Alastor

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tbh this whole thing was just bait. the thought process was everyone would get angry enough to hit someone. But who? GG is too tiered. TKR is too tenacious. T$ is too whiny. The clear answer is Rose. We (T$, Grumpy, and TKR) conspired to get the whole world mad enough to form some kind of super-TJest-type AA and go rogue on Rose. Celestial? A farce, an illusion to set this whole thing up. t$ is coming for Rose, with the ultimate goal being forced disbandment. Once Rose is engaged with the rest of the world, we unveil the real plan and hit them from behind. 1m score going down to 100k. 9 months of war minimum. #RoseFall2022

I personally haven't seen any negativity

wow what a trash take, get off the forums guy

every great man will eventually wane, every dawn must have a dusk. @Prefonteen lived out the golden days of the Syndicate but, alas, those days are over. vae victis, Rose has truly won the game.

I wonder who wrote the post ;)

hodor.

To clarify, I'm more talking about the 1st or 2nd in commands or FA heads. The political people. Having literally anyone willing to step up and run a department with competence is a good thing - but FA itself isn't really a slog it's a sandbox. The problem is the retirees get in the sandbox and basically take a nap while yelling at anyone else being loud - forgetting they're on the playground not their bedroom.

I've unironically been pitching democracy as a solution for quite awhile.

Keegoz raised a good point on my debate server: We're rapidly running out of "secondary" powers that don't evaporate in their first losing war. Part of the reason is that the meta is boring and many groups disengage from global politics. Johnsons couldn't care less about what HW/Clock/Celestial are fighting over, for example. Part of the reason is the concentration of experience, activity, and tiering in the major alliances. TKR, for example, could probably solo some spheres. So could Rose or t$. Part of the reason is pride - a lot of smaller groups refuse to take advice or help, and a lot of larger groups refuse to take protectorates out of their own pride not wanting to be responsible for "sub-par" alliances. The latter is the largest issue imo. If people are receptive and willing to take advice then larger AA's have to care and put in the effort there.

A tale as old as time. Once-competent leaders who have run out of time to play the game, if your alliance is lucky they "retire" into an advisor position and help out now and then - but more often than not they sit in high gov chats simply to disagree with the current gov and offer contrarian opinions on the way the current people want to move forward. The exceptional retiree is great, but the usual are regressive. If you're unlucky, your leader retires mentally without ever informing anyone or actually stepping down. They gradually answer fewer pings or DM's, eventually it becomes an accepted fact that your leader checks in maybe once a day, once every other day, likely without reading most of the relevant information - and logs right back out. I've been guilty of it myself as leader or gov, everyone experiences burnout. The problem is when the retirees cling to their vestiges of power in every single alliance that the new blood can never rise to the top. It is the nature of things that newer, less experienced people come into their own time to do things their way. Stop preventing that in your alliance out of fear they'll "mess something up" because this is a browser game and competence is an illusion. 99% of alliances are trash unless their membership is hyperactive and engaged. If you want engagement then you need to do things and keep life flowing. A good gardener must cut away the dying leaves and branches to make room for new growth. That's not to say you should delete if you're old, just to say give other people a freaking chance. If you alliance is too far gone then disband and let people disperse into other communities that can benefit from the influx. Start up merger talks if you're too small to ever do anything. FREAKING RETIRE AND KEEP YOUR HANDS OFF THINGS disclaimer: There are some good retirees that genuinely offer service to their alliance. Hi Adrienne.

Completely fair, I'm not saying we shouldn't go to war for fun or for "strategic reasons" I'm just recognizing that PnW is a spreadsheet sim. "Strategic reasons" literally boils down to arguments over tiering and ROI - stuff we've rehashed probably dozens of times just since NPOLT. It's stale AF. When everyone is realpolitik and everything is realpolitik, nothing really matters. Might makes right, and even that isn't as interesting as it sounds. I appreciate the efforts to self-limit by many powerplayer alliances and I understand those self-limits revolve around sphere size and tiering, but it's an old and tired discussion. We have to bring politics back into politics and war or risk losing the very reason most of us ever even googled the term "nation sim".

