Grand Emperor Brian

This man speaks truth.

Historically, the three real Great Wars were fought between LUE + Co. and NPO and Co. Sure, there have been other massive wars, but LUE wasn't involved, so they can't be thrown into the "Great War" category. Unjust War = Unjust War War of the Coalition = War of the Coalition Karma War = Karma War At least that's my opinion.

Anyone else notice the irony in the fact that "intelligence" is spelled wrong in the topic title?

Cards are an instant classic.

So, you complain about not being offered aid, but then you say that it wasn't necessary and you didn't need it, but even then, you say that this isn't the place to discuss the NPO's aid system. Are you arguing with yourself...?

[OOC]To who ever asked: Dark Jedi and Sith are different. The Sith were actually a race of their own, but when exiled Jedi (Dark Jedi) were assimilated into their culture, over hundreds of years, the Sith became the name of the Sith-Dark Jedi descendants. [/OOC] Anyway, back on topic. Good luck, Ivan. Glad to see something different happening.

This entire argument is ridiculous! Boris Grishenko and James Bond would never work together because Boris is dead and was considered an enemy of MI6!

I also admitted that it was possible, just very unlikely. The most likely scenario would be that another alliance would basically take NPO's place after a short time.

I meant there will always be one alliance on top, not necessarily the same alliance, though. After NPO falls, another alliance will take its place. It'll be very hard to end up with the polarity that we had in the old days. In a roundabout way, I'm basically saying that the game will cycle through empires and that after the NPO there'll be another evil empire ruling the game, it doesn't matter if we don't have the ability to use guerrilla tactics or secret aid.

Good read. Entertaining, as always. Seriously? I'm not in Polar nor have I ever been, but even I can see how insulting your post was.

Not a bad idea. Instead of introducing something completely different to the game, we could just create scarcity within the current resource system and allow people to switch resources with conquered nations. That wouldn't really effect the large-scale situation of the game, though, because I doubt alliances are going to go to war for the sake of changing a few nations' resources. It'd definately make things more interesting, though.

It doesn't really matter if the game mechanics aren't like real life, the politics are. No matter what happens, there will more than likely always be one alliance on top.

Ah, I see your point, now.

I think he was talking about the unaligned and/or uninterested people who spend 10 minutes a day on the game just collecting taxes. The resource can't have a huge effect on national growth or war prowess, unless admin wants to make some major changes to the game mechanics.

True, but it could also have the opposite effect of getting them more interested in the game, due to the fact that they'd have a goal. A goal of "Get as much of this as possible" is much more attainable and less ambiguous than "Become the best in the game." Plus, the effect on the political scene would likely be so great, that it'd bring in more players who're interested in the politics and community.

I meant contest.

You'd probably attract more people with a shorter declaration name. We have really, really short attention spans.

If the resource was scarce enough and desirable enough, the result would be the larger alliances in the game turning against one another, which would definately make the game more interesting and reduce stagnation. The trick would be making the scarce resource desirable in some way without giving those who own it a huge advantage. Using spy operations, a nation should be able to uncover secret aid transactions of a nation, both sent and recieved, at a moderately large cost. The way to make secret aid work in CN is to give the nation some sort of penalty. For instance, you don't get a +1 happiness bonus when trading in secret, why not cut the amount of aid you can send in secret? Just tick a box to decide if you want to aid in secret, with the penalty of only being able to send $1.5 or $2 Mil.

This seems to me to be a poll asking if we even want a contest, I'm assuming we'll get some instructions later.

I'd love a flag competition.

The only way to halt stagnation is to create conflict, and to create conflict, we need, as Heft said, scarcity. Master-Debater has a great idea with the land scarcity thing. Create a set amount of land on Planet Bob and make it more profitable to have more land, e.g. you could make it so that you need a certain amount of land in order to build an improvement or wonders. Changing the war system wouldn't really change anything, except for the strategies used to fight. It would do absolutely nothing to reduce stagnation. Likewise, changing the aid system or anything to make it easier for smaller nations to grow still wouldn't change anything because, no matter how you change it, the older nations will have an advantage. Capping infra, tech, etc. is a terrible idea, too. It's unrealistic and would just make it boring once nations reach the caps.

Thanks, Cirrus. I appreciate the comments.

Opinion?