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I am going to remove all of the Trial Changes in the most recent update except for the Econ update. After listening to the feedback here and on Discord, I have decided it was too hasty to try and force those live for testing. Obviously they all have different consequences, and it is a lot to try and stick in the game without any testing. My fear was simply that without some additional changes, nations may be too vulnerable with just the war changes that were tested, and that perhaps I and others had made an oversight during the two tournaments of testing. In any case, I apologize for the 'scare' for many of you, and I promise I do listen to player feedback and my intent is not to, uh, destroy the game and force you all to quit or whatever you think it may be sometimes.

Half the players will forgive you. If the gif was to have "Sowwy :3" instead of "Sorry", I think everyone would forgive you.

Clearly the world isn't thinking large like I would..... Seeing how I got to thinking.......I believe I have the best idea. NUCLEAR KENO By June 1st....The Best Nation Ever, Fraggle Rock, will be able to hit anyone within the top 80 nations. I will take all Keno bets 1-80. Pick 10. Payouts will be the same as any Keno game. Fraggle Rock will have a third trusted nation draw the numbers and I will nuke those nations one at a time. This idea is going to the top of the list. Anyone who thinks it's dumb doesn't get it.

From The Desk of Uncle Traveling Matt The Nation of Fraggle Rock Greetings to all the friendly nations of Orbis. And a hearty hat tip to the losers and fake news spreaders. I bring a quick update about The Best Ever Nation That Has Ever Been, Fraggle Rock. So we've been busy. Don't worry though, as we will be back into a solid routine soon enough. Sure you might think you got away...but your day is coming. We have created and failed to maintain a real alliance. Hard to do so when you reject the very notion of alliances. Seriously they are god awful. So onto the point of this. Wait one quick detour. Cheese. Oh yes, cheese. Glorious cheese. Back to the main point. We are tapped out of great ideas. Half of the Fraggles want to nuke the entire world. The other half are useless...but still have a voice......until I fix that. So come June 1st.....we need to either poop or get off the pot. So we have time, but want YOUR input. Yes even you...the lonely scab of a nation that doesn't believe in itself. We will have 400 plus nuclear weapons and want to have the world decide what to do with them. We welcome any and all suggestions. Then I will toss the best five on a poll and the winning choice will have their dreams come true. So Orbis....here it is....tell us what to do. You can do it!!! A Few Hugs, Uncle Traveling Matt P.S. Clearly we can override any dumb decisions, but given how well Sheepy rolls out updates, nothing dumb comes from this community.

Is it immature to have done all of this just to finally post something that would get a lot of upvotes? Kidding. You're right, it was foolish of me to try and force something like this without due process and full consideration of all of the potential consequences.

So you're the one who crashed the server... EDIT: On that note, for those of you who weren't on Discord when things crashed, ss23 was finally able to find the root cause of the intermittent site downtime, and we have opened a ticket with the host provider to fix the issue on their end.

If BK is taking over all these treaties.. x2 MD with Acadia x2 MD with OWR x2 MD with themselves x3 MD with GoG (https://politicsandwar.com/forums/index.php?/topic/22232-dynamism™™-ft-gog-and-zodiac/) ...?

Honestly shout out to ss23 for the hard work behind the scenes, often goes unappreciated

A how to guide: https://www.wikihow.com/Fusion-Dance-in-Dragonball-Z-(Video-Game)

Why would someone merge into a slowly dying alliance? Did they just see their declining score graph and that their membership has been leaving in droves and think "Oh yeah I want a piece of that"

- Nuke every nation in the game that hasn't been nuked yet. - Nuke the highest infra cities in the game. - Nuke whoever has the largest nuclear stockpiles aside from you, unless they agree to disarm: nukes for peace! - Nuke me, nerd: you're not so tough. - Stop soliciting boring people for ideas when you're just gonna do nothing and/or whatever you think is a good idea anyway

Are you crazy? Now is your Golden Age with the bounty system calling for so many nukings. You've basically had your life dream handed to you by sheepy.

