Alastor

This moved Polaris from an NPO satellite office to an actual independent entity again in my eyes. I personally say congratulations and good move. Every alliance should work to be independent pieces functioning within greater coalitions, not dogs to pulled along on a leash whenever master decides it's time to go for a walk war. cc @ all the inactive alliances and reasonably-sized "protectorates" who have one or two treaties that basically make them satellites that go to war whenever their active partner decides.

So since Sheepy updated us with graphs and data, we can do some interesting numbers crunching to see what our world is looking like. Resources and "Value" Obviously, if all the resources in the game got dumped at once the price would deflate. But we can roughly visualize the value of all resources in the game with the new graphs using the market index! Food - At a little under 900m food in circulation, according to the graph, we are looking at roughly $55B worth of food! Bayer acquired Monsanto for roughly $66B in 2016 to give an idea of things. Aluminum - 83 million units worth of aluminum rounds us out to around $120B worth of the resource! Alcoa (A large aluminum company in the US) reported revenue at just $13.4B in 2018. Gasoline - 118 million gallons (liters?) of gas around, we're looking at roughly $194B worth of gas! IRL OPEC earned about $730B selling oil in 2014, just to give a rl comparison. Munitions - 121 million bullets valuing at $121B. ATK, a bullet manufacturer that admittedly makes other things as well, reported $4.78B for fiscal year 2014. Steel - With roughly 116m tonnes of steel, we're looking at a valuation of $212B! American Steel, Carnegie's famous company, was the first billion dollar company. Accounting for inflation we're looking at a valuation of roughly $42B! Total value of manufactured resources in the game: $702B which is a significant amount more than the amount of cash in the game, according to sheepy's graph.

If Fark and WTF can't defend against a 2v1 matchup when they have a tier advantage, how will treaties help their problems exactly? If anything, they would burden and even adversely effect the hypothetical war effort of their hypothetical treaty partners. We've seen numerous examples of "underdog" coalitions beating numerically superior groups because activity and coordination are king. I don't think signing more treaties will help you there, and the active alliances seeking to amass numbers to their sphere should think twice on the quality of their partners rather than the quantity of their nations.

There appears to be a non-insignificant amount of people, including alliance leaders, who agree with the idea of quick wars. The war mechanics lend themselves to quick wars as well, I think.

Bringing activity and soup to those less fortunate... or shrewdly striking periphery alliances of rival spheres? More at 11. Probably soup tho

Welcome, but you should really look into getting a protector as a small and growing alliance.

As two people interested in data rather than argument, I will comment on your pastebin based purely on my subjective thoughts, the treaty web, and my recent review of alliance affairs. Frontier Records, Egyptian Empire, Acadia, UPN being considered BK&co seemed questionable to me. That's about 200 nations and half a million score riding on peripheral ties, in certain cases like two jumps away or more from BK.

I'll admit that's good but you can't say it out loud like SynPO

Can we all just agree to call Syndi-NPO "SynPO"? "It never paid more to Sin" works in a lot of ways too.

I feel compelled to defend Partisan's honor that you would compare two paragraphs to his beautiful walls of text. Nationsims such as PnW, and including PnW, used to have more emphasis on the concept of "In-character versus Out-of-Character" (IC and OC). This doesn't just mean keeping your real life separate from the game, but it also means having a character to be in. It means (meant?) putting forth that effort to make a post entertaining or worth reading. Most of the people here already know this but as these games progress in real-time, the people who put the effort in get burnt out. Some more easily, some less so. Eventually everyone that's active hits a point where they need to take a break. Prefontaine is an excellent example of someone who cares to put the effort in but gets burnt out and returns again, Partisan is a worse example but you get the idea. The game depends on the community to generate most of its content, but we're trending towards less of both quality and quantity. Again, not to single you out Buo, but your post the other day talking about signatures and treaty text being boring minutia that didn't warrant actual posting is a good example of this trend. When you said something along the lines of "let's get back to what matters: playing the game" I think that's a strong example of an overarching attitude that has had a negative impact on the overall game health (again, not trying to blame you sorry for blasting your post). More often than not, treaties don't get announced or it's more of a handshake than anything either party has put effort into designing. Declaring war is a quiet thing for many groups. Dissolving treaties even more so. I remembered when forum announcements were drafted by a team of people in certain alliances and proofread as well as a graphics person assigned for imagery. That may be a thing of the past but we still have good examples from PnW of solid effort. SK, as much as I hated their indecipherable fonts, used to put a lot of effort into the design and theme of their treaty announcements. Prefontaine is infamous for his video war declarations, a style that has been copied across the board by multiple groups. Partisan, as you say, has his moments where he posts a beautifully written wall of text with citations, sometimes images, usually a few roasts, etc. My point is: The difference that minimal effort makes is palpable on the forums, I think.

