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Remove Alliance Bank Looting & Cap Alliance Bank Amounts


Alex
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Maybe talk to major community figures (e.g. Frawley) who have a better grasp on how game is played and the nation sim genre than apparently you do before making abrupt suggestions. I'm sure they have some great ideas to best solve the challenges this post was meant to address.

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Blame Dan Schneider~

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22 minutes ago, Alex said:

 

To answer you both: I'd be perfectly happy eliminating bank looting and setting no caps. But when I suggested that before, I got this similar "no no no NO!" response, and the reason was "this will kill raiding!"

Well, I addressed the raiding issue with caps. However, it seems that's not popular either :P

Zero caps, you would absolutely kill economic aspects and make raiding out of control since banks cant hold any level of money.

 

Take bank looting out tho, sure a loot occurs once a while but its usually not achievable with competent people 

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29 minutes ago, Alex said:

 

To answer you both: I'd be perfectly happy eliminating bank looting and setting no caps. But when I suggested that before, I got this similar "no no no NO!" response, and the reason was "this will kill raiding!"

Well, I addressed the raiding issue with caps. However, it seems that's not popular either :P

Why does a change need to be implemented?

I mean, I don't really care if you remove bank looting personally, but why is it necessary?

As we've seen a few times in this war and previous ones, it is possible to loot a bank, if the holder isn't active and on point. 

Given that both solutions are unpopular, the best solution to me seems to be to just leave it as is and focus on other areas.

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10 hours ago, Alex said:

That nation has 0 score. Regardless of whether or not they could transfer if they were blockaded, no one can declare war on them anyway. So they could never be blockaded in the first place.

You do realize that you could fix that particular problem by giving all nations 1 flat score for existing? Besides, even if you did implement the bank changes, 0 score nations would still be just as much invulnerable banks as they are now.

If anything, you might rework the score mechanics to allow a wider range of declares at the extreme low tiers; someone with 2 cities could easily build beyond the updeclare range of someone with... 2 cities. That doesn't quite seem like good math to me.

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why not just prevent beige nations from making alliances, and set a score cap (like 100-300) for creating new alliances. you could also have a score cap for nations being alliance leaders to prevent the 0 score banking alliance

or maybe disallow nations from leaving alliances while they’re in active wars displaying said alliance affiliation

Edited by hope
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11 hours ago, Alex said:

That nation has 0 score. Regardless of whether or not they could transfer if they were blockaded, no one can declare war on them anyway. So they could never be blockaded in the first place.

Are you challenging me?

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5 hours ago, Alex said:

 

To answer you both: I'd be perfectly happy eliminating bank looting and setting no caps. But when I suggested that before, I got this similar "no no no NO!" response, and the reason was "this will kill raiding!"

Well, I addressed the raiding issue with caps. However, it seems that's not popular either :P

I vaguely remember that topic and I'm sure the main problem presented by players then was "This would demotivate players to fight back once planes war is lost" along with this will kill raiding.
Not removing alliance bank loot while reducing the amount stored up in bank will also help in shortening  global war length : )

Edited by Limbuwan
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I think we need to confront the fact that really the current bank system just makes newer alliances more vulnerable than older alliances that have had years to develop relationships and trust with which to build reliable offshore banking systems from. The current bank system is largely just a problem for newer alliances and not a real problem for the old.

I would suggest one of two things be considered depending on your personal bias (safe and familiar, or more radical)...

Remove bank looting, increase beige loot and prevent blockaded nations being taxed:

  • Increase beige loot to compensate for loss of bank looting.
  • Stop blockaded nations paying taxes. It doesn't make sense that the tax man can sneak past blockades while all other transaction types are blocked, also increases potential loot on nations further compensating for the loss of bank looting.

 

Remove alliance banks:

  • The alliance no longer has taxes either.
  • Wealth transfers are almost entirely publicly visible as they're performed via trades or credit redemption; anyone can see where you're trying to hide the goods (equal vulnerability).
  • No more ever-growing untouchable stockpiles or confidence in a complete post-war rebuild to shrug off wars. Wars are risky business and all accumulated wealth is on the line.
  • Shorter wars? Both sides of wars are vulnerable to being looted all their beloved accumulated wealth. Should incentivise peace terms sooner than later.
  • Alliances can adapt to the loss of taxes by organising developed members to fund grants of undeveloped members. This simply changes what coordination of econ programmes looks like but doesn't prevent alliances from continuing them.
  • It's a radical change to the status quo and could keep things fresh; decreases the value of simply having existed longer and soaked up more taxes as all precious accumulated wealth is vulnerable (except city and project growth). Large alliances may have the benefit of more resources, but risk losing more to a more organised opponent.
  • This may make pesky pirates more accountable as their loot will be kept somewhere and be vulnerable to being raided back.

