War Slot Filling has been a hot topic recently, and it's become more apparent than ever that some thing need to change to make it less of a judgement call on my part to determine what is and what is not war slot filling.
Therefore, I have updated the Game Rules to clearly and explicitly state that declaring wars on your allies is generally war slot filling. This means that going forward, you should not be declaring wars on allies, whether they're in your alliance or an alliance you're allied to. These wars, for the purpose of raiding, sending a notification to remind them to become active, etc. are not allowed.
If you have a nation in your alliance that is inactive, for example, and you want to raid them, then you can kick them from your alliance and do so. At that point, I would generally not consider them still an ally. But leaving your alliance so that you can evade the mechanics and declare war on an alliance member, then immediately rejoining the alliance is now clearly and explicitly against the rules.
The reason for this change is again to make it as clear as possible what is and what is not allowed so that I am not forced to make judgement calls which generally leave no one happy.
Furthermore, for far too long the "beige" mechanic has left perverse incentives in war, such as not wanting to complete a war or intentionally defeating allies to help them. As such, I have removed "beige" time given from losing wars.
New players will still start with 14 days of beige time, but going forward no one except these new nations will experience "beige." When you lose a war now, you will remain on your previous color.
I understand that the point of beige is to help out the defender and give them a chance to rebuild, but unfortunately the unintended consequences are so problematic that it has been and still is a pressing moderation issue. By removing the beige time issued as a result of losing a war, it will be much easier to determine what is and what is not war slot filling because there will be no incentive to do a "fake" war against an ally that results in a defeat and beige time.
My intention is not to make the game punitive and impossible to rebuild / recover from a lost war (or series of lost wars) and I will be exploring alternatives. However, the beige time from losing wars is a broken, abused mechanic that can no longer exist as-is, thus it's removal.
Lastly, with these changes I have notified two players who recently received moderation strikes for war slot filling that their strikes have been removed. It is now crystal clear that what they did would be considered against the rules, but it was not so clear before, which is why I have removed the strikes.
If you have suggestions for an alternative to the now deprecated beige mechanic for losing wars, I am all ears and would encourage you to make a post in the suggestions forum here: https://forum.politicsandwar.com/index.php?/forum/52-game-suggestions
