Chairman Cao

The MFO calc is also wrong to due flawed logic, I wouldn't recommend using either. In addition at low infra levels, you have to factor in the extra income you'll get from more citizens allowing extra improvements. Up to around 3000 this is generally enough to make any jump worthwhile in terms of daily profit.

I was gonna say that's only true in a curbstomp, but then I realised that any 'war' in CN generally is a curbstomp, so I guess you're right I also vote MP because in addition nukes act as a very big detterent in the hands of people who clearly aren't afraid to lose infra, helping to prevent such wars in the first place most of the time.

Grats, both good alliances. This is one treaty I can certainly see lasting.

Ah I thought it was one per day per nation. That changes things quite a bit.

People who get antagonized too easily are really what causes this problem imo. If fewer people felt the need to respond to or defend themselves or their alliance against every single insult by a small minority of trolls, then posts would stay on topic rather than escallating as they do, and the vox/NPO comments would remain in vox/NPO related threads.

Thx for replies, nice to be certain on the caps especially. I'm guessing nobody knows what the formula is for the 'up to' part though? Presumably the cap is lowered based on NS, I've never achieved any especially high but then I was at fairly low NS the last time I fought a war. Do you remember what kinda level the nations were to which you gave the 3-4mil DAs Imperator? So I guess with those figures the worst case scenario would be when all 6 nations you're fighting manage one DA per day. This would potentially give 30mil cash loss; 240 infra which is worth 50mil for an 8k infra nation for example; and 60 tech. This is over 80mil per day alone on top of other costs, so maybe not the most practical figure to use for warchest lol.

Perhaps, only time will tell, but my feeling based on CN history is that it won't. Too many high level players and leaders are driven by fear, either of losing their infra or the power they believe they hold despite so many actions showing them to be mere puppets. The lower levels are generally ignorant (as suits any despotic regieme in the real world), or apathetic. There are several notable exceptions of powerful leaders acting to achieve change peacefully as you suggest, and more than a handful of sympathetic alliances, but overall they are still in a clear minority and often unable to convey their views clearly enough to really influence others.

Not the case here imo. Though this is often true in the 'real world' we are familiar with (most everbody rejects radicals out of hand), it is because most of us live in countries where free speech, political debate and legal demonstrations are allowed and to an generally encouraged. In a totalitarian state this is not the case and only radicals can hope to effect change regardless of the cost. CN is much more like a totalitarian state as a whole. Though the medium of forums means free speech cannot be controlled directly as in a police state, it can still be restricted in its extent by behind the scenes and implied threats of military action. As everybody know you don't need a real CB for a war these days. Thus the people who can be most effective are those who are not afraid to lose their nations completely, while the rest of us must be content with varying degrees of compromise based on how much we're prepared to lose. We are forced to speak much more subtly and sometimes deliberately ambiguously so as to maintain deniability while Vox can say exactly what they mean outright. Vox may be therefore be small but their intellectual base its influence is far larger that of many ultra-conformist slave alliances. I don't agree with everything Vox stands for, but the OP was quite impressive, and I thank the genuine members of Vox for keeping the game interesting.

- Does anybody know a formula for this? - If not, does it appear from experience to be fixed or random but within a range? - Is there a hard cap regardless of nation size? (I heard 5mil but it was dubious) The reason I ask is because I'm try to calculate a precise worst-case warchest per day, where using daily bills alone would be hopelessly inaccurate.

I've been working on a somewhat similar military ranking system that's based neither on absolute numbers nor ratios, but membership NS distribution and considers the top 20 alliances by NS, nukes and members. I've collected the data but haven't written it up yet, will probably post in a day or two.

Good, I'm getting bored. To the OP, no doubt there are consistent signs that are present before every war but I guess what you're asking is if there is a set of signs that will indicate war is both imminent and inevitable, which I wouldn't necessarily say is the case. A might be a precursor to B, but it doesn't follow that A will certainly lead to B.

