War Rewrite, Test Server Tournament, and Loads of Other Changes! - June 2023 Update

[Village]

Hiya everyone! For anyone who doesn’t know me, I’m Village, one of the developers of the game. Over the past few months I’ve been working to get a number of updates finished up for you guys to enjoy, read on to learn more!

Apology

First off, I’d like to sincerely apologize for the recent incident with everyone’s beige turns. There was a small typo when implementing the new beige changes that resulted in the game trying to access an incorrect index, which in summary PHP took to mean that every nation had zero beige turns and so the game ran the corresponding code to change the everyone’s color and everything. Moving forward, the game is moving towards using static properties in the future and better type checking to catch these errors before they reach the live servers.

Moving Forwards

As this rollout takes place, the design team will be finalizing perks with the goal of a launch in July as well as working on ideas for improving the relevance and importance of lower tier nations in wars.

On my end, my goal is to continue working on game updates, starting with some internal tooling, perks, the new tutorial, and miscellaneous other changes. In addition, I would like to make monthly updates the norm, with a monthly post summarizing/releasing changes from the previous month and explaining the path forwards over the next few months.

Bug Bounty Program

We are excited to announce that we are restarting our bug bounty program! Any future bugs reported on the live server or during a test server tournament are eligible for a reward according to the following criteria.

Rules

1. Only new bugs will be given a reward.
2. First come first serve for rewards.
3. If multiple people jointly report a major bug, with each having contributed to it, they get each get 75% of the reward each.
4. Staff has complete discretion over which tier a bug falls into and to modify the reward amounts
5. Server outages and other global issues are not eligble.
6. Only available on the test server during tournaments.
7. When reporting exploits the user must not have engaged in abusing them beyond proof of concept and have maintained reasonable secrecy in order to get their reward.

Tiers

• Tier 4 (T4) - $2,000,000 - Minor typos, graphics issues.
• Tier 3 (T3) - $10,000,000 - Minor bugs (ex. not being able to rename cities).
• Tier 2 (T2) - $50,000,000 + Achievement - General exploits (ex. being able to peace out other player’s wars).
• Tier 1 (T1) - $100,000,000 + Achievement + Award - Serious exploits (ex. spawning resources), severe security vulnerabilities (ex. ability to login as another player, access to staff tools, XSS vulnerabilities), proof cases for long standing bugs (ex. MAP issues).

Test Server Tournament

https://test.politicsandwar.com

To make sure that all the changes are properly tested, we will be hosting a test server tournament in the coming days. The plan is to start on Saturday at DC (2023-06-18 12:00:00 AM UTC) and end 22 days later at DC (2023-07-10 12:00:00 AM UTC). As an additional note, the test server will be disabled for three days after the end of the tournament so that we can determine winners and issue prizes.

As a note, this is the test server, meaning it’s for testing changes. There will certainly be bugs during the tournament, and there are no guarantees that we will reimburse you for issues or that things will be fixed up immediately. Please treat the tournament lightly, it’s meant to be a bit of fun that helps test and break things before they hit the main game.

As an additional note, as is normal, this means the test server will be reset tomorrow in preparation for the tournament.

Prizes (winners determined based on stats at the end of the tournament)

The bug bounty rewards above will apply for the duration of this tournament.

1. #1 alliance by score will be allowed to permanently add a flag of their choice to the default flag dropdown on the test server (provided the flag does not violate the game rules).
2. The alliance with the most treasures will be allowed to permanently add a flag of their choice to the default flag dropdown on the test server (provided the flag does not violate the game rules).
3. The top 10 players by score will receive an achievement and award in the live server.
4. The top 10 players with the most wars won will receive an achievement on the live server.
5. Any player that declares a war on the test server will receive an achievement on the live server for doing so (to earn this, you must use the same email for your test server account that you did for your main server account).

Game Updates

These updates represent a monumental amount of work done over the past few months by myself and the other members of the development, design, and quality assurance teams, so hats off to everyone, you’ve all been amazing!

Rollout

These changes will roll out in the week after the conclusion of the test server tournament. A handful of changes, namely the consumption changes, will be rolling out immediately to help move the game’s economy into a better position.

IMPORTANT: To facilitate the rollout of the war changes, new war declarations will be shut down for 6 days before going live to ensure all wars are expired. If things go according to plan, that means war declarations and espionage operations will be shut down from 2023-07-06 12:00:00 AM UTC until 2023-07-12 12:00:00 AM UTC, with all updates going live at that point.

War

• The entirety of the war components for the game have been rewritten from the ground up, that’s both the backend and frontend. Given the nature of these updates, there will most certainly be issues in its implementation, and the goal of the tournament is primarily to test these changes and catch any issues before they become apparent during a live server global war.

