Justinian the Great

please

I personally think silence is a bad answer in a polisim game. Dialogue, harsh or otherwise, should be attempted. Even if the answer is no it's better than silence. Not commenting on the Grumpy-T$ relationship, merely commenting on this particular comment. I agree on principle but in practice certain spheres can only shrink so much further. Hollywood has only 5 major alliances, for example, but was obviously targeted by two other major spheres this previous war for being too powerful in a certain tier. So would Guardian-Grumpy have to basically form their own sphere to truly be "mini" enough? That's like 50 people, smaller than a lot of micros. Other groups have some obvious splits that could happen. t$ from Nexus, Rose from CAP, etc. and I think still maintain some level of integrity in terms of stats/tiering but a lot of those peripheral groups are effectively inert on their own. CAP, TFP, Fark, USN, TLE/TFed, literally everyone in Oasis... Most of those people if they split off into their own corners would likely never actually participate in politics.

That's fine that you felt like you needed a break, and I get how Buorhann, whose alliance dissolved during/after NPOLT, wanted a break. Plenty of people did! Take a break! It's good for you. I've taken several myself. Stop dragging entire chunks of the game with you though. It's that easy and simple. It's irresponsible for major alliance leaders to purposefully stall PnW politics for multiple months because they're tired or burnt out, that's what retirement and passing the torch to the next generation are for. NAP's are, at best, a redundancy as people are highly unlikely to immediately jump back into war. At worst they have a negative impact on the politics of the game for reasons I already described. The contractual safety of alliances on a large scale, for extended periods of time, is bad for a competitive political sim where most of the politics are based around war.

As we saw when the last NAP ended, we had two back-to-back wars. Whatever your opinion on those wars were, things were happening. Blocs broke, formed, and broke again. Activity begets activity in this game and I don't think it's a bad assumption to say the lack of a NAP post-Guns and Roses helped contribute to several non-war-related happenings such as high gov in key alliances swapping up, mergers, disbandments, treaty swaps etc. Things happen when there is no agreement to peace because people are forced to move for their own security and furthermore forced to consider their own position. All intersphere NAP's are bad for the game's health, regardless of length. The only NAP's people should be looking at are inter-alliance NAPs as those don't suffocate the entire game's political cycles. If that's true, I personally think the NAP benefits Rose immensely more than it does Hollywood or Blackwater. At least in my opinion. I can't get overtly worked up over admitting defeat vs. white peace. They're effectively the same thing in my mind, but I agree with your second part. Rose has skirted politics and basically thrown themselves in wherever they see a statistical advantage for years. Equally to blame are the people who keep involving them in their plans, basically writing a golden ticket and allowing Rose to circlejerk about being the king makers. No offense, but you were the "face" of one of the worst precedents in recent PnW history. The blanket multi-month NAP at the end of NPOLT has been felt almost every war since then with entire coalitions signing suffocating NAP's lasting half the year. I sincerely wish you hadn't done that and I sincerely wish you were stronger in your denouncement of NAP's now. NAP's suffocate politics in PnW because it gives a security blanket to everyone involved. TKR+GG+T$+Rose all just signed a 3 month NAP. What do you think is going to happen in those 3 months? We're going to see our usual post-war spike in treaty-shuffling and then people are going to go to sleep until the NAP ends because there is no onus to do otherwise.

Peace in our time.

My post has less to do with current politics and more to do with political theory behind the game in the last 2-ish years. I don't actually think we need to radically shift too much of anything. The simple fact is that competition is good for everyone in the game. I think most people feel that way, but short-sightedness catches us all on occasion. The conversation about security really isn't reality anymore. Most people enjoy fighting, at least occasionally, and when those fights occur people will be upset at a lack of targets or a lack of content. Members are going inactive on the winning sides of dogpiles just like the losing side experiences member attrition. Boredom is the death of this game and that's what community leaders have to keep in mind. I don't see that as an artificial limitation or a radical shift. It's simply the responsibility of leadership to ensure their members are engaged. I actually take a much more optimistic view, personally. The minispheres already exist and we do see a community effort to keep them maintained, however misinformed those efforts may be. People were incensed at TKR pulling in HM to form a new bloc instantly after Quack and I think that general feeling of wanting to keep blocs small and separate is the foundational piece we can certainly continue to build upon. I'd completely disagree with bipolarity leading to equal wars. In fact, it was always the exact opposite. In the current meta we've been seeing dogpiles happen through political agreements between spheres, with a bipolar world we simply had guaranteed dogpiles as one side already had the majority advantage. This is a topic that Grumpy and Guardian both need to broach with each other internally and with their enemies, in my opinion. For the center of politics these past six months, you guys have been surprisingly quiet on the FA front as far as I can tell.