Foreign Affairs Conference, Private Event in Paris with Ambassadors of the United States, GSO, Resoria, and specially invited guests of the diplomatic, military, and civilian officer corps. The Former National Security Advisor stood up; Containment The United Kingdoms must henceforth being to see that the spread of communism is no more than a disease. It spreads across the globe bringing with it violence and destruction...Why not was it here in France where Communist nations; OUR ALLIES and FRIENDS...The U.S.S.R., China, and even The SoE actively engaged in aiding the Communists because they were 'brothers'. Brothers, that break the bedrock of our democracy and take the law into their own hand. The Policy of Containment must be used by His Majesties Government to ensure Communism does not become another threat to France. The Containment plan will ensure France sends advisors, money, and weapons to anyone fighting against Communism and in doing so we rid the world of the cancer we call Communism. Containment will be expensive, but it is the price we must pay for our freedom. Our goals should begin to arm rebel groups like the Kurds in the SoE, the White Russians in the Soviet Union, the Tawainese Rebels against Mainland China...we must bring the fight to their backdoors. I will personally Speak with Prime Minister Laura Chauve and ensure that she can make the hard choices to aid and defend our nation's interests against communism and against all threats! [Rest of Conference shall be updated]

might as well just use this one, doubt they follow through

Can someone from BK tell me if they are going to make a thread about this or not. I want to make sure I make fun of this in the correct one

Get food production down to 0% again so we can mine the salt from the people who don't think food is needed for a WC.

Fraggle vs Apeman One nuke from from Fraggle, one nuke from Apeman Every day for a year Glorious

Alex. The previous econ update has broken the economy. A list of negative side effects of this update: Raw and refined resources are at an all time high in price, whilst commerce value has been reduced dramatically. This means people have less money to purchase refined resources which are now at a drastically higher value, no ability to self sustain with them at all, and as a result it takes a considerably longer period of time to amass them in order to do anything. Supermarkets, and by extension, the ITC project, are literally useless for anyone but the people with the highest of infrastructure builds, as they pay out a pittance in value vs most resources. Prices of refined resources will continue to rise as the overall supply continues to drop, as it requires you to be much larger, and takes you much longer, to produce the same amount of resources under the older system. This will either stagnate war in the game, or create a serious (like Venezuela level) resource shortage. Smaller nations are completely stagnated and are unable to compete with larger nations who have gotten over the lower tier stagnation area. It requires a much higher base level of infrastructure to sustain the same profits one could in the older system, but the costs are not reduced (100 infra reduction cost is a pittance and was a stupid bandaid fix, as was the daily login bonus). It requires a much larger upfront investment in order to even be profitable. It is essentially impossible to self sustain any sort of growth now at all without aid. Additionally, alliances no longer have the incentive to invest heavily in noobs either, as there is a investment hurdle that needs to be overcome before a nation is profitable, and now alliances have less money overall to deal with, and are less likely to invest in noobs heavily as they are a risky investment in general. The reasons why this is happening: You nerfed the shit out of commerce, reducing the overall purchasing power of nations, forced it to compete with refined resources by disallowing commerce AND resources in a sustainable nation build, forced those to compete with other necessary resources like food/uranium. All the while increasing the base amount of slots simply to sustain a single focused build, AND you did not reduce the slots of military to offset this, severely punishing higher military build alliances, and completely killing any profitability during war at all for any nations that don't have huge swaths of infrastructure, which usually get rekt in war. You increased the pollution aspect of natively producing refined resources to such a degree as to make it literally impossible to max produce even 1 refined resources without taking a larger commerce hit, and increased the slot usage of raws so much, making it impossible for smaller nations to even fit the neccessary slots. This forced people to rely heavier on the even-increasing market with the reduced commerce profit. You increased the slot usage of commerce, reducing the individual value of each commerce improvement. Since the profit of commerce improvements is fixed relative only to your infrastructure level basically, you gutted the value of the smaller improvements like supermarkets relative to literally some of the worst profiting resources for the vast majority of infra builds. How to fix this issue: Remove the update and return it to how it was previously. Return it to the original slots, pollution values, upkeep values, and infrastructure costs. Put aside your pride and instead of resorting to bandaid after the fact fixes to the issue, return to the previous system. The economy had minor balance issues under the previous system, which I documented and pointed out in the hopes you would increase the demand for resources, but the direction you took it has made things worse. I know you said you introduced the update in order to stop people from producing multiple resource types, but this was never an actual balance issue. Producing multiple refined resources in the previous system was done AT A LOSS in income, and the "solution" provided was a huge overshot to an arbitrary problem that did not need fixing. I've been considering whether I should even bother posting this for awhile, since you were pretty adamant in not rolling back the changes at the time (even going so far as to placate the community with other often requested updates), but honestly if you don't step in and resolve this you are going to continue to stagnate the game and the economy is only going to get worse. Doing this will both help new players who are struggling under the current econ system, and make war more feasible for the average alliance on a more regular basis than once per year.