I'd quite seriously entertain the idea of removing banks entirely, but I'm also looking forward to unnecessarily aggressive responses telling me why it's a stupid idea.

Edited by Zephyr
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17 minutes ago, Zephyr said:

I think we need to confront the fact that really the current bank system just makes newer alliances more vulnerable than older alliances that have had years to develop relationships and trust with which to build reliable offshore banking systems from. The current bank system is largely just a problem for newer alliances and not a real problem for the old.

I would suggest one of two things be considered depending on your personal bias (safe and familiar, or more radical)...

Remove bank looting, increase beige loot and prevent blockaded nations being taxed:

  • Increase beige loot to compensate for loss of bank looting.
  • Stop blockaded nations paying taxes. It doesn't make sense that the tax man can sneak past blockades while all other transaction types are blocked, also increases potential loot on nations further compensating for the loss of bank looting.

I'm more inclined to support this.

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1 hour ago, Zephyr said:

I think we need to confront the fact that really the current bank system just makes newer alliances more vulnerable than older alliances that have had years to develop relationships and trust with which to build reliable offshore banking systems from. The current bank system is largely just a problem for newer alliances and not a real problem for the old.

I have a feeling this change of capping or removing banks may very well accomplish the opposite and strongly raise the importance of creating a hegemony. Top alliances will try to ally each other and completely decimate the rest of the game. Imagine one hegemony sphere with full military thats just keeping the rest of the game zeroed and loot them forever, while the hegemony sphere just cant have their well protected nations beiged. I guess that does make wars shorter, but personally I dont see newer alliances able to compete at all, they will get rolled and lose everything they have, including all their munitions so good luck getting back up. Creating a safe offshore is really something you can do with just 2 people even for new alliances, if they know how to do it that is.

 

I do however believe that this concept of a game with a capped alliance bank or none at all isnt inherently bad, it's just that people havent played the game like this for years and with this change everyone has suddenly played the game in an unintelligent way basically since its existence, because all their stockpiles are suddenly not a good thing anymore and instead they should have built more cities or something. If everyone was broke then I doubt the feedback would be as bad. Personally, I kinda love the idea of fat loot all over the place, but the fact that I have savings and would lose it all makes it a pain to imagine. If this change does get implemented then I hope there will at least be an announcement long before the change actually happens so people have a month or two to use most of it in some meaningful way.

Edited by Dryad
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38 minutes ago, Prefontaine said:

You make just under 80M a day?

Correct. At 1500 average infra, and this is with... 3 people totaling 36 cities not rebuilt for various reasons. I'd be at 2000, but i don't feel comfortable with that much debt ontop of the rest and i'm not really having anywhere else to get money for that so, rip. 

Otherwise i'd estimate i'd be at ~700m+ per week, or over 100m/day. I am only a micro, afterall.

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3 minutes ago, Akuryo said:

Correct. At 1500 average infra, and this is with... 3 people totaling 36 cities not rebuilt for various reasons. I'd be at 2000, but i don't feel comfortable with that much debt ontop of the rest and i'm not really having anywhere else to get money for that so, rip. 

Otherwise i'd estimate i'd be at ~700m+ per week, or over 100m/day. I am only a micro, afterall.

You were making it sound like you yourself made that much.

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13 minutes ago, Prefontaine said:

You were making it sound like you yourself made that much.

Oh god no, i was speaking for my alliance. I wish i alone made that much. I run 100 monetary taxes pretty much 24/7 even out of rebuild so it'll always be high like that.

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2 hours ago, Zephyr said:

I think we need to confront the fact that really the current bank system just makes newer alliances more vulnerable than older alliances that have had years to develop relationships and trust with which to build reliable offshore banking systems from. The current bank system is largely just a problem for newer alliances and not a real problem for the old.

I would suggest one of two things be considered depending on your personal bias (safe and familiar, or more radical)...

Remove bank looting, increase beige loot and prevent blockaded nations being taxed:

  • Increase beige loot to compensate for loss of bank looting.
  • Stop blockaded nations paying taxes. It doesn't make sense that the tax man can sneak past blockades while all other transaction types are blocked, also increases potential loot on nations further compensating for the loss of bank looting.

