Instr

You know, on second thoughts, both MTC and MD wins can be easily-gamed. The problem with MTC is that if someone wants to cheat, all they have to do is to launch 2-3 rogues to anarchy an opponent, then have everyone turtle and nuke the target every update to achieve anarchy lock. MTC feeding is also pretty easy with both sides launching large-scale aggressive attacks without guerrilla camps or barracks. MD wins at least have the virtue of being entertaining to watch.

Please check the posting on why MD (most destructive [war]) flag awards are going to get gamed to all hell and why MTC (most total casualties) is better than MD. You don't have to agree with it, but please at least skim through it. http://forums.cybernations.net/index.php?/blog/1/entry-3790-tournament-round-26/

Let me make a suggestion. Max destruction should be changed to a donation prize, while the flag / secondary flag should be moved onto Most Total Casualties. The reason for that is because Max Destruction, by its very nature, is a performance, not a real fight. If you want Max Destruction, you don't fight in a normal way; you fight in a way that destroys the maximum amount of NS, whereas normal fighting is aimed at destroying the opponent's fighting ability / end-of-round NS. Here's a couple of differences: #1, you want both combatants' defensive slots to be filled by weak nations. That's because you don't want the players to get their war fighting interrupted or diminished by having other wars decrease the destructive potential of the main war. For example, all nukes should be fired as part of the main war, whereas in other cases some people would like others to fire the nuke, depending on WRC / nuke arsenal size. #2, the defender aims to lose the GAs. The reason for that is because if the defender loses the GAs, land is swapped, instead of being destroyed, and the land damage counts as destruction. #3, nukes need coordination from both sides. Since all damage in the war is shared, both sides will endeavor to maximize the damage dealt by the nukes to planes, cruise missiles, navy, and defending troops / tanks. #4, air attacks aim to maximize aircraft losses instead of actually dealing damage. The fastest way to rack up destruction points will be through sending unescorted bombing attacks, perhaps with naval support, into the jaws of the enemy fighter defense, aiming to get as many aircraft killed as possible. #5, neither side will buy missile defenses, even decomming SDIs on both sides. This is because MDs reduce damage. #6, destroy tanks spy ops anyone? I'm not actually sure if that's included in the destruction rating, however. If it is, are nukes included in the destruction rating? Then both sides should include 25 nukes and keep on wrecking each other's nukes at max levels, one or two per day, aiming to maximize nuke NS losses. === Max destruction will be pretty interesting as a type of performance, but it's definitely not reflective of a real war, because both sides need to collude to maximize the destruction. On the other hand, trying to harvest MTC will bring players conditions closer to a real war. Unlike maximum destruction prizes, where you only need to fight one war with super-nations close to the end of round, harvesting an MTC victory involves multiple fights throughout the round. It may in fact be possible to cheat with an MTC victory, but the long-term nature of an MTC victory makes it much harder to cheat with, and the primary form of cheating over MTC is denial, where slots are filled and attackers / defenders refuse to fight to order to deny casualties. Between MTC and MD, MD is far more likely to be the result of collusion / cheating / fakery, so it's better off to put the flag to MTC instead of MD. MD, however, even despite cheating / fakery, will STILL result in an extremely entertaining war to watch. It's like professional wrestling, everyone knows it's fake, but we still watch it for the storylines and pay money for tickets and subscriptions. It is not suitable to award a flag, which is necessarily an extremely competitive contest, but it would be worthwhile to put 3-5 donations into the pocket of each actor, however.

The problem is that the butt of the joke is MK / ex-DH; but you're showing good humor.

10/10 I laughed.

Implementing it wouldn't be that hard; just put in a check "Is today the last day of the round?" If so, then make it so that #1, the subroutines that control whether or not the nation experiences nuclear anarchy penalties are not utilized; #2, all nuclear weapons are disabled for reason of being "last day of the round". The original idea was to enforce an overtime 1 day after the last day of the round giving everyone the chance to collect out of nuke anarchy, but this is a more elegant solution (not as though it's still intrinsically ugly). === The tactics and strategies enabled by last-day bullshit are myriad and interesting and add much to the game, but like I said before, this is the nuclear option. If players cannot be trusted not to collude and cheat over a flag / flags, and there seems to be no action over the collusion / cheating, then take away the option to collude / cheat. Back-collects, war-dodging, all of these have been great and interesting tactics but it appears that the TE memberbase can't be trusted with it.

