Blackatron

In the battle screen when I attacked an opponent with 0 land it says "were" instead of "was".

Nice, congratulations guys!

Nice grouping. Have you decided what your abbreviation is yet? the obvious one is CotM, though maybe you had something else in mind.

I'm not aware of any other hegemonic rulership in which all but 2 of the top 20 alliances are either non-fighting, in the hegemonic block, or directly or at least very closely indirectly tied to that block (those 2 being FAN (which has no FA power at all) and The Children of the Morrighan (which may have treaties with Atlas and GATO, in which case it would fall into the "closely indirectly" category). And when the list of active and effective alliances doesn't extend far below the 40th (that is with the most generous possible definition) that is more than a little serious. I'm new to Bob, I cannot speak to previous hegemonies, however I can see what the attitudes to them were at the time, to compare Oculus to Doom House; DH+allies fought Chestnut Accords (TTK's maroon block) 3 times and won, DH-Chestnut, Grudge war, Dave War. People in TTK at the time said DH was tough, DH was the strongest in the game, et cetera et cetera, I can't recall reading too many people saying "Doom House will kill the game", "Doom House cannot be beaten" and so on, even after losing 3 wars against them. And then in the next war (Equilibrium) DH was defeated. In comparison in the thread discussing the formation of Oculus shortly after Letum announced it people were stating that they couldn't be beaten* and that it would stagnate the game within the first page (before Oculus even did anything). So even if you cannot see the difference between Oculus and its predecessor Hegemonies plenty of people outside of Oculus clearly can. *do recall that this was when many people believed that NpO and its sphere would be a target of Oculus, when in reality it is now an ally.

IIRC they are allied to Umbrella, as well as NPO, NG and Sengoku through NpO. I'm not exactly a fan of Oculus, but I'm not even sure how that prediction makes sense. I do like how the treaty has "Atlas" in brackets after Atlas, just the right kind of pedantic. Fair enough, might be cool idea.

Congratulations Joe Stupid, condolences Rayvon. Very nice banner BTW

Ah, good job you keep backups, if it were mine it would now be gone forever. As for the warchest, I don't really want to dispute your spy report, you are in the bloc fighting him after all, and I am not, but it does seem to contradict the statements of Auctor here: in which he had $3.2 billion (unless the date there is the 4th of May rather than the 5th of April, which is what I am assuming it is. But yeah he probably didn't have $13b, honestly I can't remember where I read that. Is it? $20 bil warchests and above are certainly around a fair bit, but I'm not so sure they are so ubiquitous amongst top tier nations either.

CnG and XX? Eh why not? Congrats! I must say though, that cancellation period seems rather unusually long.

The data I have seen indicates he netted ~$1 billion over a 20 day sled, compared to ~$0.6 billion for a regular upper tier nation, so his warchest was smaller than most expected, but I wouldn't call the $13 billion or so he had a joke. And when your tech level is as high as that I'm sure it goes down very quickly.

Thanks for the offer, I'm plenty happy flicking through the web archive tool, but if it is something you would like to make then I'd certainly be interested. BTW lyricalz has been down for a day or two at this point, do you know what's up with that?

I actually noticed this yesterday when looking at recent foreign aid, I noticed aid between 2 members of CotM, I assumed it was some micro but when I looked I discovered it was actually the 13th largest alliance in the game, it took me too long to figure out it used to be Pax. Regardless this, a neutral and non-neutral alliance merging to form a non-neutral alliance, is very interesting, I hope that non-neutrality works out well for you guys. Although going from neutral to an alliance that allows raiding seems to be quite a leap. o/Children of the Morrighan

Just to clarify this point: Obviously the nation I am sitting and I cannot both be sending aid to the same nation, nor can we both have active trade agreements with the same nation. However, what if one of us has a trade agreement with a third party nation and the other one has active foreign aid with them? IE is it against the rules to sit a nation one of your trade partners is aiding/being aided by or to sit a nation which is a trade partner of a nation you are aiding?

I find this line of argument self defeating, ultimately the politics is above the heads of the majority of the rulers of Bob. Certainly those who are less active, and thus more likely to leave, don't pay much attention to it at all. No, dumb terms aren't responsible for the situation Bob is in now, largely because they have only made a bit of a comeback fairly recently, but those who claim that kicking someone after you've beat them down is gonna keep them in the game are talking crap. And need I remind you that it is your own ally who you are arguing it is so great that they had these humiliating peace terms put on them? Very endearing behaviour.

So what you are saying is that you are intending on launching a down-declare on an alliance already in the process of an up-declare, with the justification that you failed to make the first move?

I agree that a new server should have been considered many years ago, now I think it wouldn't do anything. I'm certainly not going to argue that the death is not inevitable, all things come to an end as tastes and interests of the consumer change, however I object to what you say about the game being allowed to "die a natural death", who decides what is "natural"? What seems natural to me is online games continually getting supported with occasional-frequent additions and updates until the game no longer turns enough profit to justify it (and there should certainly be enough profit to justify updates to a browser based game, there's still significant donations to the game, and the ad revenue should still be considerable), what we have seen for the last couple of years is more death by neglect than "natural". The level of support that the game received in early 2014 was amazing, some brilliant additions were made from January to July of that year that I feel really has added a lot to the game, I'm not expecting to see that much support for the game at this point, just for a bit every now and then to a game and the community around it that people still spend hours and hours on and continue to give actual money to.

