Leaderboard

Hi everyone, I just wanted to make a short post now that the year is mostly wrapped up. This year has been exciting for P&W, and we've seen a lot of growth. In February we introduced the Alliance Control Panel, making alliance management a little easier. In March, I screwed up and put everyone in the alliance Rose. Two weeks later, you all overloaded the server and caused it to crash because it couldn't handle the huge spike in activity. (We upgraded the server.) In May we introduced some Politics and War merchandise (Politics and Store.) It didn't last long, unfortunately, but I got a couple sweet P&W mugs. In June we upgraded the forum software to IPS4. In July we experienced the "Great Deflation" where I united the players of P&W in their disdain for me reduced resource production and changed commerce. Later, I redeemed myself by introducing the long sought alliance Tax Brackets. In August we celebrated P&W's 3 year anniversary. I also reduced the number of captchas players faced. In September we introduced the Credit subscription option. In October I introduced the verification system, allowing legitimate nations operated by separate persons to play cooperatively on the same network. This has been very helpful for schoolmates, coworkers, and families playing P&W together. Later in October I introduced in-game treaties and fixed up the Treaty Web. And just think month one of the P&W servers died (some sort of hardware failure) but luckily we had a backup taken immediately beforehand and the game was shortly back up-and-running again without a hitch. Along the way, we introduced P&W apps for iOS and Android. While these apps are not great (I am not app developer), they have brought in a huge number of new players. We've gone from about a steady 2,000 active players at the beginning of the year to sustaining 3,000-4,000 active players. Something like 30% of all new players come from the Android app alone. Here's a neat graph of the total number of nations and the active nation count (active within a week) over the course of the year. You'll note the spike in July correlated with the release of P&W on the App and Google Play Stores. Now I've got a few fun stats for you all: Nations Created in 2017 41,038 Alliances Created in 2017 312 Most Viewed Player Ad Most Clicked Player Ad Aggregate Soldier Casualty Count Game-Wide 2,280,521,215 Total Nukes Game-Wide 4,450 Total Nukes Launched in 2017 5,156 Total Number of Wars Won (Since we started keeping track) 6,705 Aggregate Steel Amount in Nations Game-Wide 41,020,000.49 Aggregate Steel Amount in Alliances Game-Wide 8,320,068.73 --- Lastly, I just want to say thank you to everyone who makes the P&W such a great and fun game. It really wouldn't be the same without a strong community behind it. I apologize that I have been less active than usual these past few months, many of you know that I'm in college and I had a particularly tough semester (this past one) which meant more time studying and less time than I would have liked working on Politics & War. However, going forward I should have more time to dedicate to the game, which means more improvements as we move forward. Thanks for playing Politics & War, and enjoy the holiday season. I wanted to note too that we're approaching 100,000 nations created in P&W's lifetime, which will be a huge and exciting milestone. It will also herald six digit nation IDs! Also I want to give a huge shoutout and thank you to all of the wonderful moderators, here on the forums, on the wiki, and Discord for their help. I couldn't do it with you. And thank you to everyone making reports, allowing us to catch cheaters and hold each other accountable for fair and fun gameplay.

Adding tax brackets in no way redeemed you for the screwing you gave low and mid tier nations with your resource and commerce changes.

Aggregate Steel Amount in Nations Game-Wide 41,020,000.49 Aggregate Steel Amount in Alliances Game-Wide 8,320,068.73 Hmmmm....Arrgh!

This thread needs one of my videos, in italian as usual so you don't get what they say click here

So many people have Santa Christmas avatars, but they fail to forget that Christmas is built on the labor of worker elves and gnomes. They are the unrecognized and forgotten backbone of Santa's village.

You are in an alliance with high taxes. I'm sure a $1 would make you ecstatic.

Out of those 100,000 nations created I'm probably half

All I got from this is that hades likes to protect cartoon prostitution.

Which month can we anticipate the disappearance of Politics & Snore?

it was an okay year if the great inflation did'nt happen it would have been better

Reading the summary here makes it look much more brighter than some players have painted the game and actions of Alex in the past, so there is that Hopefully next year will be even better.