 

Remove alliance banks:

  • The alliance no longer has taxes either.
  • Wealth transfers are almost entirely publicly visible as they're performed via trades or credit redemption; anyone can see where you're trying to hide the goods (equal vulnerability).
  • No more ever-growing untouchable stockpiles or confidence in a complete post-war rebuild to shrug off wars. Wars are risky business and all accumulated wealth is on the line.
  • Shorter wars? Both sides of wars are vulnerable to being looted all their beloved accumulated wealth. Should incentivise peace terms sooner than later.
  • Alliances can adapt to the loss of taxes by organising developed members to fund grants of undeveloped members. This simply changes what coordination of econ programmes looks like but doesn't prevent alliances from continuing them.
  • It's a radical change to the status quo and could keep things fresh; decreases the value of simply having existed longer and soaked up more taxes as all precious accumulated wealth is vulnerable (except city and project growth). Large alliances may have the benefit of more resources, but risk losing more to a more organised opponent.
  • This may make pesky pirates more accountable as their loot will be kept somewhere and be vulnerable to being raided back.

I'd quite seriously entertain the idea of removing banks entirely, but I'm also looking forward to unnecessarily aggressive responses telling me why it's a stupid idea.

So now this will turn into cybernations which will make econ departments more dependent on the activity on individual members to carry out intended tasks? I refuse to have to go back to anything like having to pester people to send their tech trades again.

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2 hours ago, Zephyr said:

I think we need to confront the fact that really the current bank system just makes newer alliances more vulnerable than older alliances that have had years to develop relationships and trust with which to build reliable offshore banking systems from. The current bank system is largely just a problem for newer alliances and not a real problem for the old.

I would suggest one of two things be considered depending on your personal bias (safe and familiar, or more radical)...

Remove bank looting, increase beige loot and prevent blockaded nations being taxed:

  • Increase beige loot to compensate for loss of bank looting.
  • Stop blockaded nations paying taxes. It doesn't make sense that the tax man can sneak past blockades while all other transaction types are blocked, also increases potential loot on nations further compensating for the loss of bank looting.

 

Remove alliance banks:

  • The alliance no longer has taxes either.
  • Wealth transfers are almost entirely publicly visible as they're performed via trades or credit redemption; anyone can see where you're trying to hide the goods (equal vulnerability).
  • No more ever-growing untouchable stockpiles or confidence in a complete post-war rebuild to shrug off wars. Wars are risky business and all accumulated wealth is on the line.
  • Shorter wars? Both sides of wars are vulnerable to being looted all their beloved accumulated wealth. Should incentivise peace terms sooner than later.
  • Alliances can adapt to the loss of taxes by organising developed members to fund grants of undeveloped members. This simply changes what coordination of econ programmes looks like but doesn't prevent alliances from continuing them.
  • It's a radical change to the status quo and could keep things fresh; decreases the value of simply having existed longer and soaked up more taxes as all precious accumulated wealth is vulnerable (except city and project growth). Large alliances may have the benefit of more resources, but risk losing more to a more organised opponent.
  • This may make pesky pirates more accountable as their loot will be kept somewhere and be vulnerable to being raided back.

I'd quite seriously entertain the idea of removing banks entirely, but I'm also looking forward to unnecessarily aggressive responses telling me why it's a stupid idea.

Becoming more of a CyberNations clone is not "Keeping things fresh", much of this game is FROM CyberNations. 
You'll also be shocked to hear, since apparently you know nothing of the subject, that CN had wars waaaaaaay longer than anything on PW. The longest one was, what? Almost 2 years i think? Keep dreaming mate. 

All accumulated wealth on the line is bad. Something again you'd know if you ever played CN or at least even read through the wiki as i did. In CN it was actually possible to pretty much kill an alliance by destroying/taking all their wealth and tech, tech being comparable to cities/infra. This will kill alliances. All of TKR-sphere would have straight up died in Knightfall. Either disbanded or mortally wounded beyond recovery.

More accountable? No, piracy will be dead on the floor, along with a heap of other alliances, big and small. Piracy makes no sense if you're just as vulnerable to losing it all as your opponents. That's, like, kind of the definition and point of MAD.

Anybody who actually supports this nonsense should probably go read up on how CN worked and it's history and speak to some PW players who were there, because this is basically the same thing and it's not a very good idea. Losing a major war would mean you get violently trashed and will likely never return to your position pre war. 
 

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9 hours ago, Alex said:

 

To answer you both: I'd be perfectly happy eliminating bank looting and setting no caps. But when I suggested that before, I got this similar "no no no NO!" response, and the reason was "this will kill raiding!"

Well, I addressed the raiding issue with caps. However, it seems that's not popular either :P

Just keep in mind that infinite resource accumulation is a problem with this game. Net amounts are still climbing in the largest (soon to be longest) war the game has ever seen.

