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

[MBaku]

Just now, Anarchist Empire said:

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.)

Oh I see, so ground IT just drops opponents ground IT in all wars like the others do. 

[Anarchist Empire]

Noticed it says doesn't apply to naval. Probably good if one attack can break it. However if nations started at tier 2 when winning; would be interesting how it would effect it if naval could also break other ones.

Navy is kind of special, in it lives in isolation of effecting the others beyond blockading resources & being the fastest way to beige.

Edited June 17, 2023 by Anarchist Empire

[lightside]

Overall a good update.

That being said I am disappointed that all suggestions to make the mars project do something useful were ignored.

[Marshall Tucker]

So the wars were reworked in the test server? and will i be able to keep my test server nation?

[KindaEpicMoah]

Just now, Marshall Tucker said:

So the wars were reworked in the test server? and will i be able to keep my test server nation?

The test server will get reset so no you will not. 

 

The test server gets reset right before every tournament so I wouldn't get too attached to any of your test server nations anyways. 

[MBaku]

TLDR; The beige cap will make beige cycling worse than before. It needs to be removed entirely to ensure a defensive coalition rebuild isn’t compromised. 
 

 

 

 I don’t see beige cycling going away. I just see it looking different.

Beige cycling will still be achieved by the tactic of racing beige for one half of the alliance and sitting on the other half until expiry to create the military rebuild offset and maintain the advantage. 
 

If the defender declares wars and they lose the first round, they probably can’t win their offensive wars. This means their offensive wars can sit on them until expiry while their beige clock ticks down and compromise their rebuild. This encourages downdecs for the defending alliance to minimize the danger of being sat on. 
 

To avoid this, defenders might be better off not declaring any wars at all. That way they can try to ensure a full rebuild. But without counters, the race beige vs expiry offset will still cause a compromised rebuild. 

 

Option 1- They declare offensives but lose the military battle. The 5 day cap means an offensive war can sit on them for 3-5 days after all defensives expire and their offensives beige them a turn before expiry for a minimal “rebuild penalty” of 5 turns. 
 

option 2- They declare no wars but lose the military battle. Imagine the alliance has four people. Two defenders will get beiged in two days and start to rebuild. They’ll come out in 5 days or sooner with near max mil at 7.5 days into the war. The other two defenders will get beiged the turn before expiry, starting their rebuild and finishing 10 days into the war, when the first wave  are already half way through their second round.  

 

in either scenario the whole alliance will never get fully rebuilt at the same time which is the effect of our current beige cycling. To make matters worse, the inability to farm and stack beige makes it functionally impossible to get the whole alliance rebuilt at the same time. The new meta makes it impossible to beige cycle a single player, but it’s definitely still possible to beige cycle an alliance and effectively only fight half of them at max mil at a time. 

 

At least in the current meta, if everybody declares wars to farm beige, some can get 6 days, others get 9 days,  and others get 12 days for example. they can find a 5 day overlap to get rebuilt together and break beige together. They also have the element of surprise. under the new meta, breaking beige to surprise your opponent will be all but gone.  
 

that’s how I see the new meta of large scale wars looking, and it could be potentially worse than what we have right now. 
 

potential fixes?
 

1.) A project for greater daily rebuy could help. Just plugging this again. 

2.) The beige cap is the fundamental problem here. the simple fix is to remove the beige cap and allow beige to stack. Offensive wars are only 6 turns of beige anyway. 3 defensives give 90 turns of beige. Then it doesn’t matter if the defensives try to offset the war endings. Either way the defender gets a full rebuild that will coincide with alliance members that were also blitzed. It also allows alliances to break beige at a turn if their choice and keep an element of surprise. 
 

3.) beige countdown doesn’t begin until the nation completes all wars.
 

But with the 5 day beige cap, alliances will still coordinate when wars complete in order to create the offset. And it’s simple. The offensive wars beige first, then the defensive wars beige in unison. I don’t know if this will fix the problem. But since the losing alliance can choose when they declare their offensives they can try to minimize the offset by declaring offensives right on the end of the second day of war before the beige window opens. But that just opens them up to being sat on by their offensive ear.
 

4.) nerf the resistance damage of every attack. That way it’s impossible to finish wars in two days and each war completes closer to five days,

This just makes an offset smaller and more difficult to achieve, but the wars will be such a slog and impact income for raiders. 

[Danzek]

10 hours ago, Village said:

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.

uhhhh.... 

You do realize this will allow any nation or alliance (including pirates) to declare beforehand without any risk of retaliation. Also its during a conflict between CTO/Guardian,HS.

