Rich333

My trade circle recently lost our Fish/Spices supplier so we need a new one. The circle is on Aqua and has been around for about 4 years now, and this is only the third time we've needed a replacement so we have a [b]proven track record of long-term trade stability[/b]. The resources of the circle provide [b]the highest population and income bonuses possible out of any combination of resources[/b]. Team: [b]Aqua[/b] Resources: [b]Cattle, Coal, Fish, Furs, Gems, Gold, Pigs, Silver, Spices, Sugar, Wheat, Wine[/b] Bonuses: [b]Fast Food, Fine Jewelry, Affluent Population[/b] Need: [b]Fish, Spices[/b] Cattle: [url=http://www.cybernations.net/nation_drill_display.asp?Nation_ID=226130]dukeofism[/url] Coal: [url=http://www.cybernations.net/nation_drill_display.asp?Nation_ID=13263]Jhouserok[/url] [b]Fish:[/b] Furs: [url=http://www.cybernations.net/nation_drill_display.asp?Nation_ID=171326]bdubb1234[/url] Gems: [url=http://www.cybernations.net/nation_drill_display.asp?Nation_ID=171326]bdubb1234[/url] Gold: [url=http://www.cybernations.net/nation_drill_display.asp?Nation_ID=26862]The House of Sidéral[/url] Pigs: [url=http://www.cybernations.net/nation_drill_display.asp?Nation_ID=33353]Rich333[/url] Silver: [url=http://www.cybernations.net/nation_drill_display.asp?Nation_ID=226130]dukeofism[/url] [b]Spices:[/b] Sugar: [url=http://www.cybernations.net/nation_drill_display.asp?Nation_ID=26862]The House of Sidéral[/url] Wheat: [url=http://www.cybernations.net/nation_drill_display.asp?Nation_ID=13263]Jhouserok[/url] Wine: [url=http://www.cybernations.net/nation_drill_display.asp?Nation_ID=33353]Rich333[/url] If you're interested, you can post here, send me an in-game message, or just send each of us a trade offer with "Trade Circle" as the reason (be sure to switch to Aqua first if you're not already on it). [b]If you need a Harbor, I'll pay for it.[/b]

57,-23 = 99% 57,-21 = 98% 57,-24 = 99% My best guess is 58,-23 at this point.

