Cooper_

The only relevant statistic is nation counts at tiers because that's a direct reflection of a sphere's potential to project military power relative to other spheres. That's why tiering graphs are made to reflect this. Score is meaningless for comparison unless everyone has the same infra, projects, militarization, and city counts. This isn't the case, especially with the difference in militarization at the moment. Any person beyond low gov is aware of this. I know that includes y'all. I'd be happy to get into the nitty-gritty of actual military ability of all of the spheres and discuss the downsizing from Quack, but we can't do that with disingenuous arguments.

We are always proud to publicly announce all of our ties. My understanding is that transparency begets trust.

Good idea! I'll start. Zig smells bad. Pass it on.

Next Level Treaty.

Now now we all know that size isn't everything. You just got to learn to take advantage of what you've got and make the most of it, buddy. Confidence is key!

TKR world police back at it again telling poor @Denison what type phone he should have.

I don't see why it's such a problem for people to do more damage when they get dogpiled. If all this does is incentivize pixel-huggers to think more carefully about how not-so-easy their planned 3 vs 1 is, then it's doing the right job. If you win or lose, war isn't supposed to be painless. There's a large difference between "loser weapons" and wanting to hide scot-free at 8k score with full military and 3k infrastructure. You can rebuild like everybody else... Mechanics should be there to make wars interesting for all combatants, and they should allow everyone to make some ground if they're willing to fight for it. With all of the other changes making it easier to attrition a weaker opponent, this is among the mildest of tweaks that could've been made for a nation losing bc of out-tiering or dogpiling. Also, afaik Yarr/Pre are among the people who tend to hide at high scores, so this doesn't make sense that he's doing this from a personal motivation. The attacks I've seen seem to be in pretty bad faith. Frankly, I thought pre's personal interests would've resulted in him scrapping the results because of how close it was. I'm glad he went with the majority view.

The real topic of this thread is that Kev is back! ❤️

Note: Royal you Minispheres can't work unless you've got guiding principles though. Namely, that other spheres aren't engaging in paperless treaties. No amount of "proper FA" responds to the political incentives when you get even a few bad faith actors. The only thing that has changed in past iterations of minispheres is whether those same group of political actors puts their cards on the table or hides them in smokey back-channels. What's the point of having a small sphere if your potential enemies have a giant paperless web? Is there any incentive for you to just not make your own paperless web or blob your own sphere in size? The end result is no different from bipolarity as long as you can't trust other actors with some basic standards of conduct. I think the last few wars have showcased that pretty perfectly where we run through the perpetual gambit of one side slowly amplifying calls of hegemony and then proceeds to 3 v 1 said "hegemony." The "pseudo-minispheres" that you heavily influenced have mostly been a "do as I say; but not as a I do" where FA is determined by the secret ties you can scrounge from the people you knew since your time in CN. The worst offenders are usually the people who try to come off as the strongest defenders of minispheres simply because minispheres and the hegemony narratives are politically expedient for their interests. And it's part of why the past set of wars have been so uncompetitive and built on pretty weak narratives. Personally, I'd love to see a true multipolar, minispheres world, but the precedents we have so far are quite disappointing. Until we have a global understanding that minisphere doesn't mean free reign to paperless, we won't have a successful minispheres meta. That starts with the people who holler the loudest about minispheres and hegemonies who have also done the most to hurt it.

Three things here: 1. A flat reduction of 50% would actually make missiles a tiny bit stronger given that infra costs increase exponentially. i.e. two 2k cities losing 100 infra is more damage than a single 2k city losing 200 with a miss on the other 2. The damage reduction would still allow for resistance to decrease, so people can bait beiges and make it harder to get cycled. Currently you can only expect 4 resistance reduction per missile hit with ID. 3. I haven't heard that about ID before although I have heard people wanting to keep VDS as chance instead of flat reduction. I have discussed the ID idea externally with pretty decent responses. The nuke and missile military meta should not be looked at the same way. Nukes are useful in fewer situations, have less versatility, are riskier to use (saving up resources and MAPs isn't always easy), and have much greater destructive power. Having missiles as a guaranteed source of attrition you can afford with your daily bonus is pretty necessary here to balance the many buffs stronger opponents are getting to improvement attrition (requiring expensive infra rebuilding to counter).

Suggestion here to change the 50% chance to block to a 50% reduction in damage (keeping the improvement damage reduction above). Missiles are a great way people getting sat on can fight back and destroy improvements, but ID nerfs them a lot since half of the time they won't work. It's already hard enough being able to buy them without them getting destroyed by spies (which is now getting stronger) if you don't have them stockpiled, so a weaker missile is a good tradeoff for being able to more frequently attrition the enemy. This is especially true with the other changes that allow stronger opponents to do even more damage to improvements now. We're seeing a lot of changes that'll make it easier for the winning side to easily force a victory by sitting on their opponents. This would be a small tweak that gives the losing side some more space to fight back and have little ways to do some more damage.

Yes, it's called logic. I can't merge TKR with SK to form "@Squeegee Smells" and then be free of the NAP to declare on who I want. Treaties are binding when there is clear and non-conflicting continuity between the previous entities and the current one. Not really the time or place for a RebelMoment here.

Two parties, both under the NAP, that merged into a single entity are still under the NAP. The continuity here is quite straightforward.

Guilo bringing up his girlfriend unnecessarily: Guilo failing to make a logical argument and mentioning girlfriend for the 100th time: Also Guilo: Weird flex but ok...

As a minor point here, this has been standard TKR policy to have prots not sign external ties. We commit to them fully, and we provide FA services until they develop a reliable FA team (which isn't easy for most micros and a really common source of failure). We've got a pretty good track record, which TIm was a part of and Vader experienced personally. It's only natural for him to use a tried and true method versus the hands-off, sink or swim attitude a lot of protectors in Orbis tend to have towards their protectorates.

