Alcyr

Ah, first message would be from the private discussion that didn't involve Aurora/CoA/Hive? That does actually make sense and didn't register to me since the other screenshots seemed like a reply to it. So I suppose I'll have to concede that point, though I'd still say it is a mistake to tarnish Aurora's reputation over a leak. Okay. I wasn't really thinking about you as an individual though, I was thinking of Aurora's reputation as a whole - giving a 72h cancellation notice and not following it is going to hurt Aurora's reputation, which also makes finding good allies harder. Maybe you don't care about that either, though, which - fair enough, I guess. Very vague accusation here. Is this referring to the whole "won't tell anyone about cancellation but it got leaked" thing? Because it is very unlikely to be the same people who actually agreed to keep it secret that did the leak. Sure the AAs bears some responsibility for the leak since it means someone not quite trustworthy was in those channels, but that isn't the same as lying. Calling out a BS argument =/= crying. You can say "yeah we said 72h, but we're mad, so we just declared anyway" and it'd be fine. I'd still personally think it's dumb choice, but it would be valid. It trying to justify it with "well there wasn't a cancellation notice in the treaty" or "but really, it's your fault that we didn't do what we said!" that I'm arguing against. Okay. Hello. Not really a counter-point, though. I don't have an issue with war. My point was that you can't point at a subset of the community that complains about it being boring to criticize people who don't want to go along with your plans. They're generally not the same people. Which, to be fair, wasn't something you personally said I think - that was specifically in response to the person I was replying to.

See above about the "non-existent treaty clause" (tl;dr: doesn't matter whether it is a clause, you gave a 72h notice, not following it makes you a liar). Dunno what you're specifically referencing in regards to violating a treaty, unless you think having a private discussion somehow violates a treaty? "Plotting" is a ridiculous term to use here. Were we planning to drop and roll you immediately? Doubtful. Not being asked for a defense is, at most, rude - but hardly a "plot" deserving a CB and free reign to lie about a cancellation notice. "Actively sabotaged" is again ridiculous. You're using the opinion of one person (LT) who (checks notes)... Doesn't actually determine our war policy. As someone literally in TI's milcom, LTs opinion was not how we were running our beige policy, and we certainly weren't trying to throw Aurora, CoA, or Hive under the bus for our own benefit.

It doesn't matter whether there's an official clause or not, if you say you are giving 72 hours notice, then you attack us before those 72 hours are up, that is still lying. People are generally expected to follow their word. Shocking. So, you're allowed to outright lie about a 72h notice but not being consulted is a valid CB? Wow. Maybe there's a reason your allies didn't consult you first. Surprise: no alliance likes people who leak opsec! Just because it happened doesn't mean it is acceptable. Amazing how that works. Also: You state in your own DoW you don't know who leaked. Do you even know which side did the leak? There really isn't any good motivation for leaking on either side, so why are you so sure someone on your side didn't decide to leak because they were unhappy about being kicked out and wanted to stir the pot? Even assuming that you are correct that it was someone on our side, the cancellation would have to become public anyway when, you know, you left the bloc. Is it really worth breaking a cancellation notice and being labelled as a liar because people found out you got kicked out a few days earlier than intended? If a threat is assessed and everyone but you decides it isn't significant, unilaterally trying to gather a coalition with alliances unrelated to the bloc you're in (which can easily turn into a CB which only makes you even more likely to be attacked) is absolutely an issue, yes. The game is called Politics & War. Just because war hawks associate war with fun doesn't mean you can ignore your bloc and do whatever you want in the name of fun. And this is a community filled with many people with different views and goals, of course if you focus on one (rather vocal) part of the community you'll end up making another part of the community upset for different reasons.

If someone gets a Pyrrhic or Moderate vs a full superiority, does that break it entirely (i.e. to no superiority) or just reduce it one step (to partial superiority)? Not asking about immense triumph since it makes sense for that to do more. Personal preference would be for Pyrrhic/Moderate to reduce it by one step rather than breaking it fully.

