MikeSierra

I would like to extend my personal congratulations to the GPA on the new DoN.

It is intrinsic to the WRC, not a separate weapon. If you have the WRC, your weapons do more damage because they are more advanced. Because they are more advanced, they cost more. The down side is your cost to effectiveness ratio worsens. For example, if you have 2000 tech, your weapons do 16.7% more damage than someone without a WRC (1.4 vs 1.2). However, the cost of your weapons is 20% more than someone without a WRC. The upside is, since you are limited in the number of attacks you can do in a day, you will do more damage to your opponent per day than he will do to you if he doesn't have a WRC as well.

This opens up a whole other kettle of fish... Logically, doing something that increases the happiness of your citizens (such as establishing international trades that allow for the creation of luxury items, i.e. bonus resources) improves the social atmosphere, and therefore should improve the environment. Yet somehow it only works the other way around, whereby a decrease in the environment reduces the population happiness?

Perhaps a name change is in order. Instead of Mining Industry Consortium, make it an Energy Consortium. Coal, Uranium, and Oil all have obvious uses in generating energy. Lead is used in lead-acid batteries, as well as in high voltage power cables as sheathing material to prevent water diffusion into insulation. Nations with these resources could be net power-exporters, supplying those nations with lesser ability to generate power, thus increasing their income. Same thing, just less question as to why only certain minerals are affected.

That may be the case, but that does not explain how the effects from the environmental penalties come into play. Why should nuclear nations make less money than non-nuclear nations, especially when you consider that the top four nuclear powers in the world (US, Russia, UK, France) are G8 nations? Why would possessing nuclear weapons decrease the population when you consider that the three most populus nations (China, Indiia, and the US) all have nuclear weapons? Possession of nuclear weapons may have an effect on the "political and social atmosphere", but where is the evidence for that having the kinds of in-game effects that are currently in place. Considering that nukes were already capable of inflicting an unrealistic amount of damage (I wish I had kept a copy of, or a link to, my analysis of what a nuke should realistically be capable of in-game), I'm not sure that their being capable of doing more damage now is a good thing either.

A couple of items I feel need to be discussed, what with the new changes to the effects of the environment. Owning Nuclear Weapons Affects Environment I believe that the negative environmental effects of simply owning one or more nuclear weapons should be dropped. What possible justification is there for the negative environmental impact of simply owning a nuclear weapon? It can't be a radiation effect... there simply isn't enough radiation coming from a nuclear warhead to negatively affect the environment. I worked in the Radiation Protection field for seven years, so believe me, I know what the effects of radiation are and how much exposure is required. If there was enough radiation being emitted from a nuclear weapon sitting in a silo to negatively affect the environment, then the vast majority of Canada, Australia, and any other country with large deposits of uranium would be a barren wasteland. It also can't be the missile component of the nuclear weapon. After all, cruise missiles and the Space Program wonder don't have any negative environmental impact, yet both require large rockets, and there's no real world justification for an unused rocket to affect the environment of an entire country. If it is supposed to be due to the manufacturing process, then why would it increase with the number of nukes made? Given that you can only manufacture one nuke at a time in the game, this implies that you only have one manufacturing center (or two, if the new Weapon Research Complex is implemented as written, and it already has its own environmental penalty), so any environmental effect should be independent of the number of nukes owned. Even if it were somehow tied to the maintenance of the nuclear weapons (i.e. periodically manufacturing new warheads as old ones decay), given that you purchase them over a span of time, the maintenance required would also be spread out, so the environmental effect should not increase with the number of nukes owned. The only remaining rationale for the environmental penalty to exist and to scale with the number of nukes owned is that it is somehow tied to the silos themselves. Although I can't imagine how that makes sense, let's assume for a moment that this is the case. The nuclear silo is going to be limited to a very small area, so even if it has some local environmental impact, how does it affect the environment of the entire nation? Which brings up the next point: Environmental Affects and Land Area Let's take two nearly identical countries, with equal levels of infrastructure and technology, the same resources, and the same environmental factors. The only difference between the two countries is one is twice the physical size of the other (we'll assume that their population densities are 10 and 20). How is it that negative environmental factors affect both equally? Let's assume the countries both import coal, which they burn for electricity, thus creating the environmental penalty. Since they have the same amount of infrastrucure, tech, population, etc., they should require the same amount of electricity, and thus burn the same amount of coal. In the larger country, the smoke from the plants will disperse over a larger area, reducing the concentration of pollutants in the air, thus having a lesser effect on the population and local environment as a whole. The larger country should also have more green space, which would further reduce the environmental impact. One of the arguments in favour of the new environmental changes was that it makes the environmental score more meaningful. Fair enough. But as it stands now, land area is virtually meaningless. Once you've reduced your population density to an acceptable number, there's no reason to have more land. Allowing greater land area to moderate environmental affects would at least give another reason to have a physically large nation.

I think it would make more sense if the amount of tech you received from a successful attack was based on the difference between the winner's and loser's tech levels. After all, what new technology is a superpower realistically going to gain from a third world country?