Interesting points, and I strongly agree with what you say about the futility of trying to apply real world political theories directly to CN. It hardly needs saying that there are so many social result based factors and emotions present in RL politics which simply don't and can't manifest themselves in the limited system of CN. Certainly some elements of RL politics can be transferred over and are observed directly, but it still surprises me how many people think that CN even has the potential to mirror the real world. I don't pretend to agree with your overall view since I myself see the goal not as maximising power or success, but a realistic combination of power, longevity and OOC fun which inevitably leads to a different philosophy; however what you say is for the most part a good doctrine for those with similar aims to yourself. Your one point I strongly disagree with is that on trust. While trust is certainly a virtue both in the conventional sense and a limited one within your usage of the word, it is not necessarily a determinant of success or power; although it no doubt has some positive effect is one of the less significant factors in CN success. Further, deviousness or lack-of-trust-ability can be an equally effective tactic both on an individual level, as with some players who become extemely successful by keeping quiet so as to avoid the limelight, letting others make the hard decisions and take the flak for them, enjoying the benefits of an allaince and gaining from the easy wars, then judiciously hopping alliance the moment trouble seems to be brewing; or on an alliance level as with those make utterly worthless treaties and sometimes in such ways as to create ties to every major alliance in the game so they can choose exactly which side of any conflict they wish to be on. Such alliances are more likely to end up in the winning crowd provided they don't show themselves up to the imperceptive majority by being extemely vague and intransparent (a key feature of CN politics - RL politicians at least pretend to be open and informative). On the other hand I'm sure most people feel that at least several alliances who got screwed over in the last GW ended up that way exactly because they were trsutworthy and stuck by their word - these alliances are justifiably well respected as a result but they don't really hold much power. I'm most certainly not arguing that people should adopt the distrustful approach, which I find repulsive, merely pointing out that trustworthiness has little bearing on CN success or power, and can even be destructive. Your definition of trust as just 'predictability' is incompatible with 'keeping your word'. If talking in terms of simple predictability, one could quite reasonably say that "I trust alliance X, Y, Z to make worthless treaties, be manipulated by others they're nought but slaves to, and go back on their word on a whim". While this may perfectly true, if trust is defined in this way, it is both a pointless concept and holds no virtue since it will have no bearing on anybodies actions.

Nice one.

How meaningful is it to measure war effectiveness in terms of bill-days payable though? If bills were the majority of wartime expenditure then fair enough someone with a low ratio would have the advantage, but in general the costs of daily replacing tanks, aircraft, nukes, navy (?) let alone infra at the end of it all will be so great that the advantage will lie with whoever has the best profit margin relative to their size and therefore has the biggest warchest to begin with. Edit: I should say some compromise between the two, depending on the relative contributions of daily bills and other wartime costs.