I'd recommend also force peacing all wars if you go this route. 

10 hours ago, abaddon said:

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.

Dogfights give the attacker advantage. Ground attacks have symmetrical casualties (whether you are attacking or defending). 

I dont think it's correct to frame superiorites as being an advantage for updeclares, since they require an Immense Triumph; the stronger nation has a better chance of gaining superiority. Though I agree it's a benefit to the attacking party since you can choose your targets and knock out a decent amount of military with multiple attackers on an enemy (e.g. as part of a blitz). 

You generally cant blitz with both an airstrike and two ground attacks, you have to pick one.

Weakening or removing the ability for ground control to kill planes would make updeclares easier because then you dont have to contend with multiple unit types and can focus only on planes. 

But weakening air control as well shifts it back to benefitting the stronger party more than the attacker. 

[Nintendo]

Overall, I really like the announced changes. It's great to see effort being put into the game from the dev team. 

I'm really not sure what to make of the 2 tiered IT change, but part of that is because I don't really understand how it works from this post. It's not really clearly explained.

Love the changes to beige. I've always hated the concept of beige cycling and the fact the game made that so ease to do. This is probably my favorite change. I really like this part too, which is ease to miss in the massive post: Beige accruals do not begin reducing down until all defensive wars end.

I still think part of the war system still needs to be changed, but sounds like future updates will be more frequent, so I'll hope changes down the line. For me two things need to change with the system:

• I think IT are way to easy to get, while successful victories are to hard to achieve once you've been IT'd. My reason is that ITs offer a what I think are overpowered bonuses to who holds IT...it should be easier to break ITs, which would allow the "losing" nation to fit back a bit better...if they are putting in effort to replenish their military units.
• As stated above, I think IT effects should be nerfed slightly...but perhaps this 2 tiered IT system sort of does that naturally.
• Mega down-declares aren't fixed here. I think a down-declare should be capped at a 10 city difference. But the changes to missiles/nukes might help fight these off a bit more since it makes it easier to knock out more improvements.

I'm happy to see the announced changes though. Will be interesting to see how they pan out!

Edited June 17, 2023 by Nintendo

[Raphael]

14 hours ago, Village said:

• Players will be sent an email to verify their IP address when logging in from a new IP.

Can we please make this optional? I can see this becoming hellacious with the number of times PnW already asks me to re-login if I go from PC to mobile to a laptop, etc.

14 hours ago, Village said:

• A new alliance disband button to allow easier alliance disbandment (this has a number of checks to prevent against erroneous or mistaken use).

If you add an idiot test button to your game, then I don't think you understand who your playerbase is. I can see this being abused maliciously by disgruntled leaders or accidentally triggered via a page loading lag way more often than anyone actually needs to use it. It's already simple to disband an AA, my vote it to not add this feature at all. Ease of access is not always a good thing for certain features.

 

14 hours ago, Village said:

Nukes now kill four improvements per attack.

This and missiles destroying 2 improvements feels absolutely excessive to me. Improvement destruction shouldn't become a meta ever, improvements are the core element of PnW that enables economic and military production (AKA - the ability to do anything), allowing them to be further destroyed via wars I think is a mistake in a game that already struggles with lacking recourse for losers. Even acknowledging nukes as a weapon of last resort, improvement destruction should honestly be nerfed from its current state rather than buffed.

 

 

All the other changes look good though, I think/hope they will have positive game impacts. I'm unsure of the superiority changes but let's see what tests show.

[Majima Goro]

One of my major complaints about the Test server is that the testing phase, i.e, the initial tournament phase has everyone set equal. In the real game, everyone is not equal. People have different city counts, military, etc. In the test tourney, everyone starts at 10c or so. The test hence cannot in essence capture what a real war would be like.

I think it would be better to transfer over nations from main to test server so things like updeclares, downdeclares, etc can be tested better. Ofc I am not saying all people get moved over. To be moved over, you need to sync your current real server nation to the test one. Could be done using ingame messages. This will create imbalances which will help to mimick real server better.

[KindaEpicMoah]

49 minutes ago, Majima Goro said:

One of my major complaints about the Test server is that the testing phase, i.e, the initial tournament phase has everyone set equal. In the real game, everyone is not equal. People have different city counts, military, etc. In the test tourney, everyone starts at 10c or so. The test hence cannot in essence capture what a real war would be like.

I think it would be better to transfer over nations from main to test server so things like updeclares, downdeclares, etc can be tested better. Ofc I am not saying all people get moved over. To be moved over, you need to sync your current real server nation to the test one. Could be done using ingame messages. This will create imbalances which will help to mimick real server better.

