AND more destroyed infrastructure in the tier that we're trying to impose a bit of fairness on. Plus I think generally that allowing players to fling more nukes is a good thing because it's the "loser's fight back" mechanic. I know pixel huggers will balk at this initially, but my experience as a whale - confirmed by many others - is that once you break through to the higher city counts, your relative costs actually decrease in spite of the exponential curves Alex has put in place on things like infra and city cost. It's easier for whales to fight forever, rebuild faster, and grow quicker than it is for the midtier or low tier playerbase. We need to start introducing fun ways to increase the cost of being at higher city counts or risk PnW falling into a Politics and Whales game... which it arguably already is.

Few thoughts on the distinctions made in the poll: Bipolarity was the default political state of not only PnW, but multiple other nationsims that parts of the community were also involved in. I have no idea about the "now" in those other worlds, but our world has greatly benefitted from Minispheres or the pursuit thereof. Stagnant, repetitious politics have been replaced with dynamic coalitions that find former enemies as allies almost every six months or less. For anyone who's been around more than a couple years, that's a huge shift from two monolithic coalitions that occasionally lose one or two alliances per six months. If you think politics are boring or exclusive now, bipolarity was ten times worse. Very often half the game would rely on a single person or a single alliance to basically dictate/decide/trigger stuff happening. If you wonder why Partisan, Abbas, or Roquentin are always mentioned as "top FA minds" in discussions - this is why. Some will argue it's not so simple, but those are probably the subordinate-leaders from the lesser alliances that coalesced around NPO/t$/Rose for years. A collaborative structure doesn't negate that a single alliance usually dominated their half of the game. All that being said, I don't believe minispheres can happen. Even if every powerhouse AA agrees to a 300 nation or smaller sphere, whale alliances like Grumpy or TEst will hold all the power. Micros that can accumulate massive coalitions like in Midgard can roll people via sheer numbers. Multipolarity and reasonable self-restraint are the only way forward that actually exists. And finally, as someone else mentioned - you are brainwashed if you think sphere politics is separate from alliance politics. Alliances never lost a thing from spheres, many actually gained a seat as equals. Something they never experienced in bipolarity / treaty chess / "alliance centered politics" or any other buzzword for big-as-F spheres.

I haven't kept up with the war itself, but from my personal perspective in Arrgh. I'll list the best and why: 1. Eclipse - Despite being overwhelmed in a losing war, they're still incredibly hard to catch lacking when raiding. 2. Rose - Rose was tiered perfectly for this war and went balls out against their age-old enemy t$ and their new rival Eclipse. Everyone else seemingly did fine. No outstanding performers from my limited perspective. Worst: The Immortals - Despite being a massive alliance and a top five for years, their offshore was the sensation of the season. Their FA doesn't exist or actively harms them when it does. Their milcom is asleep. etc. T$ - A lot of e$ and t$ people seemingly fell asleep for this war. I've heard through the grapevine that t$ leadership is in full-doomer mode and that's never a good sign. Lots of loot given out, no attempt at depositing or fighting back etc.

I mean, yall are the same alliance so I know you know this: But this is TKR's future and only getting worse the more y'all fall behind in growth (in the upper tier). Don't take my word for it, ask your new friends in Rose how to improve and I almost guarantee they'd help you out to some extent. They're nice lads. TKR Econ is what's holding TKR back rn. To be fair though, Rose is also very FA-active in poaching/recruiting whales as is Eclipse. T$ kinda just has that years-of-winning advantage but that'll wear off soon too.

Had this conversation with Village the other day and you (devs) have heard me express it so many times before but I'll reiterate here: Slapping mildly cool ideas into project slots once a quarter is not adequate content production. We have big issues in the game right now. The meta is glued to the top 0.01% of players who are in the c35+ (really c40+) range because of how strong bigger nations are. The economy of the game is lacking significant resource sinks. The market itself is run by a handful of "very active" players. We're not retaining hardly any new players beyond the 2 week benchmark. There's also nothing to do beyond c30 other than just keep buying cities. And honestly the spy satellite, espionage, and beige mechanics all still suck. I hate to sound doom-y because I hated hearing it in latestage CN, but how long can we expect this to last? It's very frustrating to see random new projects thrown out every quarter and no real progress being made for years. I hope this trend is corrected before it's too late. To end this on a positive feedback thought: Endgame content is the key to almost all these issues. Resource sinks, something for old players to do, something to break the current meta, etc.

No one deserves this

There's a daddy issues sex joke in here somewhere

When you look at root causes for the issue(s) surrounding this question, I think it makes more sense to simply institute a mechanic that puts new players at c10 to start off with, but I do support removing the timers entirely for the reasons others have highlighted. The game is very old and needs not only catchup mechanics but also starting advantages like new nations starting at c10 so people can just begin and get rolling into things. People complaining that this lets them skip XYZ are missing the point that the game itself needs more features - building a city every 10 days is not a fun feature, it's a growth-limiter.

I just want to bring this up again not because I care about the occasional alliance banker getting posted to RON to get made fun of, though I do think a culture of public humiliation is pretty lame. I make this post on behalf of every player that doesn’t spend 90 hours a week on this game, doesn’t necessarily have a mastery of the meta, and may very well be playing on a phone screen like mine that is slightly too small to show a full trade offer. New or less committed/attentive players should not be subjected to literal scam trade deals. I don’t get why that concept is contentious when I’ve brought it up before, but it significantly decreases a player’s enjoyment of a game to feel scammed. Not just did they “lose” something, they lost it to some incredibly idiotic mechanic that people are exploiting. Were I a new player who sold a credit for $1 after paying irl money for it, I’d quit this game and issue an irl chargeback for my money. If Alex and the devs care at all, this should certainly be addressed - and maybe even include ingame moderation strikes against these nations posting these offers. clarifying note: I’ve never sold or bought any of these scam offers, and I don’t care if your big alliance lost money on a mistrade, but new players do fall for these which is why people post them. It’s a toxic af practice that has continued for years unanswered. Thanks for your time.

Congrats Anri and Sketchy ily

Alliance Search | Politics & War (politicsandwar.com) Click that link and look for the the top spot. This thread is for alliances that split up their membership into (large) offshores or training AA's, though I just realized I'm so used to including TKR in everything that I accidentally included y'all. edit: I removed TKR so no one gets pre-maturely salty.

Based and Roberts-pilled

Back again with another analysis thread from Roberts due to boredom. What do alliances truly look like in an age of training alliances, offshores, and other random circumstance? What do these same groups look like in a relevant tier? To borrow a phrase from a certain celebrity yellow lab: Let's find out! The Syndicate Total member estimation: 167 Total member estimation over c30: 75 Eclipse Total: 160 Over30: 67 Aurora total: 179 over30: 41 Cataclysm Total: 118 c30+: 33 The Immortals Total: 193 Oer30: 30 The Fighting Pacifists Total: 193 Over30: 29 Camelot Total: 367 Total without Gray nations: 230 Over30: 3 Sorry if I missed your alliance, I didn't really feel like doing AA's with obvious answers (no major training AA's or offshores etc.) Also disclaimer, these stats are very very basic to the point of almost inaccuracy. TKR's 50 c30+ tier for example includes a lot more upper 30's than TI's 30 nations, for example. Eclipse also has a ton of c40+ that got included into the general statistic and is probably the heaviest c40+ alliance in the game right now between them and Grumpy.

Okay the other two were amusing but this one made me actually laugh

Much orb-pondering has occurred.