Corvidae

For team First Contact

"I will pay you to play AoE4 with me"

Not to deride a peace agreement but referencing the posting here, you guys fought for exactly 30 days and signed into a Non-Aggression pact for four months. Locking up 1/4th of the [active] game into a NAP for a third of the year from less-than-a-month of fighting is cowardly and frankly plays more into Rose's hands than the alleged victor's. I know people rarely care, especially gov who are ditching the game anyway, but it's sad to see careless peace deals like these. NAPs set the stage for stagnant politics by removing potential coalitions or partnerships within specific windows, it takes the dynamism out of the game and creates an environment where your incentive to fight a war is not in an interesting CB but rather in the end result of guaranteed safe growth for X months. Here's the kicker though: Safely growing in perpetuity is killing this game, the same way the lack of updates coming from the dev team are. Congrats on an interesting war bookended by a poorly-thought peace deal.

Hey so I saw you used this image, unfortunately it is under copyright protection by Kyu and you will be executed for this transgression. Congrats on forming and good luck.

Finally, a good f**king theme

This post is my personal try-hard roadmap if I were Alex: It's time to re-analyze the design philosophy of the team. By the end of April, devs need to agree on a few things: 1. Wars will no longer prevent rollouts. If that looks like rolling out mid-war, so be it. If that looks like a global forced period of peace, so be it. If you can find another solution, great. The development cycle should not lean on player wars as an excuse. Ideally this would mean establishing a release date for updates so the players can plan around it. 2. Establish and stick to a pipeline: Pick an idea, work on it, send it on the coders, test it, implement it. Get a pipeline flowing. Every quarter should have an update which includes bug fixes, UI improvements, and new content for players both old and new. It doesn't have to be a massive World-of-Warcraft-esque expansion pack, but every quarter should have those three things as a minimum and never miss a release. Reliability and accountability are key pieces to growing your game instead of watching it wither away. Thirdly, utilize your resources on-hand: The QoL improvements threads is still pinned to the top of the suggestions subforum. Start going through and picking some for each quarter. Fourth, even though the numbers are controversial, the city cost change was long coming. It modernizes and future-proofs the game in a way that we haven't yet seen with any other mechanic. Take that philosophy forward with the bones of the game. Referral bonuses on a sliding scale, credit redemption amount on a sliding scale, get the foundations of the game all on the same page. Now after that work is done, start skimming for new content ideas. Someone complained in Discord that suggestions aren't detailed enough anymore. Here are a handful of examples just from me in the past few months that got ignored. You don't need to pull them directly but perhaps they could give some inspiration: There are a lot more in the suggestions subforum, you just have to skim through titles and see what strikes your fancy. Again: I don't care what we do next. What we need is a reliable development cycle that can generate interest in the game, like every other modern multiplayer game does.

As the old adage goes: Pride cometh before the fall. Congrats on peace, I doubt anyone learned anything.

You do realize that EVH got hit right? This argument isn't in the hypothetical vacuum of "well maybe TGH will hit us if we don't do this." This is the head of TGH FA/current leader telling EVH leadership that he will cover for them if they get into a conflict and then in the same message paints TI as a perfect target. The gun definitely existed and it was fired multiple times, to continue with your metaphor.

Better than Buo shifting the blame of the CB onto Rose... his ally who also got hit for it💀