• Spy counts and exact spy odds have been made public.

• Nation score from cities has been returned to 100 score per city instead of 75 score.

• Superiorities in war have been changed to a two phase system, this only applies to air superiority and ground control, naval blockades remain unchanged.

  Immense Triumph

  • If holding superiority (or no one has superiority), will increase by one phase to a maximum of 2
  • If not holding superiority, will decrease from 2 to 1, if at phase 1 will flip the owner of the superiority
  • Will decrease opponent superiorities in ALL wars

  Other Victories

  • Will reduce superiority by one phase until it hits zero for the current war

• Beige has been changed as noted below:

  • Every player defeated in a defensive war results in 2.5 days (30 turns) of beige.
  • Every player defeated in an offensive war results in 0.5 days (6 turns) of beige.
  • All wars that end from expiration result in beige for the defending party.
  • Beige accruals are capped at 5 days (60 turns).
  • Beige accruals do not begin reducing down until all defensive wars end.
  • Expired wars do not damage infrastructure or give loot like normal beige does.

• Spy attacks against missiles now have a 25% chance to destroy an additional missile.

• Nukes now kill four improvements per attack.

  • 2 of these improvements can be any improvement.
  • 2 of these improvements are any non-power plant, non-military improvement.
    • In the effect 2 such improvements are not available, the remaining improvement destructions can target any improvement.

• Missiles can now kill two improvements per missile.

• Missile Launch Pad allows a nation to build two missiles per day.

• Iron Dome reduces the number of improvements destroyed by a missile by 1.

• The chance that Iron Dome blocks a missile is reduced from 50% to 30%.

• Vital Defense System reduces the number of non-power plant, non-military improvements destroyed by a nuke by 1.

• The chance that Vital Defense System blocks a nuke is increased from 20% to 25%.

• Military Salvage now uses steel/aluminum used by both sides when calculating the amount of resources to add.

• Treasures can only be lost through defensive wars.

National Projects

• Added Bureau of Domestic Affairs:
  • $20,000,000, 100,000 Food, 10,000 Aluminum, 10,000 Gasoline, 10,000 Steel, 10,000 Oil, 10,000 Coal, 10,000 Iron.
  • Requires Government Support Agency.
  • Reduces the timer for changing Domestic Policies to 1 turn.
• Added Advanced Pirate Economy:
  • $50,000,000, 20,000 Aluminum, 40,000 Munitions, 20,000 Gasoline
  • Requires Pirate Economy and that the nation has won or lost 100 combined wars.
  • Adds an additional offensive war slot, 5% more loot from ground attacks, and a 1.1x modifier to loot from defeating a nation and the defeated nation’s alliance bank.
• Pirate Economy now provides a 5% bonus to loot from ground attacks.
• Added Surveillance Network:
  • $300,000,000, 20,000 Aluminum, 20,000 Steel, 10,000 Uranium
  • Requires Intelligence Agency and Advanced Urban Planning.
  • Spy attacks against your nation are 10% less likely to succeed and the attacker is 10% more likely to be identified.
• Added Mars Landing:
  • $200,000,000, 20,000 Oil, 20,000 Aluminum, 20,000 Munitions, 20,000 Steel, 20,000 Gasoline, 20,000 Uranium
  • Requires Space Program and Moon Landing.
  • Similar to Moon Landing, provides a unique achievement to the first player to build it as well as one to every other player who builds it. All players who complete it will be tracked on a leaderboard like the Moon Landing project. Nations will also gain a daily boost to their approval rating.

Economic Changes

These economic changes are going live with the posting of this announcement.

• Nuclear plant upkeep is doubled, going from 1.2 to 2.4 uranium per day.
• Food consumption per city, per day is changed to (((base_population)^2) / 125_000_000) + (((base_population) * (city_age_modifier) - base_population) / 850)

