Hob Dobson

Looking at today's results, that brings the final percentages back in line. Thank you. The wide variation among what I've been seeing in incoming and outgoing damage numbers isn't what I'm used to seeing, so I was thrown way off (obviously) in trying to figure out what was contributing and where. Serves me right for looking too closely at the details and not broadly enough at results!

"One of these things is not like the other" :) Thanks! ((((230.517 / 0.85 ) - 172.5 ) / 172.5 ) / (0.01% / 100%) ) = 3363.3 Yes, that works out. Thank you. I wish I'd known that Munitions Factories disable one's opponent's bunkers earlier.

I recently bought 5 bunker improvements for my nation, to at least see how they perform in practice. However, based on Nuclear Attack reports from the last two consecutive days, I'm left wondering if there have been recent changes that I haven't caught on to. The first of the two messages: Per the posted infra damage descriptions in the Information Index, the tech level required for 198.748 infra damage would be: ((((198.78 / 0.85) - 150) / 150) / (0.01% / 100%) ) = 5590.6 tech, which is roughly the amount that Chimaera's nation had on-hand at the time. The second of the two messages is obviously where the confusion arises for me: In this case, the tech level required for 230.517 infra damage would be: ((((230.517 / 0.85) - 150) / 150) / (0.01% / 100%) ) = 8079.8 tech By my best estimate, killjoy123's nation had 3671 tech when he launched the weapon, no Weapons Research Complex, and no EMP Weaponization to increase the infrastructure damage by almost 16% coming from a nation with 3,000 units less of technology. I could easily be missing something in comparing the two damage instances and the two nations. If so, please just point me to the appropriate references. If not, then please consider this a potential bug.

We're aiming for an entertaining light show, and hope you and the whole Wombat family can enjoy it!

I'm more fond of dragons in heraldry, but nicely done nonetheless!

A refreshingly honest treaty there, but it could use a little more arrogance.

Many lines being drawn there, but it looks like that's a good thing this time around!

What? You put the booze away? No wonder the war took so long!

I thought as much! Next time we're on opposite sides of a front and in range, it's a date. If I can't give as good as I get, well then, it will be my own fault!

There are no formalities that I can think of, except those used by the alliances they are members of. Managing them on the battlefield is likely left to their own initiative, as the only practical limit to their ability to down-declare on an opponent is, perhaps, their tech level and warchest. As to rebuking an alliance for using such nations, why do so? The nations they attack can counter-attack, and can be aided while doing so. The damage caused is expensive all around to repair, but more so for the nation with a higher NS to return to. That said, winning the current war anyway, and afterwards isolating the alliance through public relations and foreign affairs policy are reasonable means through which any tactic or strategy may be rebuked.

It looks like a good step in the right direction. Props to FEAR for brokering it.

From a recent listing: "Last updated: 2014-02-11 01:51:50" Are the stats uploaded daily, or weekly? There are good arguments for/against either frequency, so this is more a question <ooc> admittedly a professional interest,</ooc> than a complaint. Poking around yielded some neat facts and potential uses, btw.

Short answer: DOOMBIRD DOOMCAVE More detailed description: Any nation ranked within +/- 250 spots of your own nation ranking by NS (thank Admin it's not by casualty count ranking) can declare war on your nation. That makes the top 250 or so a free-for-all zone in which a 140k NS nation can be attacked by nations with 4x its strength, and probably 4+ times the resources. As a result, 3 nations like that can knock my alliance's top nation into my range in one round. Some alliances now deal with that by putting their top nations into PM. But not always, as there's always the chance that the opposing alliance's lower tier nations will take that bait, and get pulverized once he takes a minute or two to rebuild. The downside of that, in turn, is that the lower tier nation taking the bait might just be able to hang on and keep the aging behemoth in nuclear anarchy and unable to do further damage to its alliance. As White Chocolate points out, with the appropriate coordination amongst an alliance's active members, many of the opposition's tactics can be derailed.

