Corvidae

Enjoy your well-earned vacation! See you when Alex implements Lunar wars

I agree with this post as well, lots of false-negativity about how the game has fallen off. I have my own share of critiques when it comes to this game and community, but the people who are feeling like the world has lost something are also the people who have disengaged themselves the most from the community. It becomes negativity to dare ask these people to come back into shared spaces. This is more or less what I was trying to say, and about more than just UPN. While I recognize that age lends some gravitas to any group, it really doesn't define a legacy. UPN's history, in my mind, was as a group that had momentum in the early game of PnW but got beat out by competing powers over time. Then they tied themselves down to NPO and lost their individuality from there. Haven't seen them do or act in years, and I think when they fought the Johnsons it was revealed they're running a very weird off-meta MMR which just shows you how out of touch some insular groups can become. The game's meta is so easy to understand and plan for, even if you don't feel like learning it just copy/paste what t$/Rose are doing with their nations and you'll have success. That's where the jokes and the "yelling" and the general sense of inferiority come from. Yet you can see in the responses I've gotten from these UPN people talking about their playstyle being judged, it's a victim complex. They'd rather be bad out of spite and pride.

I know this is an AI memepost but multiple groups have shown the efficiency of central planning in PnW. The only drawback is the community skews towards more active people and those more active people want gameplay. Just like letting an FA head run your politics instead of letting every member decide if they're going to join a war or vote on a treaty, central planning is probably better than letting every individual decide things for themselves.

So as of this post, two members of NpO have joined TCM. A strong merger. If this isn't a meme post for a new protectorate, honestly may be a good call for NpO to move on to new projects.

So this treaty will last as long as it takes Pascal to check his pings in the balkans then, got it. Nice treaty, well-written, ODP's are a bit weird to me but we'll see where this goes!

Thanks for putting in the effort to respond btw.

I don't buy into this oft-repeated platitude. It's a lazy blanket to hide under, that's all. Some newer players may get roped into this line of thought by the older players repeating this ad nauseum, but that really feeds back into my point that these old, tired groups are a net-loss for their own members and the wider community. When you look at the peak of activity here, in Cyber Nations, in Nationstates, and every other similar game it's during the peak times of alleged toxicity. NPOLT or earlygame PnW were ferocious on the forums, people trading essays and claiming that XYZ was out to get them. Me "yelling" (aka- saying anything about the reality of the situation) at these people doesn't drive them away, their disinterest keeps them away and my "yelling" in fact brings some here to defend themselves. This is a political/nation simulator, disagreements and criticisms are core gameplay elements. It just boils down to having cake and eating it too. If you're happy, as some in this thread claim, with your current status - then by all means stay the course. I'll be in your defensive slots looting your stuff, and my gameplay experience will not be worsened for it. I post these threads to call attention to, and hopefully get read by, the people who are languishing in these insular or dead groups like the low gov who are genuinely interested in PnW but stuck in a bad AA.

Good thoughts that I agree with. This thread is part of my attempt to refocus discussion back onto the forums, as realistically there can be no communal space that is privately run, as privatization naturally creates exclusion. While I didn't mean to kick UPN in particular, they have been the bulk of people responding. So I hope they don't feel hated or unwanted in the community when the contrary was my point: I want these people and more to come back into shared spaces and take proactive political and internal action to better themselves. Self-organizing is just anarchy in disguise, the central committee will organize the people.

There was a second part of this post, but I got cut short by IRL stuff. UPN was a major player for the first couple of years of PnW. You cannot deny your alliance's fall from grace. Disbandment is not a bad thing when you've spent more years as a looked-down-upon alliance than a major player. If you guys want to do something else then that's also fine, but I think it's safe to say you and several other long-standing groups need radical change to stay or become competitive with the other alliances in the game. Sorry if that offends you, these are my personal thoughts and by no means some kind of religious proscription. You can play the game any way you want but you can't be mad when people call your alliance bad when... your alliance is bad. Just to re-emphasize my above reply, that's great. UPN is just, unfortunately, not the competitive alliance it was in the earlier parts of the game. If we're being honest it's a pain I share with you, being in Arrgh: We're constantly working to bring ourselves back into relevance after being a big-ish player in the early game. So I hope this doesn't come across as preachy, but rather just shared experiences.