Miscellaneous

• The game will now notify you when your verification is about to run out.
• The new player revenue bonus is extended to 100% at C1 then decreasing by 5% through to C20.
• Login bonus changes:
  • These changes are amalgamated from the approved changes here https://forum.politicsandwar.com/index.php?/topic/33757-game-development-discussion-second-new-player-thread/ as well as the more recent ideas here [https://forum.politicsandwar.com/index.php?/topic/35717-log-in-bonus-increases/.](https://forum.politicsandwar.com/index.php?/topic/35717-proposed-log-in-bonus-increases/)
  • Login bonus daily increase changed to $500,000.
  • Login bonus maximum amount increased to $2,000,000.
  • When you miss a day, you go down two steps not down to zero.
  • New players earn 2x the max login bonus (no chance from existing functionality), making their maximum bonus $4,000,000 with a $1,000,000 daily increase.
• Nations leaving Vacation Mode will automatically be given 1 day (12 turns) of beige.
• Players will be sent an email to verify their IP address when logging in from a new IP.
• Completing a bounty while blockaded will place the money into an escrow account that will be emptied onto your nation once you are no longer blockaded.
• When a nation deletes with active defensive wars, 50% of its resources will be split between the attackers.
• A new withdrawal confirmation modal to protect against mistaken transfers.
• A new alliance disband button to allow easier alliance disbandment (this has a number of checks to prevent against erroneous or mistaken use).
• Add a editor parameter to the nation and alliance edit pages to allow disabling the WYSIWYG editor for custom HTML descriptions (&editor=raw in the URL)

API Changes

These changes will be likely be deployed after the test server tournament, however they may be launched earlier. Further updates will be provided in the Politics and Development server (https://discord.gg/Rrq56nMYSK).

• API v1/v2 are being deprecated. They will have a six month deprecation period then after that they may be deleted or have their functionality reduced at our discretion. I strongly recommend upgrading your code to use API v3 moving forwards.
  • The send-message endpoint is an exception to this deprecation and will continue to function indefinitely.
• Massive shoutout to Putmir for this, API v3 now has mutations for accepting personal trades and managing alliance positions. Also, tax bracket and treaty mutations were released a while ago although never announced very well.
• Again massive shoutout to Putmir, the game now has functionality to facilitate the creation of scoped API keys (i.e. API keys that only have access to specific pieces of information). These scoped keys will not work for API v1 or v2 but will allow users to protect themselves and limit what actions and information developers are able to work with when creating bots or scripts.
  • All existing API keys will have all scopes and new nations will no longer be created with an API key.
• Massive shoutout to Mateus for this, API subscriptions now support backtracking, meaning if you lose connection, once you reconnect your channel will receive events back to the last 10 minutes.
  • To manually trigger this process, the client may make a GET request to /subscriptions/v1/rollback endpoint with two URL parameters being the timestamp (in milliseconds and up to 10 minutes before the present time) to roll back to and the channel to roll back. Events will then be sent back to that time.
• The API will also be getting a number of new fields to correspond to the war changes and new projects.
• And again to Putmir, anew query roughly equivalent to the tradeprice query from API v1.

Conclusion

Hope you guys are as excited for this as I am, have a great day everyone!

[Kihansi Haley]

There should be a hype reaction for the forum lol

[Rewan Demontay]

Nice.

[Mysterious]

Oh yeah!! 

 

[namukara]

This is way too many changes to be included in one post. Please split them to make it easier for players to critique each.

[His Holy Decagon]

Fingers crossed

[Abaddon]

Just now, Village said:

 

• Superiorities in war have been changed to a two phase system, some details are posted below:

  Immense Triumph

  • If holding superiority (or no one has superiority), will increase by one phase to a maximum of 2
  • If not holding superiority, will decrease from 2 to 1, if at phase 1 will flip the owner of the superiority
  • Will decrease opponent superiorities in ALL wars

Please don't do this. This doesn't help anyone except for people that are downdeclaring. Updeclares are going to be infinitely more difficult when you can't compensate a strength/numbers disadvantage with an attacker advantage anymore.

Not only that but the game is already a diceroll simulator. Now you're gonna have to do twice the amount of airstrikes at the start of every war meaning we'll default back to the plane meta where people will spam airstrikes on each other for an entire round.

I just see myself clutching my cross and my pearls at the start of every war praying for my sh*tty 40% IT over and over again to get the stupid phase of air superiority.

[Unlimited]

I hope this kills beige cycling.

[Ducc Zucc]

Another update changing city score and ignoring how broken military score has been for 3 years now, yay.

[Neo Le]

this is hot also the war changes are so pretty I can't wait to manage wars with it.

[Dopeemperor]

Just now, Unlimited said:

I hope this kills beige cycling.

It already will tbh

[Jacob Knox]

1 hour ago, namukara said:

This is way too many changes to be included in one post. Please split them to make it easier for players to critique each.

There have been multiple posts discussing different portions of all of these changes. Players had plenty of opportunities to critique most components of this post.

[Jacob Knox]

----------------------------------------

I, for one, appreciate all the hard work that Village and everyone has been doing. Massive shout outs to everyone on the Design, API, and Quality Assurance teams for making this happen. Keep up the good work. ❤

 

Special thanks to @Village, @Alex, @Prefontaine, @Putmir, and @Mateus (pretty sure that's the right person).