I have no idea what the central theme of this really is, it may honestly be a stream of ideas that don't necessarily fit together. These are just some thoughts I've had regarding PnW as a whole lately, I felt like sharing. Meaningless Wars Looking over 2021 and 2022's great war list, it's incredibly hard to find a war which started for any reason at all. The best I can find are some CB's about poaching (which many of you know I already consider a weak CB in itself), while the vast majority of wars are listed as boredom or provocative raids that escalated into wars. I am a huge proponent of fighting for no reason sometimes. On the other hand though, when every fight is for no reason you begin to question why we're constantly bashing nations against each other. I've said it many times before, if you're only here for the war system I genuinely have no idea how you glean enjoyment from the game. Even (especially) raiding alliances like Arrgh have multiple layers beyond simply declaring 5 or 6 wars per week and zeroing out someone's resistance. Politically speaking, the motivations for war seem to be... just boredom. Find something to pick a fight over because gov generally feels like fighting someone. Again, fine, but at a certain point where do the politics even come from or go to? This is a question that's been plaguing me for a long time, how do you continually generate politics in a sandbox game? Which leads into my next thought... Internal Politics are gone/Democracies are scarce or extinct Not to say autocracies cannot have internal politics, because they do. I just think democracies as a system are obviously better geared to encourage political engagement and "class" mobility within an alliance. Many established communities will probably read this and laugh, but when you think about it truly - we've all come into a nationsim game to roleplay to some degree. There are better strategy games, war games, etc. out there also free to play, but PnW has an extra element of political emphasis on top of it. Between external and internal politics, internal are by far the more content-rich. By their nature they are also the more dramatic, I think that fear has driven many communities into seeking shelter from such a thing. Avoiding democracy like the plague, discouraging internal politicking, and generally trying to create and facilitate a monolithic or unified community. Not a bad goal at all - but we see the price for it: Boredom in a game that should have way more politics in it than it does. Interestingly enough, there is a similar call for stability and security in IRL dictatorships/authoritarian regimes. Volunteer your rights away and toe the party line for stability's sake. Except in PnW there isn't really much you seemingly lose by giving up self-determination except your interest in the game. Political Roleplay and formalities I've ranted about this a handful of times and there are elements of the game who outright oppose the political RP/Model-UN-esque approach to the game. I get it, it's not for everyone. But the atmosphere of the game changes dramatically just by acting slightly more formal, especially in public spaces. The political roleplay such as discussions, debates, contracts, treaties, etc. all contribute heavily into the atmosphere of the game. Right now, I'd call PnW hollow - but there's always potential to fill it. Forum usage I hope the last few months haven't just been a trendy-revival of the forums, because I genuinely believe we need longform communication in not only PnW but in our lives as well. Intellectual digestion and discussion, even when you disagree with someone - being able to see their thoughts laid out and being able to lay out your own thoughts in full is satisfying in a way discord simply cannot compete with and often frustrates.

Well fought, good luck moving forward.

The world must know

ok but what is SoL and FSO's stance on how Camelot treats their members? Can you give an official statement please?

I think it's a lot harder to pin down exact rankings in the age of spheres. Who holds more power at the end of the day? The active FA team that strives to make moves, or the group that holds (and uses) the veto power in their sphere to suppress said moves? I would switch several of these around, based on my personal perception. But overall not that bad.

I wouldn't describe pre-NPOLT as alliance-based in the sense that you're probably thinking. Politics were and are determined by the powerplayers of the game. In the past we called them spheres of influence and they were much less codified - but everyone was still part of a large grouping in the treaty web. I guess one upside of this is that alliances were more agile diplomatically. Alliances could, within reason, be free to sign or drop treaties as they pleased. There wasn't as much as an obsession with tiering and numbers as there is today. On the flip side though, you couldn't really make anything happen on your own without triggering a world war. Even a raid-gone-wrong could escalate into a great war with the whole web getting into conflict over something unrelated to them. As this period dragged on, we also saw the pretense of treaties/chains dropping entirely. People four chains away from the point of conflict would pre-empt in the initial blitz. So in essence, the world was simply two giant spheres with very little changing over years in the game In short I thought it was lame.

This is a good point and should also be added into the update.

I don’t agree with the extent of problem as you laid it out but I agree that there needs to be some adjustments made. City score changes are being cut back because the initial change was taking an axe to a scalpel job. the ratio of military score to city score was too high. It creates the same problems you’re describing where someone with max military can hit you while you have no military simply because your city score is keeping you up too high. We want people to be able to sink, recover potentially (not guaranteed per se), and come back to the fight. This isn’t the complete solution but Alex likes to take things in steps to make sure the game doesn’t break. 100% agree military score and down dec range should be altered to prevent the same problem we’re both seeing.

Spoiler: Silence

I love stuff like this, thanks Hidude.

At this point in the game I personally think we should tack on all new nations starting with 10 cities.

I love this

This is just a poll I made for fun, not related to the dev team or anything they're working on.