For someone who was complaining about slot-filling by friends this round (and I am aware of incidents like this), you sure seem awfully opposed to the nuclear option. This, certainly, would not resolve inadequate-type slot-filling, where an attacker attacks with insufficient force and can still do all attacks, except they don't matter, in either the nuclear or naval realm, but it would help even the field and lessen the damage. And you must remember, I am one of the heaviest users of Methax / Immortal Turandot tactics. Most others plan to do the same thing Samwise did this round and enter "hell week" with heavy warchest and boost up at the end. This type of change hurts me more than anyone else, then it hurts the people who opt to hide out of war at the end of round (as though that worked for anyone, ever), then it hurts the least the normal conventional flag runner.

There's two other issue with this, however. #1, this encourages early raiding for cash, because the main protection for new nations right now is that they tend to have too little NS to be efficiently targeted. Raids for cash against unaligns then become more viable, but the chances of it going wrong, as well, also becomes more likely. It's a bit more fair than friends setting up nations for harvesting (which people incidentally don't seem to care about dealing with), since it provides everyone the opportunity to do so. #2, zero-day rogues are currently hamstrung by the fact that you need to coordinate trades for them. (That's the main value of starting with infra; the trades are a gargantuan problem because people need optimum / near-optimum trades to get anything done and without an organization it's fairly difficult.) By removing the requirement for zero-day rogues to have trades, the amount of zero-day roguing will increase. This may result in a far more interesting round, of course.

I will note for Overlord Shinnra that Confusion is probably the most successful flag runner in TE. His organization has won: Duckroll, Poison Clan, NATO, TORN... what else am I missing? My record was 2, TFD's record was 2, BN/PS got 2... As far as Confusion making shady deals goes; this is fairly par for course and slot-filling is pretty par for course. On Jraenar / Shaun Mason, for instance, I believe the Citadel attacker on Shaun was one of Confusion's old cronies and if you do note the nuke timing, Jraenar was nuked right after update. === I also do note for you that Con takes a break every other round; perhaps he'll be back in full force next round, but otherwise there's no point in "blowing him up" next round because no one cares and no one will be impressed.

The biggest problem is that that means that, given the motivation, an alliance can at any moment destroy any player of their choice by just plain targeting a ridiculous amount of nations on someone they dislike. They can do it even in a conventional war; got a big nation you dislike? Dump 40 ground attacks, cruise missiles, and planes on them, then dump 2x that during an update quad. Without tech bonuses, that's 3600 infra gone in 10 minutes.

Of course, your experience is one where only people who can't win the flag care about casualties and aren't seriously trying to game the casualty system to inflict losses. There's a ton of unfortunate ways to game the casualty system. For example, rogue strikes to prevent a leading opponent from earning casualties; three low-infra players send the target into anarchy to prevent declares, then self-ZI to prevent victorious soldier casualties, then lock the opponent into nuclear anarchy every day. How about just plain turtling to deny the casualty winner?

The problem with simulating late-game play in SE is that late-game play in SE tends to be very very long-term; the only reason you buy infra in SE past 15k or 20k is because you want your nation to look good, not because of any actual economic advantages, so direct growth options for players are more lacking. TE to some extent already simulates late-tier play; a colleague last round mentioned how they had more navy floating in TE than they did in SE with a top 100 nation, and tech is already scaled in TE to compensate for the lower effective tech levels.

I think delaying the inevitable would be good, however, because it gives new players more time to play around and organize their nation. Maybe they'll decide to actually join a decent alliance and learn how to play instead of just dropping the game a while later.

The problem with this idea is that you'd end up having some kind of scoring system that could be gamed. There's also the issue of alliance sizing; for example, if you do things off ANS, what about micro-alliances? Let's say, we have what starts as a 18-man alliance with 1 runner-like, then at the end of the round 17 of the people leave, with the runner inflating the score and ANS of the alliance. It's a great idea, but only if you can have a fair scoring system.

Who is this Methax fellow (aside from Round 13 winner) and what the hell do we care?

