[A detailed analysis of recent political action]

So hubristic...

I'll be amused if Gre kills this new hegemony like last time.

Just don't forget to take out the neutrals before you go down!

[Increasing the tech requirement of the MP]

At the present moment, the cash cost of the MP is highly prohibitive. Even in an accelerated game, with 5m start-up funds, nations would lose many days of growth if they get the MP early, and would have to delay acquisition of the MP iif they get it late. So, the MP is not necessarily something that is cost-effective and would only be obtained later in the round.

While I would not like earlier and more common MPs, one possibility would be for the Manhattan Project's tech requirement to be increased instead, from the current 200 tech to 500 tech, and for the Manhattan Project's money cost to be reduced from 10 million to 2 million.

This achieves the objective of retaining the late acquisition of the MP, while increasing its cost-effectiveness. I do not remember the exact figures, but the cost of 200 tech is about 3mn, and the cost of 500 tech is about 8mn from 200 tech. It may be off; the cost may actually be 5mn or lower.

Of course, TE-wise, we are currently experiencing a round with late nukes; at 2k, the earliest the MP could be acquired would be around day 10, assuming it takes a week to reach 2k, and 3 days to bulk up for the cost of the MP. It may not be desirable to make MP more cost effective.

[Manhattan Project Change]

The issue is not whether or not it's fair for the top 5% to have an advantage through easy access to nukes, but whether or not it's good for the game.

As an example, consider the peak infra change. I was initially opposed to it, because I felt it removed the strategic risk of fighting and removed the consequences of war. Even though losers would be trapped at lower infrastructure points, and would not be able to engage better-developed alliances, diminished alliances could still go to war with each other. By adding the risk of loss, it increased the importance of political play as an alliance that was stomped down would not be politically relevant.

However, after the implementation, the result was that TE improved as every alliance remained on the same table. Defeated alliances remained in the same bracket as victorious alliances, and remained politically viable on the top tier, and as the cost of going to war was reduced, wars became more frequent.

That is unfair to victorious alliances, because previously, as a reward for victory, they could shove a winning alliance from political relevance. Yet, when the change was made, TE improved as a result.

===

Now, regarding this change in itself, one big advantage of the 5% rule is that in TE, alliances can choose to either improve their economic ability, resulting in long-term gains, or focus on military preparedness, resulting in short-term power. Part of the advantage of the 5% rule is that alliances focused on long-term gains can get free nuclear weapons as a bonus. It helps to alleviate the risks inherent in a preoccupation with the long-term.

However, with the increase in MP cost, it becomes the case that the cost of MPs is now so prohibitive that a short-term strategy is nearly inviable, removing the strategic choices available to alliance leaders. Instead of creating strategic options, it just means that the optimum choice is to race for the top and to hope that you can bulk nukes at that level, even if it means buying expensive planes to reach 5%.

===

There are some benefits to the 5% rule, however. For example, by making it so that the top tier of players has access to cheap nuclear weapons, it means that they end up being resented by the rest of the game. Just from my experience, though, and I know the game has changed a lot since I last played, most of the organizations don't have the guts to go after the top.

It's also a strategic advantage, it's akin to possessing the hill at the top of the game, and presents an incentive not to go to war. If you want to settle some scores against a stronger opponent, then sit out a given round of wars, continue building, and bulk nukes with 5% free nukes. With the current structure, it is already highly incentivized to go to war and removing the incentive to occupy the top 5% reduces the amount of strategic options in the game.

[Tech Cost Formula]

Regarding Han-Ender, it's a silly joke.

Back when I was booted from IRON, I was hand-buying tech to 3k in order not to strain alliance tech availability.

Ender seems more interested in 2k, and I can understand why; 3k costs, if I recall correctly, something like 400-600m and for a small nation, especially with the new (ha!) late-game wonders around 14k, cash becomes precious enough that at 500m or 600m, it's enough of a cut into warchests to make buying such massive amounts a bad idea.

[Nuke within 24 hours]

Probably. That was the third round of war.

[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/WWabm.png[/IMG]

After deleting the old wars, this message disappeared. And as Nippy suggested, actually clicking on the button gave me an error message.

[Nuke within 24 hours]

I refrained from nuking him while the bug was in effect.

I'm just trying to report a bug: I did not exploit it and I don't think my counterparty has a desire for restitution considering that he was never nuked.

I think the only way to replicate it would be:

-Dummy nation 1 starts in nuclear anarchy, government is set to anarchy
-0 nukes
-HNMS
-WRC
-0 Soldiers, some tanks
-20 or 22 days inactive?

-Dummy nation 2 declares on dummy nation 1 while holding nukes
-Defeat alerts dummy nation 1 immediately, while doing no other attacks.

-Dummy nation 1 buys nukes.
-Dummy nation 1 checks whether it can nuke dummy nation 2

If it can't, this bug is a CNR / Cannot Reproduce.

[Nuke within 24 hours]

1/18/2012 4:59:13 AM
"Tech raid, PM for nukes."