Treaty Web and my arbitrary sphere divisions circa 2021 Minispheres moving forward So many people are probably in the same position as me. Wondering about the future, looking at their own corner of the world, and trying to calculate how to come out on top. This is a great thing. We need people ambitiously seeking their own self-interests in this game, but that ambition must be tempered. Competition is what drives politics, the community, player activity, and overall our fun in PnW. So the question for the longest time has been "How do we foster competition?" The answer has always been "a multi-polar world." Why is a multi-polar world even worth it? Many players are too young to even know what PnW was like just a few years ago. We lived in a Bipolar world and we'd been living in one for over a decade going back before this iteration of nationsim even started. Two sides, permanently destined to fight arbitrarily as boredom peaked. Politics were extremely stale, the slightest change in sphere composition being the highlight of the year. Competition effectively did not exist, often people would go inactive for months waiting for their annual curbstomp either winning or losing. Things did slowly start to change though, despite the efforts of some stuck in the past and saturated with paranoia. Minispheres as a concept began years ago and for a long time was a corner-ideology shared by few. You could've chalked it up with the paperless crowd who wanted to kill treaties altogether, except some people actually bought into paperless while minispheres was mostly laughed off. Now, through design or coincidence, we finally have what I would definitively call a true multi-polar world. So why does a multi-polar world mean competition is inherently better fostered? Well, frankly, it doesn't. While the official treaties and mega-blocs of bygone eras may have disappeared, the habits and thought processes of the individual players have held a little more firm. We've been seeing it over the past couple of years: Almost the entire game uniting against Quack, Quack overrunning the Swamp, Oasis/Mystery Inc jumping in to defend Rose against Hollywood, and now t$/Rose teaming up against TKR/GG. The idea of bipolarity in theory is gone, but in practice we've still seen it effectively every war. Overwhelming force being brought to bear against the unfortunate target. It is my personal theory that we cannot go on like this. If this is the attitude the player continues to hold towards war, then bipolarity will return in true form as everyone seeks security from a world where warfare is either complete victory or total loss. I also personally think this would be a great loss for politics as a whole. I think multi-polar politics opens the door for much more activity, fun, and just generally gives more potential for what can happen. Which is why I think we need to protect it. How do we protect our multi-polar world from returning to a bipolar stagnant state? Firstly, I think we need to seriously rethink our collective war doctrines when it comes to major conflicts. Overwhelming force breeds bland and uninteresting fights as well as stagnant politics moving forward. It leaves a bored victor and a disillusioned victim. If every global involves every minisphere, how does that differ at all from the bipolar world of 2007-2019? Secondly, I think we need to continue pushing the idea of what constitutes a minisphere even further. We should make active efforts to not remain stagnant nor let others remain stagnant under our protections. This is a political game and really only a handful of alliances even play the politics while the rest sit for years in the same sphere, quiet as the grave. I think shuffling allies every now and then, at a reasonable pace not at any kind of breakneck speed, is necessary to flush out the muck that contributes to stagnancy over time. I know not everyone will agree with everything I've written here, and I will be the first to admit that most of what I've said are generalities with plenty of exceptions that make sense. Hopefully though enough people will agree with the sentiment and we can take the foundations we've laid as a community and use them to propel PnW into a new golden age of activity, fun, and interesting politics. Thanks for reading.

My mercy may be trash but it’s still better than yours. Gold heals !@#$.

Remember last war when you were so excited to decry a "dogpile" of Hollywood v. Rosesphere and now you're the first post on multiple DoW's of much worse dogpile? Says a lot.

Yes but don't you get it, Hidude? The advantage of those 5 nations more than makes up for the 2:1 or worse advantage in every other tier? The whale consolidation is extremely threatening, you see, so it's not actually a dogpile. /s The massive dogpile combined with the Syndicate unironically trying to claim an SRD radio show quip as a CB is sad. I wonder if we'll see Oasis and Minc riding in to "balance the war" this time.

Salve! Are you a trueborn Roman looking for your home in this game? Do you have an irresistible urge to reconquer the West? Does reading about the Fall of Rome make you tear up a little bit? Maybe the song "Istanbul not Constantinople" triggers you a bit? Then look no further. The Eastern Roman Empire is here to Renovatio Imperii and drive the barbarian menace(s) from rightful Roman lands! Apply on our discord: https://discord.gg/au9zW5XvuU Also check us out in-game: https://politicsandwar.com/alliance/id=8864