Hey now, TKR robbed me last time with that guy who went on to betray them like a week later so getting robbed this time by their rivals or whatever is all quite meh. There is no need for an award anyway, everyone knows the Roz is the best.

For the record, making fun of micro's is so last year, the cool thing to do now is make fun of alliances that cant manage a top tier, which is about 95% of them.

Differences aside, Mensa was pretty dope.

Ha! Silly little micro isnt even aware of the secret minimum bar of entry for an alliance to post a DoW on the Alliance Affairs board, losers!

Great game Alex. Love it.

o/

How precisely do alliances bribe their own members and how can I get on this gravy train of bribery? As a deeply corrupt person always willing to sell myself to the highest bidder, I'm genuinely curious.

The leader, who feared for his life, ended up writing down all other leaders of the rebellion, locations of arms storage and where the leaders of the rebels meet to discuss war policies. Turns out, on the map, it created a triangle around this base, one North, 25 miles away, one East, 25 miles, and one West, 25 miles away. He showed them each locations of smaller outpost that were created, and gave out a rough estimate of 400 thousand men that joined them. The meeting spot was at the Northern major makeshift vase they created at 9:00am every morning, and the defense of the bases were rather inferior, disguised as heavy defense systems to keep the reports of the KGB incorrect.

Eh, well, I guess you know what you're doing Squeegee. I'd still warn you to not let them have free passage through your lands...they tend to sack whatever is in their path.

Not bragging fam, just stating facts. It was your incompetent side's fault for pissing away pretty much every advantage they had at the start of that war. And for the 1st one I did need help, true. Then again I had 14 cities, you had 15, the guy who had already DoWd me had 19 and then a 12 city nation also DoWd me. Not sure how I should have been able to compete without a bit of help. The 1st round was actually interesting. You and the NPO guy almost got my aircraft to 0 and it was this one counter on the NPO guy that ended up saving me, since you had been countered earlier by dat bish @Flame of the Flawed .

The problem is, I think I agree with what you said, but I can't be sure because of your heavy Italian accent. Please help.

Wonder whether that would’ve worked for HBE. Instead you had the salty machine known as hades representing your alliance.

I see anime panties, I like.

People shit on micros so much because so many of them do so many stupid idiotic things. Like this thread.

What a nice and upbeat post! That's pretty (as the kids would say) sugoii!

From The Desk of Red Fraggle New Minister of Fraggle Rock Nuclear Weapon Research Division (FRNWRD) The Nation of Fraggle Rock Howdy!! I hope y'all are having a delightful day. It is my pleasure to announce that The Best Nation Ever, Fraggle Rock, is wrapping up Phase Four of its Grand Plan. Sir Emperor Dear Leader Wembly Fraggle has put me in charge of Phase Five. Uncle Traveling Matt has given his blessing to proceed with our plans. In two days, we will be done building nuclear weapons and moving towards the finish line. As we are in a transition period, I would love to invite all the world leaders to our great nation for a benefit dinner and robust round of musical chairs. Food is on us, of course, and there will be a minor transportation fee of seven million dollars per person. Sign up today and reserve a spot at the table. Also, as we come towards the end of building two nuclear weapons for every Fraggle, I invite the world to regal us in tales of our program and what you believe our next move is. FYI....you won't guess, but have fun trying. Stay tuned for Phase Five, it will be a blast!! Also, don't forget to sign up for The Fraggle Awards: Presented by Diaper Mouth Inc, Hosted By Kitschie. Send your deposit of nine million dollars per table and tell us how many are coming for the best event ever. Also.....if you have any extra money laying around, go ahead and send it to us, as we have never misused funds before. Many Hugs, Red Fraggle

You beat me to it... I miss the good ol' days where trying to read SK scrolls made my eyes hurt. ;_; Congrats to both parties on the treaty, seems like a 3rd sphere is being born. Unfortunately since the scroll is pretty legible I'm afraid the treaty is invalid, but still well done! o7

0 wars declared.

You're not supposed to tip people off about the New Pirate Order. ffffffff

Thanks to both of you!

Why the !@#$ are mods actively derailing threads? I demand Justice.