I've been asked to post this response from the OG forums here. First off, let me say that I'm definately in the "builder" camp. I can't say I disagree with the concept here, but I can't see the changes doing what they were intended to do. Re: Hitting a point where building your nation actually hurts it: With his new suggestions, and the ever-increasing cost to buy infrastructure and land, eventually you hit a point where it is too expensive to buy enough land to keep your population density down (is there still a maximum size cap?). At that point, if you buy more infrastructure, it raises your population, which raises your population density, which lowers your environment, which lowers both your income AND your population (which, incidentally, is a double hit to income, because you have fewer people with each making less money!). You're still going to hit a point where it makes no sense to build, this will likely just have shifted where that balance point is. Re: Slowing down growth for everyone making destruction have more impact: To go to the builder/warrior model, some builders are going to be put off by the fact that their nation growth is even slower than before. Warriors, on the other hand, are more interested in growing their nation to be able to wage war more effectively. If everyone is growing at the same rate, then one of three things happens: the recovery time between wars increases (decreasing the number of wars in a game that many say needs more wars to keep things interesting); wars occur at the same rate and a new equilibrium point is achieved at a lower nation strength; or alliances/blocs capable of laying the smack down on their opponents grow an even more insurmountable lead, because their opponents can't recover as quickly. Re: Increasing destruction on a sliding scale: While nations would likely do more damage to nations of similar size, bigger nations also recover faster than smaller nations, so they will tend to remain bigger. The really unfortunate side effect of this, which is completely contrary to making it easier for new players to reach the upper ranks, is that a big nation would pound a smaller nation even harder than before, and the smaller nation would do even less to the bigger nations than before. End result, it becomes easier for the established nations to keep new nations from reaching the top tier. Re: Adding new features that cost a lot: This does nothing to fix the problem of nations sitting on hordes of cash because there is nothing for them to buy. People will just do a cost-benefit analysis on the new items. If the benefit exceeds the cost, then they will buy it, gain an even bigger advantage over nations who can't afford them, and then once there is nothing left to buy, sit on hordes of cash. If the cost exceeds the benefit, then people just won't buy the new items, and will continue to sit on hordes of cash. Re: By changing to a % environmental penalty, "all nations would be affected equally": Nations with resources that carry an environmental penalty will be affected more, not because the affect on their nation directly, but because people will be less willing to trade for those resources. Rather than "balancing" the resources, it may very well just shift what the "optimal" mix of resources is. I have enough trouble finding a good stable trade with Cattle/Coal because it's not an optimal mix. Now if accepting coal is going to lower your environment, it makes it that much harder to sell my sub-optimal mix of resources. Re: By uncapping the GRL "nuclear war will have worldwide effects and there will be political pressure to stop the massive use of nuclear weaponry": When the GRL was initially introduced ( :argh: ), it wasn't capped, and there was no pressure to stop it. The reason? People argued that since everyone was affected by the GRL equally, the only global affect of the GRL was to shift everyone down the scale equally. The GRL went to some ridiculously high number before Admin decided to cap it. Let's put it this way... if I fire a shotgun at my enemy indoors, I know it's going to hurt both of our ears, but he's going to get shot and I'm not. If launching a nuke at my enemies is going to lower both of our incomes by some fraction of a percent, but he's still going to lose all of his soldiers etc, and I'm not, I still come out ahead by firing the nuke. Since the warriors are only looking for an advantage and not relative footing, this is really only going to hold back the builders. Re: Land has additional use and is more important: Land still reaches a point where it is prohibitively expensive to buy. The only reason that I have a huge amount of land is I had previously hit a point where buying more infrastructure would hurt my nation, and buying more tech did nothing for me, so I put all my income into land for a few months. Essentially this change just makes it more expensive to grow your nation because you have to buy land in addition to your infrastructure. Re: Skill has more impact in the game: Because this is a new change out of the blue, luck has more impact right now, as in "were you lucky enough to have bought the right things so that this change doesn't affect you terribly". Going forward, some players will simply figure out what the new optimum mix is, share it with their alliance mates, which will then spread to the rest of the game. At that point, it simply becomes more "common knowledge" like "always buy a harbour for your first improvement". Re: "realism. Environment has in reality a strong impact on the health of your population, and therefore the amount of deseases and deaths (pop modifiers) and the amount of days they are ill (income modifier):" The United States produces a huge amount of pollution, yet has unrivaled economic strength. China has severe pollution problems, but has a huge population. Sure, the environment affects health, but there are many, many factors at play. Furthermore, the "environment" is not insular to one country... air and water pollution caused in one country will affect its neighbours. You want realism? Your nation doesn't have or import iron and at least one of coal, oil, uranium, or water? Sorry, no electricity for you: say goodbye to most of your income and population. You don't have steel and construction? Sorry, you can't build any infrastructure. No electronics? I guess it's the dark ages for you. Population density is too high? Sorry, you can't purchase more land, all of the planet's land area is already owned. Your soldiers all died in the war? Sorry, you can't just buy more, because they have to come from somewhere... I guess you'll have to wait while you train another generation of citizens. Blah blah blah... Claiming that an arbitrary decrease in a nebulous "environment" stat directly leads to a reduction of x% population and y% income isn't more realistic, it's just more arbitrary.