Eastern Roman Empire declares Imperium There was once a dream that was Rome, you could only whisper it. Anything more than a whisper and it would vanish. Justinian looked out over the Theodosian Walls towards the setting sun. The West, the fallen half of the Empire which had stood more than a thousand years, was beyond the horizon and yet felt so close. So within reach. Italy, Africa, Hispania, Gaul, and even far-flung Britannia had all fallen to the barbarian hordes and a lack of true leadership. Would he be able to reclaim them? Could he restore the Dream that was Rome? The Eastern Roman Empire hereby declares its existence. Protected by The Knights Radiant. I'm sure this goes well historically, right? https://discord.gg/au9zW5XvuU

tbh you're pointing out a very unlikely scenario that nonetheless needs to be addressed in the mechanic... but I can't help but think someone netting billions from whales via spy ops would be glorious lmao

For legal reasons, this is a joke. I think some kind of diminishing returns thing would work best for this spy op though. Something like, it's more likely to get 3-5% of lower amounts of cash and more likely to get 1-3% of larger amounts of cash. But I think it would provide another "strategy" piece to consider in multiple facets of the game. Raiders would probably like to start keeping spies maxed out, whales might like to deposit things more often, people holding banks might consider using Arcane instead of Fortress (or whatever they use now). People might become more secretive about where banks are hidden. Maybe more! edit: to add a little math: 5% of one billion is $50m. So if you roll perfectly on, say, a bank holder you're still stealing a negligible amount. Every successive spy op obviously steals even less.

In the modern world, naval piracy is only a problem in select geographic areas. However, online piracy is omnipresent and hackermans are the greatest threat to the modern Boomer using "Password" as their password. To reflect a little bit of realism and add some flavour, I would like to propose a new spy operation: "Hack Bank Accounts" - Steal 1-5% [RNG of course] of your opponent's cash on hand. Pretty simple but I think it would add some cool potential flavor.

Nice to see guys. Good luck!

"Don't declare counters or the nukes come out" "Raiders got involved, so there will be no separate peace" "We feel comfortable going for months in a war we started" "We'll hit uninvolved parties because otherwise our stats would be slacking" "we would be doing better but foreign powers are secretly plotting against us" "The game is against us" I'm starting to have flashbacks.

https://tenor.com/view/titanic-its-been-a-privelage-gif-8487203

The Syndicate has been home to several legendary government members that were all masters of their craft (and probably took PnW too seriously). Shiho definitely fits right into that same pantheon. Enjoy retirement, hope to see you around.

This single change puts control of the economy of the game in the hands of a select few people (alliance gov). The functionality of embargoes already exist and are utilized to varying degrees of effectiveness, a coordinated embargo could be issued. Now it just takes a single active member in alliances of 50-100 members to take chunks of the market out of reach for other players. It's too much control over individual nations to give to alliance leaders imo.

Monsanto is a new company designed with one purpose in mind. We're tired of seeing food prices bottom out. The farmer that feeds Orbis and sustains the backbone of the world's economy should not have to settle for pennies on the dollar for their high quality grains, vegetables, meats, or other edible products. The goal is a cooperative firm that amalgamates food producing nations together in a powerful union to stop the exploitation of farmers. Separated we are weak, but together we are strong. Resource flipping is also a lucrative position within the Monsanto group. Even if you don't produce food, but have an eye for profit - we are looking for people to help us with our goals of fair food markets. In time, with the growth of Monsanto, we will begin subsidizing the food needs of our non-producers as well. If cooperative market regulation interests you, or if you enjoy making money, feel free to stop by our discord server. https://discord.gg/mXEseTeDZk

Yes sometimes life will frustrate your well-laid plans, but your immediate reaction to a poor turnout is to ping your supposed audience to admonish them for being "too lazy" or even too busy to play the game(s) you wanted to play... I type this as actual life advice. It's ok to be frustrated but you are exhibiting classic lashing out behaviors that indicate a lack of emotional maturity. Life doesn't have to be a battle, buddy. You win more flies with honey.

Here's to at least two more!

Speak for yourself, my nation will be over 16,000 days old

Both of these are not incorrect per se, but specifically regarding the proposed changes I think (merely based on my experience in this last war) that harming planes ability to kill other planes while choosing an alternative attack (other than dogfight) is going to harm planes ability to remain a unit of use. Already there are problems with the casualty rates of planes v. tanks and planes v. ships being impractical or subpar in terms of resource/MAP usage. If planes are bad at killing tanks and bad at killing planes (again not including dogfights) and bad at killing ships... Why am I using my planes? I'd rather do a dogfight or two and establish air control and then only use ground while keeping my plane count maxed out for defensive air control purposes. Some people I've talked to, including heads of milcom in top 15 alliances, are saying this is basically already the optimal strategy. The idea behind wanting all units to be strong is that it's extremely easy to overwhelm people in one arena of warfare. Ground, Air, Naval, Spies. So if all units are relegated to supporting the ground units, we're basically back to where planes were in NPOLT but with tanks now. I'd rather see a more interesting rock-paper-scissors style of warfare where people have options and choices, limited as they may be in PnW.