Alright, so i was purusing the forums earlier and noticed that a couple of alliances were posting huge accomplichments in Alliance Strength.

However I propose the following:





Clearly, upon examination we see, that anyone can have a large nation strength, but since an alliance is supposed to improve unity within an alliance, it is clear that average NS is better... Therefore everyone in the top 10 Average NS, Congratulations !!!

In particular congratulations goes to The Order of Paradox for scoring top 10 in both catagories !!!

What about us?

Yes, what about those Grämlins? They don't count?

Stupid ghosts bringing us down.

Yeah it's easy, go found an alliance and reach 20m of Total Strengh.

But is impossible form a 20 man alliance with 50 of Avg. Strengh.

Next time come with a more logic argument.

Um, sorry what? Also, can you please explain in what sense Average NS is better?

I think what he's saying is it's harder to have a large alliance with a high ANS, like a Citadel alliance, than it is to have one that recruits a lot and has the NS more spread out, like an MCXA or MHA.

Obviously, there are exceptions to this, and each one has its pros and cons when leading.

High Total Strength: Impressive
High Average Strength: Unimpressive
High Total Strength and High Average Strength: Impressive

Then again, I'm somewhat biased. No slight to PC, by the way, OP.

Average NS is easy to accomplish: just start a one man alliance (or whatever the minimum is that counts) with a large nation. I could have an ANS higher than anybody there trivially . The true measure of strength is the net nation strength, multiplied by a factor of how much of that NS is 'real' and would fight effectively for you (which of course can't be known).

However it is very satisfying to see the dominance of Citadel in the ANS charts, and the double-counting of TOP and ourselves

I have to agree in some ways, the current make up of TOP and the Gremlins is extraordinary and a massive deterrent to anyone that would wish to attack them. At the same time, what would have happened if the Gremlins or TOP were to be spied upon or some such by an alliance like TOOL of the past, that had an Ave. NS of something like 4K? I mean, obviously, both TOP and Gremlins had allies that could attack in the lower ranks, but I think that it is important for an alliance to be able to hold its own in every facet of war operations. So theoretically, TOP or the Gremlins could have had a valid CB against TOOL, but would be unable to prosecute a war against them. Therefore, I would argue that it is just as important for an alliance to be strong across the board (in terms of the range of targets their members are able to engage) as it is for an alliance to be strong in the upper-most ranks. (And of course, TOP, the Gremlins and TOOL were just used as examples to illustrate my point).

Well that depends on your objectives. If your aim is independence and the ability to do what you want, then being out of range of a lot of people who could cause you trouble is an advantage. (For example, Citadel has very few problems with rogues and low level wars.) If your aim is to be able to prosecute wars upon other alliances, then it is important that you can attack them, or have allies who can do so. (Spying on us would be a waste of time unless you like long arguments anyway .)

Attacking people is not a major part of our world view, and so being largely out of range of a lot of alliances is a good thing for us – although we have very valued allies who we can ask to assist us in situations like what you describe, and also chasing down aid scammers and so on.

Also, war on TOOL at update . (Bad example these days by the way, I was going to do the 'I'm declaring on all the nations I can' joke but there are actually 3 in my range, which is more than a lot of alliances in that area have. TOOL are surprisingly strong at the top now.)

It is something TOOL has worked on hard over the last year. When we had an ANS of 2k, we had no academy and shedload of ghosts. Now we have an academy and I can count the amount of ghosts on one hand.

edit: woops gravedig, sorry

I think both average NS and total NS are wrong. The real measure is total NS in the top 40 nations, here is where all the real fighting happens and so is a good estimate of how much strength an alliance really has to prosecute war with, you could also look at total NS of nations in the top 5% or something similarly restrictive. Here it looks different, for example NPO heavily outclasses MCXA in average NS, but MCXA has a slight advantage in the very top nations. Similarly FARK has the highest average NS, but fewer really strong nations meaning in a real war they would still lose at the very top.
I'm not gonna' pull the statistics right now, but when you do it my way Gramlins and TOP still top the chart, but IRON, MCXA, NPO etc. are not far behind.

If we use that logic then it is a waste for alliances to fight. Just let the top 40 duke it out.

Really though, if you have a top 80 that is in range of another alliances top 40 and it isn't reciprocated; then you have a 2 vs 1 advantage.

Iron imo is really the strongest alliance overall, save war wonders.

In many cases both of them are not very relevant where it counts most, and that is a fact.
The numbers account for something, but at the end of the day diplomacy is what matters the most.

Lets take the NPO for instance, an alliance perceived to be the most powerful. In terms of numbers, NPO controls about 3% and 5% of total members and total strength respectively. Alone although that is quite impressive, it's still only a very small amount. Without diplomacy theoretically, a movement which controlled 6% and 10% of total members and strength respectively would wipe the floor with them.