I think it is important to note that details beyond what are explicitly mentioned in the OP are subject to change as well, so I think it's better to consider whether any of the ideas proposed could be made to work after some additional details are worked out. They aren't full proposals, just general approaches. The resistance/maps issue is a valid point, especially if saving MAPs because of beige cycling. Ignoring the beige cycling issue for a moment (since that should be addressed by beige changes ideally), I think the partial superiority idea would somewhat offsets that since rather than all or nothing, if you got the initial success you'd have half the bonus for example - so weaker, but still there. Anything more than two steps seems like it could start being a much bigger issue, though, even with that offset. Naval is an issue too, as it is already rather secondary in wars, with blockades being fairly easy to plan around. And blockading isn't really something that can be halved. Either the benefit would need to be entirely reworked to something that could be variable (something that affects other units like ground/air already do?), or getting naval superiority can progressively unlock abilities. What specifically would be up for debate, but there was a naval bombardment idea that was floated around (which would allow ships to target city improvements in exchange for decreased infra damage and taking more damage from defending ships), so just as an example it could be that half superiority causes a blockade as it behaves currently, then full superiority allows for bombardments. Or something along those lines, that's really just an example to explain how it could work. So personally with some fleshing out of details, I think it could result in something decent.

Yeah, I think the second suggestion is the more useful one here, mostly because it allows for better ability to vote on all the liked options rather than having to pick one. Theoretically all the people who voted for partial superiority could also support 2 ITs, but not the reverse - which would mean that 2 ITs actually has wider acceptance even though it has less votes. Though I highly doubt that's the case here, I think it's more likely that people who support 2 ITs would also be OK with the partial success than the other way around (but that may just be my own opinion on the options). Edit: It also makes it a little bit clearer that it's more of a question of "is this something you think could be changed for the better, and if so, do any of these initial ideas sound good?" so that the initial yes/no is about the problem rather than any specific ideas, at least in my opinion. My two cents on this: if you're sitting on someone, then either you're accepting that you may lose in order to prevent giving them beige or they're basically zeroed already - in both cases, superiority isn't a hugely motivating factor I think. It'd probably be better to address that by changing beige so that sitting doesn't have a benefit in the first place, rather than punishing people for following the meta caused by other mechanics. I think it would also be a bit of a nerf to GC compared to AS again since you can still airstrike any unit no matter how long you sit, but GC would get lost.

Ah, ok. Being as clear as possible about what stage the ideas are in is always a good thing. A bit off topic, but I'd consider making the poll either (a) combine the "after 2/3/4 ITs" options into one (it isn't an important detail for determining community acceptance of an idea in general) or (b) have two questions, one a yes/no for overall willingness to discuss changes and another a multiple choice poll for which ideas would be acceptable (the people who voted for 2 ITs may also support the partial superiority option, for example). Since I don't want to be entirely off topic, I'll just say why I voted the way I did since my original post didn't actually say anything about how I voted. I can see myself liking a more variable way of superiority being gained, lost, and applied, even compared to how it behaves now. It's probably a bit more of a change than the other proposals, but the other options regardless of how they're implemented seem like they would end up being more unintuitive and messy, and I don't think I'd be likely to get behind any of those options.

Ah ok - might be good to clarify that point on the OP (that how superiority is broken would be decided in further discussions if the poll supports a change) since it seems there's already been a couple questions about it. Which it doesn't hurt to discuss anyway, but knowing that it will be discussed in further detail before any changes happens will help.

There's a lot of questions here. Do the ITs need to be consecutive, or does IT, Moderate, IT work? What happens if the enemy gets a victory in between ITs? Off the cuff, it seems like out of these changes (assuming there is a change, so eliminating the no change option for this discussion), the most intuitive way of doing it would be some variation of partial superiority. A very basic sketch of the type of mechanic I'm thinking of: Two step function for superiority, first IT gives 50% second gives 100% Someone getting a pyrrhic or moderate success vs superiority only drops this by 1 point (so 50% -> 0% or 100% -> 50%) Someone getting an immense vs superiority drops this by 2 points, going 1 in their favor if you only had 1 point (100% -> 0%, 50% in defender's favor -> 50% in attacker's favor). Getting an immense also drops superiority by 1 point in all other wars the target is a part of (representing the shatter superiority mechanic that currently exists). Something along these lines, I think. You could play with the values to have a more complex tug-of-war too, like increasing the number of steps but having ITs count for 2 and Moderates count for 1 (and if you're attacking into superiority, 3/2/1 for immense/moderate/pyrrhic). Something like that, though the specifics could use some work.