1/18/2012 3:16:58 PM Ryan R
RE: You do realize rickrolls are [utterly banal]


1/18/2012 5:22:24 AM Ryan R
A short song. [rickroll]


1/18/2012 5:06:26 AM Unknown Sender
Spy Operation Attack


1/18/2012 5:06:08 AM Unknown Sender
Spy Operation Attack


1/18/2012 5:05:32 AM Ryan R
Cruise Missile Attack


1/18/2012 5:05:24 AM Ryan R
Cruise Missile Attack


1/18/2012 5:05:05 AM Ryan R
Escorted Bombing Attack Report


1/18/2012 5:04:54 AM Ryan R
Escorted Bombing Attack Report


1/18/2012 5:03:19 AM Ryan R
Defeat Alert


1/18/2012 4:59:13 AM Ryan R
War Declared!

===

At the time, i had no nukes, while holding a WRC and a HNMS and after receiving those messages I opted to buy two nukes.

While I do have to acknowledge my good fortune, I was unfortunately late to update and was unable to exploit my free nuke. It's likely that admin would had reverted the nuke damage as well.

[Nuke within 24 hours]

The game is currently allowing me to nuke on the same day I was declared on.

Peculiarities:

I was declared on and immediately issued a defeat alert as I had no soldiers at the time.
My opponent declared on me, somehow, with 200% my NS. Part of it could have been that he had dropped planes when he declared, which should add up to 3600 NS. From his warchest reading, it's also likely he sold off huge amounts of infra, then bought back up. It's also possible he sold and rebought nukes to engage me.
I was 20 days inactive, then collected.
I had no nukes when I was declared on, then bought two nukes promptly.

====

I am currently planning to take advantage of my good fortune at update. An immediate instruction not to would be enough to prevent my happiness.

[Everyone Surrenders To GOD]

Your gift for detecting sarcasm amazes me.

[Secret Trades Invisible to Owner]

Just to elucidate; there is no indicator of whether or not my trades are secret.

This is problematic because:

1: If an alliance is preparing for sanction warfare, it becomes difficult for government to confirm that a group has switched off to secret trades because members would need to pay special attention to trade messages to confirm that they are secret trades, not normal trades.

2: If you are roguing, you cannot correctly gauge your level of sanction protection.

As it is, all my trades are secret. You can confirm it by sanctioning me off Maroon, but I'm not wholly sure of it.

[Secret Trades Invisible to Owner]

On the trades screen, I cannot tell whether or not I have a secret trade.

[What exactly is killing the game?]

As you've mentioned yourself, there is no real political narrative to speak about. Leaders are not dynamic players because the game will not allow them to be dynamic players. The moment you get beat down, you are looking at another 2-3 years of building back up. The time involved is simply astounding and most players cannot tolerate this type of crap.

Simply put, the intelligent alliance leader will not take the risks inherent in playing dynamically, because getting beat down means they will be politically irrelevant for years.

One way to handle this problem by itself is simply to change the game to decrease the total amount of damage that can be dealt; say, to implement concepts like peak infra or peak tech (which in a naive implementation is easily abusable), but it will not evade the population deflation problem.

Right now, what's going on politically is that people are passing around the weeaboo stick; the person who is least popular at the end of the war gets picked as the target for the next war and gets brutally beaten down because people get bored and want to have a war. There is no real potential for any new hegemony or radical maneuvering because the risk involved is too high.

And, sometimes, it's not just 2-3 years between you and recovery. Alliances go inactive, and alliances die. We've seen the end of some significant, promising, and respected micros and minor alliances in the recent past; DF is now a part of Umb, OSA, I believe, has passed away, and Ronin is no longer extant; an alliance lead by MK's MoFA during the glory years.

It's a question of stellar formation and stellar death. The game has changed to the point where only stellar death is possible and stellar formation has become impossible. Alliances can merge and become more relevant than they once were, but we really will never have the new kid on the block threatening the world and shaking the place up.

[What exactly is killing the game?]

As far as a passionate, engaging, political narrative goes; this is an expression of the malaise affecting the game, but it's not the malaise itself.

Quite simply, we are in a deflationary era. Tech becomes more and more precious every day, if not on a direct level, but because the tech markets are in the process of collapsing. At a certain point, all the tech available in the game will have to be bought by buyers themselves to the dearth of sellers, and at that point, tech becomes extremely, extremely, expensive. A point of tech spent today is more valuable than a point of tech spent tomorrow; so consequently, because it's so hard to recover from your losses, people are less inclined to take risks.

[Long on-going bug regarding passthroughs]

I'm not sure what the server load is, but if you could convert the URL target to a hash and have the server redirect on the hash, it would solve the problem.

It's a matter of elegance, though; it's not game-breaking functionality and does not give an undue advantage to one side or another.

