KiWilliam

How does one pronounce Adrienne. I'm at a loss. This is where you defend with "I was taking the piss" and then drop the subject. That or be required to include a pronunciation guide with all of your posts from now on.

I like the idea of power not being calculated at the city level, but dislike it being something that is bought/sold. Mainly because power is something that is tied to the status of having enough during a turn or not, and not a quantity you can steal or stockpile. I'd like to consider & see more options for individual power before opening the flood gates to adding it as a market/multi-player one. I think making power less rigid would be interesting. Right now you really only have one meta that people follow, and it really doesn't change based on market conditions or war vs. peace etc.

ooc: Youtube (for better or worse) actually provides the music many times in the description below (not embedded) Song: Energetic Upbeat Pop Artist: MorningLightMusic Song: Drop Artist: Jesse Kreidel Album: Blackbird (I see WarriorSoul replied. If he beat me to the punch so help me)

I'll be fashionably late to make a post. Love you Dubya.

I'm trying to learn about these homemade poptarts. Could you calm down until after that?

Who would be left to hold the bag?

The rest of the game already knew the quality of Swamp.

He's saying that it's not coded yet. Mods don't code. The development team codes.

The depth argument, because it adds an additional metric to take into account when planning wars, and what types of attacks to use, I could see as one argument that could be made. Even if I disagree with the quality of the argument. But how does it help newer nations? You can have an opinion, but without any explanation, it's one opinion vs. another. I have to agree with Zoot that changes like you are recommending fundamentally change the style & type of game PnW is. It's like if you suggested in checkers to start with difference pieces that move in different ways, and attack with different strength. At that point you're talking about some variation of chess. Not really checkers. As well to have a limitation for missiles; the one unit that actually can cross borders, and not for soldiers is silly if the point is to increase realism.

Minesome is probably the only person who could get away with this joke. I almost starting nitpicking the OP, but then I remembered it was Minesome.

When you have 2 good candidates for the job though; do you go with the small potatoes or the goat?

You should swap your Econ & FA. More people like your Econ and your FA was always the better resource collector.

As long as no one tries to turn something that is supposed to be a role play, or flavor aspect into a game mechanic on its own; I also strongly believe it is best to fix neglected features if we want to keep them into something that is useful. Even more so when it does not affect game play, the numbers can be tweaked on the fly without worry about causing a stir in the community. Good starting point for suggestions.

It's Alliance Affiliation. Who is spreading around lies.

Where's my "I wanted it to block a bit of damage on every missile but if I can't have that because we live in a democracy, the maximum amount you'll reduce it" option.

Anything to improve the tutorial please. That thing is awful and is not only overly wordy, really misses the point of the actual game. It just hand holds the player through each page without really doing anything. Not to mention the actual verbiage and layout (UX/UI) of the game could be changed to make things simpler and easier for new people to pick up the game and get up to a level of "decently competent". As much as I would like to be an elitist, without lowering the barrier to entry to playing the game; while not lowering the barrier of quality drastically; we can't bring in enough foot traffic to combat natural attrition of players, but also not add to the community which is the actual driving force of the game. With your specific points Roberts, I don't necessarily agree with railroading a player into an alliance right away, part of the tutorial is taking them to the recruitment page. I do believe that the emphasis should be increased to get anyone joining to join an alliance, but not necessarily to make that the first thing and ignore their actual education with the game itself. A player should primarily be familiar & comfortable with the game they will be playing; hopefully every other day, during their stay. And your point about the grant for cities, I don't agree with the specifics, but I do generally agree with the idea I would prefer if new players started with some sort of "base" city they can then edit and grow, rather than starting from zero. Some specifics about the tutorial, it's too linear so if a player skips a step they have to redo it for the game to count it as completed. Also could you add some NPC nations that a new player can war with? Or possibly some mechanic where after a war they go to beige automatically to rebuild with some bonus, for maybe the first month. So a new player could war right away, and then if they don't like getting creamed they can get a breather and rebuild. Taking them out of *half* of the game for the first 2 weeks seems silly. Someone that isn't already joining as a friend of someone else already playing is going to miss half the game for 2 weeks, when most people are going to drop the game in the first day or three. They should get a taste of winning, and losing a war as soon as possible in my opinion. I'd even go as far as making it part of the tutorial. Reset their nation afterwards if you must. Just anything to improve that aspect of on boarding. I could list a hundred things to improve or add to the tutorial, but in general I think any handful of experienced and driven players could write a much better tutorial. Education & player retention really just goes along with the theme of what I personally believe should the forefront of game development. I won't back off of my strong stance that thing should be tested though. Why not throw up the tutorial on the test server so even older players can try it?