So, the fact remains that no alliance is a power unto itself, and statistics of alliances alone do not say much at all. However as was commented on earlier, the Citadel for example seems to be disproportionately represented in the top 10 of average strength. This shows that with the high average, and the diplomacy behind it aswell, they can control the upper tiers. This trend can be found in the various levels of development.

To be honest, neither value really says anything. Important are the rulers behind the nations. Are they active, loyal, reliable?

For example, Alliances like TOP and Grämlins not only have a higher average NS, they also have a lot higher average activity when it comes to participation. Both of them could easily mobilize surely 80-90% of their members for a fight during very few days.

"Massmember" alliances (let's say 300+ members and recruiting randomly) have a hard time to bring even 30% of their total members on IRC or coordinate them effectively via boards/messaging systems. I bet my whole nation that not a single sanctioned alliance is able to mobilize 50% of their members for a fight, you have always hundreds of guys who only log in once every week, do not play seriously, do not follow orders, surrender and flee instantly if they have 3 heavy opponents against them and are pounded hard. The rate of staggering failures, targeting failures, miserably prepared and outfitted nations, anarchies, billlocks and willingness to face ZI for the alliance is WAY in favor of close tied, high avg alliances.

Another important thing is response time. Grämlins and TOP could basically with a 24hours notice bring 50-75 fully prepared nations, armed to the teeth with nukes, wonders and warchest into IRC, ready to hammer someone into the ground - each of them. I bet there are not more than 2 sanctioned alliances who can bring a comparable force on the table in a similar timeframe. Also the 'rest' of the members would "check in" for fighting a lot faster.

If you want a rough overview of fighting capabilities, check an alliances aidsceen. The higher the activity rate there, the higher the activity orgaskills and systems in the rest of the game. Simple example:

Grämlins: 120 members, 383 active aid transfers (non expired)
Ratio of 3.19 aid transfers per nation
Aidslots: 120*4 + 120*ForeignMinistries + 106*DRA = 706 total slots
Fill rate: 54.23% of all available slots used.

TOP: 181 members, 579 active aid transfers (non expired)
Ratio of 3.19 aid transfers per nation
Aidslots: 181*4 + 173*ForeignMinistries + 122*DRA = 1,019 total slots
Fill rate: 56.82% of all available slots used.

NPO: 900 members, 968 active aid transfers (non-expired)
Ratio of 1.07 aid transfers per nation
Aidslots: 900*4 + 661*ForeignMinistries + 181*DRA = 4,442 total slots
Fill rate: 21.79% of all available slots used.

IRON: 876 members, 696 active aid transfers (non-expired)
Ratio of 0.79 aid transfers per nation
Aidslots: 876*4 + 618*ForeignMinistries + 172*DRA = 4,294 total slots
Fill rate: 16.21% of all available slots used.

Since everyone can increase activity during war, you can roughly estimate that alliances like TOP, Grämlins, Umbrella etc. can be counted with 75% of their NS value during war as actual "fighting power". The better organized large alliances with around 40%. The less organized ones will be good if they can bring 30% of their NS to a real battle. Paper tigers not even 20%.

Ah, refreshing, my job as Grand Treasurer is done after seeing us beat you Grämlins =D.

/quit

I would like to take a moment to realize how amazingly brilliant it would be if OBR joined Citadel

It was considered at the beginning, but we're not quite the right fit for each other .

Where did you get the 181 members Syz? We are at 176 and 2 of them are left over ghosts from Vox that total 250NS.

But Syz is right. In the last war TOP had a 87% activity if you take out the one NpOer that was ghosting TOP. 2 nations could have been involved in the war as well but did not have targets, which could have raise it to 88%-89%. Those kinds of number are unheard off in alliances outside of some of the higher average NS alliances. I would expect PC, and ML along with OBR to have those numbers as well tbh, but below that I'm not sure any would.

Lies upon lies. Tis a match made in heaven I say.

They were there at the initial talks but chose to back out.

Oh I copied the member numbers from yesterday (we had a similar discussion at your boards) and I cannot know how much of them are ghosts . But you got the point. Alliances of that structure can throw probably up to 90% of their firepower into a battle, while the larger alliances will have problems to reach even 40-50%.

Well thank you. That is a rather interesting tidbit of information. Knowing OBR they had a valid reason for doing so and it's good to see Citadel has flourished all the same.

It may be widely unknown to CN, but large parts of the 'Lux Aeterna' (Citadel Treaty) were even drafted and written by the OBR.