[Long on-going bug regarding passthroughs]

Currently, trying to access various pages while not being logged in will give you a log-in page directly moving you to the following page. However, trying to access a search page through log-in passthroughs will will always give you empty results because the search command is malformed. I believe this is through problems with the URL parsing and the log-in redirect.

It's a small annoyance, but I think it wouldn't be that hard to get it fixed.

This problem seems to apply to both Opera and Chrome.

[What exactly is killing the game?]

Endurance, Jerdge, I disagree.

The three aspects of the game, nation-building/alliance-building, war, and politics are integrated. Politics is fundamentally based on the desire to blow other alliances up for some perceived slight back when you were a zygote, or just to blow them up for fun. This is how politics is related to war. Nation-building, alliance-building; all of this is to enable alliances to matter when it comes to war, and by mattering when it comes to war, nation-building/alliance-building is now related to politics. Rephrasing it: Alliance-building provides power. Politics leverages power. War expresses power.

At the end of the day, though, it's true that the game is not a war-game. When we do discuss things like changing war mechanics to save the game, we are talking about changing the expression of power in order to change the system of political interactions.

[What exactly is killing the game?]

I've considered changing the war limits myself as a type of solution. It would work in the sense that you would be able to deal catastrophic damage to a large nation; nuke, then launch large waves of attacks against a foe with little ground attack ability. There would be ways around it, however. For example, the large nation could simply turtle; and thus by sacrificing the ability to attack / defend tech via the ground, you'd be limiting your ground damage to one DA a day.

One problem with the proposed change, is that it's potentially too radical. It would make it so that the established players would have no real advantage over newcomers with significant forces. The cost of the various nations would also change dramatically; it simply makes the game unplayable for elite alliances to face the threat of being mobbed by throngs of zerging nations that only cost 6 months to build.

There is also the issue of long-term logistics; for example, the zergers typically would have very low warchests, and thus would be unable to sustain a long-term attack. They will run out of warchest faster than the large nation would; especially if the large nation denies them earnings through turtling, and when that happens, the small nations are just wrecked, without the logistic potential to rebuild, and are likely to quit the game.

While the problem with the game is the relevancy of new players and new structures, making it so that old nations would be completely endangered would make it so that the existing playerbase would be further incentivized to depart. Going too far in one direction, to the point where you completely remove the advantages of the existing playerbase, is not a solution.

[Rethinking Tech Dealing and Nation Building]

I think the actual fact of the matter is that buyers really hate sellers. There are more rapid ways to grow than tech selling, but at the same time, the tech market is the most efficient way to obtain tech at the present moment. The longer sellers are kept dealing, the more tech they make available.

There are in-game methods to deal with it; that is to say, there exists an opportunity to deal with the present structure, but I'd rather keep them under wraps.

[Official Declaration From the Ski Lodge]

unnecessarily inflammatory

[Non Grata Declaration]

nice reps; reasonable for the alliance size.

It's a bit of a pity you had to peace out Kaskus; otherwise, you could say you had been continually at war with various alliances between october and the big one

[A new Declaration from The Order of the Paradox]

What's for lunch, Polaris?

[A new Declaration from The Order of the Paradox]

[quote]Honestly all I hear is "You betrayed us 3 years ago, You made us pay reps because we lost a war, and now that we have became friends with someone stronger then you were gonna fight you!".

It was funnier when TOP was going to declare 3 days ago but then lost support from their new allies and they ran like cowards. The reason there is 66 wars by IRON/TOP is because they're not even fighting, PB/DH is fighting for TOP. If PB/DH dropped support for TOP tomorrow, TOP would call a ceasefire and beg for white peace. TOP will never fight this war, only talk about how they did so well when someone else tries to roll Polar. If TOP was offended so much of getting "betrayed" by Polaris back then, then why didn't they declare 2 years ago and settle the issue?

EDIT: Polaris, Please fill out a new debt slip to TOP for 253,000 Tech this time... So they can call it an even 500,000.
[/quote]

I'm impressed. I tend to have very filtered and very eclectic situational awareness, but you have even worse data than I do.

You really have no idea how decision making works in CN, do you?

[A new Declaration from The Order of the Paradox]

[quote name='King Xander the Only' timestamp='1322287801' post='2851866']
Please kill them dead.
[/quote]

i like the way you think; after all, there's other modes of killing, right?

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CDIQtwIwAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3D7YAEWrnOtrY&ei=pl7RTta5KcTAtwe-6e2xDQ&usg=AFQjCNHt0TwLIXSEXsAVU5-8QqG8gX9uFQ&sig2=CbcZM5BG3oFeVYULE_wS6A

[26 days inactive?]

This occurs. One of my dear friends (neneko) deleted at 26 days inactive. The next scheduled deletion after 11 PM server, is 1.30 server.

[A Final Ronin Announcement]

Good luck, Airme. Loved you in EFF; sorry to see Ronin go.

Would be great to have you make a stint in MK, but you know what's been going on. On the plus side, GKC got demasked from forums access after an "incident", although he still retains IRC access.