[quote name='Zero!' date='05 March 2010 - 07:23 PM' timestamp='1267835310' post='2215387']a nation with a significant higher infrastructure level will have to have significantly higher bills[/quote] Their bills are nothing compared to what it'd take for their opponents to rebuild from ZI. Even in the worst case where they have no upkeep discounts and their opponents have every possible discount for rebuilding, it'd take months before their bills exceed the rebuilding costs of their opponents, and if they're fighting for that long, they must either be taking sufficient damage to lower their bills significantly, or they must be taking little or no damage and should therefore be able to collect taxes as normal. And that's not even counting the cost of daily defeat alerts for their opponents; the money lost to defeat alerts by the ZId nation could easily exceed the difference in infra upkeep between the two nations. There's also the loss of spies during every defeat alert, which cost several million to replace, and if they're not replaced then they leave the ZId nation at a disadvantage in spy ops, which could easily amount to another $20M lost every single day from Destroy Money Reserves operations. [quote name='Zero!' date='05 March 2010 - 07:23 PM' timestamp='1267835310' post='2215387']In terms of CMs, Aircraft and Nukes they should pretty much be on equal footing (though you can argue that if one's navy is depleted, they may lose access to some defensive planes).[/quote] They should be on equal footing with CMs, but this sort of situation only comes up in a curbstomp, which means the ZId nations are greatly outnumbered, and therefore they're likely to be at a disadvantage when it comes to nukes. Once their initial nuclear stockpile runs out, which tends to happen pretty quickly against nations with SDIs, they can average only 0.4 successful nuclear attacks per day against SDI nations, or 0.8 if they have a WRC. Their opponents, on the other hand, can probably nuke them every single day, because they probably have sufficient numbers of in-range nations to be able to rotate the attackers assigned to the ZId nations, thus allowing them to replenish their in-range nukes more quickly than they use them. Only in the best case scenario for the ZId nations are they on equal footing for nukes; in the average case, they're at a disadvantage. ZId nations are also at a disadvantage for both offensive and defensive aircraft operations because of a lack of carriers. [quote name='Zero!' date='05 March 2010 - 07:23 PM' timestamp='1267835310' post='2215387']The advantage the 10,000 infra nation holds is in the ground attacks and defense (and I won't deny that). However the 1,000 infra nation still retains the underdog bonus (correct me if I'm wrong, but some of nations I've fought have "defeated me" despite having less than 25% of my defending tanks and troops).[/quote] No ground attacks can be conducted so long as the odds for either side are under 5%, so 1k infra nations can't generally ground attack 10k infra nations, but 10k infra nations can deploy sufficiently few troops to be able to ground attack 1k infra nations, so the 1k infra nation will suffer ground battle losses or defeat alerts, or both, every single day. There's also no more underdog bonus; ground battles come down pretty much just to the numbers, so if for example the game says you have a 75% chance of victory, you'll win 3 out of every 4 times. [quote name='Zero!' date='05 March 2010 - 07:23 PM' timestamp='1267835310' post='2215387']However the 10,000 infrastructure nation must also have to endure significantly higher bills for infrastructure, troops and tanks (with a WRC and high amount of tech, this figure can easily be double to triple the original bills).[/quote] Against a 1k infra nation, the 10k infra nation doesn't have to maintain tanks, or much more than their usual peacetime level of soldiers. Also, WRCs only increase purchase costs, not upkeep, and even then they only do so by 0.01%/level; that works out to a doubling of the purchase cost at 10k tech and a tripling at 20k tech. With a full set of GCs and Barracks, soldier upkeep also becomes negligible; even with the huge upkeep penalty for having max soldiers, GCs and Barracks cut soldier upkeep down to less than it would be with the 20% of citizens minimum. [quote name='Zero!' date='05 March 2010 - 07:23 PM' timestamp='1267835310' post='2215387']my argument does hinge on the fact that the GAs can still cancel each other out (correct me if this "underdog bonus" is non-existent).[/quote] It's non-existent. If someone can only manage a 5% chance of victory, they'll lose 19 times out of 20. A 1k infra nation generally can't even manage 5% odds against a 10k infra nation though, so they won't be able to use GAs at all. Even if they can manage it, and do win, they'll almost certainly lose against both counter-attacks, and probably get a defeat alert on top of that.

[quote name='Lord Brendan' date='05 March 2010 - 08:01 AM' timestamp='1267794345' post='2214792']Nobody has suggested "completely nerfing" anyone. The important issue, in my opinion, is slightly tweaking the incredibly overpowered Manhattan Project. Nations with massive tech that are ZIed would still demolish their opponents.[/quote] Nonsense. Even with a WRC, the maximum is two nuke purchases per day, and against nations with SDIs that averages out to only 0.8 nukes per day. No matter how low their land gets, if they still have any navy vessels they can be hit with naval attacks, so if they still have carriers, they won't have them for long. That means they're at a significant disadvantage in airpower. On top of that, they can't ground attack. At best, what can they do? They can make on average less than one successful nuclear strike per day, they can launch air attacks which will fail most of the time, and they can launch CMs. They aren't going to demolish anything once they run out of their initial stockpile of nuclear weapons.