If growth was as easy as resigning the allies you already had, sign me up too.

These folks are British... It is Doctor Who to you. --- Excited to work with you folks. We'll spread the gospel of Free BBC!

The real crime here is that this all happened in light mode @Mhearl.

This is one of the reasons why war is necessary in this game as a filter for what essentially becomes overgrown micros. Schrute left NPOLT, had to have their allies and Rose bail them out against raids, and barely lifted a finger in the most recent global. If they had to face a real, challenging war, they would've collapsed or got their crap figured out. Mostly, I see this as an indictment against allowing and protecting pixelhuggery as even the members here got hurt. It was an open secret about what Schrute was doing. Anyone who paid any attention to his nation knew what was going on. Nobody grows 36 cities with weird infra counts and horrendous city builds in that timespan. ASM, as an upstanding alliance, deserves better than this imo. So do the members of Schrute. But this wasn't just enabled by the Dwight or his government.

The flaw here is the question. For me, the point of my role in FA is to create a fun environment for my communities. What many political actors in the game don't understand is that winning isn't the same as enjoying the game. From my own experience, the finest moments of my community have occurred at our darkest hours at the times of greatest challenges. That isn't to say I want to lose all of the time, but people have got to be ok with putting themselves at risk if they want to achieve anything. And here's a news flash: if you fight well, the end result of a loss or win at war doesn't look that much different at all. Points to Pantheon. My alliance has put a lot on the line to achieve its ideology, including getting rolled, but there's value in having principles and goals. If you want to just win every time, then what are we really simulating here? What's the challenge?

Yep. You either genuinely play the game and get spurned as my alliance has time and again, or you put up a front and take advantage of those who play by the rules. It takes little effort to throw up some secret treaties and show only a few treaty lines on the web while you call out anyone you don't have secret deals with a "hegemon." I mean even NPO was able to pull that one over on us. The fact that it happened again isn't surprising, but it is disappointing. Can't say we didn't try though.

I couldn't have explained your contributions any better myself. Well done.

Excuses? I might be reading this wrong, but poking a jab at my alliance for not taking risks is laughable. Since early 2018, we've been choosing the unsafe options. Although you won't ever find him around anymore, it was TCL who first wanted to end EMC. Then after KF, we joined Chaos dropping all of our allies and forming an isolated small sphere. During NPOLT, we signed TI, a new alliance without much background, and T$, an alliance we felt betrayed by and who we felt was vacillating on enabling NPO. None of our choices were easy. All of them were risky. Also, TI and TFP aren't alienated from most of Orbis at the moment. That's a poor comparison. I can further go into how I've think CoTL hasn't been at risk at any point in the post-NPOLT period, but that wouldn't be productive. That's only true if you assume bipolarity, which is your assumption not mine. Yes, I fully hoped that some of NPC would go to war with each other because that's exactly what we need to see happen given the secret treaties. We don't have a good reason to trust that you've broken your secret ties. Even if you have, what's to say they won't be brought up again when it's convenient? That's the problem with operating in the dark without transparency. There's no trust. Maybe that means that Quack or Post-Quack elements get the chance to roll one of the post-NPC spheres, but that's a hypothetical and that's also ok. No matter what side I'm on, I'd like to see the guy who just got rolled to pick himself up and win the next one. That's what the meta is about, and it's the Orbis I hope to see. No one "wins," but everyone is eventually a victor AND a loser if they play the game well. This is a false equivalency couched into a more agreeable 'coming-together' statement to seem reasonable. If we're going to put this war down to Sphinx and Boyce plotting, Occam's Razor wants a word about Hedge's anti-Quack rhetoric since day 1. I'll agree that there's blame to go around, but I won't welcome conspiracies on clearly established truths. My understanding is that secret treaties are categorically invalid at least that was what your own coalition's constituents (and your own government) told my alliance during KF for treaties that were never even activated. If we're to move on, this is the point that needs to be acknowledged and addressed. It's likely your words won't move the needle enough, so I'll look towards your actions.

I tend to agree, which is why @Benfro was at one point specifically requesting a Quack-only NAP. We had taken the damages, and we needed the diplomatic cover to assess or perhaps reassess our FA position. After KF, you guys experienced what it's like on the other side of a dogpile, and it's not always pretty. Having a few extra months to figure thing out and mend relations for Quack is frankly a good thing if you want to avoid a rote repeat. However, Ben had to drop that point, despite my insistence, because of your side's requests to that effect and focus on negotiating only on the length. Given my M.O., this is a bit unfair. Our choices have never been about security. We strongly considered a few different options after NPOLT. One of which was G/G, but post-KF we're always wary of the upper tier consolidation argument. We've been told we're a hegemony no matter what we do for more than 2 years now, so we're a bit sensitive to returning to a place where we've been called a hegemon. Although I will contend that almost all claims (absent Opus Dei and maybe 2018 EMC) of hegemony are more rhetoric than reality and that in our case it would've been unfounded too, it was still a concern. At the time, Quack was weaker/smaller than TcWsphere, so our choice to stick with T$ wasn't a super bloc nor did we consider that any more hegemonic than tying with G/G. When TcW started to fail, internal pressure ratcheted up to downsize Quack a bit to match the next strongest spheres. This manifested in a few cuts notably Aurora and determinations about some peripheries. Then, Swamp formed and grew enough that we felt somewhat satisfied with the cuts as our sizes were comparable although there still was an informal end to any non-passive growth. I'll also note that throughout this period, we received credible offers from a bunch of different alliances to leave T$. The reason we haven't is because we've found an ally we trust and like to work with. That's very valuable to us as our FA approach is entirely focused on relationships. There was no overriding reason in the meta, so it made sense to stick with Quack.