Politics and Whales

[Keegoz]

I'm sure most of you are aware at this point that a large amount of politics in this game for the major alliances and spheres revolves around whales.

Regardless of whether you want to or not, as a political leader you're a fool to ignore the whales in other spheres and allow them to grow unchecked. This is quite simply because the game mechanics have been set up for whales to be one of the biggest advantages economically and militarily.

Quite simply, whales win wars.

I'm sure most of you know this but just to illustrate the point, whales can easily down declare 10 cities with little to no effort. Fenris for example can almost hit me (a c38) whilst sitting at the same MMR (0250). Now it is completely impossible for anyone to realistically beat someone 10 cities above them if they're active and running full mil. Group these whales together such as we're seeing in Grumpy, TEst and even t$/Rose to an extent and we can see issues. Whoever has the most whales can wipe out their tiering and the tiering below them. Haven't even started about what they could do if they wanted to actually put effort into down declaring (it's over 10 cities btw).

Now obviously wars aren't just fought in the upper tiers, they are fought in all tiers. However whales make a large portion of an alliance's wealth, lose your own whale tier and that's an incredibly expensive rebuild bill. It also means less income for a while. On the other side they can begin to bankroll or continue to grow. Grumpy for example took relatively no damage against BW last war.

Recently Alex posted a bunch of changes that, once again, heavily favoured the whales in the game. New projects once again had food costs which whales mostly produce and thus they'll likely profit from the new resource sink. This came at no shock to anyone who has been tracking new projects, the majority have been helping whales in one form or another. He also added reducing city score (with no real reasoning behind it).

I think this makes the outlook for the game look bleak. It's not politically healthy, it doesn't promote new players coming into the game and we could easily have a dominant whale tier in the game. The game has to imo make a choice on whether you want to simply entrench your own power in a dying game or whether you allow some competition to be able to rise up.

Now there is no silver bullet to any of this, I wouldn't advocate nerfing whales dramatically. However there clearly needs to be some balances around the military and economic benefits they give compared to any other tiering. I believe military score needs a clear rework as does the range of which you can downdeclare. I believe we need more projects or economic benefits like the latest one that gives economic benefits for being smaller (this includes the c20s).

Going to @Alex in the vein hope he reads this, but we need to probably actively talk about it when each change comes about. Alex only really notices glaringly inbalances in his game when it's increasingly obvious or people are loud about it.

[Kosta]

Well said Keegoz. But I don't see that changing for a long time. Especially with the pace of previous updates. 

Edited April 9, 2022 by Kosta
Grammer

[KindaEpicMoah]

I know my good friend Prefontaine would NEVER add anything that disproportionately benefits whales /s

In all seriousness though, I agree that the current state of warfare is heavily whale-centric, but while it may seem tempting to point to shrinking the downdeclare range as the solution, the problem would inevitably come back in 2-3 years since the war declare range changes at a percent rate. One could also argue that there should be some sort of city cap to downdeclares, and while it's a better solution, it still runs into the same problems as the previous one. I think a much better solution lies in changing the actual military mechanics (i.e. rebuild rates, how different units interact, etc.), and while I'm not entirely sure of what that solution may be, there's a lot more potential for an interesting change that'll shake up the game meta (and maybe even make war fun again? :p).

Frankly, the project system desperately needs a rework. Conceptually it's a good system because the idea behind it is to force specialization by limiting people to choose the projects that work the best with their playstyle, but in reality, they only serve to further the growth of top end players since megawhales can have every project at once with slots to spare. Low/mid end players are the ones forced to specialize, and as a result, their growth suffers for it. An easy fix would be to decrease the infrastructure for the first couple of projects slots, but to gradually increase the amount required with each subsequent project, forcing megawhales to specialize their builds. This even could effect the war system if/when more military projects are added, as people would have to choose what econ projects they replace before war in order to remain militarily competitive. 

Will things ever change though? Ehhh, probably not. 