Removing bank looting isn't a solution in itself. Banks are a great idea and being able to loot them is as well. The reason people want to remove bank looting is for their own political advantage.

In an MMO game (which is what PnW is), there shouldn't be a way that resources are mechanically impossible to take. Mechanically possible to secure? Yes. Banks offer that, offshores offer more of that.

 

Just off the top of my head, you could add mechanics that give benefits to the entire alliance. Like a "Fort Knox" project that the entire alliance can contribute towards and it halves the loot lost from the alliance bank during a beige.

 

Similarly, while no resource should become untouchable, no resource should be so painfully easy to steal that it makes your time/effort feel trivial if someone can just come in and take it away.

This is the same problem with the war system btw. It takes a week to build, and a blitz to basically destroy you.

 

No one wants to see their resources evaporate because they went to sleep. This isn't Rust. We don't want to be playing Rust. We want to have a long-term political simulator. So putting caps on banks is also a very bad idea because it will inherently force players to simply adapt to ways around the rule. More offshores, moving banks around, 0-score bank holding nations, etc. Capping resources isn't going to force people to accumulate less wealth or go to war more often, it's just going to cause frustration and adaptation.

 

Instead, look at things that can take resources out of the game economy. Things like larger military caps (which would also solve the issue of score range being too tight and allowing city 30 nations to hit city 20 nations), quicker rebuilding of military (resulting in more casualties on both sides), nukes destroying military as well as infra, upkeep for infrastructure, a variable tariff on market transactions that simply takes extra money (but doesn't give it to the selling nation, just deletes it) depending on the volume of trades posted at once. Make looting destroy a % of resources as well as looting some.

etc.

9 hours ago, Matthew The Great said:

Maybe talk to major community figures (e.g. Frawley) who have a better grasp on how game is played and the nation sim genre than apparently you do before making abrupt suggestions. I'm sure they have some great ideas to best solve the challenges this post was meant to address.

I'd really rather he publicly discuss things with all of us.

There's a lot of factors that go into major updates and they can affect different people in different ways. I'd rather everyone have at least the opportunity to voice a thought.

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What if there was a feature that prevented warring nations from transferring alliance banks to different alliances? That way, one-man offshores wouldn't be able to keep moving their banks around whenever there's a threat of looting. Of course, this could be easily circumvented by having another nation who is not at war joining and moving the bank, or by transferring the bank to a nation and having that nation move it, so we would have to find a way to keep that from happening as well. 

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I hope you realize the obvious workaround to this is to have 0 score nations or beige nations take up the new function of alliance banks, right? By ruining the effect of alliance banks, you just encourage people to find ways to create beiged nations (reckless raiding, for instance), then have them hold banks. Or you end up encouraging war slot filling or other attempts to create secure nations that can't be engaged and are holding massive amounts of capital.

 

As others have said, 0 score nations are not invulnerable. But there is very little functional difference between a 0 score nation that stores its bank on its nation and in its alliance bank if you assume they are.

Edited by Inst

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7 hours ago, Zephyr said:

Remove alliance banks

Why are so many people casually opposed to centralized alliance economies? I'm sincerely curious to know.

This would remove an entire style of play that's produced multiple vibrant alliance communities as well as a lot of IC politics and military and economic strategy. A similarly drastic and destructive "fix" would be to remove all looting altogether. Why should it matter if people who enjoy raiding can no longer do it, after all, if it provides a blunt "solution" to the problem at hand and you, personally, don't care about it?

---

Capping resources isn't an inherently unworkable idea @Alex, but I think you'd need to adhere a couple of design principles if you're ever going to implement it:

1) Players should have a substantial degree of control over stockpile sizes. That means that soft caps or caps based on easily-purchasable assets like improvements and projects are better than hard caps, and somewhat better than city-based caps. (Cities are purchased relatively infrequently and are permanent, which means a nation's city count has more long-term ramifications than its improvements or projects.) In other words, rather than prescribing an upper limit on stockpile size, give players the power to do so, but associate meaningful opportunity costs with larger stockpile sizes.

2) There should be no preference for where resources are stored. That means that alliance banks should be just as cheap and efficient to store resources in as nations are. Whatever you might have envisioned it as, Politics & War is fundamentally a game played by groups, not by individuals. The actions of individual players matter, and some people prefer a more isolated, individualist experience than others, but ultimately the only thing P&W has to offer over other, more fleshed-out simulator games is the social, multiplayer experience. Nerfing alliance banking, and thus nerfing group-level econ, is a terrible idea because it directly undermines the best parts of the game.