Having read the Writ de Credo and Lux Aeterna both on multiple occasions, that is intriguing as well.

The activity comparison about aid slot use is not a little bit false, because Cit alliances makes inter-alliance tech buying, which show 1 slot used and the mass-alliances usually make intra-alliance transfers( aids, tech dealing etc.), which show 1 slot used, but 2 alliance members are involved, so they should count twice.

Otherwise i have to agree that there are much more deadweight in 300+ alliances, who won't be avaible to mobilize and coordinate as much high level and skilled members as fast as the Cit. alliances can do it. There are only several alliances, like PC, ML or TORN who can do it.

You, Sir, are correct. Using two members for the same deal basically cuts the available slots for business in half, that is why we never considered it to be lucrative , but when talking about a "fill rate" you are totally correct, internal deals 'fill' two slots (or better: reduce the available slots by 2 instead of by 1).

New Values (updated today):
Grämlins: 119 members, 353 aid transactions (non-expired), 19 of them internal (double) = 372 total transactions
Ratio of 3.13 aid transfers per nation
Aidslots: 119*4 + 119*ForeignMinistries + 105*DRA = 700 total slots
Fill rate: 53.14 of all available slots used.

TOP: 176 members, 554 aid transactions (non expired), 49 of them internal (double) = 603 total
Ratio of 3.43 aid transfers per nation
Aidslots: 176*4 + 173*ForeignMinistries + 122*DRA = 999 total slots
Fill rate: 60.36 of all available slots used.

NPO: 896 members, 857 aid transactions (non expired), 586 of them internal (double) = 1,443 total
Ratio of 1.61 aid transfers per nation
Aidslots: 896*4 + 662*ForeignMinistries + 181*DRA = 4,427 total slots
Fill rate: 32.60% of all available slots used.

IRON: 877 members, 677 aid transactions (non expired), 574 of them internal (double) = 1,251 total
Ratio of 1.43 aid transfers per nation
Aidslots: 877*4 + 622*ForeignMinistries + 174*DRA = 4,304 total slots
Fill rate: 29.07 of all available slots used.

Indeed, but as I said earlier what's important isn't what percentage of nations you can deploy or have active, it's what NS you can deploy. For example MCXA (Since I know it, but should apply to IRON, NPO, and other major alliances) we don't have the same kind of overall percentage of respondents to activity checks and wars that TOP or Gramlins do. But within our top 40 nations we have activity that is comparable, to what Gramlins can boast. If we kicked out our bottom 600 members we could have an Average NS and activity level equal to the elite alliances perhaps not quite on the level of Gramlins, but not far behind. That's why I say looking at percentages is worthless, you should just look at and compare the top 40, 80, or 5%. Or even just use nuke count, SDI count, and WRC count to get a good strength approximation without even looking at the individual nations.

To use your examples I would like to point out that Molon Labe has 35 nuclear capable nations, Poison Clan has 40, and TORN has 42. Even if they could co-ordinate every one of them which I doubt they could, that wouldn't put them close to the 100+ nuke nations in Gramlins, or the large sanctioned alliances. Even though all three of those alliances sport high average NS's they don't have enough tough, big, active, nations to challenge non-elite sanctioned alliances like MCXA, IRON, or NPO.

You got the truth, nc1701. TORN, PC and ML was just examples for active alliances who can mobilize their nations quickly and can fight efficiently. But they won't have chances against the sanctioned alliances, but compared to their membership number they can fight very well.

This is a valid point, for instance, if IRON were to simply drop our academy squad, then our average would skyrocket to levels similar to that found in those charts.

If we kept our highest 120 nations (same number as gramlins) our average NS would be highest on the chart there. If we kept our top 3 squads (~260 nations) we would be higher than TOP and with more members.

Just as pure NS can be misleading, avg NS can be even more so. All that is irrelevent however if you aren't able to deploy it, as someone has pointed out. In these regards, the smaller "Elite" alliances typically do have an advantage, however I don't think they should discount the ability of large alliances to deploy and using aidslots as a guage of activity is biased towards alliances with a greater economic focus. However activity is hard to measire publically so no public data is going to be perfect.

Most of a large alliance's NS is typically within its larger nations which tend to be far more active, responsive and loyal if they've been long time members as many have been.

Just for the hell of it, I decided to check out all of the "mass" alliances Syzygy's method, and the results sort of surised me. Didn't bother to actually do the math, but the GGA had a lowest number of transactions per members at a glance. The NpO was extremely impressive (I expect the war cleared away a lot of the dead wood and the sheer focus on rebuilding hasn't hurt either.) What shocked me though was FOK's ranking - it was comparable to the elite alliances! Didn't quite reach them, but no other sanctioned alliance came close. So congrats FOK.