This market remains interesting. Since the time of the last posting, someone bought Munitions up to the 1100's and Steel is almost back to 2000, yet the market index is lower than when I posted (~14k around the last post, ~13k now). A volatile market is way more fun to watch.

Just another fun estimation due to late-afternoon boredom: In order to restore the market value of Food/Steel/Gas/Aluminum/Munitions to my subjective opinion of their "normal price", the collective community would need to drop almost $3 billion on all these resources. Food back to 90's- 808m Gas back to 2000's- 528m Steel back to 2000's - 635m Munitions back to 1100's - 124m Aluminum back to 1700's - 648m The majority of the cost for almost every resource to fluctuate back upwards towards a "norm" is actually due more to a handful of members posting large sell orders that appear to be locking-in prices. For example: $431m of the $808m needed to boost food back up is from one persons single posting at 63 PPU.

The current market index looks like it's floating about $1000 above your last plotted point and in recent recollection this is the lowest I've seen it in awhile. It'll probably drop lower but just an interesting thing I noticed.

That's a lot of text for a lazy announcement. Congratulations on your treaties. We're ever closer to a true multi-polar world.

Hello and welcome to my TED talk. I think the score formula could use a look at simply because of the age of the game and the scale of certain nations. The way score is calculated has long been a source of contention and it's about time to stir the pot once again. Some facts for discussion/consideration: -The nation of Fraggle Rock (sorry Fraggle ily) is the #1 nation in score by a margin of ~2000 score. -The number 50 nation is approximately half the score of the number one nation. From 51-100 is less than 1k score difference. From 101-150 is roughly 400 score difference. 151-200 is roughly 200 score difference. From there everyone is pretty tightly compacted all the way down. - The top 2 nations are considerably ahead in score even from the next nation in rank. (Fraggle to Tywin is about 2k, Twyin to Wampus is also about 2k). After Wampus (#3) scores seem to follow a much closer trend. - The breakdown of how Fraggle achieved #1: 14 cities, 32.2k infra, 6 national projects. All of which account for a little over 10% of her score. There is no military other than missles and nuclear weapons in the nation of Fraggle Rock. - The breakdown of how Tywin achieved #2: 38 cities, 99.7k infra, 14 national project. All of which account for a little less than 50% of his score. Tywin's military is almost entirely traditional, with only 5 missiles and no nuclear weapons. - Wampus, Seb, and Bollocks all have a similar build. Seb should probably be #3 with the current formula but he has relatively little military but more cities than Wampus. Notably, Wampus only has ~40k infra whereas Bollocks and Seb have about 80-100k each. Actually the rest of the top ten follow a similar pattern of less military but larger city count and infra than Wampus. Suggesting Wampus and potentially Tywin and Fraggle are not the "true" top nations. - Based on the nations on "None" alliance alone, a rough estimate puts PnW at less than 4000 active or semi-active players. My initial thoughts on looking at things is as follows: Infra needs to count for significantly more score than it does. Like say a 20-30% increase. Cities need to count for slightly less score. Like say a 10-15% decrease. Nuclear weapons need to count for significantly less score than they do. Like a 50% or more decrease. Soldiers and Aircraft could stand a 5-10% increase in score but they aren't "needing" to be tweaked per se. All score numbers could be doubled (before factoring in any other tweaks) to create more spread out tiering. More spread out tiers may be a good or bad thing though, I would interested to hear opinions on this.