 

Edited April 9, 2022 by KindaEpicMoah

[Jeric]

A hard set "5 down 10 up" could help prevent these huge 10+ city down declares while allowing whales to still be hit by up declares. (Active after City 30 or something) 

I'm just spouting off because I'm tired of watching c40+ nations down declaring on c30 and lower because of "low infra" 

Could make military improvements less effective if your infra is below  a threshold. Or remove the strength gain from infra which could potentially fix down declares..

[Charles Bolivar]

4 hours ago, Keegoz said:

 

Now obviously wars aren't just fought in the upper tiers, they are fought in all tiers. However whales make a large portion of an alliance's wealth, lose your own whale tier and that's an incredibly expensive rebuild bill. It also means less income for a while. 

 

I've aways believed what you allude to here is the reason for why we see whale tier consolidation in the first place. Whale rebuilds are expensive, for both an alliance and the individual.

On an individual level, a single whale or even a few whales within a typical mass member alliance are going to have an extremely hard time during a war with little direct tier support unless they are lucky enough to have decent allies and communication structures. It becomes problematic during rebuilds because then you have to justify spending the large amount of cash on a few versus the many. Of course with proper financial planning and allocation of rebuild funds it becomes less of a problem, but there is always that balance of distribution between your whale, upper, middle and lower tiers.

So in that sense, you can't blame individuals for wanting to be around other whales. Upper tier focussed AAs offer better security for the individual, plus it avoids the rebuild dilemma mostly because any decent upper tier orientated AA should naturally have more funds at their disposal, and you don't have to worry too much about the allocation of rebuild funds because everyone is a costly rebuild.

On a meta level regarding the relationship between alliances, a similar dynamic applies, namely security and safety in numbers. It's pretty much what drives relations between the established AAs who have an upper tier, with that drive being the protection of your principle source of wealth creation and force projection.

I do agree with you in that it does make the political meta pretty bleak. I've said it for awhile that the notion of multi-spheres is flawed in this sense simply because of the mechanics around whale tier economics which favour upper tier consolidation. I think it's possible to have multi spheres ( we largely do anyway already), but it's a moot point because we certainly don't have a multi-polar world because the risk of alienating potential allies who can offer support in the upper tier against future enemies is simply too much of an expense if an alliance's whales get rolled.

I also agree that it is something which largely requires an in-game fix and it's not something which can be remedied by a FA solution since all that does is encourage weaker alliances/spheres to engage in the creation of secret treaties and so on.

As for the solution? I have no idea because we are attempting to remedy human nature seeking safety in numbers essentially in my opinion. Boost city costs, make infra cheaper? I've always thought having the in-game map assume more relevance would be a good way. Like say an upper tier alliance is based predominantly in North America, they would be unable to significantly project their full force without significant penalties to let's say south Africa without large penalties. That way we see greater political regionalism (multi-spheres) and we would also see the down declare issue resolved to an extent since an upper tier nation in South Africa would have a better chance against a whale tier nation based in north America ( sucks to be upper tier in Mexico or Canada I suppose though).  Alliances would be forced to relocate to differing parts of the world map for security etc. It's probably not possible within the game's mechanics, and hence a pipe dream, but I think it would work.

As for projects, I actually think there should be distinct trees within the larger project system which prevent a person from buying all of them and make it mandatory for a person to specialise. If a person makes say steel, limit them to specifically making steel and be unable to say farm or make alum, gas etc. You could apply a similar logic to the more Econ and military orientated projects. If you build an econ project, it should prevent you from building some of the military projects or impose a severe nerf on the effectiveness of the military project. It would encourage specialisation within alliances to fulfill certain roles, but also alliances themselves may specialise into certain roles.

Just my thoughts anyway.

Good topic

 

 

 

 

 

Edited April 9, 2022 by Charles Bolivar

[hidude45454]

Just a simple set of questions I am curious how people will answer.

Everyone is unhappy when they are personally downdeclared on, whether that be by 2 or 5 or 10 cities. The question, then, to me is at what level do people feel is appropriate for their tier? For ex, what should a theoretical maximum downdeclare look like onto a C25 nation or C30 nation or a C35 nation, and why?