[quote name='Zero!' date='04 March 2010 - 06:54 PM' timestamp='1267747178' post='2214210']I wasn't proposing that we make the change right now, in fact I believe most of the people have suggested this as an idea to change after the war has concluded.[/quote] Yes, of course, so the next curbstomp doesn't involve any of that pesky, totally unrealistic, "fighting back". I'm sure making it even easier to erase years of nation building work in a matter of days certainly won't have any negative impact on player retention rates. In fact, wouldn't it just be easier to add a feature like senate voting to delete other people's nations? That'd give you your automatic, instantaneous, zero cost, majority autovictories, without all the usual server load that accompanies major wars. [quote name='Zero!' date='04 March 2010 - 06:54 PM' timestamp='1267747178' post='2214210']In my (humble) opinion, I think the system is unfair and somewhat unrealistic.[/quote] Yes, it is unrealistic. If my tech level is twice yours, your nation should cease to exist after one nuke. It's no less unfair or unrealistic that you should be able to hold your own against a clearly superior nation than that clearly outnumbered but well-prepared nations are able to hold their own, so to further simplify war, nukes backed by superior tech should delete nations, just as majority votes should delete nations. Perfect "fairness" and "realism". [quote name='Zero!' date='04 March 2010 - 06:54 PM' timestamp='1267747178' post='2214210']However I still think that high infra nations don't need to punished even further (especially with the additions of the WRC and the Space wonders that make it virtually impossible to score a real victory).[/quote] Oh, yes, of course, the ability of nations that have spent years building and saving to fight back counts as "punishing" those who keep attacking them, but completely nerfing the losers, who've already lost billions of dollars worth of infrastructure, doesn't in any way count as unfair or "punishment" for being outnumbered or anything. And obviously those billions of dollars worth of infra damage don't count as a "real victory"; only nation deletion or its equivalent in damage would count as a "real victory". In case it isn't clear, all of the above was sarcasm. You're trying to "fix" something that isn't even in the same universe as broken. In most games like CN, the people with the equivalent of 20k tech would turn everyone else into resource farms without much if any effort, regardless of how outnumbered they might be against weaker, less prepared, nations. You should be glad CN is different enough that your complaint is that the strongest and most well prepared are able to fight back at all.

[quote name='Baldr' date='01 March 2010 - 12:43 AM' timestamp='1267422394' post='2209545']A set with Steel,Jewelry and Affluent population simply isn't a great set.[/quote] Adding in Fast Food can make it a decent set. A set with Fast Food, Fine Jewelry, Affluent Population, and Wheat, provides the greatest population and income of any resource set in the game; it's great once you've already built up to something like 14k infra and don't feel the need to build up on infra any further (the gains from doing so are miniscule), or if you're able to do temporary trade swapping for infra discounts whenever you infra jump, but even if you're just building up with it with no trade swapping, given enough time the extra income will offset the higher infra purchase costs, and the extra population will certainly help with getting improvements early on. Getting Iron instead of Wheat makes it a FF/FJ/AP/Steel set, which isn't quite as good, it has slightly lower population than the C/B/FF/Fish/Wildcard 3BR set and much lower than the FF/FJ/AP/Wheat set, but with it's very high income (the same as FF/FJ/AP/Wheat) and better infra cost and upkeep reduction than the FF/FJ/AP/Wheat set, it's still competitive. For someone with Iron/Coal as their native resources, I'd generally recommend just getting C/B/FF/Fish/Steel though; it's well balanced and will generally match or outperform C/B/FF/Fish/Uranium for nations with nukes but no nuke plant wonder.