This is mostly an issue for the food market right now but could, in the future, conceivably become a problem for the future of all resource markets. We obviously have a flood of food right now for various reasons. Prices have crashed as a result. Food is plentiful and cheap, yay. However, these crashed prices are being artificially extended via alliance stockpiles worth of food being dumped for cheap. See the millions of units for sell on one stack. This creates an artificial block of price fluctuation. A typical nation can buy a couple hundred thousand worth of food if they’re really wanting to and bump price by a small margin. That’s part of the fun of trading is that it’s interactive and belongs to the players. To that end I have my suggestion: Any single player can only post 99,999 of any given resource at a time. Alliances can still coordinate and post multiple offers, which will engage members and make embargoes feel a little more potent. But via human nature and activity limitations between different people, this will diminish the amount of “doom stacks” on the market. This is probably a controversial suggestion because it’s trading ease for what’s probably better for the community. I genuinely believe this would be a good change though. It would allow prices to fluctuate faster and keep people more engaged.

ODN's is a tide ad.

It appears that once again Arrgh will show the world that war is the natural state of things.

You guys are great! Special thank you to Alex for throwing this into the changelog! We're almost to $250 raised which is way more than I expected to *end* with. Right now the website says we've raised enough for seven people to get access to clean water. If you think about how much your household pays for water, you've given these people sustainable access to clean drinking water for the collective price of 2-4 months of water bills. That's my favorite part about Charity: Water, the low cost and ability to impact a life in such a significant and positive way.

Where's the Hexagon though...

I've been told by quite a few people that PnW isn't the best place to raise money, but that's not the point. This is a rare chance for our community, that shares these forums and this game, to come together for a common good. The amount we raise isn't the point. It's the occasional opportunity to set aside IC differences, or even OOC disagreements, and make some sort of difference. Whatever we donate here will go to a positive end, hopefully the goodwill generated by this gesture will matter as well.

Thank you, single other anonymous donation!

Politics and War Holiday Happiness: Charity in the Nuclear Winter Hello all. I'm 5 days late on this post but oh well. As a global war rages on and countless civilians and military personnel are experiencing untold suffering on Orbis in roleplay, let's take a minute to remember that suffering exists in the real world as well. The holidays can be a time when people are tight on cash, but it's also a time for giving. A time when people look to give happiness and hope to others. Typically every year around the beginning of December I like to attempt to organize some sort of fundraising drive so that our small community here can make some positive impact on the world. As it turns out, it's slightly harder than you'd expect to find a reputable charity with an accessible website that you can utilize to do a group fundraiser that would appeal to the widest possible audience. So while it may not be the most "holiday" themed, I hope you will still look upon this as an opportunity to come together and make a difference as a community. https://my.charitywater.org/bartholomew-roberts/pnw-holiday-happiness Charity Water is a charity that the nationsim community has utilized before in the past, they are reputable and no one (including myself) except the intended recipients sees a penny of the funds raised by our campaign. I get nothing from this, you get nothing from this, this is an opportunity to potentially change our world for the better as quickly as you would make a purchase on Amazon. There is no minimum or maximum donation limit, but I set our goal for $5000 just in case we're really feeling spirited. The charity itself is all about offering access to clean water across the globe in an international effort to provide the most basic of necessities to people who need it. https://my.charitywater.org/global-water-crisis This link provides more information, and obviously there's more info to be found on their website. Paypal is accepted, which is my preferred method of donation due to privacy and security - but they also accept cards. Thank you for your time, your care, and your (hopeful) donation. quick edit: I would ask that if you cannot or will not donate, that you share this on your alliance forums or discord servers.

This is sad. Whoever did this should feel ashamed of themselves.

Halving resistance would be too much. The tweaks to PNW are already famous for taking an axe to a problem you need a scalpel for... Increasing the number of attacks it takes to win a war is not necessarily a bad idea though. I also liked the suggestion of giving war types extra resistance but there have also been some good arguments against it too. I 100% am behind any change to resistance honestly, it’s not a Great War system for the niche this game fills. It’s too real-time reliant imo.