Yes, that is what I'm expecting, because that's what a community is going to want out of the person who's the face of the dev team - especially in a thread that's explicitly about discussion. I can't meet you in the middle because you're not just interacting with me. You may be having this discussion with me, but you're interacting with a community, not an individual. And we're interacting with you as a representative of the dev team, not as an individual, even if we're having the discussion with you. If you come across as defensive and distant in these threads, then the dev team comes across as defensive and distant. That's not something I or the community can change - it is the nature of your role. Heck, if afterwards you can come back and say "this was a common complaint, but we talked about it and decided that it was worth it because of xyz" that's still better than nothing. And I'm not saying every single post needs this kind of response, but if someone makes a particularly good point or there's a point that is repeated a lot, it needs to be addressed one way or another. And a response weeks later in the form of modifications to the idea doesn't really work for people, on a psychological level. It's too disconnected from the original discussion thread. Sure, you'll never satisfy everyone, there's always going to be people who don't like that you didn't do exactly what they wanted. But the goal isn't to satisfy every individual, it's to make the wider community fell heard. I understand better now, though I still think you're wrong. The problem being that I see your point from the perspective of you as an individual, but it just isn't really compatible with the role you've ended up taking here.

I get that - I'm fine with moderating the comments and expecting people not to resort to insults. I was more saying, still remove them, but if you are getting an unusual amount of them it may be an indication that you're suggesting something unpopular. It may also be something where each discussion thread should have an agree/needs work/disagree poll so that people can give a high-level opinion without having to make a comment, and a bit more formal than up/down votes (plus having the additional option that allows for "I could get behind this, but it needs some changes"). So people who don't have the willingness to elaborate can still give their overall opinion without disrupting the thread. Preferably anonymous if polls can be made anonymous.

Now this is getting really frustrating, and is really an example of what I'm talking about. Your response to some criticism was basically just "no, you guys need to do better, I'm doing perfectly fine!" Those examples are suggestions around specific details that you were already amenable to changing and thus were willing to change fairly immediately. Great. Now what about when there's an argument that requires a bit more thought to determine whether and how to address, or is a concern with the fundamental change and not a detail of the change? For example, with the current discussion, several people have outlined cases against your changes. The only thing we've seen is defensive responses to a subset of those, while others get ignored even if they elaborate on the point. Have any of those resulted in you reconsidering the approach? Did anyone make a point that you'll be bringing up with the dev team? We have no idea, and posting a comment or new thread weeks or months later doesn't help with the feeling of not being heard. You don't need to have a fully formed change in order to respond to criticism, you can say "good point, we'll take another look at the idea with this in mind". And if you don't do that, we have no idea if you're ignoring our comments because you've dismissed them or if you're actually thinking about it. And you can't seriously expect the burden to be on players to be better about communication. There's always going to be those individuals who just say "terrible idea" without any elaboration, you will never get rid of that. Players aren't representing a dev team that holds the decision making power, they don't need to be concerned with whether other people trust them to be listening to other people's ideas. And not everyone wants to type up an essay explaining why they think it is a bad idea. Moderate the actually rude comments if necessary, but don't try to shift the blame for lack of responsiveness onto those individuals - because you will get people who are willing to explain, too. Do pay attention if you get more of those "this is terrible" comments than usual, then look at the people actually willing to make an argument for reasons why that might be.

So very delayed and not necessarily clear to people whether they in particular were heard. Look, here's something that would go a long way to helping people at least feel heard: when you see something that causes you to reconsider an idea or approach it from a different angle, say so. Immediately. As in, respond to them in the discussion thread, and say something like "That's a good point, I'll discuss this with the rest of the team". If the only thing we see you do is defend yourself without acknowledging any issues, it comes across that you don't actually care or you're really set in your own opinions (whether that's actually the case or not). That doesn't mean you should never explain why you want to make a particular change - we need to know your point of view in order to better form our own opinions and arguments about the change - but visibly acknowledging when there's a drawback, and saying when someone's argument is making you think about things deeper would go a long way to help with trust.

Reiterating and expanding on some points that got deleted: Your change has the following effects: It makes it take slightly more attacks for someone to get zeroed in the first round since you're doing less damages on a down declare, but doesn't change the end result. The blitz advantage itself is going to be more important to deciding the winner than any city count differences. After the first round, the losing side loses more infra and thus lose more score, meaning debuffing down declares and buffing up declares actually hurts the losing side and helps the winning side. You've said no one uses this strategy, but that anecdotally isn't true - it has been used before, even if it isn't the most common strategy. The reason missile turrets are more common is because it is easy and doesn't require coordination, not because this strategy is invalid. You've admitted to these, though the post was deleted in your cleanup. But here's the thing: It isn't worth worsening an existing problem (that being the difficulty in coming back from a losing war) in order to slightly soften the opening blitz, especially when that softening isn't actually going to have any practical change in the end result. If one side has enough whales to spare on enough down declares, it isn't going to matter that their damages are going to be lowered a bit. And in the rare scenario that the war was close enough for the bonus/malus to change the end result, then all you've done is change which side is getting pinned - which doesn't address the actual issue with wars in general. So that's why I don't think you should do this change. If you must change something related to damage, I do have an alternate suggestion that I personally at least think would be better: Base it on current army values instead of city count. More units should always mean more damage of course, but once you have more units than your opponent, damage can scale in a non-linear way beyond that point. I don't really want to propose specifics for something that would really be a balancing act, but the idea would be that it is always benefiting the currently disadvantaged side rather than basing it on something like city count, which doesn't actually tell you who's winning. This accomplishes your goal of softening down declares in an initial blitz (when military is maxed), but without screwing over the losing side's whales just by virtue of the fact that they're whales. I think it also makes some sense from a realism perspective, though that's not necessarily a good argument for a game decision.

