Corvidae

A relatively meta topic on my mind lately is how to compare an alliance to a real life organization, and leap-frogging from there perhaps giving people a better understanding of how an alliance functions and how one succeeds or fails. Is an alliance comparable to a business? In certain ways, I think a corporate bureaucracy is the simplest way for the modern player to setup and effectively run an alliance. A simple chain of command leading up to some number of executive heads in charge of various pieces of the whole. Typically business models will at least claim to be meritocratic in promotion, and typically try to seek out talent as opposed to seniority: "Who's going to do the best job?" When applied to members however, I think an easy trap to fall into with the business-driven meritocratic mindset is neglecting your community and the soft skills needed to nurture members into successful players. Much like in real life, numbers aren't the only thing that matter and there needs to be a balance. If you only focus on how well you're doing numerically, you lose your identity to a... pretty lame game, if we're being honest. Is an alliance comparable to a government agency/entity? Typically, seniority supersedes all in many government agencies. Talent is recognized but not to the same extent as it might be in the private sector. Meritocracy comes second to experience. I think a lot of alliances operate on iterations of this concept, whether it is due to balancing community needs of an egotistical member who has been waiting awhile for their time in the sun or simply a belief that experience can make up for lack of raw talent. I think this system is easier to grasp for the totality of membership unless you've built a meritocratic culture and often trying to change it up can lead to drastic effects like splinters or coups. However I think the drawback here is that the command structure suffers when you fail to let active and talented members rise quickly enough to have maximum impact. It's more conservative and perhaps safer, but also doesn't pay dividends over time like talent does. This system can often lead to stagnation in my opinion. Is an alliance comparable to a volunteer/non-profit entity? If you've been around the community long enough you've probably heard someone joke or seriously state they've used alliance government positions on their resume, and often under this classification or something similar. "Direct organizer for over 100 subordinates in a volunteer organization." I think there's some merit to this, as with actual volunteer and non-profit orgs -- no one in this game gets paid for the work they do. We rely solely on people's passion and motivation to play the game in order to fuel groups of, sometimes, hundreds of players. These are often structured similarly to a business, but operate on a very similar "activity is the most important factor" concept that many alliances are forced into: We've probably all encountered people who would've been amazing in a gov position, but due to their time constraints simply couldn't handle it or had to resign. Many volunteer organizations face the same. Promotion through attrition, basically. The drawbacks here being a little more obvious: What if you run out of competent people? Though I will say sometimes dedication can account for a lot even when talent or experience aren't there. I'm interested to hear thoughts, I tried to keep this very non-inflammatory as opposed to my usual posts. How do you think alliances operate comparatively to real life organizations? What's the ideal, what's the reality, who's the exception, who's the example? #reviveForums2025

unironically yes

I knew about this weeks ago

Looking forward to whatever comes next unless you hit me

It's pretty wild that the game is 10 years old without a functional bank system. Even adding a simplified version and fleshing it out later would be nice. It cannot be overstated how much administration work goes into simply keeping track of the economics in this game -- either through third party bots or massive manual spreadsheets. This seems like a huge QoL feature that gets overlooked or dismissed because most major groups have bots that do this by now, but I think it's worth having in the base-game itself. 1. Track totals for members: resources and money given, resources and money received, resources and money taxed -- all separately tracked. 2. Fleshing it out: The ability to distinguish between and issue loans and grants. The ability for members to withdraw their own deposits (enabled and disabled in alliance control panel). etc.

My old ass can't figure out gifs. Good job!

This'll probably be a controversial suggestion but the game is advertised as a geopolitical simulator, yet geography plays zero role in the game. Geography plays an important role in real life history and politics, obviously. A nationsim without geography can only ever have sandbox-based politics, but balancing or even envisioning a fair scarcity system has proven challenging. When treasures were introduced to fight over, the playerbase responded by creating treasure island forcing Alex to cap their benefit. So my thought is: Adding a beneficial resource will never been balance-able. The players will find a way to game the system. So in order to introduce geographical importance, you have to use the existing resources. Without further ado, the actual suggestion: Alliance impact Alliances have to choose a continent, all member nations will function as if on that continent. This has very obvious production repercussions but the logic is that alliances, not nations, are the true political unit of this game. In order to have meaningful politics from resource scarcity you have to tie geography to the political unit (alliances). This could also be swapped out for production maluses instead of outright forcing people onto the alliance continent. So anyone not on the alliance continent will suffer production loss across the board. This change forces a new dimension of politics so that each alliance must coordinate with others in order to have access to needed resources. This may not actually be as significant as people think, with the plethora of available resources in the game the market and large bank-holders will still be able to buy and sell resources as usual for quite awhile until the impact of this change will start to be felt. This could potentially push larger groups into creating "colony" extension AA's. While this may not make a huge difference, there have been many instances in Nationsims where extensions have turned into their own political units and added to the political scene of the game. Distance Impact In order to keep it simple, a table of "distances" will be made between continents. Distance will play a factor in both trade and warfare. Example: Europe, Africa and Asia have a distance of 2 from each other. Asia has a distance of 3 from Australia, Africa -> Australia is 4, etc. The further the distance, the larger the impact. What this could mean for trade: Distance becomes a percentage of food lost when traded. This includes Alliance to Alliance transfers since alliances will have locations now as well. This could also be extended to all resources or the infamous tariffs suggestion could finally make an appearance and make sense. What this could mean for warfare: Distance becomes a multiplier for different types of attacks. My initial thought is the further the distance, the larger the malus for offensives and a bonus for defensives. Alternatively, further distance could boost navals/air attacks and nerf ground attacks. tl;dr - continents now have a set distance between them. It impacts trade, war, and production. In order to maximize this into a prominent political feature, alliances are forced onto continents.