I totally agree with you, but the problem with porting everyone over at the beginning of a tournament is that it fundamentally goes against what a tournament is because it puts players on an unequal playing field. 

 

I think randomly distributing cities to players (e.g. most people start as c10, some start as c11s, c12s, etc. until c15) would be the best of both worlds because in your case, most low tier wouldn't be incentivized to participate. Unfortunately, even in my case, some people who are looking to play the tournament for the rewards would quit if they started with less cities because they're at an inherent disadvantage. 

 

 

Edited June 17, 2023 by KindaEpicMoah

[Majima Goro]

51 minutes ago, KindaEpicMoah said:

I think randomly distributing cities to players (e.g. most people start as c10, some start as c11s, c12s, etc. until c15) would be the best of both worlds

Have a registration phase for 48 hours. Then distribute cities per current game's city distribution statistics. This distribution can be random ofc. 

[Zaxon]

18 hours ago, Village said:

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.

 

 

[MBaku]

7 hours ago, Borg said:

uhhhh.... 

You do realize this will allow any nation or alliance (including pirates) to declare beforehand without any risk of retaliation. Also its during a conflict between CTO/Guardian,HS.

I'd recommend also force peacing all wars if you go this route. 

 

I can’t believe you.. you just believe the worst in people. Not everyone just sits around trying the game the system. Admin has way more important things to do than worrying about this anyway.
 

nothing to see here, just move along 

 

[KindaEpicMoah]

3 hours ago, MBaku said:

I can’t believe you.. you just believe the worst in people. Not everyone just sits around trying the game the system. Admin has way more important things to do than worrying about this anyway.
 

nothing to see here, just move along 

 

Don't underestimate the power of my denounce blitz 

[Village]

Kinda decided partway through to start replying to some things, so sorry if I missed lots of things! (As for general feedback for superiorities and stuff, I've taken most or all of it and forwarded it to the design team, we're discussing things now, and depending how things shake out we'll probably have some more changes for y'all soon ).

On 6/16/2023 at 11:58 PM, lightside said:

That being said I am disappointed that all suggestions to make the mars project do something useful were ignored.

We might in the future! At the moment it's just a fun thing that took two minutes to add. 🤣

On 6/17/2023 at 7:46 AM, Borg said:

You do realize this will allow any nation or alliance (including pirates) to declare beforehand without any risk of retaliation. Also its during a conflict between CTO/Guardian,HS.

I'd recommend also force peacing all wars if you go this route. 

On 6/16/2023 at 8:50 PM, abaddon said:

We might go with the force peacing, and if any major conflicts are ongoing at that time we're going to delay the rollout. The idea is to make it painless and allow existing wars to finish, if something goes wrong with that we will likely reconsider and sort something out.

On 6/17/2023 at 11:07 AM, Roberts said:

Can we please make this optional? I can see this becoming hellacious with the number of times PnW already asks me to re-login if I go from PC to mobile to a laptop, etc.

On 6/16/2023 at 8:30 PM, Village said:

I'll definitely consider it depending how things shake out, you should just be able to say "stay logged in" and be logged in for 60 days or something as long as you don't clear your cookies.

On 6/17/2023 at 11:07 AM, Roberts said:

If you add an idiot test button to your game, then I don't think you understand who your playerbase is. I can see this being abused maliciously by disgruntled leaders or accidentally triggered via a page loading lag way more often than anyone actually needs to use it. It's already simple to disband an AA, my vote it to not add this feature at all. Ease of access is not always a good thing for certain features.

 

It's not easy at all to disband an AA, you need to kick out every one of potentially dozens of members and then disband. As well, to actually disband with this, you need to input your alliance name and check a bunch of boxes so you can't just accidentally click on it.

On 6/17/2023 at 12:06 PM, Majima Goro said:

One of my major complaints about the Test server is that the testing phase, i.e, the initial tournament phase has everyone set equal. In the real game, everyone is not equal. People have different city counts, military, etc. In the test tourney, everyone starts at 10c or so. The test hence cannot in essence capture what a real war would be like.

 

We're going to look at running some form of transfer tournament or just tiered betas of some kind to make things more representative in the future. At the moment this is all we've got sadly.

[Kastor]

• "Players will be sent an email to verify their IP address when logging in from a new IP."

Please have this toggle. I move a lot for work and use my phone also so my IP changes a bunch from location to location. I wouldn't appreciate this change personally.

[Kastor]

On 6/17/2023 at 2:01 AM, MBaku said:

TLDR; The beige cap will make beige cycling worse than before. It needs to be removed entirely to ensure a defensive coalition rebuild isn’t compromised. 
 