3) Winner-take-all mechanics are bad. Anything that increases overall looting - capping alliance bank holdings and forcing resources onto beige-able nations, for instance - would probably constitute a mechanic that rewards winners at the expense of losers and perpetuate whatever advantages the winners already enjoy. The primary reason people create offshore banks isn't because they can, it's because looting, and bank looting in particular, is so costly that they must in order to remain competitive.

4) The overall effect should speed up the metagame, not slow it down. Stockpiling cash and resources boils down to an economic and military arms race. Making it harder to accumulate stockpiles, but not reducing the economic and military advantages that stockpiles confer, would only make players and alliances spend more time and effort building their stockpiles; it wouldn't spur people to reduce the sizes of their stockpiles. There might be other ways to accomplish this besides well-implemented caps on stockpile sizes.

 

These design principles aren't really about offshore banking because cash and resource caps aren't a good way to counteract that. They could, however, be a way to address the unbounded nature of cash and resource stockpiles if you ever find a sensible way to implement them.

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Maybe a re-balancing of raid/war booty takes would solve the problem. If individual nations were to lose a much smaller percentage of their accumulated wealth to a raid or lost war, then there would be much less incentive to shift wealth to a bank or banks. Individual players would probably keep more of their wealth in their nations, while raids or lost wars should yield in total (nation + alliance bank booty) about the same average amounts as currently to winners/raiders. This would entail making the percent total of bank lucre shelled out to war victors and successful raiders larger. This should cause a decrease in money and materials hidden in banks, and a decrease in bank numbers and their relevance, due to banking being more risky. Alliance banks will still take measures to protect Alliance assets, of course, but their bank assets would be a lot less, since they wouldn't have to hide the large amounts of cash or resources on deposit from member nations. I'm not sure this would work out for sure; I'm just kinda thinking out loud, and generalizing. I'm not sure about what the numbers should be to make this happen.

Alliances are made up of individual nations. An Alliance bank sitting on a mountain of cash and resources which are, on average, around double that of each member nation combined has on-hand is completely unrealistic. Current stats are:

Total $ in Nations - $208,990,453,036.68.

Total $ in Alliance Banks - $408,474,906,769.89.

Total number of Nations in game - 13,127.

Numbers as of May 23, 2044 Orbis Time.

Numbers like that are like the United States handing NATO or the UN around 2/3's of it's wealth for safekeeping! Never happen.

Players are incentivized by the current system to hide most of their nation's wealth in banks, which, in turn, has made Alliance banks and the Offshore Banksters way too important, not to mention way too numerous. Speaking for myself, I have a crap-ton more money and everything else sitting in a bank compared to the peanuts I keep in my nation. I seriously doubt it's just me operating this way. Not very realistic, is it? Only on the Planet Orbis, baby! What's sittin' in a bank ain't just the shekels and materials collected by our friendly, neighborhood Alliance Tax Collector we all know and love, now is it?!

Maybe this idea will also keep the, uh,...."Privateers", shall we say,  operating normally, as well as slash the numbers and importance of the Banksters. There's just way too much of everything sittin' in the banks of Orbis anyway.

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Guest Elijah Mikaelson
18 hours ago, Hwan said:

Super dumb idea, Yakuza got looted for hundreds of millions of cash and resources in a few days, your average is just that low because it adds the smallest micros and their empty banks. Even the 0.1% loot NPO and BK banks give is larger than that. Bank loot does really stack up, i've talked with gov a couple times over how much loot our bank is losing, if you multiply it by hundreds of beiges, you'll find it's not a trivial amount at all. But what can you know, you don't play the game and just look at some very skewed statistics to decide what to do when you're too lazy to moderate.

And really, a 0-score nation who can't even play the game holding Fark's bank doesn't bother anyone.

Yakuza being looted was mostly down to inactive gov who did not move the bank around or have it in an offshore, however before I stepped down we lost hardly anything, so what you are saying is, adding this it simply means alliances like Yakuza wont be loot able due to in activeness or poor management therefore an easy target.

6 hours ago, Akuryo said:

Correct. At 1500 average infra, and this is with... 3 people totaling 36 cities not rebuilt for various reasons. I'd be at 2000, but i don't feel comfortable with that much debt ontop of the rest and i'm not really having anywhere else to get money for that so, rip. 

Otherwise i'd estimate i'd be at ~700m+ per week, or over 100m/day. I am only a micro, afterall.

Well if you have three members making 80m a day with 36 cities @ 1500 infra I must be doing something wrong, As at 33 cities avg 2400 infra I am only on about 40m a day and thats with 6k land.

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