Instr

Brilliant attack, you updeclared against 2x your nominal NS. Good luck.

We're currently experiencing a case where we're gaining XP for receiving attacks as well as dealing damage. Some of my members have reported that they seem to be gaining XP after receiving air / ground attacks, so I'm not sure if this is intended functionality as Admin has previously stated that this is not desired as the XP system is intended to encourage aggression.

bombuator, meeting has already been scheduled with aftermath.

With a proper build protocol, you should either have 899 or 999 infra by the first day, and 1499.99 by the 7th or 9th day. I spend considerable effort micromanaging and delegating build responsibilities to other people, but that doesn't mean everyone can be on at update to check for war. Specify Other also spent a considerable amount of time raiding people; we did manage raids on cash farms (low NS nations that bought soldiers; see Einer's report on us), a tactic copied from RE (who we believe WAS actually colluding), but raids against conventional nations, due to the need for higher soldier counts, GCs, and the risk of backfires (see Dancing Queen), can quickly compromise growth.

At the time of targeting, you could see perfectly well what the likely outcome of the attack would be. You saw that most of the defending nations generally lacked significant ground defenses, and would have been easily sent into anarchy within the first update of the war. You also selected targets that both individually and combined had less NS than you did, with your alliance holding 180,000 NS to 160,000 NS, and you selected targets that combined had infra parity, which would quickly degenerate into infra inferiority upon a successful blitz. As far as the infra-based tiered nations front goes; your alliance is about twice our size and has a far wider distribution than our alliance. We have both have actives, semi-actives, newbs, and people who just can't play, but whereas in your alliance they're concentrated below 1k infra and more thus more likely to engage the Aftermath front, ours are bearing the full brunt of your attack, who are mainly composed by elites. When you say that Aftermath is "bearing up better" than we are "due to higher military preparedness", with less anarchies, the thing is, most of your pre-update attacks were focused on our alliance instead of Aftermath. 24 attacks were targeted at Mume, while 13 attacks were targeted at Aftermath. One can construe this as your alliance choosing to focus Mume and drag Aftermath along to inflate NS,

I actually asked that nations with low warchest and low infra be let go so I wouldn't have to request rerolls. I offer this to everyone I fight; I'm not in the business of wrecking alliances except those that go out of their way to deserve it, and while I can't expect that generosity in return, I think it's a reasonable request. As far as to the other allegations; I'm not commenting on your erroneous interpretations nor am I going to waste time on a mud-slinging match with you. You are very, very, classy, Bcortell.

I think that even if we had been prepared for war, things would not have gone easily as you stuck a training alliance composed almost entirely of sub-1k nations as our ally; the war was still a down-declare of about 15% on both an NS and ANS basis. As far as Aftermath having a much easier time of avoiding anarchy, well, the last I checked Aftermath only had 18 GCs and 20 barracks in a 25-man alliance; attackers in the super-micro tier tend to be of lower quality anyways, and the majority of the update blitz attacks were focused on Mume. It is my responsibility for choosing an aggressive build strategy, but I think you're still liable for bunching in a training alliance and doing a statistical down-declare.

I'm not disclosing the content of the negotiations, but please do note that we got set-/up late, growth wasn't fully up to snuff, and a bunch of people hit were being boosted up to 1.5k so they could begin war preparations. Specify Other had very good timing, because if they had engaged us 2 days later, or even this update, we'd likely have had the warchest needed to make a good showing and our alliance would have been at least 50% at alert, instead of getting 83% of the alliance anarchied.

Do remember that we had the entire alliance commit suicide against TPC last round; if we had turtled, we might have ended up with a flag that round. I am holding my tongue about what appears to be obvious baiting. Negotiations are on-going, and excepting you, I enjoyed good relations with Specify Other. I'm curious about one thing, though. Did she ever bitch to you about me? There was a brief time... that would be something that would hurt me, and given your general mood if she did, maybe you'd like to talk about it.

Thanks for warning Dem61s.

no comment.

Nice blitz; 15/18 members were anarchied, although most of the members were told to rush to 1.5k without considering military preparations.

Also, just a note; but all 4 max econ generals translates to what my approximation says is ~25% additional income. Not sure if that's in the design doc, if it's too high (maybe create those stats in increments of .5 and have a max of 1.5 for effectively a 20% boost? Cap it at 1 for a 12.5% boost?), or if it's just right.

I do have a problem with the raiding, though, because it encourages nation inequality (the supply of raidable nations is limited, and once that's been depleted, the only way to gain XP is to do a conventional war, which means that weak nations end up being forced to fight weak nations, leaving the weakest completely unviable and the rest of the round unplayable for them) and encourages run-away effects, where stacking bonuses or multipliers enable a certain group of players to get so far away from the pack that there's nothing that can be done to them. One other implementation I suggested in the other thread was to make Generals cost XP to recruit, instead of requiring but not using XP, and making it so that Generals can be assassinated (originally suggested by lYlyth). In that case, having Generals can translate into an advantage, but it's not an insurmountable advantage since it can be removed through the use of a rather expensive spy attack, and it forces players to economize on their use of XP points; do they get the most expensive general, who can be easily assassinated, or do they get a cheaper general, who can be replaced more easily?