Nukes per Member - 14/02/09 There are a few changes this week. I've broadened the number of alliances reported on by extending the qualifing conditions for the main list from just top 20 by NS to top 20 by NS, Nuke Count, Member count, all of which are significant in different ways. This hasn't massively increased the number included, but as you'll see there are 4 alliances qualifying only by nuke count who are outside the top 20 by NS or member count, and a further 5 qualifying by member count who are outside top 20 in the other two categories. I've also re-sorted the list by nuke count, which is more relevant to the topic at hand, but kept the NS rank displayed at the beginning of each line for reference (I decided against sorting by nukes/member as this would place many small alliances at the top and be misleading - relative power is not the same as absolute power). Finally I've changed the color scheme to work based not on fixed values, but on quartiles of the total distribution whose values I've given. The list of alliances with >10 nukes/member also remains beneath, but I've decided to stop tracking change in absolute NS/nukes/avg-NS values which was more effort than it's worth, and stopped tracking avg-NS rankings entirely. Change in nukes/member over the last week is still shown. All Top-20 Alliances by NS, Nuke Count and Member Count (29 qualify) Alliances are sorted in descending order by nuke count, the initial value is their NS rank to use as comparison. Bold value is nukes/member ratio. Value in brackets is change from last week; any change of less than 0.05 is not shown. Red: Top Quarter Blue: Third Quarter Green: Second Quarter Violet: Lowest Quarter (Q1 = 1.58; Q2 = 3.06; Q3 = 6.30) 2) Independent Republic Of Orange Nations - 4.3 (+0.1) 1) New Pacific Order - 3.5 5) The Order Of The Paradox - 16.3 (+0.6) 8) The Grämlins - 18.7 (+0.1) 3) Multicolored Cross-X Alliance - 2.5 14) FOK - 6.3 (+0.3) 15) Viridian Entente - 4.7 (+1.1) 13) The Phoenix Federation - 5.8 (+0.4) 6) Mostly Harmless Alliance - 2.6 4) Sparta - 2.4 7) Fark - 4.0 (+0.3) 32) Umbrella - 17.4 (-0.3) 18) Valhalla - 8.5 (+0.3) 11) New Polar Order - 3.1 (+0.6) 9) Ragnarok - 2.3 39) Poison Clan - 16.2 (+0.2) 42) Global Order of Darkness - 10.2 (+0.2) 45) TORN - 10.8 (+0.6) 12) The Order Of Light - 2.6 (+0.1) 20) Echelon - 6.3 10) Orange Defense Network - 1.5 (+0.1) 19) The Democratic Order - 1.0 (+0.1) 21) The Dark Evolution - 1.6 31) Monos Archein - 1.8 22) Global Democratic Alliance - 1.5 23) United Purple Nations - 1.4 33) The Legion - 1.2 17) Grand Global Alliance - 1.1 (+0.2) 16) Green Protection Agency - 0.1 All listed alliances with over 10 nukes/member Bold value is nukes/member; value in circular brackets is change from last week; values in square brackets are rankings for nuke count and total NS respectively. The Grämlins - 18.7 (+0.1) --- [4, 8] Umbrella - 17.4 (-0.3) --- [11, 32] The Order Of The Paradox - 16.3 (+0.6) --- [3, 5] -- Overtake PC Poison Clan - 16.2 (+0.2) --- [16, 39] Molon Labe - 14.6 (+0.3) --- [25, 57] Old Guard - 11.4 (+0.1) --- [33, 47] Vanguard - 11.2 (+0.1) --- [24, 50] Aircastle - 11.1 (+0.9) [51, 115] -- Overtake OMFG and TORN The Order Of Righteous Nations - 10.8 (+0.6) --- [18, 45] -- Overtake OMFG OMFG - 10.8 (+0.3) --- [62, 105] Global Order Of Darkness - 10.2 --- [17, 42] -- Requalified Miscellaneous Stats - The global average nukes/player is 2.08, an increase of 0.05 from last week. - The 29 alliances considered in the upper list together comprise 34% of the global membership, and hold 59% of the global nukes. - The eleven alliances to have >10 nukes/member together comprise 2.8% of the global membership, and hold 19.2% of the global nukes. - Biggest weekly gainer in terms of nukes/member is Viridian Entente with +1.12!. - Biggest weekly loser in terms of nukes/member is Umbrella with -0.33 All data as at 14/02/09