Why is RNG good? Too much RNG and you're just all playing separate instances of a lottery. So obviously pure RNG is bad. And no RNG would be chess. Given the spectrum, I would err to the side of chess with other human players, than a lottery.

If you want the game to not be boring, and to be fun, and not be dropped, and to be played, as to not be ignored for months during our half year long wars, or to actually be actively played by the players. If you don't care about players you wouldn't do so, while if you care about players you would do so. To say so in as few words as possible. I can't stress enough the importance of making the *video game* actually playable by a player at all times while being fun and engaging and not just when other people in the meta game decide so. Other than maybe using the test server to test things, this can't be anything but the most important thing to do if you actually want people to play your game.

I can't think of a single update ever to ever happen in the history of updates from the development of the ASCII standard to the final spec design of the newest wifi v12 AI brain waves, that would not benefit from testing on a test server first. Don't get me started on the test server itself, but small incremental steps towards a proper & good SOP for new feature introduction would make my doki doki go very heart.

Finally some real media coverage live from the battlegrounds. Cue image of Thalmor running from sniper fire to board his private plane.jpeg These people aren't the only ones who can provide quality journalism in Orbis, but they are the only ones who actually do so.

Three people can't appreciate the wordplay. These are the bants.

I'm blind so I wanted it more legible. Just posting since I thought other people with less than good vision might also like it. Hopefully I didn't mess up the formatting. I liked the poems.

I won't comment on the first part, but the second is I hope just a tongue in cheek joke from you. I'm not actually advocating personally for bounties to be removed like OP. My intent was simply to throw out suggestions for changes, and give my unsolicited 2 cents about the hierarchy of priorities for game changes. Someone completing a bounty should always get paid the bounty. Changes to how or when could be made so there doesn't need to be any moderation and it is automatic. No game breaking exploits if those existed. But something should be done so that a mechanic that is in the game can be used fully & properly if it is to continue to exist. Otherwise if it is cut off at the knees, going against the entire point of the feature (to get money posted for winning a war against a specific target) in favor of fair play (whatever ruling that I still don't honestly know the history of involving bounties not being paid to people), then it should be removed if it is causing such problems. Simple as that. If Mr. Scarfalot is lying, and bounties have always been paid out correctly to all nations who have ever completed them, then I retract all of my statements. But bounties should work properly or be removed. Having a half baked feature around because people sometimes talk about one aspect of the game on discord or use it as a joke is not proper justification in my book to keep it around. My other ideas were just spit balling because I prefer freedom & versatility of game mechanics to allow players to decide the politics & metagame. Also one quick point in my word soup; I'm very much in favor of things being documented and do not appreciate players running into a wall because something wasn't specified. So any aspect of bounties that can not be clearly read & understood in-game should be changed or documented. No exceptions.

I know they are used, but they're hardly used that often. I was being hyperbolic when I said 'never used'; the point I was trying to express was on holding on to certain game mechanics vs. reworking them.

Could we not just put a delay on when a bounty is posted and when it could be collected? Yes some people might then "abuse" (air quotes because they would simply be [b]using[/b] it) to get money when blockaded, but it's the same logic as declaring on a target who is blockading a nation in order to break their blockade on a third nation; you would declare war on another nation to get money when one nation is having you blockaded. The actual usefulness of a blockade is to stop someone from getting resources to defend (like munitions, gas, or steel) or moving those resources or large amounts of cash off their nation to someplace safe. All this would do is allow someone who is otherwise blockaded get some amount of money. It's no more broken than simply using a credit to get out of a pinch when a nation would otherwise be "blockaded" and with a credit you can get resources too. Something beyond the scope of a bounty. I still am not really a fan of how bounties work in general, but I would be in favor of something being done to make them useful or removing them. Keeping around a vestigial feature just limits gameplay changes in the future and confuses players. Yes a new player isn't going to instantly understand all of the meta game in year [current year] without some experience or interactions with the community, but features that are never used shouldn't remain simply to have them around. They should be reworked. If we really wanted to try and make bounties more useful, more features like being able to set a bounty for any alliance member in an alliance for a period of time; any nation in [x] alliance that's defeated in an attrition war will win the nation 5million for example. That would make bounties insanely more useful, and political. Nations that win should always get their money (I don't know where it goes if they are blockaded) so they should at least be able to get it later (maybe make it standard that they're paid as soon as they're out of all wars? That would be a funny mechanic, to keep a nation at war so they don't get an influx of cash they've built up. That would be an insanely interesting "abused" mechanic). An open ended bounty system like that would have its own problems, but honestly with a couple of checks, I think it would only add a few interesting ways for drama to happen.