These are just my personal thoughts on a topic that is a bit controversial. I've felt recently that there are quite a few alliances in existence that don't participate in the wider community, don't really initiate or even contribute to politics, and generally only ever fight defensive wars when their inactivity or incompetence becomes the center of someone else's war of boredom. The reason I write this is because I feel that there has become an oversaturation of these alliances and we seemingly are living in a time of change for Orbis, so maybe this writing will prompt action. The problem with these groups is usually not their inactivity as they log in often enough to function, sometimes just barely, as an alliance. The problem also does not lie with their incompetence, as the meta and politics are both relatively easy to learn and navigate. The issue is that stubborn pride is like a glacier: Locking up fresh water, inaccessible to the world. These alliances are host to several active players usually working hard to keep the wider group afloat, locked away from the community, and usually stuck in lower government positions long enough to drive them inactive. Cora from UPN is a good example of a potentially great player in an alliance fallen from greatness long ago, and now can only be described as insular on their best day. UPN, The Immortals and Mortals, Dark Brotherhood, TCM, USN, and Gods of Orbis -- just to name a few from the top 50 -- have over 400 nations between them. That's almost 10% of all active nations, locked up like a glacier in insular communities that generally don't drive or even participate in politics. Food for thought.

For future reference, these types of posts need to go into Orbis Central subforums. Alliance Affairs is really for announcements or something your alliance wants to share with the world at-large. You're also embarrassing yourself a bit by making multiple posts about some random micro guy no one has heard of, better to join an actually established alliance like Rose or TKR than keep on this crusade in my opinion. You can even come join Arrgh and attack Ragnar and his cronies all you want.

Congrats to both parties on the upgrade.

It'd have been cool to see the wording of the treaty, if there is any, specifically looking for a supremacy clause or lack of. I'm curious how this pans out when you have so many peripheral alliances and treaties left in the wake of this new bloc. T$ being the obvious question but also: House Stark, Carthago, the entire Odd Bunch bloc, the Legion, Requiem, etc. Congratulations and praise for doing something new though, this is definitely an unorthodox lineup and I know more than one party is taking a chance to make this happen. I'll be interested to see how this pans out over the next week.

Can we please make this optional? I can see this becoming hellacious with the number of times PnW already asks me to re-login if I go from PC to mobile to a laptop, etc. If you add an idiot test button to your game, then I don't think you understand who your playerbase is. I can see this being abused maliciously by disgruntled leaders or accidentally triggered via a page loading lag way more often than anyone actually needs to use it. It's already simple to disband an AA, my vote it to not add this feature at all. Ease of access is not always a good thing for certain features. This and missiles destroying 2 improvements feels absolutely excessive to me. Improvement destruction shouldn't become a meta ever, improvements are the core element of PnW that enables economic and military production (AKA - the ability to do anything), allowing them to be further destroyed via wars I think is a mistake in a game that already struggles with lacking recourse for losers. Even acknowledging nukes as a weapon of last resort, improvement destruction should honestly be nerfed from its current state rather than buffed. All the other changes look good though, I think/hope they will have positive game impacts. I'm unsure of the superiority changes but let's see what tests show.

Cataclysm is establishing a tradition of fast-paced politics and agile diplomacy as they see a perceived advantage to take. I appreciate the change of pace compared to other major groups and the openness to opportunity that we see from you guys. Good luck moving forward.

Good luck guys

All the ideas look good here to me, seems to be a net-positive for the game. My only feedback is regarding this quoted piece: I feel that both the game AND Alex would both benefit from widening this a little bit. Rather than basing it on nation age, why not base it on a sliding scale in relation to cities (or even more simply, score). Anyone outside of the top 1% of the game (score or city-wise) can purchase this bonus. This allows those older players in the c20-39 range get a good boost and reason to login daily and help solve this growing issue of whales dominating the game, while also widening Alex's audience of "people who might be interested in buying more credits." Just my two cents. I will also simply mention that $8m is a pretty high number when looking at the game's economy. That will add a lot of cash into the game that was otherwise not there, maybe try doing the new player bonus as $1.5m -> $2.5m -> $5m first and see how that pans out. We can increase it later on.

As they should be. I judge all my actions by whether Morf would approve or not.

I want to really stress that if this were happening irl with a bank and a depositor, you guys would be on the hook so hard lol. This is starting to read a lot like the story of Enron. Even your rebuttal to the CB is full of mistakes, misinformation, or just platitudes appealing for forgiveness citing human error. I want to type up a longer reply but frankly I have no dog in this fight. Suffice to say, this was not the angle I would've personally gone with trying to defend myself. The people commenting that this is good are either skimming or lying.

For clarity, do you mean Guardian or are you pre-emptively stating this for other third parties outside of CTO-HS?

While I personally disapprove of private business ventures in the game, I will say that they've contributed to the politics of the game in their own way. Usually in a very silly way like every bank collapsing, but still.

This new Guardian, breaking up with Grumpy and forming new spheres, sparking globals, and now jumping in on an Optional Aggression clause of their treaty... Christmas in July June!

You guys have time to honor the cancellation clause of the ODP. This was a great post by the way. Well done, Ataxia. I absolutely understand how dealing with Daveth can be and honestly it's impressive you guys managed to hold off war for almost a year.

Reasonable and measured.

Pretty simple. Make Wind plants power 500 infra instead of 250. I think you'd see a lot more use and niche raider builds use wind plants. Gives somewhat of a use to otherwise ignored improvement.