[quote name='King Hendrix' date='02 March 2010 - 09:36 PM' timestamp='1267583981' post='2212131']The problem with these radical updates is the code it requires. I don't understand code or anything, but that's what I keep hearing about.[/quote] I think a big part of the problem there is the design of the code. Based on some of the comments I've seen the admin make about things that wouldn't be possible due to "the way the code is designed", I suspect it wasn't very well designed initially. Good designs tend to be pretty flexible and make maintenance relatively easy. It'd probably be a lot easier to add new features if someone were to first go through the existing codebase and refactor it (i.e. improve the design without changing the functionality); the same applies to the database structure, though database changes tend to be a bit more difficult, especially if the rest of the code isn't well designed. A solid set of unit and integration tests would also be a good idea to prevent regressions (reintroducing already fixed bugs) and catch new bugs. The best development strategies generally involve writing the tests first, and the code that passes the tests second, because it ensures that the code is easily testable and that it behaves correctly, so that should probably be done for any new features, but there's nothing to prevent writing tests for already existing code, and doing so would help ensure that any design changes to the existing code don't change its functionality. Once that's done, adding new features and radically changing existing features should generally be a lot easier. The html for the game should also be refactored, both to make modifications easier and to reduce the amount of memory and bandwidth used by the server; if you "view source" on just about any in-game page, you'll see a lot of needless bloat and just plain invalid html, and there's very little use of proper css styling to separate appearance from structure, making changes to the interface more complicated and error-prone. Considering how little the interface has changed over the past four years, giving the game a facelift would probably be just as beneficial as, if not more beneficial than, adding new features, and would be far less risky considering that changes to the game mechanics have the potential to drive people away from the game.

I really wish people would stop making threads like this. Every time there's been a curbstomp, [i]every single time[/i] for the past four years, there's always been one or more threads wherein the winning side has complained that "it's not fair" that the losing side hasn't had months or years worth of nation building work nerfed completely into irrelevance for no other reason than that they're on the receiving end of a curbstomp. As things stand now, about a thousand people already quit the game during every major war; giving people even more reasons to quit in disgust isn't good for anyone.

You should ask Provost Zhakarov for help if you have trouble finding the hotspot. He's calculated the 100% spot for the moon for several months now, and he only needs a handful of >50% data points to find it, so those of us with moon wonders are consistently getting back to 100% efficiency within 24 hours of each hotspot reset now.

latitude: 35.00000001 longitude: -68 efficiency: 65%

You have to be on the same team when the trade is offered, and you both have to remain on that team. You used to be able to keep the bonus when changing teams, long long ago, but now you lose the bonus when you change teams, even if you both change to the same team, or one of you changes teams and then changes back; the only way to get the bonus back is to cancel the trade, get back on the same team, and then resend the offer. You also can't get the bonus if the trade is secret; secret trades are protected from trade sanctions but at the cost of the team bonus. In case you don't know what sanctions are: team senators (you should get a reminder on election days) have the power to put in place both trade and aid sanctions against a nation; a nation with a trade sanction against it on a given team cannot trade (secret or otherwise) with anyone from that team and loses all existing non-secret trades with nations on that team; a nation with an aid sanction against it on a given team cannot send aid to or receive aid from nations on that team.

If you can arrange trade swaps for infra jumps and nuke purchases, the Affluent Population/Fine Jewelry/Fast Food/Wheat resource set is the best in the game for income maximization.

They're not backwards anywhere except in the url. The in-game coordinates that are displayed are listed in Latitude, Longitude order. Everything in this thread is likewise listed in Latitude, Longitude order. The relocation url, however, uses Longitude, Latitude order (i.e. lon=someNumber&lat=someOtherNumber), and a lot of people don't pay enough attention to what's before the equals signs to get it right.

You'll lose more in the short-term by not LC cycling than you'll gain with a Stock Market, but in the long-term you'll lose more if you delay your wonder purchase schedule, so I'd say go for the Stock Market.

This. I don't just cycle my Labor Camps though, I cycle my soldiers, defcon, threat level, Guerrilla Camps, Barracks, Labor Camps, and Border Walls. Before I collect, I switch my defcon and threat level to 5/low, decom my LCs, GCs, and Barracks, drop my soldier count down to somewhere between 20% and 30% of my citizen count, and purchase my optimum number of BWs. After I collect, I decom the BWs, purchase max soldiers, buy back my LCs, GCs, and Barracks, and switch my defcon and threat level back to 1/severe (either immediately, if I switched to 5/low the day before in preparation, or the day after if I forgot to prepare). The total cost with a 20-day cycle averages out to only about $200k per day for me, which is less than 1% of my net daily income. Well worth the cost, given that I'm always prepared for an attack.