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elsuper

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Posts posted by elsuper

  1. What if 1/12 of recruitment capacity updated every turn, stacking up to the current daily limit, as opposed to all of it once per day ?

     

    There is currently some advantage to focusing replenishment and attacks at server-midnight; this would provide a bit more scheduling flexibility to players without having to worry about missing out on that arbitrary advantage, and also reduce server strain at that time.

     

    This could obviously not apply to missiles and nukes.

  2. There are 2 other things that would need to be changed for this to work as intended:

     

    1.) Spies would have to not contribute to score (they're negligible right now, so I don't see this as a big deal).

     

    2.) The number of defending spies can be somewhat inferred from the odds of a successful attack. You'd need to make spy success odds opaque as well if you really wanted to have no idea how many spies someone has.

    • Upvote 4
  3. IMO, it's important to remember that the New Testament was written when Christianity was an underground, minority movement. All of its commands refer to how the body of believers should behave toward one another, not how they should exercise dominion over non-believers in their society, one way or the other. This forms neither a solid basis for moralistic theocracy, nor for religiously-influenced state socialism. The New Testament simply does not tell Christians how a nation should be governed, because the idea of Christians governing a nation was a pipe dream at that time.

     

    As far as the Old Testament goes, there are a great many laws and regulations, which Paul affirmed as right yet argued that Jesus abolished them as requirements (the book of Romans is a good resource on this, especially chapters 7-9, IIRC). These laws were specific to the ancient nation of Israel and its covenant with God, and legally generalizable neither to the other societies of that time nor to subsequent or present societies. There are moral lessons to be drawn from them, but one must be very, very careful to draw the correct lessons from context.

     

    I feel sorry for Christians having to choose between the unpalatable but unambiguous message of the New Testament and hypocrisy. Nagging guilt is a much softer option than meaningful personal sacrifice.

     

    This guy gets it.

  4. Sheepy, please include a value/exchange rate for currencies, more like how colour stock bonuses are calculated.

     

    I think this could have a lot of potential to add depth to the market, but it would need to be done very carefully, and the obligatory "we have bigger problems, so let's worry about adding stuff later"

  5. Yeah, I wasn't sure if this was serious or not at first, but I think it's sincere. Just reading the comments and the rest of the site, there seems to be a legit debate about it, and there really are people who still think the earth is flat.

     

    My question is: if the Earth is flat, why don't we fall off the Earth when we try to go around the entire planet?

     

    Well, your question assumes that the earth is round, because if it were flat there would be no such thing as going "around" the planet, only "over" it. I think the more important question would be "where is the edge?"

     

    But really, people have gone up to space and looked down and taken thousands of pictures of the round earth, which we can look at. Even if a person thinks science is some huge conspiracy, it takes a special level of delusional narcissism for one to sincerely think they've caught on to some great secret coverup surrounding this.

    • Upvote 2
  6. I meant the topic to be broader than that. Centuries ago, the concept of "side" was defined by the King or Queen, and winning/losing were defined in relation to the monarch's goals. In modern democracies, it's both simpler and more intricate - simpler in that you could ask whether a voter would prefer $10,000 per capita to be spent on a war or put into their pocket through reduced taxes and improved government services, and more complicated in that it's extremely hard to estimate the long term impact of a war, and therefore much easier to cast a fog over it.

     

    It's not hard to see who benefits most short term from a war - politicians in power and the military industry - but getting support in a democracy for something that has yielded "sub-zero returns" to the voters at least since WW2 is worth casting an eye over.

     

    Would you consider a Pyrrhic victory to be a misnomer, i.e. not defensibly a victory (winning)? I consider there to be a difference between having a victory and having that victory be worthwhile.

     

    Although it could also be, as you said, a matter of short-term vs. long-term. That is, you can defeat your enemy in every way you consider important, but spend so much doing so that another enemy will overtake you.

  7. A topic on what constitutes "winning" a war would be interesting. ;)

     

    I think "winning" should be defined by a given side's completion of its own goals, and must therefore considered subjective. Victory could be considered proportional, though, to the number or relative importance of goals achieved, rather than an all-or-nothing proposition.