The Roquentin Dynamic Alliance Measurement Index™

Although I don’t particularly have an idea for an alliance right now, I’ll drop this post - hopefully it helps someone that wants to start an alliance I wrote up a huge wall of text a while back - part of which discussed this. I’ve seen one too many alliances fail, and the reason that that happens is usually not due to external factors (necessarily) but more due to internal issues the Government doesn’t know how to handle. So, I’ve listed down a couple of things you should have down before you go ahead and make an alliance: Know Yourself, Find your Identity: a. What’s the goal? b. What sets you apart from other alliances? c. What kind of players are you attracting? b. Experience, and your own strengths Limits? What are those? b. Some alliances set artificial upper limits to the number of members they will accept. I’ve micro-managed 50 member alliances in war, and almost never failed them, but above that? My micro management’s efficiency will start to fall. c. Government types are also necessary to building a proper alliance - iNCi from eRep followed a very primus inter pares method of operation, and it worked for them. It might not for you. Is your MilCom centralised or decentralised? (Shoutout to Rose here last war) d. Artificial score inflation, keeping inactives, tax farms - are you okay with this? IA wise: a. Community building mother!@#$er, can you do it? b. Raising, and maintenance of activity on boards/Discord c. Guides - hit me up if you want one, I have written most down. Econ: a. Micro level stuff - audits, maximising profit etc. b. Macro Econ plan - growth rings Corollary 1. Tier’ing, artificial city upper limits. Corollary 2. Optimal taxation - Kemal would be more knowledgable than me on this, but the principles of taxation are similar in game - if you cross a certain threshold in terms of monetary/resource income, you’re potentially incurring massive losses in other areas (activity, desire to stay in the alliance, individual growth) MilCom: I will defer to people like vanek and Senry’s opinion here (you should see these guys go man) but the general outline for MilCom remains similar. I think micro MilCom stuff is pretty explanatory, so let’s go to this: a. Is micro management a thing for you or no? b. Discord activity is imperative to winning. c. Is your micro section looking good? Guides, knowledge of war mechanics, etc. For Macro: Macro-MilCom FA: Oh boy, boy o boy. I could go on about this all day, but let’s go over one very simple rule: Often times it doesn’t matter what you do, what matters is how people perceive that action. Remember this. 1. Learn how to spin things your way (narratives) 2. Keep a diplomat team if you can, when I was FA I did practically all work by myself, because I could. Find what suits you, implement. 3. Treaty chess - !@#$ is that? Simply put, you need to be capable of planning long term - looking at the bigger picture is more important. Your treaties should be based on two primary things, for the major part: a. FA policy alignment and Friendships b. Suitable addition to fighting capability (offensive: complimenting your tiers by adding to the places you’re weak in | defensive: adding to similar tiers so you have more backup) Above all, don’t give up ever. If you do that, you’ve lost the game. Other Skills: 1. Math 2. Spreadsheets 3. Programming Learn. Use. Prosper. (ps: I wrote this all on mobile so there might be a crapload of mistakes xdxd)

Alliance name: The failures Color: It doesn't matter, all players are beige or grey Flag: The point of this alliance is to be the worst ever, we like players with a stupid nation setup and players with a lot of negative forum rep, we start a blitz doing fortify, we only do utter failures, our nations have negative revenue, we use nukes on 300 infra cities, we buy credits for 8M and then we redeem the credit for 5M, we declare war to Grumpy with all the nations under 1000 score and then the entire alliance goes into vacation mode, we are the ones who are not moved to Rose, we have 40 improvements slots all used for wind power, we have uranium enrichment program as first project and our nation in located in Europe, we do spy operations to terrorize civillians, things like that Protectorates: Arrgh Everyone can join

Alliance name: opsec Alliance Color: opsec Alliance Flag: opsec Government. FA head: opsec IA head: opsec MA head: opsec Econ head: opsec FA direction: opsec opsec opsec

Come to the apeside

He obviously meant venereal diseases

Nukes are just fun, guys. Not everything has to be min/maxed.

I mean it's pretty much true in terms of recent memory in seriousness despite this being a joke topic. You've plunged into wars despite knowing they'd be losses. I'd say being willing to start stuff in spite of the odds is pretty big.