 

 

 I don’t see beige cycling going away. I just see it looking different.

Beige cycling will still be achieved by the tactic of racing beige for one half of the alliance and sitting on the other half until expiry to create the military rebuild offset and maintain the advantage. 
 

If the defender declares wars and they lose the first round, they probably can’t win their offensive wars. This means their offensive wars can sit on them until expiry while their beige clock ticks down and compromise their rebuild. This encourages downdecs for the defending alliance to minimize the danger of being sat on. 
 

To avoid this, defenders might be better off not declaring any wars at all. That way they can try to ensure a full rebuild. But without counters, the race beige vs expiry offset will still cause a compromised rebuild. 

 

Option 1- They declare offensives but lose the military battle. The 5 day cap means an offensive war can sit on them for 3-5 days after all defensives expire and their offensives beige them a turn before expiry for a minimal “rebuild penalty” of 5 turns. 
 

option 2- They declare no wars but lose the military battle. Imagine the alliance has four people. Two defenders will get beiged in two days and start to rebuild. They’ll come out in 5 days or sooner with near max mil at 7.5 days into the war. The other two defenders will get beiged the turn before expiry, starting their rebuild and finishing 10 days into the war, when the first wave  are already half way through their second round.  

 

in either scenario the whole alliance will never get fully rebuilt at the same time which is the effect of our current beige cycling. To make matters worse, the inability to farm and stack beige makes it functionally impossible to get the whole alliance rebuilt at the same time. The new meta makes it impossible to beige cycle a single player, but it’s definitely still possible to beige cycle an alliance and effectively only fight half of them at max mil at a time. 

 

At least in the current meta, if everybody declares wars to farm beige, some can get 6 days, others get 9 days,  and others get 12 days for example. they can find a 5 day overlap to get rebuilt together and break beige together. They also have the element of surprise. under the new meta, breaking beige to surprise your opponent will be all but gone.  
 

that’s how I see the new meta of large scale wars looking, and it could be potentially worse than what we have right now. 
 

potential fixes?
 

1.) A project for greater daily rebuy could help. Just plugging this again. 

2.) The beige cap is the fundamental problem here. the simple fix is to remove the beige cap and allow beige to stack. Offensive wars are only 6 turns of beige anyway. 3 defensives give 90 turns of beige. Then it doesn’t matter if the defensives try to offset the war endings. Either way the defender gets a full rebuild that will coincide with alliance members that were also blitzed. It also allows alliances to break beige at a turn if their choice and keep an element of surprise. 
 

3.) beige countdown doesn’t begin until the nation completes all wars.
 

But with the 5 day beige cap, alliances will still coordinate when wars complete in order to create the offset. And it’s simple. The offensive wars beige first, then the defensive wars beige in unison. I don’t know if this will fix the problem. But since the losing alliance can choose when they declare their offensives they can try to minimize the offset by declaring offensives right on the end of the second day of war before the beige window opens. But that just opens them up to being sat on by their offensive ear.
 

4.) nerf the resistance damage of every attack. That way it’s impossible to finish wars in two days and each war completes closer to five days,

This just makes an offset smaller and more difficult to achieve, but the wars will be such a slog and impact income for raiders. 

I think your vision lacks skillful play.

 

Your scenario is basically Rock- Paper - Scissors. Defenders shouldn't have any type of advantage, that's what has made certain "defensive" wars so spectacular. There's 2 key elements to warfare now, timing on hundreds/thousands of wars all across an alliance. Deciding who get's beiged and who doesn't. Then on the flip side do you go on the offensive, or do you just eat the attack then recover? There's several different facets that can be chosen. What you want is a "response" to an offensive/blitz that favors or tries to equalize defenders, but you forget, blitzing, hitting every enemy, tiering beige timers, syncing updeclares, all of that is the "skill" part. The defenders are the one at the advantage already because they don't have to do anything, and if the attackers mess up, they lose. We've seen where bad attackers have lost wars or even taken more damage than necessary. The art of war in this game is the attack. Not the defense. 

[Raphael]

On 6/18/2023 at 10:22 PM, Village said:

Kinda decided partway through to start replying to some things, so sorry if I missed lots of things! (As for general feedback for superiorities and stuff, I've taken most or all of it and forwarded it to the design team, we're discussing things now, and depending how things shake out we'll probably have some more changes for y'all soon ).

We might in the future! At the moment it's just a fun thing that took two minutes to add. 🤣

We might go with the force peacing, and if any major conflicts are ongoing at that time we're going to delay the rollout. The idea is to make it painless and allow existing wars to finish, if something goes wrong with that we will likely reconsider and sort something out.