This will be very fun. o/ Wolves

Hello all, I first partially wrote this up a couple of weeks ago when the number of nations on Bob dropped below 6,000 for the first time. I didn’t get around to post it largely because I felt it would be a waste of time, and that it would not get much of a response, or at least much of a positive response, or even flak from the moderating staff. But today I decided that I could not continue to play in good conscience without saying this or something like it. As of the rewriting of this sentence there are 5,818 nations in the game, this is down from over 7,000 when I created my current nation 8 short months ago. People in virtually every thread are proclaiming “the game is dying”, “the game is dead” et cetera, et cetera. There seems to be little hope left for the future of Cybernations, and a lot of players don’t even seem to care. People blame various things for this, mostly the IC actions of various groups within the game. I largely disagree with this assessment. The decline in the playerbase is not primarily due to people who post in the open world RP announcing their intent to leave Bob, it is long time players getting bored and simply forgetting to log in, it is not down to Oculus or whoever else within the game for their IC actions, it is down to this: This update was released 2 years, 1 month and 1 day ago today. This is the last thing in the game update log that relates to actual “gameplay”, everything later is just TE, statement of policy, or just more viewable stats. 2 years since the last update is not good for an online game in the 2010’s, to say the very least. When the gameplay in Cybernations is as limited as it is, it is very unrealistic to expect it to prosper with no new content or mechanics for long time players to experience and discuss and to reassure new players that the game is not stagnant, content to allow further growth of established nations and give people something slightly different to do over than log on every few days to pay bills, collect taxes and send/receive cash/tech. I make no suggestions at to what changes should be implemented, that is what the suggestion box is for, only that change is made. Furthermore there is almost no effort to bring new players here anymore, almost everyone who creates a nation arrives here randomly, as there is seemingly no advertisement or anything to draw players here from other similar games and communities. And whilst the number fluctuates it seems well over 50% of new nations are gone ~30 days after their creation, which means the players have lost interest within a couple of days, generally games that lose more than half of players within a day or two of them starting figure out ways to get new players into the game and keep them entertained and get them committed. So simply put: Why has nothing been added in over 2 years to keep the game somewhat interesting for established players? Why has nothing been done recently to attempt to draw new players into the game? Why is nothing being done to increase the number of new players that stick around? I have mentioned keeping players interested several times in this post, but that is not the main reason I believe updates are important. People have lost hope, people have lost faith and trust in the game, this is painfully obvious across the OWF, where people state openly that CN will not be a thing in a years time, that we have seen the last world war to envelop Bob. If people do not believe that the game will be around for very much longer they are unlikely to put much work or effort into it, and players will lose hope and leave, hastening the demise they predicted. So that is why am making this appeal to Admin; start to try to update the game, add features that people would like to see, help this community to grow by adding and retaining new people, show players that this game is not dead and that the game and it’s community aren’t going anywhere for the time being, and give them enough hope for and interest in the future to continue committing their time to this world. And if you are not willing to do this, then I simply and humbly ask that you hand the responsibility over to someone who is. Your’s sincerely, A faithful player

Pretty much. [OOC: I would like to take this opportunity to demand a "like" button]

It's certainly an improvement, thank you.

We first spoke only this June, though truth be told it feels like I have known you for far longer, I said more in private and I feel like it is best kept in private, all I say here is that it has been an honour knowing you friend, good luck in life. Good luck to rotty, you have large shoes to fill, remember always that you have friends. o/ KiWi o/ Rotty o/ Invicta o/ moving on

I don't really have a side in this debate, but I can certainly see someone who once leaked information to him being referred to by Chim as a spy.

To some extent what Thrash said, more specifically it's to do with Senate and sanction troubles, and possibly just a long term dislike of eachother, there was a whole (relatively quite) thing about it back in September, what with NpO trying to dominate the Blue senate, with Grub getting rather unhappy that CCC/NADC (they share a seat IIRC) sanctioning someone at the request of DK. So watch out NATO.

Meth could lose his seat... o/ Peace EDIT: Damn, probably shouldn't have brought his name into this. Oh well, too late.

The guide for new players is decent, but it is fairly basic and somewhat out of date, I assume you are referring to this guide: Some of the stuff there is completely unnecessary, for example the resource stuff is really not something you need to think about at all right now, the only advice new players need with resources is "don't change them until told to", as you can only change them once every 30 days. If you have changed them don't worry, it will just mean a bit of a wait. Likewise for tech all you really need to know ATM is that you shouldn't go above 100 (as that is the amount needed for tech dealing, not 50, as that figure is outdated). Not to say that it isn't good to understand these mechanics, but it isn't really for new players, rather it tries to be for everyone, which is its weakness IMO. You'll find much better and more up to date guides within most alliances you can join, as well as that most alliances will have some kind of mentoring to help you learn stuff. One quick piece of specific advice I would give you looking at your nation is not to buy anymore land for the time being, infra is a much better investment and 340 purchased is a lot for your size (probably too much TBH, though it is so cheap at that level it doesn't really matter).

When wars go on as long as this, you have to wonder what counts as gravedigging. I do wonder why all of these alliances seem to be intent on permawar, is no one able to translate from English to Indonesian?