And while I agree for the most part with Goob's project suggestion, I think it would also be interesting to see how people feel about a shift in the opposite direction -- what if there were no caps on maximum project slots? A common opinion in a server of mine was that it would certainly not bias towards megawhales who already have enough infra to build anything, but that it might not go all the way and favor new players either (since a lot of projects still benefit you at the most the mid or mid-high city level), but I am curious to see what other think about this as well.

[Lord Tyrion]

Realistically, a cap on number of cities (or make them even more exponentially expensive) and removing the 10-day timer would probably be a decent idea to close the disparity.  A new player will take many years to catch people who have a 40 city head start on them.

[Exar Kun -George]

I've always felt that there should be a hard city cap on down declares. I feel 3 cities under is more than enough reach for whales. 

[Mayor]

Instead of nerfing whales why not just make it easier for others to grow by making infra cheaper if you have less that 20 cities or something. I spent a long time and lots of money to get my projects and cities, I have spent years in this game, so idgaf if others have to "specialize" I had to do that for years as well. It is already far easier for people to grow these days anyways, a lot of the time people don't grow is because they are in dogshit alliances with bad econ or simply don't want to grow for some reason like war range. My friends still in Roz Wei have barely bought cities but everyone who left the alliance has nearly doubled in size or more (especially Akak), I left Oblivion because of the same reason.

[Raphael]

I don’t agree with the extent of problem as you laid it out but I agree that there needs to be some adjustments made. City score changes are being cut back because the initial change was taking an axe to a scalpel job.

the ratio of military score to city score was too high. It creates the same problems you’re describing where someone with max military can hit you while you have no military simply because your city score is keeping you up too high. We want people to be able to sink, recover potentially (not guaranteed per se), and come back to the fight. This isn’t the complete solution but Alex likes to take things in steps to make sure the game doesn’t break.

 

100% agree military score and down dec range should be altered to prevent the same problem we’re both seeing.

Edited April 9, 2022 by roberts

[Sweeeeet Ronny D]

point to the doll where i hurt you keegz

Edited April 9, 2022 by Sweeeeet Ronny D

[KindaEpicMoah]

15 hours ago, hidude45454 said:

Everyone is unhappy when they are personally downdeclared on, whether that be by 2 or 5 or 10 cities. The question, then, to me is at what level do people feel is appropriate for their tier? For ex, what should a theoretical maximum downdeclare look like onto a C25 nation or C30 nation or a C35 nation, and why?

 

Well I personally don't really care about getting downdeclared on (even if it is inconvenient), but if we're talking about implementing some sort of city cap, I'd imagine somewhere in the 75-80% city count range would be ideal for max mil nations. The biggest issue is that this would serve as a complete middle finger to low score raiding, which is why I'd prefer a change that allowed people to bounce back faster from being downdeclared on. 

 

19 hours ago, Charles Bolivar said:

As for projects, I actually think there should be distinct trees within the larger project system which prevent a person from buying all of them and make it mandatory for a person to specialise.

I like the idea of project trees a lot more than my suggestion, but I don't know how much time it'd take Alex to develop such an idea or if he even has the coding chops necessary for it (I am not a coder so I have no idea how complex this is). 

 

11 hours ago, Lord Tyrion said:

Realistically, a cap on number of cities (or make them even more exponentially expensive) and removing the 10-day timer would probably be a decent idea to close the disparity.  A new player will take many years to catch people who have a 40 city head start on them.

Honestly, I wouldn't even mind losing cities if there was a cap implemented below my current city count. The test server has shown me that there's a lot of potential fun to be had even if everyone is the same city count, but if this were to happen, Alex would likely need to develop actual endgame content (since endgame content right now consists entirely of cities and projects). 

The frustrating part is that there are already soft caps on city growth and infrastructure limits, but every time a new econ project is added, infrastructure ROI becomes faster and the time it takes a megawhale to build their next city decreases, which incentivizes people to keep pushing their city counts and infra levels further and further.

 

4 hours ago, Sweeeeet Ronny D said:

point to the doll where i hurt you keegz

[Vice]

I see more crying about whales, I downvote. Part of the game I enjoyed was aspiring to be a larger nation. Maybe grow internally?

[Malinok]

As was stated earlier it is easier to go from 0 to 20 cities than ever before.  I spent years accomplishing that alone.  Now you have some people hitting city 30 in less than 2 yrs.  

