hamlin

Here's a list of what each NS effector costs you when purchasing these wonders, numbers listed below are for Mars wonders, Lunar are exactly half the cost Item----------------Base----------Extra Mile of Land--------9,000---------7,500 Tank - Deployed-----900-----------750 Tank - Defending----1,200---------1,000 Cruise Missile------60,000--------50,000 Nuke (1st)----------60,000--------50,000 Nukes (20)----------24,000,000----20,000,000 Technology----------18,000--------15,000 Infrastructure------18,000--------15,000 Soldier-------------120-----------100 Aircraft (Level 9)--270,000-------225,000 Navy (Corvette)-----60,000--------50,000 Navy (Landing Ship)-180,000-------150,000 Navy (Battleship)---300,000-------250,000 Navy (Cruiser)------360,000-------300,000 Navy (Frigate)------480,000-------400,000 Navy (Destroyer)----660,000-------550,000 Navy (Submarine)----720,000-------600,000 Navy (Carrier)------900,000-------750,000 So yea...it's crazy expensive to actually have a military and buy these. I'll do an average 15k infra nation and calculate only the average military costs. 15k infra means roughly 150k citizens. Actual number depends on resource set. Assume 50% soldiers that's 75,000. We'll assume they don't keep tanks but we'll assume a full airforce (lets just go with basic basic airforce of 50), navy and nukes. Full navy strength at 15k infra is 539. Full Airforce assumes 8 Aircraft carriers (25 extra aircraft), Construction and a foreign air base (50+10+20+25) = 105 75,000 soldiers * $120 increase per = $9,000,000 Full Airforce * $270,000 per plane = $28,350,000 Full Navy * $60,000 per point = $32,340,000 Nukes = $24,000,000 Total for military = $93,690,000 Seems a tad excessive as this is more than all but 5 other wonders. And from an RP standpoint it doesn't make sense as a big military shouldn't make it more expensive to go to space. Edit: In case you couldn't guess...yes I am very bored.

If you truly think it's better to have a low NS then you can easily delete a bunch of infra/land. Tech is a little more awkward, but sending out 300 every 10 days should get you down pretty quickly.

I think the target audience is nations with several billion lying around, lol

It was already stated that the base is likely a break even wonder that is built only to allow access to the other 'better' wonders (specifically the mine). Although in the new changes mines are almost as expensive as the base

Rather than scrapping and rebuilding would there be a chance to implement something like retooling or repairing/upgrading the base. What I'm thinking is something along the lines of, after 2-3 years I can repair/upgrade it for say 1/2 the cost of a brand new one and renew the timer to another 4 years. It would make more sense that repairing your base would cost less than building a new one as you don't have the full expense of having to start from scratch. Ideally the cost would scale with age (or remaining age) of the base so repairing after 1 day would be cheap but repairing at day 1199 would cost say 90% of a new base.

To expand on this because I don't think I said it as well as I could have: The income a nation makes is almost exclusively derived from it's level of infrastructure. Yes, tech plays a role in happiness and bill reduction but a nation with 10k infra and 1k tech will make vast vast vast sums more than a nation with 10k tech and 1k infra. Without doing actual numbers I would hazard a guess that the average nation has 90-95% of it's income (post bills) derived from it's infra (including improvements and wonders which are essentially tied to infra) and 5-10% derived from its tech. Essentially you end up with a wonder that not only costs a large income nation less in real money, it costs far less in 'adjusted' money (essentially 1M means the same to a nation making 2M/day as 5M does to a nation making 10M/day). It also provides said nation with far more benefit as none of the new wonders or resources are modified by tech, they all provide bonuses to either citizen population (directly pulled from infra) or infra cost and bills. So, in effect, not only are high tech nations punished by an initial cost, they receive much less benefit from the wonder than a 'similar' nation which has focused more in infra.

There's a couple arguments against this. First, Why shouldn't that nation be able to reap large benefits from this wonder. This was a very advanced nation and spent the time to save vast sums of money, they shouldn't be punished for being able to keep a large level of technology while having lost a large amount of infrastructure. The static part of the cost (in the placeholder numbers it's 100-200M) ensures that you won't have us (CN players) dropping 18m to a tiny nation and having them buy it for ultra cheap. Also, the income potential, and the RoI for the wonder, is dramatically higher for infra than for tech. Given that NS goes up faster with tech than infra you're essentially punishing people for buying tech as not only are they spending money on something they already don't get a good RoI on, it also dramatically increases the cost of the wonders. Every 50 tech increases the cost of a Mars base by (50*5*10000) = 2.5M while it barely affects your nation in terms of increased income. On the other hand 50 infra increases the cost of a Mars base by (50*3*10000) = 1.5M but it also increases your income potential, and the saving potential for the wonder, by a good amount. What this seems to reward now is infra heavy, tech light nations. The second argument is a logical one. Increasing levels of technology should not increase the cost of doing something that is inherently technologically geared. As my nation becomes more advanced it shouldn't cost more to put a man on the moon/mars. It should cost less. To bring a real world example in. If we wanted to land a man on the moon today it would cost far, far less than the ~$150 billion it cost for the Apollo program (adjusted for inflation). In fact, depending on estimates, we could currently build a *base* on the moon for the same cost it took Armstrong to simply walk. If anything tech should decrease the cost of a wonder, although not let it go below the 'base' cost (so as to prevent the 20k NS 26 infra nation from getting it for 5M)

Greatest alliance ever in the history of Planet Bob. Led by the greatest leader of an alliance ever in the history of Planet Bob.

I confused threads. I thought we were still on the Echelon reps thread.

I wasn't intending to speak on how just this war was or wasn't and I certainly wasn't trying to argue about the start of the war. That's a debate for another topic and is completely irrelevant to this one. My point was that without the MDP/MADP web there we be far fewer combatants on *both* sides

pot, meet kettle.

I think eliminating, or reducing the benefit of, tech raiding would be a good step towards improving this game. Many people want to play the game and be involved with a smaller alliance either with RL friends or just with a smaller group of online people however they don't want to deal with larger alliance curb stomping them. In the real world this doesn't happen because other countries step in (even when treaties don't exist) and say "hey stop being a !@#$%" In CN that doesn't happen because there's 43 treaties for every alliance.

I agree with this. There is really no way for an alliance to become involved in a smaller contained "war" What this leads to is the vast majority of nations either never experiencing war, or only experiencing it when it's 3v1 or 1v3. Neither of those situations are really fun (I've been in both). A reduction of the MDP/MADP web and the reduction of protectorates would improve this game greatly I think. However there's no way that admin could ever implement that as these things are entirely in the realm of player control. It's up to the powers that be to stop signing treaties, or it's up to those that aren't in power to become more active/involved and take power. Overall a change in general player attitude would help as well. The vast majority of fights in CN have been started by something stupidly trivial which was multiplied 50x over by MDP/MADP webs (this war is a perfect example). Most of this stuff is a pipe dream though. It all relies on people taking the play of this game more "serious" and this is the internet so I'm not gonna hold my breathe about that happening.

To play devils advocate. If there were secret terms how would you know they had been dropped?

Good to know, I'll have to keep that in mind for those people that cancel trades on me and cost me collections.