As deputy Minister of FOK Economic Affairs, I take pride in hearing this. Thank you

of course, they had awesome teachers and were even more impressive learners.

Too bad you cant see the average warchest in the stats...

The man is correct, usually the most inactives are in the very low ranks and the higher up you come, the higher is the activity and loyalty rate.

Compared only the Top100 of all 12 Sanctioned alliances + 2 Runners up + TOP + GRE the field would look like:

#01 GRE: 7,286,428.34
#02 IRON: 7,275,720.36
#03 TOP: 7,131,597.87
#04 NPO: 6,843,836.45
#05 MCXA: 6,196,343.42
#06 SPARTA: 5,292,056.79
#07 TPF: 5,287,527.18
#08 MHA: 5,109,824.44
#09 FARK: 5,021,288.01
#10 ROK: 4,995,412.70
#11 ODN: 4,847,373.95
#12 FOK: 4,860,011.02
#13 VE: 4,709,647.59
#14 GPA: 4,571,581.10
#15 GGA: 3,755,445.77
#16 NpO: 3,286,354.66

However, this still is not an entirely correct estimation, because of course all the nations below the Top100 also have people among them who can and would fight. Even if they do not fight very good or do lower damages than the top-tier nations, they still can stagger, prevent collections, nuke or CM all day long and simply keep nagging on the enemies infra-fat.

I'll show you mine if you show me yours.

I'm on my PS3 so bare with me.

Syz, your method does not count inter-alliance aid/trade. ie;(alliance tech/building aid) as it is only listed once. Fill rate would be estimated wrongly but I suspect only marginally. Although your method is a little flawed.

TPF: More Top heavy than it would appear.

I laughed out loud at that.

o/ ridiculously big warchests.

He fixed that a few posts up.

Gremlins probably requires a billion stashed away from all of their members. I'm sure Citadel as a whole may very well have that policy in place. Compared to the probably half that for their largest nations that most sanctioned alliances require. Some in those alliances are probably smart enough to save all they can above and beyond what is required but on a whole I'd say Gremlins probably would outlast anyone in a a real drag out war. So if Gramlins have ever looked at you funny you may as well try to start saving to a billion before you try to take them on or you will be in real trouble.

I have already counted inter-alliance trades with x2. See here: http://forums.cybernations.net/index.php?s...t&p=1136546

TPF: More bottom light than it would appear. (for clarity I was kidding great stats there.)

Didn't notice that. As I suspected though it didn't make a huge difference.

I would say top 40 is also missing the point.

In inter-alliance warfare, you want to focus on nations that are difficult to rebuild. If a 1K infra tech selling nation gets hurt, rebuilding aid or reparations will be able to fairly easily cure its wounds.

I tend to look at nations with 5K infra and 1K tech or higher. Those are the nations that actually took a little while to build up, and can't be immediately rebuilt if they get destroyed. The more strength you have in that area, the stronger an alliance is in wartime.

(TOP and Grämlins still do very well, as nearly all of their nations are in that league.)

I agree. Plus, most of the time more active younger nations end up in back collects and end up as a larger nation pretty quickly

If you want to really know the ability of an alliance to mobilize for war, send a message to every single member and see what percent have read that message in 24 hours.

Repeat that about 4 times to get a rough average and THEN you can start talking about which alliances are going to be "strong" or "powerful" or what not.

Any alliance can have a ton of NS. Any alliance also can have a lot of people who log in once a week, buy infra, and then are inactive another week.

I know I have fought a few people who never even logged IN to their nation for nearly the entire course of a war - all they do is give up an attacking warslot, and contribute literally nothing other than that to their home alliance in terms of military abilities.

Heres another way to look at this debate.

whats better,

100 50,000 str nations

or

50 100,000 str nations

now this is an equal overall strength, but given the current war system i think everyone can agree that 2 on 1 even at half the strength will have the advantage.
(this is assuming that every player is active and knows what there doing)

but also with the current war system, 50,000 str nations cannot declare on 100,000 str nations. maybe an example with different numbers would make a better point. im not good at math though, so dont know the numbers XD

no XD smiley?

I'm not so sure. Besides the point maicke raised, there is the issue of sustainability. Assuming all the nations are equally well prepared(relative to their size), the larger nations are going to be able to do equal damage to each of their two opponents, at least for a little while. When each of the 50k nations are down to 30k, and the larger one is down to 60k, is it still an even fight? Those higher NS nations are far more likely to have much higher tech totals and things like WRC, so I would tend to doubt the 50k nations will be able to stay with the larger nations. They will certainly win the 'cost to rebuild' part of the war, but that might not be relevant.