Casual reminder to all Eclipse members: Spend your rebuild on Keno ONLY. Chances are you could be the next c55!

Congrats on 7 years of one of the cooler themes in the game

Not many achieve apotheosis in this game, but Hatebi has just become the nuke god.

I think it was said somewhere that the original idea was for no one to be beyond 30 cities as well. One nuke is almost meaningless beyond a 15 city nation, trivial to rebuild from and most impactful during wartime where they shut off farms for X amount of time -- not that this has stifled food production, food supply is at all-time-highs. I know people dislike ANY kind of war when they don't feel like it, but realistically looking at numbers nukes need to be buffed not nerfed. I will also comment from a "game admin" perspective: Your economy is experiencing hyper-inflation due to overproduction and over-availability of cash (in higher tiers), you want mechanics that can blow up infrastructure as the admin. I do appreciate the regular interest you've been showing lately though @Alex. Keep plugging away with your ideas, I know the community may seem harsh but we appreciate the chance to give feedback on ideas even if the majority think the ideas would have a negative impact.

All of these seem like bad ideas that have no benefit to the player or the game. "Make less resources" to balance a spreadsheet and fit your general idea of where resources should be is a horrific waste of development time. Let me hit you with some bullet points just based on your own: RNG nuclear meltdowns and disasters with an extremely low chance of occurrence and an annual limit on how many times it can occur per nation (like it can't happen twice in 365 days, nations get a disaster-happened flag when it pops off and it expires in a year. Can be used for adding in more events later!) Crime fluctuates based on events, active wars, recently destroyed infra, etc and it actually has an impact beyond being an income reducer. This game desperately needs some kind of events system to give the actual feeling of a nation. Feeding into the events-theme of my post, unions can go on strike and reduce your manufacturing output. Or the nation can rally together during times of war to increase production. Deepen the Season system that is already in-place. Give a chance for a harsh winter or summer, a bad harvest due to blight in the Autumn, and maybe even rework how farms function in totality: You have to have them in the Spring season to plant them, if you build them after or lose them before Autumn then you get a reduced harvest. Winter has no production. I think we're reaching the death-point of this game rapidly and without some serious and creative changes, you will continue to see Band-Aid fixes like these be universally hated by the community you're pitching them to.

I think this was a potentially good idea but the execution you proposed sounds like it would create new issues worse than problems it solved.

Noot noot

The memes are on point I cannot even lie. Have fun everyone! "State-owned media (Roberts)" made me laugh pretty hard.

Everyone knew this was a long time coming, really the better part of a year. Hope everyone has fun and enjoys the carnage. Food hoarders: you're welcome.

TL;DR - you made something up and dragged an alliance that you essentially couped into a war. To the actual membership of DB: Welcome to the war, have fun.

I agree with the sentiment of the solution and I would point equally at the community and the game mechanics as to both fault and solution: New nations, new alliances, smaller alliances, or even large alliances who have struggled to find their place in politics are all essentially left out as shark bait for everyone else. You must seek shelter or die. What can be done to open this game up to a more casual playstyle and become more interesting/rewarding to be small and new? I liked your mention of dynamic war slots in theory, though I'd want to see hard numbers on how it played out. I'd also point to the lack of game mechanics that really make PnW a "Nation simulator." There's... not actually a lot of simulation going on, if any at all. Fleshing out internal politics even if it's just for show with a legislature mechanic, giving some meaning and mechanic to the RP stuff like government types, allowing baseball to be superficially adjusted to any sport of your choosing or expanding upon the baseball feature to see some like olympic game type stuff... Meaningless mechanics like the Moon Landing that ultimately add flavor into the game would be huge. The white backdrop with limited color and spreadsheet set-up where you just keep up with numbers for the sake of it is just not appealing to 2024 gamers. The culture itself needs to be more open to LARPing as a nationstate instead of focusing purely on maximum efficiency. This could come in many forms, only limited by imagination. It's just generally frowned upon to RP after a certain extent. Overall I think PnW does a very poor job of leaning into the genre itself. It's clear from adverts that Alex has a "vision" of what he wants the game to be but it's just not there. I highly doubt there would be more than couple hundred players in this game if it cost $5.99 on the app store, for example. The free-to-play and time-sunk are the two main reasons for most of us remaining I'd guess. I also think the pace needs to slow down. The game needs to be recognized for what it is: FtP feature-starved spreadsheet. The idea that you can go to sleep and wake up to being wiped out in a war is pretty laughable even by IRL standards. Slow the pace of warfare down significantly (and maybe flesh that out too) and I think you'd see higher retention and also more investment into the wars themselves.