[Malakai]

Just now, Jacob Knox said:

There have been multiple posts discussing different portions of all of these changes. Players had plenty of opportunities to critique most components of this post.

And we should continue to do so; just because they've been approved for testing and eventual live deployment (minus the consumption crap) doesn't mean they are good ideas, should be treated as such, or that we should resign our objections. The implementation of the PnW Welfare System is another addition to the pile of worst ideas ever that have plagued this game.

I try to be fair and open minded and there are several aspects to this update that I hate, others I love, but as a whole, with it all considered as one unit, I'm disappointed.

 

Edited June 17, 2023 by Malakai

[Rageproject]

I need 5 days beige to recover from reading this start to finish. 

[Jacob Knox]

Just now, Malakai said:

And we should continue to do so; just because they've been approved for testing and eventual live deployment (minus the consumption crap) doesn't mean they are good ideas, should be treated as such, or that we should resign our objections. The implementation of the PnW Welfare System is another addition to the worst ideas ever.

I'm not knocking constructive criticism. I'm just saying that stating something along the lines of "this post is too long for me to read it all and critique every part of it" is bs when there have been plenty of opportunities to voice opinions on the individual subjects of this post in their own posts and there is still opportunity to do so here. But that's just my opinion.

[Anarchist Empire]

Tier 4 and 3 bug reports, reward is very small. Login Bonus, but guess still worth mentioning if seen. Consumption increase on uranium barely matters. (Deleting inactives will have a bigger effect on prices than that.)

Overall looks positive, the changes. (Give people credits for reporting bugs if you want to make it more worthwhile, but helping the game is reason enough.)

Most interesting change is the war change though. So an immense triumph on the ground can make them lose air superiority. Does it break a blockade though?

Edited June 17, 2023 by Anarchist Empire

[Dusty]

Eta on commodities?

[Jacob Knox]

Just now, Anarchist Empire said:

Tier 4 and 3 bug reports, reward is very small.

I mean... they are just typos and minor errors/bugs. In my opinion, the reward for a typo shouldn't even be $2m lol, but I understand wanting to reward players for contributing.

[Malakai]

28 minutes ago, Jacob Knox said:

I'm not knocking constructive criticism. I'm just saying that stating something along the lines of "this post is too long for me to read it all and critique every part of it" is bs when there have been plenty of opportunities to voice opinions on the individual subjects of this post in their own posts and there is still opportunity to do so here. But that's just my opinion.

I apologize for the misunderstanding. I do hope this moves our economy into a better position.

Edited June 17, 2023 by Malakai

[Anarchist Empire]

Just now, Jacob Knox said:

I mean... they are just typos and minor errors/bugs. In my opinion, the reward for a typo shouldn't even be $2m lol, but I understand wanting to reward players for contributing.

Yeah, still takes time to report it. Doesn't really matter, just if they wanted people to go out of their way looking for those. Higher would motivate people more, but if people just see it, doesn't really matter.

[-Mike-]

Spy sat should have a 37.5% chance to destroy 2 missiles, (or even 50%)

[MBaku]

34 minutes ago, Anarchist Empire said:

Most interesting change is the war change though. So an immense triumph on the ground can make them lose air superiority. Does it break a blockade though?

How does a ground IT break AS for all wars? I don’t see that in the update.

I know an air IT already does. Under the new system, will an air IT drop IT down on the opponent one step in every war? Same question for blockades- a naval IT breaks blockade in every war, does it just go down one step? 
 

 

[Anarchist Empire]

Just now, MBaku said:

How does a ground IT break AS for all wars? I don’t see that in the update.

I know an air IT already does. Under the new system, will an air IT drop IT down on the opponent one step in every war? Same question for blockades- a naval IT breaks blockade in every war, does it just go down one step? 
 

 

For individual wars, it says an immense triumph reduces theirs for all wars. That's the point of having 2 tiers, so you can afford a loss and maintain it. (This could be good maybe though. Will make war more using everything, rather than one strategy.)

Edited June 17, 2023 by Anarchist Empire

[Thalmor]

The removal of beige cycling means that alliances are going to be able to perform more counter blitzes. This is a significant change, because at the present, the only option to those being cycled is to declare at random and try to farm beige in order to build back up. Under the upcoming system, the focus shifts to where those who get hit hard on the defense can build back up easier. From there, they can counter blitz; which is really a community exercise is coordination, activity, and competency. 

Idk I had to meditate on it a lot this evening, but I kinda dig this. There's now going to be more skill and leadership involved with wars. Curious to see how it plays out.

All the other changes seem solid. Nothing really struck me as being particularly bad.