I'll definitely consider it depending how things shake out, you should just be able to say "stay logged in" and be logged in for 60 days or something as long as you don't clear your cookies.

It's not easy at all to disband an AA, you need to kick out every one of potentially dozens of members and then disband. As well, to actually disband with this, you need to input your alliance name and check a bunch of boxes so you can't just accidentally click on it.

We're going to look at running some form of transfer tournament or just tiered betas of some kind to make things more representative in the future. At the moment this is all we've got sadly.

Thanks for putting in the effort to respond btw.

[MBaku]

8 hours ago, Kastor said:

I think your vision lacks skillful play.

 

Your scenario is basically Rock- Paper - Scissors. Defenders shouldn't have any type of advantage, that's what has made certain "defensive" wars so spectacular. There's 2 key elements to warfare now, timing on hundreds/thousands of wars all across an alliance. Deciding who get's beiged and who doesn't. Then on the flip side do you go on the offensive, or do you just eat the attack then recover? There's several different facets that can be chosen. What you want is a "response" to an offensive/blitz that favors or tries to equalize defenders, but you forget, blitzing, hitting every enemy, tiering beige timers, syncing updeclares, all of that is the "skill" part. The defenders are the one at the advantage already because they don't have to do anything, and if the attackers mess up, they lose. We've seen where bad attackers have lost wars or even taken more damage than necessary. The art of war in this game is the attack. Not the defense. 

I disagree with your description of large wars. From my experience, blitzing is a massive advantage for a number of reasons. The only time the offense fails is when they hit alliances larger than they are in the hopes that the defending membership will either lay down or can’t counter effectively. Or they knowingly run into an unavoidable war they can’t win because the offensive is such a large advantage that it’s their best opportunity to deal a large amount of damage.
 

 

Blitzing is easy. But effective, fast counters after a surprise attack is hard. The 5 day cap makes it impossible to dictate your own strategy on defense. It should always be possible to defend well if you’re skilled. And effective defensive strategies shouldn’t be limited to nuke turreting with no mil
 

It takes more than 5 days to get a full rebuild and day buy. This new proposal makes 5 days the max and there are a ton of ways to ensure your opponent gets less than that. In this new meta, what can the defender do strategically against a skilled opponent that they couldn’t do before? 

[tenk]

Very stupid question: what exactly do the different phases of superiority mean?

[Trae102]

Can we do something about the dome only being able to block 25% instead of the 50%? It's not fair for most of us who have fairly new nations that don't have the money to buy more land and in turn create more improvement/project slots. It's hard to get the additional project slots to even create a missile pad. So for the new countries that are able to get their hands on a missile pad, it creates unequal chances of battle when the only defense we have is the dome. It seems the changes have changed to be more in favor of offensive attacks instead of defensive attacks. There should be just as many defensive techniques to offset attacks as their are offensive techniques. There are way more offensive techniques and hardly any defensive techniques. I think the dome should actually be increased from 50% to more instead of being decreased to 25% taking away our means to protect our countries.

[Anarchist Empire]

On 6/17/2023 at 12:06 PM, Majima Goro said:

One of my major complaints about the Test server is that the testing phase, i.e, the initial tournament phase has everyone set equal. In the real game, everyone is not equal. People have different city counts, military, etc. In the test tourney, everyone starts at 10c or so. The test hence cannot in essence capture what a real war would be like.

I think it would be better to transfer over nations from main to test server so things like updeclares, downdeclares, etc can be tested better. Ofc I am not saying all people get moved over. To be moved over, you need to sync your current real server nation to the test one. Could be done using ingame messages. This will create imbalances which will help to mimick real server better.

Testing server I would maybe do if I could keep my progress. I do agree to an extent, people aren't equal already if we're testing the mechanics. I think letting people carry progress over from the test server, rather than main game. (Rather than reset.) Might be better. (Even transferring my current nation, more likely to test it if I can use my nation.)

Is there a tournament prize that makes it worth having everyone on even ground? Not sure. Could be fun making a clone of our current nations, just to wreck testing the new war system. So your way is interesting also.

Edited June 23, 2023 by Anarchist Empire

[Village]

Hey folks, just an update, the war and spy blackout planned for tonight won’t be happening due to ongoing major conflicts in the game. Staff will be starting the blackout at will sometime after the conflicts are resolved, likely without prior warning to minimize the potential for abuse. Have a great day everyone!

[Unclaimed]

The tiers should be swapped. like small typos should be t1 and Serious bugs should be tier 4 and you get my point right? so its not as confusing when we read it.