Thanks @ Bombuator.

My nation is currently listed as 8 days old in TE, but I am receiving a birthday bonus. Please advise.

Right now, I already have 3 generals at max / near-max econ bonuses, and it's only been 8 days into the round. It feels as though it is too easy to raid / game to get maxed-generals. IMO, both defensive and offensive attacks should grant XP, and the XP required to operate should be raised; 2x in the case of army and air force, and 1.5x in the case of intelligence. Navy feels fine as is. The point of this change is that raids grant far too much XP to the attacker; whereas in a real war, both sides are exchanging attacks, so a hard-fought battle between both sides should generate more XP than simply a raid or a curbstomp where the defender turtles. It is also possible to make it so that defenses generate twice the XP of attacks, but that may overly encourage turtling or encourage players to take it easy on the defender to prevent them from gaining too many levels.

The reason Admin needs to terminate the present system of alliances is because the coding for TE and SE alliances are completely different; in TE, alliances are identified by an id # instead of a name. I'm guessing that when an alliance is called in TE, it calls some data object, whereas in SE, it runs a search on all nations that have the trait "alliance affiliation: example". === While it does appear that the majority of people support a swap to the TE system, I would suggest that the objections of the dissenters are considered in that that Admin take the time to code a switch-over mechanism that does not leave people on the none AA or cause people to lose their alliance seniority. This would change it from meeting a plurality of people's needs to a supermajority. Recently, it appears that Admin seems to have the time and motivation to work on the game, so perhaps it would be possible for Admin to put in the work for a smooth transition. Of course, I will continue to object to implementing the AA system based purely on principle.

I'm against the alliance management concept in principle; simply because a more structured approach to the game removes room for player creativity and innovation, although I do admit that in this sort of stagnant game such things are unlikely. My own preference would be for a more hybrid approach; limiting managed alliances only to sanctioned alliances and/or donor alliances; sanctioned alliances does have utility in some circumstances. With regards to a forced PM change; as others have mentioned, some players are currently at war and this would be disruptive to such players; as well as bringing the possibility that certain players will simply opt not to drop out of PM if they're given a free card to PM. In the latter case, changing it so their new nation penalty-less PM thing is active would be a good thing. === On an activity point of view, this is highly risky as you risk losing quite a few players that are only nominally active. I have actually done deletion tracking for Mushroom Kingdom for quite a few years, and the situation is not as simple as lylyth makes it out to be. Quite a few players might be semi-retired; they come around, make contributions every once in a while or at war time, but they're inactive most of the year or considering quitting. Sometimes they become more active, sometimes they become less active. When they're already considering deletion, this could be the last straw; and once they delete, instead of thinking about whether or not they should become more active, they now have to think about coming back to CN and the latter is a lot less likely. On the other hand, if adding alliance management creates raiding chaos, this might be good for activity as it might give players an entertaining spectacle over the summer. So it could go both ways.

As of right now, successful blockades do not grant experience. Is this intended functionality?

Also, Clash, we did launch a glorified tech raid (I was hoping someone else would come and exterminate RE!) on RE, but the hope was that we'd be in sufficient order to launch mass rogues. We had an internal fight in the gov room a couple of days before end of round and the intel officer stormed off, so the rogues were never launched, and I do admit I was hoping that Devilyn Caster, Lord Hershey, or Tywin Lancaster would make it as runners, however.

Nope. I distinctly recall that DarkZoneElite had nuked one of RE's runners at a couple of minutes past update and I am pretty sure it was Shaun / Jraenar. As far as yourself goes, Jraenar, I will fully admit that it was Fodell who screwed up the sustained nuke anarchy, however; because I think we had all accepted that people would be jackasses and preventing or accepting slot-filling would be the responsibility of the players and while DZE was probably arranged between Cit (or Cit elements) and RE; Fodell had the ability to keep DZE in nuke anarchy and didn't.

Instead, give us 24-48 hours warning beforehand. Of course, this is completely moot if you're already scheduling the game to go up today... The reason for that is that by giving some degree of predictability, it means that everyone who's really interested in the game can start on the same day or around the same time, instead of giving certain players a 1-2 day head start on everyone else because they're refreshing the game all the time.

One of the issues is also reverse war slot filling. Let's say, I hate this guy, so I deploy a guy with the intent of framing him for war-slot filling. This is literally the best rogue ever, because I don't have to do jack and I completely neutralize his chances for a conventional flag run by getting him deleted / banned.

Of course, we're discussing what type of cheating to obtain a victory condition is better / more entertaining, so... Welcome to TE Round 26, gentlemen.