The only points I'd argue is that the utility of leaving some beat-down nations in the lower tiers seemed obvious to me at least as early as BiPolar. At the time, it was the fastest way to keep some of the heat off the lower tier nations that just could not effectively fight the nations being knocked into their range by the 3rd or 4th round (even earlier now, it seems). Rephrased as controlling the tiers one can control is a more general application of the idea, I would still agree. Your points regarding warchest building are in line with my own experience, so there isn't much room for me to argue against them. I'll also admit to agreeing that some aspects of this war have me seeing a renewed use for banker nations. However, in that regard I'll disagree that they would need to be in the 80k NS range. Given that aid isn't limited to cash, having well-funded bankers sitting as low as 20k NS can be a distinct advantage. That was my own initial goal, growing my nation as fast as the system would allow. A few rebuilds later, I'm more interested in whether my growth goals put me in a good starting position towards getting my nation and as many of my alliance's nations through to the end of the next war. In retrospect, VE's middle tier going into Eq was clearly of the "growth good, small bad" majority, and IRON/AI tore right through that tier. That same war, however, showed that it doesn't take an inordinate amount of coordination to get very satisfactory results. I still think Baron Aaron should have put together a slide show on the topic of "This is is what happens when you work with/listen to me; this is what happens when you don't!" Even fighting against him, I managed to pick up a couple of new tricks . . . That brings another point to Unknown Smurf's table that fits well with your own about "elite" alliances: to succeed much beyond minimum survival, an alliance and its members need to be willing to learn from their mistakes and to adapt tactics to the conditions they face. If nothing else, it's more satisfying than just playing "shoot, shoot, bang, bang!" for 5 minutes a day.

I hate to disappoint you guys, but of course my nation is in anarchy again. Besides, the last time Mogar was in my cross-sights, I received a notice that IRON was more of a priority than AI (14k range, IIRC, and it looked like a potentially lively fight), so I settled for having destroyed one nuke and moved on.

Given that it's about NPO, no, not really. The best one can hope for is that at least the anti-Pacifica posts may be somewhat entertaining (or did even that go away with Vox Populi?)

As head of her sovereign alliance, that is a decision for her to make. As it's more likely to be a fully informed judgement based on an inside view of her alliance's readiness for a protracted war, I'm more likely to accept that view over your expressed disdain for her alliance and its wartime performance. I suppose at this point it would be traditional to respond with some asinine challenge of warfare over the point of disagreement, but it lies to me whether I consider my own wartime record adequate or not. In either case, there's little to be done that can validate it and surely room enough to improve it.

I'd like to point out in response that for many people communicating through this forum, English is not a first, or even a second, language. Even among native speakers, the extent of education held varies, without even accounting for personal distraction, fatigue, the effects of medication, intoxication, or personal disability. Krashnaia is of course guilty of similar disregard when poking fun at your use of the quote function, but to a far lesser degree, given the harshness of your response. With regard to the utility of spell-checking or word prediction software, I should point out that rouge ends up being discussed here far more frequently than is entirely appropriate. This is particularly petty in light of the fact that this topic is about TLR surrendering individually to numerous alliances, more than one of which is a current ally, recent wartime ally, or at least a close ally of a current ally. If I had to judge by the public discussion, I'd say that Non Grata and The Last Remnants have generally been dealing with their situation with far more grace, dignity, and good humor than Nordreich has. Judging by other side discussions in the topic, I'd judge that I'm by far not the only person who's been given that impression - if that has in turn soured peace negotiations for your alliance far more than NG's or TLR's, with a largely similar group of opponents - it's not pd73bassman or even "commies" that should shoulder the blame but yourself and other Nordreich members who may have been giving your opponents a far more negative view of your alliance's conduct and attitude than necessary.

Maintaining a stagger to keep the pressure on is a part of the job too, so I've no right to complain. It just re-emphasizes the point that you all did as best as you could given the situation you were in. Maybe next time out we can blow some stuff up and see who leaves the biggest craters!

I don't speak for VE, but I can't honestly think of one member sorry for attacking TLR in defense of DoD. Nor do I know of anyone feeling sorry or offended that TLR did so in defense of Non Grata. While maybe a third - not "most" at all - stayed in peace mode, the damage distributed among the rest was, in most cases, not at all trivial. (What damage I managed to inflict on rifleman's nation is far from being the stuff of song and legend, so the caveat's warranted. I'm fairly certain that kwenie only hit PM for reloading nukes, and maybe a smoke break.) As a result, I have no sympathy for anyone who wasn't directly involved with the conflict carrying a grudge forward that The Last Remnants somehow hasn't been beaten down enough. Having had my own nation tent-pegged a time or two, I'll wish my former opponents well at rebuilding if I chose to do so.