By these metrics I do believe this makes Roz Wei the most dynamic of all alliances considering that big repeated +50 boost for the wars. Thank you for bringing this to my attention brother Sketchy.

Roquentin disapproval: -300 Dynamic Rating

This thread is Sketchy. Criticism of dynamism: -25 dynamic rating.

idk where but probably abbas

Did you make cartoons of it though?

Apesphere.

A bit trivial seeing how she had sex with blacks and they have high STD levels.

Idk what to call this, here goes. I'm quitting the game, and a few weeks ago I drew this up. Shared it with a few friends, thought it may or may not benefit someone out there. Call them the ramblings of a man gone senile. Pretentious shit ahead! Notes: I drew this up when I couldn't sleep, at midnight. Haven't checked it a lot, got some help from people. Mistakes are bound to be there. ~~~ You’ve created an alliance, or you’ve been thrust into the leader role, or you’re just someone that’s been assigned to IA. Maybe you have extensive government experience, maybe you don’t. For those of you who don’t, and are confused about what you can or should do, in this post I will go over my experiences in an attempt to help you in your decision making. You have have many things you can do according to what kind of Alliance you want to see yours turn into. By the end of this post, I intend to have shown you what can work and what can’t work in different types of alliances, and then hopefully you as a player in a new leadership role, or as a player who’s been assigned to IA, can start making meaningful and well-advised decisions in your policies. Getting to know your Alliance’s Identity: As an alliance, you need to understand who you are, why you do what you do, and what your end-goal is. On that note, do you have an end goal? Or are you more of the “We’ll cross the bridge when we get there†type? Do you have any short-term plans and/or objectives to reach before a due date? If so, are you actively trying to move towards the realization of those goals? Some questions to understand who you are as an alliance: What kind of alliance are you in terms of the entry of members? Are you a selective alliance (Hogwarts, TEst, etc.)? Are you open to all players? If you’re the former, what is the criterion, and how do you ensure the standard of your membership (City count, Nation Score, Nukes/no nukes)? If you’re the latter, do you have any form of ‘quality-control’, or any form of trimming (Past alliances, OWF presence, people like MasterD/Calvin.)? Are you a mix between both? These are many of the IA questions related to both recruiting and quality control. Is your alliance made up of the ‘serious’ player class that devote time to the alliance, and are active whenever called upon, or is your alliance made up of casual players that log in once a day, and aren’t really all that concerned with the game even if the alliance can use their activity? Is it a mix and match between both? Rank yourself, observe, and note the results. Consider making a poll of some sort to collect this data. What is your alliance’s objective? If it does not have one, set one. You need an objective and/or aim to understand as to whether or not your alliance is progressing; you’re not going to be achieving much if you don’t have an aim, and that isn’t just because of the technicalities of ‘achieving’, ‘success’, and their relation with the presence (or lack) of aims/objectives. Do you want to have membership that is based in upper, middle or lower tiers? Are you spread out across multiple tiers evenly? Where does most of your membership lie in terms of tiers? Where does the majority of your tax yield come from? The middle tier, the lower tier, or the upper tier? If you can think of more questions that can help you build a better image of your alliance, then you should ask them. That image will prove to be imperative in forming your goals, your ambitions, and the frameworks you introduce to counter problems your alliance may have. Keep this in mind when you answer these questions. Your Alliance’s Membership: This goes hand in hand with your identity, and your aims. Who are you looking to get into your alliance? Do you have a limit of people you’re not willing to cross? Do you have a specific requirement? (No Shifty the 1-city requirement doesn’t count). Why is this important? This is what’s going to form an optimized government standard, and have you progress to a certain aim, since most aims are based around either score, military prowess, elitism et al, and of those all are derived from your membership. Are you NPO with massive crushing numbers? Are you Hogwarts that prefers elitism and goes by a very strict city standard? Or are you like Mensa with both numbers and elitism, ensuring you don’t get outnumbered easily, while also ensuring a standard of quality. At the end this question boils down to “Quality or Quantity?