Okay, but it would help if you actually acknowledged concerns about the change. As it is, it kind of feels like you're simply informing us of the change and then defend the idea. Posts criticizing the idea only ever get a defensive response, or no response at all. Do these discussions actually change your mind? If not, why bother making them? If so, make it clearer when an idea is being scrapped so we can see that talking about it actually works. If all we get is defensiveness and silence when we have a problem, of course that's going to cause more anger than constructive discussion.

Still a good post - it is good to have an anecdote of someone actually using strategy since @Prefontaineseems to think that doesn't exist (admittedly missile/nuke spam is more common, but if alliances don't commonly utilize a strategy that doesn't mean the strategy is invalid).

I think with beige there's still room for the attacking/winning side to make a counter-blitz harder for the enemy. For example, an idea that came up pretty quickly was staggering beige times so that the enemy has to either come out in theoretically more manageable waves or decide to do a larger counter-blitz with incomplete military. With the spy changes, there's no way for the side winning the spy war to mitigate the counter-attack - it is basically just a full reset of the spy war about every week, with timing entirely determined by the losing side. Also, I think you overestimate how quickly spies get wiped across a coalition. It isn't like a day or two into the war, everyone's zeroed and you can target their military. So you're still wiping spies while they're recruiting reserves that they can bring back into play once they're wiped. I'd say the "10 days minimum" window would actually be 10 day maximum of taking advantage of the "spy blitz", since they'd likely already have a few days of reserves built up from battling it out at the beginning of that round of the spy war.

Wait, hold on, I didn't see this in the original post. It doesn't describe expiration as an auto-win for the defender, it says defender gets beige. So who's getting looted/infra loss? The defender? Or are you actually saying here that attacker gets looted/infra destroyed and defender gets 2.5d beige?

That's... Not actually that much when you're talking about selling infra. Literally, just the two nations that RON reported on covers that entire infra drop. So congrats, you've gone from "omg there's a person selling infra!" to "omg there's two people selling infra!" and making it sound like it's an alliance wide policy.

Huh, so small blocs group up with larger blocs for safety permanently instead of temporarily. That sounds like you'd naturally gravitate towards a 2-sided world. I feel like I've heard that recently.

Except that was an argument against 1v1 minispheres because it would always encourage the smallest bloc to expand to be bigger to avoid being an easy target. Whereas LT was suggesting using temporary team-ups that can vary from war to war depending on circumstances, with actual politics deciding what any groupings end up being. Now, differences of opinion are of course going to happen, but it seems weird to quote LT's opinion of what would happen in your version of minispheres as part of an argument against his version of minispheres when you didn't actually address the concern at all.

What I posted: LT doesn't use any alliance funds for his cities. What you took from the post: LT uses alliance funds for his cities. Amazing. You can throw baseless accusations around while ignoring what I actually said. Congrats.

I'm just going to highlight a key word in that sentence: Of course, to your original point, LT isn't using any alliance funds to my knowledge. I believe a lot of his money came from flipping resources on the market. Bank records are of course public, so if you think he's using the AA to fund his cities, you should of course be able point to actual transactions. More generally speaking, I can certainly agree with namukara's assessment that TI's objective with grants isn't to fund the top tier (and if it was, it doesn't do a good job of it).

Oh man, are you telling me those HM alliances broke their paperless treaty with Rose? Because HM is just as guilty of what happened in Duck Hunt. Or maybe, bear with me here, TI doesn't have a paperless treaty with Rose? Gasp.

Well so far TI/TFP have shown more willingness to downsize, both by leaving Swamp after Duck Hunt and downsizing Oasis when TKR/t$ split after Quack's Last Ride. Meanwhile, TKR's downsizing was immediately followed by forming a sphere with another bloc to become the biggest again. Plus, those numbers don't help now.