Technically two wars, then a tech raid by us, then a roguing. OP took it easy on you guys, aiming to make you someone else's problem (insufficient nuclear pressure at the top), but eventually it turned out that it became our responsibility to take you out. You apparently also got lucky when WD was unable to hit RE due to an attack by TPC, and you also got lucky when WD failed to nuke you on the final day. Crusader nuking you back also removed our bargaining position to hit Leafsrock / Dubiety / Hail to the King / Janro again with nukes. == RE's yield is 4-6 flags. 3 direct flags, one via a runner hidden in Warriors, 1, I presume, via a deal, the other via what I suspect is a sleeper. It's a good yield; why can't you admit to having played the round like flag runners?

I think one of the ways to deconcentrate play around the flag and just encourage more play for the fun of it would be to set up an awards page with various achievements, all providing one $25-equivalent donation. You could put things like: Most casualties taken Most navy destroyed in one war Most aircraft destroyed in one war Most land area and so on. The flag could perhaps be pinned towards the player/alliance combo holding the most achievements, instead of just pinning it to NS. Making the game an achievement hunt for one round would at least be an interesting experiment.

Giving a stickshift / automatic option would be good, however, but players who choose stickshift without knowing what they were doing would be more likely to quit the game.

In SE as well as TE navies are primarily cash sinks and NS inflators. We saw this to a great extent last war in SE, where naval warfare was actually critical because eQ killzones were below Competence killzones and eQ wanted to drag down Competence nations. Naval warfare, to my great surprise, became critical.

The problem with any treaty map is that the distances involved imply that a lot of alliances are closer than they actually are, and vice versa.

Two other common cheating patterns are: -Arranged non-nuclear slotfill; where the attackers and defender conspire to give the defender enough time to get out of nuclear anarchy -Botched nuke timings; where the timing of the nuke can determine whether or not the player can survive the round due to the huge NS damage dealt to planes. Easy, if ugly ways, to get rid of these two problems are: -Remove the ability to nuke on the last day. It over-politicizes the game if the winner is the one where the nuke timing is favorable or unfavorable; for example, Lazaraus45 lost the flag in round 14 because OP got upset at him for some reason or another and nuked him at 11:59:59. It's also pretty cheap when players coordinate so that they get hit early in the day so they don't have to worry about getting nuked at all. -Remove nuclear anarchy on the last day of the round. Now, I've won rounds by getting people past the radar and getting them a last day collect, but TBH the sheer potential for abuse is too great. My memory is foggy, but I do believe the attackers of the winner on Round 7 informed me a couple of years later that they HAD in fact performed a nuclear slot-fill by refusing to nuke the winner, purportedly because there was someone in front of him that was slot-filling. In Round 17, something similar happened, where the attackers conspired to make sure the Round 17 winner could get a final collect out of nuclear anarchy. Here, my memory is a little fuzzy, but I seem to recall they were so brazen they actually went non-nuclear for not only 1 day but two in order to enhance the final back collect's quality. By removing nuclear anarchy on the last day of the round, it will remove the thrill of being able to sneak nuclear back collects, but it definitely puts everyone on an even playing field. It also weakens the advantages of people who manage to dodge wars at the end of the round; since no matter what happens everyone will get a last day back-collect.

How would you feel if players had their starting funds reduced and instead started with a large amount of infra instead? It would decrease the difficulty for newer players, who have no idea what improvement orders to buy; every round, even in SE, involves a huge number of players who have no idea how to build their nations in a way remotely resembling the ideal fashion. A proposal would be to have all players start with 1 million and 1k infra instead of 0 infra and 5 million. It would also help alleviate trades concerns for unaligned players. And certain complaints about players mining 3 NS nations with 2 soldiers would be partially alleviated....

I'm just asking people here how you feel about the 10 flag payout. It's changed the dynamics of the round significantly; did it make this round more or less exciting? How about the integrity of the game? Do you feel that this round is more or less marred by irregularities than previous rounds?

Alliance mega-mergers. The main issue with flags has always been politics; the game seems to be converging towards a point where a bunch of people make shady backroom deals about who is entitled to a flag and who is not entitled to a flag. If you do it on a score basis, what's to stop people from just calling in SA Goons and flooding the game in the last 2 weeks with a GOON swarm to fuck with the alliance system?

That's how navies are supposed to work. They're enormous cash-sinks designed to provide additional NS. If you want to wipe out an opponent's navy, either stop that opponent from accumulating a large navy by hitting him early, or use a rogue to conduct skirmishing actions and blow his navy up early, then deploy 3 attackers with vast naval superiority to wreck the opponent.