†Choose carefully. Note that quality does not refer to score, but to how good the player is. If you don’t have strong leadership*, and a powerful centralized system, don’t keep too many noobs. Them not knowing what to do and you not being able to help them, it will make them fail in things such as war, and subsequently result in a net loss for you. If you are keen on taking in new players in a large quantity, be sure you have academies that properly educate new members on the game’s mechanics, and how things work. You not doing this is synonymous with your IA department sucking. Sure, experience is the best teacher but how many times are they going to go through the game without knowing how to do what they wish to do? How many times are you going to suffer the brunt of their mistakes? Know that if you do not have a proper education system in place, you’ve failed. Your Alliance’s Government: So you can’t decide what type of government you’d like to have, don’t worry, that’s perfectly normal if you don’t have extensive experience in working with alliances. The first thing you need to understand is a Membership Government ratio. It’s something that’s integral to your alliance’s PR, and actual working. First, gather how many members you have, and what style of government you wish to pursue. To help you with understanding which form of government is best suited for your alliance, we’ll discuss a few thumb rules. First, if you have a large number of members (+50) you’re going to need a proper Government, i.e. department heads, leaders et al; with a smattering of Department workers. Note the word ‘worker’; this is going to be taken into consideration once we talk about how you raise activity. This is where our previous question set about your alliance’s membership comes into play. Who have you decided to be? If you’ve decided to be a mass alliance, you’ve decided to forego precision for vastly overpowering numbers that smash through defenses. Remember that with this ‘advantage’, there are several disadvantages. You need competent logistics, for one. If your government and/or workers are not up to the task, fire them. Hire those willing to set apart time for the alliance. There is no place for laziness when you’re managing that big of an alliance, and wish to pursue a smaller government size. For that purpose alone, we have the two-class system; the actual government and the workers. The workers are the driving force of the departments, while the department heads assign new workers, promote, demote, and fire current employees based on their competence (Alliances are businesses). Before you delve into the micro-management however, let’s talk about the two poles in the current spectrum: Arrghism with very loose government (That still is looking out for the betterment of the alliance and it’s goals) and a Dictatorship that has the leader ruling with an iron-fist. Ground Rules: Establish a formal hierarchy unless you’re going full Arrgh and planning on not possessing a formal hierarchal structure. (Though to be fair they do loosely control their members on certain, very specific things. I have it on good authority that Arrgh’s government has the right to propose things, but doesn’t actually say “Alright, you go do this, and make it happen quickâ€.) The alliance works with a set of principles and rules it does not break; to make these ‘laws’ official, create charter, and introduce it to alliance at large. This should be self-explanatory. For the people that don’t get it: Laws of succession (To the leadership role), procedure before declaring war, appointing new officers, changing policies regarding Econ and Military et al fall within this section. Be careful when you add rules, also include rules on amending rules. Bureaucracy ftw Increasing Activity: This is the big one that affects everything and anything that your alliance can and/or does do. You see, all the numbers your alliance possesses mean absolutely nothing in war if your members aren’t active. Every nation you’ve built up will be of no use to you outside the realm of tax farming. Understanding why members go inactive is the first step to mitigating the damage dealt by inactivity, and increasing player retention rates. Recognize that P/W is not the game for everyone, and it can and will get boring in periods of time where war is not present. Long war will also make the game stale if one side is continuing to pound the other. For this reason alone acknowledge the fact that not everyone you recruit and not everyone that comes to your alliance will stay in your alliance, or even in the game. To that effect, you must find ways of increasing player retention. Having had experimented with a couple of things, I’ve found that to keep them hinged onto the game you can do the following: Firstly, introduce the players to the OWF. This can be a place where they can shitpost, but remember to keep them within a certain boundary. Although the OWF can be a salt mine at times, it can also be quite amusing, and is certainly the place where the majority of activity takes place outside times of war and specific Discord channels/forums. Secondly, don’t rely on P/W alone to be able to make them stay. Your community is something you must create. Don’t be an aloof jackass of a leader, it won’t work unless your members are God-tier guys, talk with your membership, hold weekly/bi-monthly polls on how your members feel. Gather