I've watched project after project aimed at helping little people while long term players are lucky get an odd bone thrown their way.  And you feel it's too much?

Instead of whinying about it change how you're playing the game.  I've been into food production since before city 5.  It makes the most money and unlike infra you can't loose land.  There are many other tips to max your income regardless of your nation size.

Conclusion: If you want to be whale stop sitting on your butt and whinying about it and start setting up your nation to grow. It takes time and good decisions. Sometimes crap happens and you have to clean yourself off but you keep going.

If you don't want to be a whale don't complain when you find one sitting in your pond.

[Blink]

44 minutes ago, Vice said:

I see more crying about whales, I downvote. Part of the game I enjoyed was aspiring to be a larger nation. Maybe grow internally?

This is what drove me to fight all the wars/raids I have done to ‘earn’ whale status. All I ever see is let’s make it easier, look around and there’s plenty c30’s under a year old. That took me probably two years and and roughly 800-1000 wars to achieve. 

[Keegoz]

36 minutes ago, Malinok said:

As was stated earlier it is easier to go from 0 to 20 cities than ever before.  I spent years accomplishing that alone.  Now you have some people hitting city 30 in less than 2 yrs.  

I've watched project after project aimed at helping little people while long term players are lucky get an odd bone thrown their way.  And you feel it's too much?

Instead of whinying about it change how you're playing the game.  I've been into food production since before city 5.  It makes the most money and unlike infra you can't loose land.  There are many other tips to max your income regardless of your nation size.

Conclusion: If you want to be whale stop sitting on your butt and whinying about it and start setting up your nation to grow. It takes time and good decisions. Sometimes crap happens and you have to clean yourself off but you keep going.

If you don't want to be a whale don't complain when you find one sitting in your pond.

Not asking for everyone to "become a whale" though am I? Just simply not allowing you to dictate the 3 major facets of the game with very few counters other than "become a whale". 

1 hour ago, Vice said:

I see more crying about whales, I downvote. Part of the game I enjoyed was aspiring to be a larger nation. Maybe grow internally?

As always, ignore the subject matter to protect your own interests. You want to actually argue the points raised for once?

 

35 minutes ago, Blink said:

This is what drove me to fight all the wars/raids I have done to ‘earn’ whale status. All I ever see is let’s make it easier, look around and there’s plenty c30’s under a year old. That took me probably two years and and roughly 800-1000 wars to achieve. 

Not asking for it to become easier, I am asking that whales aren't the sole focus of the game and the mechanics are tweaked. My post only really advocates one current path atm which is to adjust score/score ranges to not allow whales to down declare 10 cities with no real effort. The rest I am not honestly sure how to fix and I don't see it being done overnight.

 

Edited April 10, 2022 by Keegoz

[His Holy Decagon]

1 hour ago, Vice said:

I see more crying about whales, I downvote. Part of the game I enjoyed was aspiring to be a larger nation. Maybe grow internally?

Hey, you're active again? You realize... Keegoz is a c38, right? He's literally 8 cities higher than you, advocating for something so someone larger than him, can't downdeclare on you.

Edited April 10, 2022 by His Holy Decagon

[Mahakall]

59 minutes ago, Malinok said:

As was stated earlier it is easier to go from 0 to 20 cities than ever before.  I spent years accomplishing that alone.  Now you have some people hitting city 30 in less than 2 yrs.  

I've watched project after project aimed at helping little people while long term players are lucky get an odd bone thrown their way.  And you feel it's too much?

Instead of whinying about it change how you're playing the game.  I've been into food production since before city 5.  It makes the most money and unlike infra you can't loose land.  There are many other tips to max your income regardless of your nation size.

Conclusion: If you want to be whale stop sitting on your butt and whinying about it and start setting up your nation to grow. It takes time and good decisions. Sometimes crap happens and you have to clean yourself off but you keep going.

If you don't want to be a whale don't complain when you find one sitting in your pond.