True, it might come well before 14k infra. What I was meaning is that once you buy that last wonder this ratio will only drop.

The moment you get the last economic wonder. There may be people with very infra and still impressive ratios, but if they dropped some of that infra their ratio would be better yet.

I can respect that some combos will be harder to fit into ideal TCs than others, but I suspect that the above chart is based on some kind of game theory assumption than nobody will accept a tradecircle short of the best they can manage with their own resources. The reason this fails is because many people prefer to to compromise slightly on tradeset to gain the stability of trading with people they can trust, and the safety from sanctions that comes from trading in-alliance. If everyone went for the totally optimum tradesets then it would be utterly impossible to achieve this. I have oil/water which should be a re-roll according to the chart yet I'm very happy with my tradeset. My combo is not a standard one but it's a slight variant on a common one and works out better than the majority of tradesets in terms of pop, military and income, and is not hugely short of the AP set in terms of pure income. And at the same time it's fully within the pink team, and composed of immediately and close allies.

Nukes per Member - 07/02/09 All listed alliances with over 10 nukes/member (Bold value is nukes/member, values in brackets are overall rankings for avg NS, nuke count and total NS respectively. Green/red text for rankings indicates gain/loss in position compared with previous week, not change in actual value represented which well generally increase across the board.) 1) The Grämlins - 18.6 (+0.2) ----- (1, 1, 9) 2) Umbrella - 17.8 (-0.1) ----- (5, 9, 28) 3) Poison Clan - 16.0 (+0.4) ----- (6, 15, 39) 4) The Order Of The Paradox - 15.7 (+0.2) ----- (3, 3, 6) 5) Molon Labe - 14.3 (+0.1) ----- (7, 25, 56) 6) Old Guard - 11.2 ----- (4, 32, 47) 7) Vanguard - 11.1 (+0.2) ----- (8, 24, 50) 8) OMFG - 10.5 ----- (15, 61, 107) - Newly Qualified 9) The Order Of Righteous Nations - 10.2 (+0.2) ----- (17, 18, 45) 10) Aircastle - 10.2 ----- (50, 54, 117) - Requalified Global Order Of Darkness - - Out - <10 nukes/member (only just, you can make it back!) NB: Order Of The Black Rose technically qualify since they have 20 members again, but one and possibly two members appear to be ghosting, so I've discluded them. (Though they are pushing the rest of our avg NS rankings down ) For the following, colour does not indicate gain or loss, rather, Red: >10 nukes/member Blue: 5-10 nukes/member Green: 3-5 nukes/member Top 20 by NS 1) New Pacific Order - 3.5 2) Independent Republic Of Orange Nations - 4.2 (+0.1) 3) Multicolored Cross-X Alliance - 2.5 (+0.1) 4) Sparta - 2.4 (+0.1) 5) Mostly Harmless Alliance - 2.6 (+0.1) 6) The Order Of The Paradox - 15.7 (+0.2) 7) Fark - 3.8 8) Ragnarok - 2.4 9) The Grämlins - 18.6 (+0.2) 10) Orange Defense Network - 1.4 (+0.0) 11) New Polar Order - 2.4 (+0.4) 12) The Order Of Light - 2.5 (-0.1) 13) The Phoenix Federation - 5.4 (-0.1) 14) Viridian Entente - 3.6 (+0.1) 15) FOK - 6.0 (+0.3) 16) Green Protection Agency - 0.1 (+0.1) 17) Grand Global Alliance - 0.9 18) Valhalla - 8.2 (+0.2) 19) The Democratic Order - 1.0 20) Echelon - 6.3 (-0.1) Other top 20 by nuke count (outside top 20 by NS) Umbrella - 17.8 (-0.1) Poison Clan - 16.0 (+0.4) Global Order of Darkness - 10.0 (-0.1) TORN - 10.2 (+0.2) Miscellaneous Stats - The global average nukes/player is 2.03, an increase of 0.02 from last week. - The top 20 alliances by NS together comprise 29% of the global membership, and hold 48% of the global nukes. - The ten alliances to have >10 nukes/member together comprise 2.5% of the global membership, and hold 18% of the global nukes. - Biggest weekly gainer in terms of nukes/member is Poison Clan with +0.42. Inside the top 20 alliances, it's NpO with +0.41 - Biggest weekly loser in terms of nukes/member is Echelon with -0.10 All data as at 07/02/09 AM

As I'm in PC, MP goes without saying

Yes but most people overestimate their profit gains with extra infra, even at medium infra levels you're approaching this point. People consider the significant increases in income but don't tend to factor in the increases in bills. My nation setup for example, at 4999 infra has a daily collection of 5.357 and daily bills (same but swap for 5 labour camps, 5 guerilla camps, max soldiers, defcon1, severe threat) of 2.034 million, for a profit of 3.323 before swap costs. Going to 5999 with exactly the same wonders, tech etc and I will increase my daily taxes by slightly over 1 million to 6.416 mil, BUT my daily bills will also increase by 0.753mil at the same time, increasing my daily profits by only 0.306mil. The thread was about ROI so the point I was trying to make is that a lot of people go wrong by putting infra as too high a priority which results in them having over-inflated NS and being very vulnerable - quite weak for their NS level. Over a whole month I'd only gain 10mil from this jump while putting myself into range of a lot more nukers so minimising my own nuclear advantage. I'm better off sitting and saving up a good warchest while maintaining tech purchases before I think about the next infra jump. I prefer being powerful for the NS I'm at which means I'll lose comparatively little in the next big war, while someone who foolishly spends it all on infra will have all the difference and more nuked away.

This. Then work out profit per day as: (taxes in collecting mode)/(bills with LCs) - (swap costs/days per collection cycle). Maximise your profits by leaving more time between collections. You'll find that beyond low infra levels your actual increase in daily profit due purely to extra infra will be small to tiny, but the increases will initially come from the extra improvements it allows, and after that from wonders. Beyond a point you'll gain almost nothing in daily profit from extra infra as your bills will increase almost as much, but most people will continue to buy it as their lowest priority expense purely to keep growing and becoming more powerful/formidable.

What Rasskull mentioned, but I'll emphasize optimising your gov position - this is an absolutely free one that even quite a few experinced players don't seem to know about. Set immigration policy to option 2 or 3, drugs policy to option 2 or 3, and nuclear position to 2 if trading uranium, 3 if you have nukes and 1 otherwise. You can get a 3 point environment increase from this which is a significant increase in citizen count and income. Edt: And one not mentioned so far, soldier efficiency below 60% of citizen count. Most people including myself would advise against this though as it leaves you much more vulnerable.

Gogo

But would he try it on a different colour?