opinions. Make the members feel as if their opinion matters shit, this is important to the nth degree. If you understand that the game isn’t all there is to PnW, you’ll know by now that you need to engage your members in activities outside of the in-game affairs. Play Town of Salem with them. Chill out with some good old Mafia in Tim’s server on Discord. Play Cards against Humanity. Hell, play online Uno if it helps. These small 5 minute games can get these guys involved like nothing else. Do this, and you’re increasing their willingness to come on and log in. Continue to check up on them in-game, and instruct them to raid. Furthermore, get ALL of your members into a chatting platform of your choice – Discord’s currently the go-to, but if they like Slack more, then shift there. This is extremely important. Do NOT miss this step. Chatting platforms such as those are where your coordination and communication takes place in times of war, and is the place where you bond with your members. If they don’t feel a sense of loyalty towards you, you aren’t a leader; you’re only taking the spot of the leader. Resign. As a final note, to gauge activity levels on your Discord, ping everyone in your membership channels and tell them the first person to ping you receives a certain amount. This promotes activity, and also let’s you know where you currently stand. Government Workers/Employees: To promote activity, and to encourage them being willing to do work for you and the alliance as a whole, pay them money and/or resources. Do things such as ‘Employee of the Month In Defense’ et alia. This kind of stuff works when you’re trying to get people to do shit efficiently. Don’t go overboard, and don’t make the think they’re getting paid for doing their job. They’re getting paid for doing their job properly. Huge difference. Gathering Stats: Three things: Spreadsheets, coding, and Math. Learn (how to use) all three. In terms of statistics, you’ll want to be collecting them (stats) on your alliance every single day, preferably twice a day. To store that data, either you’ll want to connect your spreadsheets (Use Google Sheets, it has a powerful scripting capability) to that data, and thus ensure that it’s updated on a scheduled time, or you’ll wish to either automatically import data into an Excel Sheet, or manually C&V the data into Google Sheets/Excel. Whatever you do, spreadsheets and scripting will help you with gathering stats and storing it in a place where it is easy to locate. Do that and I assure you half of your stats gathering problems will go away. Either learn scripting languages, or get to know whether you have someone that already does. Why is this useful? It’s useful for a multitude of reasons that involves both detecting surprise attacks, and to maintain a database of information that may require at any given point in time. As for Math, dude this is self-explanatory. Maths is how all in-game mechanics work, and planning goes hand in hand with number crunching, a shit load of it. Note on Decentralized v. Centralized MilCom: The main issue with centralized MilCom is the problem of logistics. The main issue with decentralized MilCom (especially in wars) is whether or not your members truly know how to deal with certain situations. Fact is, there are few alliances that truly gear their members up for war, and few alliances that actively encourage members to raid. This lack of encouragement from the get-go is what separates the centralized MilCom’s faults from the decentralized MilCom in times of war. If your members are wet behind the ears, you’ll need to micromanage their wars for them, and in times of war, this ‘micromanagement’ can be fatal. Your members need to know what to do, and how to do what they wish to do. To this effect, raiding and warring from the get-go is extremely beneficial, as the indirect consequence of them knowing how to counter and declare war is that they have experience with running wars. Experience with running wars means you have an extra ‘hand’ capable of instructing others on what to do, and running their own properly, thusly resulting in less workload for you. This of-course assumes that your centralized MilCom is not capable of guiding everyone through, which it shouldn’t need to do, as any missing space within your command structure means that your war effort is indirectly adversely affected. Note on VM-!