Tru 

[Tartarus]

I see the problem that you've laid out, and its safe to say that anyone engaged in the broader community of this game sees the problem too. The problem with trying to solve this problem, is how? There is indeed, no silver bullet. Any solution will have ripple effects that I believe will negatively impact the game in ways we can't forsee, or predict.

They are the oldest and largest players in the game, do they not deserve to be forces of nature? Whales do win wars, yet is this not representative of the way of the world? The USA is (or was, that's open for analysis) a global power. Any war that directly get involved in will tilt the scales in their favour. Simply because they're rich (think: whales' tax contribution, or lack thereof to individually fund rebuilds after war), they're developed (think: military power scaling with large amounts of cities per nation), they're generally experienced (think: this one's logical. You'd expect a c40 1500 day old nation to know what theyre doing).

So, yes. Whales win wars, yet this is not a mechanical issue in my humble opinion.

I think it's far more accurate to refer to this as a structural issue. This does not have a one solution. In fact, if one sphere amassed a power great enough to strongarm the rest of the game, would it be mechanically incorrect? They're just playing the game, afterall. The mechanics allow for it, therefore it is within reach.

When I refer to structurally, I'm speaking of how this game is structured and how the individual player and alliances fit into this. This is a combination of how the mechanics impact the players, and how players choose to respond to this. Minispheres, duopolies, hegemons, whatever you wish to label a sphere, they're all our own constructs in this game. Mechanically, after all we can go in any direction we want. Structurally, alliance leaders must figure out what they want, what their alliance needs, and what's best for the overall game health. These three groupings can often conflict. Using Grumpy and Guardian as an example, to anyone who states they should part ways, as their tiering compliments each other nicely and that they skewer any bloc they join in their favour. Why would that do that? There is no mechanical reason for them to. They can stay together. It might piss off some of the game, they might make enemies. But that's not a mechanical fault, it's a structural fault.

The main question is, why shouldn't whales win wars? And yet, I dislike it as much as anyone else. I believe its a structural failure that the game has come to this point. There is simply not enough variety in tactics, abilities ingame, customization, options. Every alliance is the same, give or take. They are all nearly carbon copies with the same style of government, the same functions, and similar mannerisms. Quirks exist here and there, and some alliances function significantly better than others. But this game has no variety, which is why we end up in the same situation after every war.

'Every war' is another point of contention. Having some "global war" once or twice a year, it's boring. It truly is, and why do we do it? Unironically, raiding alliances are the most fun to watch and observe in this game because they are unpredictable. KT, for all of its drawbacks, toxicity, and edgelord culture, when they went paperless in 2020 I believe, hit micros and raided around, that was entertaining. We need more of that, variety. Too many people are content to build up and tune out of the game, hiding in their private discord servers. Talking to the same names and faces, disliking the same people, and hearing the same echo chamber. I name no names, because it's highly likely you can apply that to any alliance worth their salt in this game.

I don't like the war system. It is hyper-realistic (barring guerilla warefare, because in this game that refers to maxing out your losses then hurting the enemy more) in the sense that the bigger number (whether that's nations, cities, or military) always comes out on top. There is no way to counter such a significant advantage with quantity, so much so that it becomes the quality. There is simply no opportunity to play around with kinks in your military for unexpected bonuses, to fight an unexpected advantage. The larger number will always win, going forward. It is no surprise that the major alliances create larger and larger blocs. Once one bloc does so, the others have to follow. It's a simple adapt or die scenario.

These walls of texts that have been occuring recently, unironically, restore a small medium of faith in the game. It shows that people at least do care, and public debate is fun. And we need more of it.

If you've made it this far, then you've probably realized that I have no solution. I don't know what to change of the structure of this game.

• Do we entrench the tiering? Raise the city score?
• Is there a cap on down declares?
  • However, doing so will adversely effect large raiders who have low score.
• How can we change the war system to allow variety?
• What incentives can mechanically be given to alliances to create political variety?

I am, above all that I've said here, a believer in the fact that diversity and variety will save the game here. Whether that is some alliances adopting forums, dicords, some being economic some being military, some raiding, this game needs variety.

Edit #6: I think a good summary of what I've written is that structurally this game rewards hegemonic behaviour. As well as poor choices in mechanical decisions.