Ah yes I actually forgot to include this in the essay. It feels like there's even more pressure now for perfect-play or risk ridicule/ostracization. Perfect play meaning both mechanically and politically: Fall in line, do what's expected, or get replaced because a sphere only needs like 4-5 alliances.

Does the current sphere meta help to solve or worsen political stagnation

I think I'm going crazy when I say this but maybe Partisan was right. A little background, before NPOLT (about 4-5 years ago!), this game was mostly divided into 2-3 major spheres of influence. This is not to say these spheres were uniform in nature, it was a chaotic affair trying to organize dozens of alliances in one direction and typically it wasn't governed as spheres are now with a centralized leadership. You had competing interests in each sphere, just as the spheres competed with each other. The idea of many different spheres was novel, it was even viewed by many as a fantasy. "Minispheres" as it used to be called. The idea had iterations upon iterations until it finally came into its current form: We now have a handful of medium-sized spheres, some bigger or smaller, and generally speaking they all revolve around a central figurehead alliance (or two). Many of us thought that formally dividing the major powers from each other and culturally dividing their interests would lead to dynamic and interesting politics as opposed to the sometimes-repetitive nature of bipolarity. We, as a community, have harshly enforced this new status quo: Teaming up to attack spheres that showed signs of excessive collaboration or "paperless treaties." A lot of casus belli from the last few years have been regarding the size or tiering of various spheres, or whether someone has sat out of too many wars while the other spheres burned each other. In a way, it has created a more dynamic political environment. Something akin to musical chairs. So how was Partisan potentially right? The sphere system seems to lend itself more to the uplifting and amplifying of any given "major power" than to the rest. Even in situations when a sphere or bloc truly are co-equal and make mutual decisions, the political scene is gridlocked unless your "shot caller" is directly involved. This is enforced both by the other sphere leaders, who will sometimes stonewall political discussions unless you're with a major power -- and by the sphere followers, many who will defer to their sphere leader as the only decision maker in the bloc. I'm calling it the vassalization of alliances many of whom are chained to their "master" alliances for years at a time without ever having the chance to start their own machinations or pursue their own agenda, if they have an agenda at all. Vassals, lapdogs, servile alliances have always existed in any meta but the sphere meta seems particularly harsh in ensuring that you must follow the leader, no matter what. There is no option other than to choose another leader to follow. I will also point out that the cultural enforcement of the sphere system has begun to blur over time. Lingering cross-sphere ties are seemingly present everywhere with unwritten rules governing the true state of these ties: Are they going to be honored? Are they going to be enforced? Maybe, is the answer. You'd have to ask and it depends on the day. There is also the issue of new spheres and their inability to form a competitive bloc despite they themselves being a strong central force that might otherwise exert a sphere of influence if the system was not so rigid. This decay of a clean sphere system combined with the rigidity of the politics has caused me lately to question the efficacy of such a political meta. Thought I'd write up a short thing about it. Let me know your thoughts!

We are all acutely aware.

The lie is that House-SAIL-Eclipse were in serious talks about a NAP, and that TKR was leading the charge on this, or that anyone in our bloc even agreed to anything more than listening to someone else's pitch. It wasn't us who pitched the idea, and it died in DM's within a very short conversation. I've brought it up in private with many already, but this just flatly was not a thing that was happening. It wasn't even a backup plan, it was just a pitched thought that never went anywhere after one discussion.

Just save the typing effort and say you can only photosynthesize in the light of my attention

I thought it would be nice of me to compile a list of things you could do between now and August if you are one of the roughly 3000 players affected by the handful of cowardly leaders who doubled an already way-too-long NAP after 24 hours of warfare back in February. In no particular order: Learn a musical instrument Start an exercise routine Coup your leaders Leave your terrible alliance Pick up knitting Give painting a try, Bob Ross is nice to watch Listen to some new, or old, music Read a book or 20 Start shopping for your autumn wardrobe - the NAP will end by the time the weather starts turning in many areas. Give Rise of Kings Online a try, a new nationsim game that doesn't [yet] have years of NAPs being signed Learn some basic Spanish Do some yoga Visit your family Post your ideas for how to spend the 2024 NAP here!