I'd assume he's only deriding the 26 of you who've been in PM since November and not the 19, including yourself and Kestral, that went into PM in January (Looking at the dates and number of nations, that's pretty much as Kestral described the strategy.) Be that as it may, the alliances fighting you are obviously satisfied that TLR has fought long enough, and it seems Non Grata is happy with TLR's conduct in this war, so it's probably best to ignore third party complaints unless they turn out to be more entertaining than usual.

Having a sub-10k NS nation myself, I do have a fairly good idea of how far the money goes at first and how rapidly the rebuilding costs go up the further that rebuilding has to go. If you're concentrating on the nations that started from the sub-10k NS range at outset, you're looking at the tier of nations least likely to have a FAC, cutting your maximum aid output up to 33% from the start. They're more efficiently aided by low- and mid-tier nations that also do not have a FAC. If you're looking at nations now in the sub-10k NS range, there's a higher probability of those nations having a FAC and a commensurate need to rebuy much more infrastructure than accounted for by the "small nations are cheap to rebuild" axiom. Some may well see the sort of delay in full rebuilding I've suggested. Even those that don't would likely be much happier NOT to be competing for tech sellers against the alliance's top tier, at least at start. Nonetheless, I remain of the opinion that if NPO is sufficiently organized, the terms are not as crippling as many see them, perhaps not worth the effort to obtain. However, if that is not the case, then avoiding the terms will not help NPO so much as hoped or feared, and again perhaps not worth the effort to obtain. Or I could be completely wrong in my assessment. In any case, we'll all likely know more in six months or so, no?

It would be difficult to characterize war-averse nations like Cirith Ungol or Soviet Domain as anything other than bankers. It may be even more difficult to characterize Kingdom of Dark and Delray Beach (ranked #10 and #22, respectively, for total casualties among all CN nations,) as bankers. Knowing how much VE's own Arcland prefers to function as a banker, yet Warlocke has still managed to accumulate 2.4M casualties, I'd consider it reasonable to estimate that 30-40% of NPO's top 37 nations in peace mode are reserves, and that a select number of nations among those are in peace mode for reasons outside the domain of CN. Make of that what you will, but the numbers suggest that neither side is being entirely truthful in characterizing said nations as "all bankers" or "all reserves" As to the crippling extent of rebuilding aid potentially lost by holding 33 nations in PM ... that also requires a bit of perspective, as JoshuaR notes. I'd need to spend roughly 1.7B to rebuild my one nation; doing so on aid alone (6 slots, 9M each) would easily take 310 days. At that rate, 14B-21B doesn't cover much rebuilding compared to what is likely to be needed, maybe translating to 33 nations similar to mine requiring 40% more time to fully recover to pre-war conditions. Considering the organization that would be needed to translate into completely efficient use of that many nations at the end of a 3 or 4 month waiting period, it seems to me that the terms being discussed in the OP are only crippling to the extent that NPO is already crippled and consequently of less use than many seem to be assuming. All that said, everyone's free to draw different conclusions from the information available to them. Sometimes that even results in interesting propaganda.

If it's worth doing, it's worth taking the time to do it right. I'd compare it to the Entente's charter ... but that would require finding said charter, and perhaps even paying attention to it :awesome: Congratulations to the new govt. slate and on the revised charter!

While I'm no fan of tech raids, and fully support the right of the raided nation to return fire, I'm somewhat at a loss to see how BringMeTheHorizon was being that much of a "bully" in this instance. Perhaps it was the unsupported accusation of cheating, threats of retaliation, and demand for reparations under threat of retaliation, but Isle of Sheppey seems to be a far less peaceful nation than my Uustonia. Having taken a brief look at the transactions listed on Isle of Sheppey's aid screen, along with the national slogan: I have to wonder if British Defense Force isn't facing a steeper economic, diplomatic, and military learning curve than is conducive to long-term peace and stability. That, or perhaps I just have a different working definition of "relentless targeting" when it comes to espionage operations. Either way, I'll wish "happy hunting" to Riot Society.