Edited April 10, 2022 by Tartarus
Structure

[Johnson Boris]

Cities=bad. Individuals should stop worrying so much about growing in city count and should worry more about learning, having fun in wars and improving their reputation. 

 

As for the alliances, this is just going to happen naturally in a game of this kind. I would reduce the extent of the importance of the high tier by increasing project and city score, but there isn't much to do about it.

[Butter]

1 hour ago, Johnson Boris said:

Cities=bad. Individuals should stop worrying so much about growing in city count and should worry more about learning, having fun in wars and improving their reputation. 

 

As for the alliances, this is just going to happen naturally in a game of this kind. I would reduce the extent of the importance of the high tier by increasing project and city score, but there isn't much to do about it.

everyone likes money so city building gives more money so everyone builds cities . no reason for not building cities and not being a whale. define reputation.  reputation is just supporting some influential players and saying "yes" to thier every deed or you dont know how to play the game and r a noob. this is what i have observed in "most" scenarios and i have been playing the game for years.

 

 

[Mayor]

3 hours ago, His Holy Decagon said:

You realize... Keegoz is a c38, right? He's literally 8 cities higher than you, advocating for something so someone larger than him, can't downdeclare on you.

I don't give a crap if Keeg is a city 38 and has more cities and is "advocating" for something so people can't declare war on me and others. I would prefer if they could declare on me. Like seriously, are people so afraid of losing wars they think this is a positive change for everyone. I think city caps (maybe 50?) are possibly a good start, but making it so that whales can fight basically no wars is just a horrible proposal. Wow every global I can fight maybe 1 or 2 wars with a 3 city down declare range. It is these proposals which will ruin game participation for people not the other way around.

If people want to encourage growth then make it easier for the lower tier to grow and not penalize higher players would have put years into this game and are among the most active players around. Make more projects only for the lower guys then, but enough of this lets nerf the whales to save the whales bullshit.

[Mayor]

3 hours ago, Tartarus said:

massive WoT

I agree with my bud here, I think Tartarus is correct when he says it is not necessarily whales that are the issue but the game mechanics itself. I have always thought of maybe a cap on alliance membership, or an efficiency tax on alliances too big so they have to split up. Really anything to break up big alliances and decentralize them to encourage more wars, internal conflicts, and politics.

I have always been in favor of making infra cheaper to encourage wars, and more raiding loot to encourage wars, also adding more war projects to make war easier is always an option as well. I think ages ago people were thinking of some kind of system when you could specialize your nation to be more war or econ focused and they are mutually exclusive. I am always in favor of adding things into the game to make it more fun, but I never support making the game more tedious and borderline boring like some of the suggestions in this thread.

If people want to stay under 20 or 30 cities maybe give them some nice bonuses, but don't make people who have too many cities have to be penalized for just playing the game the way they want and that includes building cities.

3 hours ago, Johnson Boris said:

Cities=bad. Individuals should stop worrying so much about growing in city count and should worry more about learning, having fun in wars and improving their reputation. 

 

As for the alliances, this is just going to happen naturally in a game of this kind. I would reduce the extent of the importance of the high tier by increasing project and city score, but there isn't much to do about it.

So Sheepy raises score, lowers score, makes city score higher then lower, blah blah blah. Enough with the minor score changes already as they are mostly useless, I built my nation with score in mind and these arbitrary changes get annoying. The problem is structural and a simple score change isn't going to fix it and is a mere Band-Aid than has been repeatedly used before.

Edited April 10, 2022 by Mayor

[im317]

i want to point out that of the 3 new projects 1 stops working when you have more then 15 cities meaning there is no benefit to whales at all. another opens extra project slots, something that is more useful to smaller nations since whales usually already have more project slots then we can use. the third project helps everyone equity by further decreases costs for cities, infra and land.

[Dr James Wilson]

Aside from making it cheaper to build cities under say, c30.   I don't know what would be a legitimate solution.   Whales tend to be long term players that have been here since the beginning and the game is built in a way that time is what enables you to reach the high-end of the city spectrum.   

 

Unless cities become cheaper there is no way to catch up to people who have a 3/4 year head-start when it comes to nation building.