     

    Taking the topic of superpower wars in the thread this spun out of: it is my personal belief that a shooting war between nuclear-armed states carries a high risk of escalating to the use of those nuclear arms. Both sides are capable of fulfilling a goal of inflicting massive damage to the other, but not of fulfilling the obvious goal of protecting their own lands and population. Result: No winner by any standard that isn't trying to cause an apocalypse, because no side is capable of achieving all of their core goals of self-preservation.

     

    Regarding asymmetric warfare, esp. Iraq and Afghanistan, goals are asymmetric as well. The U.S. set the goal of first defeating and dismantling the forces of the existing government (quick and straightforward) but then set the additional goal of setting up a friendly, stable government capable of maintaining order and preventing a terrorism-enabling power vacuum, defending the country against outside attacks, defeating and eradicating insurgency (ha!), (to a lesser extent) preserving human rights, and remaining at least non-hostile to the US. What other examples are there of anything like this except maybe the occupation and reconstruction of the Confederacy, and later Japan and Germany? The difference being that all those examples were pacified and devastated by years of total war, and not riven by internal strife. Such mission creep makes the achievement of all objectives difficult if not impossible.

     

    On the other side, the objective of an insurgency is typically to survive and frustrate the occupiers enough to give up and leave, making their victory much more likely.

     

    Other thoughts?

    • Upvote 1
  8. One thing I question is the psychological effectiveness of missiles as a deterrent. War is already expensive and wasteful, and the people who go looking for it aren't always concerned about preserving their pixels. If they were, they wouldn't be looking for a fight in the first place.

     

    It might occasionally factor into a long-term calculation about which target to select, but only in situations where the aggressor is thinking "yeah, I hate that guy, but I don't hate him enough to take that much damage in order to roll him..."

     

    Generally, if there's a beef or a CB, I'd expect to see a war regardless of whether missiles are involved.

  9. We must first determine if we exist to determine if God exists.

     

    I find Descartes' "I think therefore I am" to be pretty compelling. But if, somehow, we don't actually exist, why would that preclude God from existing?

  10. I think (very) gradual depletion would be good for the game, overall, because it stimulates market demand from the wealthier nations over time, ultimately redistributing extra money to new players and even incentivizing recruitment to the game (get new players to provide resources for your established alliance).

     

    I'd want to see the depletion timeline stretched waaay longer, though, either by extending the lifespan of deposits beyond what OP suggested or making prospect cost increases/diminishing returns linear rather than exponential. This would help avoid a raid-rush to steal and hoard resources, and reduce inflationary shock.

     

    I think relative abundance of resources by continent would also be a neat addition to further increase interdependence.

    • Upvote 2
  11. God does no one ever go the extra mile these days? Would it have really been so hard to add two extra articles to properly spell 'you'? Poor effort, would not read again.

     

    That's the beauty of it, though, misspelling it is the extra slap-in-the-face.

  12.  

    But what are the implications of this to the question in the OP? My reaction is that, if anti-American sentiment were deeply held in Afghanistan unrelated to the occupation, there would be more awareness and pride surrounding their greatest "victory" against the U.S.

     

    Edit: And where's our basic psy-ops/propaganda to inform the people of Afghanistan of our reasons for being there? Seems like a basic step toward "winning hearts and minds," even if some think it's all lies, at least some will believe it.

  13. Pros:

    -Order +5

    -Social Services +5

    -Education +5

     

    Cons:

    -Brutality, esp. chemical weapons -10

    -Poor foreign policy decisions that sparked the ire of great powers (especially invading Kuwait, and later kicking out weapons inspectors, what did he think would happen? Also, launching missiles against nations not attacking him during Desert Storm) -10

     

    Overall -5/10 would not recommend.

    • Upvote 2
  14. But do you really think USA doesn't have interest in doing it?oil?selling weapons to other countries?

     

    As far as oil goes, I've cited it before, but Afghanistan has miniscule oil reserves (source: US Geological Survey), and oil imports from Iraq hit their all-time peak before the invasion, and have never come close since, in fact trending downward. (Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration). If we invaded "for oil," we did a really crappy job of it, because we were getting more oil from them before the war.

     

    The military-industrial complex argument is a bit more compelling, but as a special-interest motivation, not a national-interest one.

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