@#$ and war deserters: Simple. Do not accept them at any cost whatsoever. They failed their previous alliance, they’ll do it again. They’re dead weight. You letting them in achieves absolutely nothing except you adding onto your alliance members that don’t give a single shit about the alliance, and care too much about their pixels. A Few Econ Tips: This connects with stats gathering. You need 3 things to automatically improve your current Econ Dept. Firstly, start an auditing department. Teach people how to audit, and what to look for. First look for simple mistakes, i.e. wrong policies, incorrect color. Then go into their city builds – first see if their simple build is correct – 1 Nuclear Power Plant, 1 Police Station, 1 Subway, 3 Banks, 3 Shopping Malls, 2 Stadiums. To counteract pollution if you have any, a recycling center should fit. Land Infra ratio should either be 1:1, or land should be greater than infra. Infra should theoretically not be above 1,700 unless you’ve come to a city count where you can both afford to bear the costs of going to 2,000 (Do not go above, the ROI is crazy, and unless you’re hoping to go to war once and be a pixel hugging whale, you’ll want infra damage to be the least of your concerns in war) and at the same time get the return before you reach war, you can go for it. I personally will not ever be going above 1,700 infra, as it is a simple waste of money. Once you’ve checked your alliance mate’s build, go to the next big thing, their resource manufacturing buildings. See if their current setup can be improved (Use my city sim or one of your own design to gauge how much more one can make with another setup) and then suggest those improvements. I’ve personally been working on an audit bot that does that for me, i.e. gather information and tell me where their faults lie. If someone you know or you yourself have those scripting capabilities, I laud you. Use that to better your alliance’s building. Second tip: Teach players how to use the buy section of the market effectively. Buying at a lower price and selling at a higher price is a simple, daily exercise that can earn you hundreds of thousands each day. Use this to its max potential. Thirdly, do NOT place self-sufficiency over profit per slot. This shows you’re lazy. If you as a leader are doing this, resign. You need to be a model for your members, not someone that’s doing their shit in a half-assed manner. (NPO’s model is different. That’s a subject for another day.) Some War/Defense Tips: I’ve seen several alliances that don’t have minimum military requirements. If your alliance doesn’t, sack your MilCom. They isn’t doing their job. Get your members to keep some ground forces, a suitable navy and sufficient air power at all times if they’re in the sub-500 range. This is where raiders are most common. Tell your members to keep 100% air if they’re around the 1000 NS range and above. Track military percentages every single day. I’ve designed a sheet to help you with that. Collect stats on every enemy nation and every allied nation. Refer back to stats gathering for this part. This will be of immense importance when you’re trying to gauge who can fill in for guys that die off, and who can counter your guys. Expect the counters if you’re going up against anyone remotely competent. Learn to counter the counters! Draw up several target lists* as a hobby. When you’re in a place where you legitimately need to do this, this hobby will help a shitload. Design and engineer stat gathering scripts for these kind of things. Use spies efficiently. Do NOT waste spies on things such as infrastructure and soldiers. Do not be a scrub. Tier your alliance properly. Don’t leave members out in the open. If you do that, they are liable to being butchered as soon as war starts. Practice blitzes on raiders. This will help when you actually have to do it. Create fire-teams with people in the similar city/age category, and grow them together. Have them bond. Once they’ve gone to war with each other in events such as counter-raiding, they’ll know how to do what needs to be done in actual war. On Target Lists: If you aren’t capable of creating target lists, and you still wish to pursue centralized MilCom (in relation to assigning targets to members in this instance), go to someone that you know and request a few target list templates. Usually, people do the following: Assign a target with the link and number of cities they have, and then name the 3 players on them along with their city counts. In my case, running a script yields me the link, city quantity, units, projects, and war policy, which makes for a more detailed target list. This also means, however, that it takes longer to consider and weigh the options you have. People usually refrain from assigning most members any more than 3 targets, as being stretched out on several fronts means that the incoming counters after your blitz are going to be effective to a larger degree. In a certain case, 3 liters of water fills 3 bowls. The same volume of water fills 6 bowls. The more the water in each bowl, the better. Water in this case is the war effort, and the bowl is the target. Keep in mind that after the first wave, your target list is mostly useless. Score’s have dropped, unit quantity is a mess, and generally that’s the end of the target list’s use. If you’re looking to continue blitzing after the first round ends, draw up new target lists prior to update. For alliances that run (kek) decentralized MilCom, target lists can be useless. Members are doing their own thing out of their own initiative, and while it can get messy if they’re wet behind the ears, if they know what they’re doing, the fact is micromanagement and the load on MilCom goes down by a wide margin, giving them space to plan counters to counters. Won't work if your members dunno stuff. End Notes: Praise Khorne. Oh and, goodluck and goodbye Orbis bois. Quitting time's arrived.