Sketchy told me this was an unjust war

Brand new expansion for Civilization 6 PnW: 1. Boom and bust cycles: Nations can experience income and population modifiers in cycles. Booms give you more income and population (2%), busts give you the inverse(-2%). Typically these cycles last 30 days each but can be impacted by various things such as: Winning or losing a war: Winning a war can shorten your bust cycle or extend your boom cycle by 12 turns. Losing can do the inverse. This also adds some interesting war implications. Login bonus: Each consecutive login after the 1st day will extend your boom or shorten your bust by 1 turn. Trading with another nation or on the market: This can only be done once per cycle but it will extend booms or shorten busts by 12 turns. Being on your correct alliance color will lessen the impact of bust cycles Running out of food on your nation will increase the length of bust cycles by 12 turns Running out of money on your nation will increase the length of bust cycles by 12 turns 2. World Congress: (to be fleshed out over time I hope, but keeping it simple enough to have a 1% chance of actually being coded rn) Once per thirty days, the entire game gets to vote on one alliance to receive a 5% income boost, and one alliance to receive a 5% income decrease. The increase target can only be selected from ranks 16 and lower. The decrease target must be selected from the top 10. Whoever "wins" each vote is ineligible for the following month's vote of the same category. 3. Disasters: Once every 120 days (randomly rolled somewhere in there) your nation will suffer a disaster from the following list: Nuclear meltdown: Basically a nuke goes off in your city. Losing large amounts of infra (like a nuke would) and applying radiation to the city and the game. Severe Drought: Farm outputs across the nation are reduced by 20% for 5 days Hurricane: Three random cities lose 500 infra each. Tornado: Three random cities lose 500 infra each. Forest Fire: Pollution is increased across your nation by 60 points for 5 days Aliens!: A random city has its infra reduced by 1000 Sheep Stampede: Lose a random improvement in each city I will accept my invitation back onto the dev team I think any of these would be cool to see, simple to add. All three would be a pretty major update and add quite a bit of content that doesn't unbalance the game.

Grumpy are good allies, take care of them or else ❤️

I again will voice that I think these threads need time to cook before pushing to the test server and acting like they're polished. I hope you guys re-examine a lot of these changes and take a better game-design approach to things. Doubling the aluminum cost of planes isn't a good game design choice, maybe try increasing it by 10-20% first instead of doubling it. Ships removing superiority looks unbalanced as heck, but I agree it would be neat for ships to be battlefield control units: Maybe instead of removing superiorities they could provide buffs/maluses to offenses/defenses like a better version of Fortify. Military research looks interesting and the beige buff looks interesting.

Erm, for clarification is this the ship system currently on the test server preparing to go live? If it is, I think the total lack of feedback here is an indication that we may need to slow the roll and actually... get feedback. At a glance these two options alone will have sweeping impact on the war system. Rather than taking an axe to the problem, we could take a scalpel: Have ships provide bonuses or maluses to attacks/defenses so they can be battlefield control/support units.

Can you, for future threads, pin and link these "Official" threads please? Love all these proposals but probably will need to examine balancing closely on certain treasure bonuses mentioned. Love this idea but cap the number of templates each player can have before someone creates 999999999999999 and crashes the game. This is pretty bad and honestly screams of the old Rose and NPO tactics of trying to push or block game mechanic changes that would specifically benefit themselves. This game is not flooding with new players, and you need to consider your current playerbase instead of a mythical flood of new players. In this case I think you can appease both sets by simply reducing the cost of lower city counts and removing city timers up to the average, while leaving the cost of higher cities alone. Making it harder or more expensive to gain cities won't solve the core issue: The game isn't designed around such high city counts and it's disruptive to the overall economy and balance to have people growing that high. Address the mechanics that are poorly designed to accomodate the obvious end result of a decade-long nationsim rather than slapping a questionably-political bandaid fix onto the issue. Alex intended economic specialization years ago, why hasn't this been followed up on? Completely agree but I disagree that your solution will do anything other than give some temporary political advantage to the alliances currently lagging in the whale race. The cost of c43 isn't really what a new player is concerned about. We've hashed this conversation a million times on discord: New players don't quit because they feel too far behind, they quit because the game itself is dated and feature-poor. Something that the other changes (more treasures, colors, easier build templates) do actually address. The only people who stay are those who stumble into an alliance that they happen to click with. It's been years since the alliance recruitment page went up for example. Why isn't it pushed into people's faces that this is a social game? It's more of an inconvenience to new players because they're constantly spammed recruitment messages. The game itself should be plopping new players right onto alliance recruitment pages, with an explanation that PnW isn't meant to be played alone and that sandbox content is created by the community: PICK AN AA AND JOIN IT. Overall a much more solid post from the design team than usual but I downvoted it anyway bc Keegoz said it didn't matter.