Shifty's earliest ancestor, thought to have patrolled the ancient seas:

Nuke every leader in the top 5 alliances.

*playing golf it with mates* Friend: Damn that hole is far away Me: That is long distance relationships for ya

People tell the truth in two different situations. - When they want to save what they are losing & when they got nothing to lose.

I think Nuclear Keno just works out, plus you could just hit everybody with a Nuke that has a Nuclear Bounty on them. Granted people just putting up 1mil bounties on others for a Nuke is retarded. At least put up double the cost of a Nuke for a Nuke Bounty.

I like it now that PnW has a dark theme but I had some changes I personally would like to have on it. Below is a stylish css. This updates the link colors, menu, graphs and other small things. Below are some screenshots of what is changed. https://rpi.gomn.net/i/r_40b37936-d01e-49d7-b854-ebca2b4c261b_03-06-18_21-39-20.png https://rpi.gomn.net/i/r_faa5c34a-4715-4d7c-8b6a-ed06228338dd_03-06-18_21-39-31.png https://rpi.gomn.net/i/r_8dbc7082-3539-4ce6-9c49-6460acf622f8_03-06-18_21-39-42.png https://rpi.gomn.net/i/r_99d48361-3028-4729-b5e9-6cd0c5504712_03-06-18_21-39-51.png CSS Code - https://gist.github.com/anonymous/3d0ebea5155c06500edcb8043f0a9fee Styleish Chrome - https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/stylish-custom-themes-for/fjnbnpbmkenffdnngjfgmeleoegfcffe?hl=en Firefox - https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/stylish/ These fixes are easily added to current theme if Alex would like to use them.

Play nuke Keno with the whales? I can get behind that.

Nuke Abbas 2018 for the whole year. Nuke Pantheon once and for all. Nuke which ever side finishes rebuilding first after a war. Make them go bankrupt. That's what I'd do if I were Fraggle.

It's very difficult and sorta noble to reverse course rather than just bluster your way though something. Particularly when, essentially, your work is being attacked. Cheers for that. Everyone appreciates the effort. (Amusing note: I tried to send this message a little earlier, and the forums went down when I hit submit.)

Thank you. The War changes themselves pretty much gutted the whole system. I'd rather test them out before we implement in here.

Thanks for listening to the players

A spy op, perhaps. Remember spy ops, kids?

What's making me, and a significant quantity of other people, pissed off about these changes, is not just that they don't seem like a fix that the community asked for, not merely the fact that these are things we'll need to adapt to: it's more so that you threw these curveballs at us without much consultation. and expect us to adapt. Let's assume we don't adapt for a while, and these changes stay for a month: we're losing out on optimal builds. Let's say we do change, but these changes get reversed after a month: we're losing out by investing time and funds into something clearly not worth it. That = no bueno. i) 25% more casualties for the opponent. While it may seem as if this is useless, and can't be used, it certainly can. Assume you're in a scenario where you have greater standing forces, but have just been updeclared upon. The key to updeclares is to eliminate the opponent's airforce. By doing so, you're exploiting the extra day taken to max out jets (slow recruitment rate, as compared to others). With the 25% bonus on, you could spend the next few turns without logging in, because opponents that are already suiciding into your nation are going to get f'd even more when they launch an air-to-air. - ii) 5 MAPs as start-up. This eliminates the "Ground then air" strat, or, alternatively, the "air then ground" strat. Second, it punishes updeclares even further. As I mentioned above, the key is to eliminate the opponents airforce by slowly wearing it down. It becomes far slower this way, and because of this, gives the bigger guy more time to shoot down his opponents jets. At the same time, it swings towards giving the defender more time to prepare. I don't think that's necessarily a bad idea in and of itsel - iii) Slot changes: oh man, again, more time for defender to react, and reduces a key component of updeclares/bringing down a larger opposing enemy: you'd have to invest a greater amount of time to wear him down. - Combine this with all of the above, and you have this meta that's really hard on not allowing submarine strats to continue. There may be an argument for why this was needed. Now, moving on to something I think is so hilariously exploitable (assuming this beige takes away your loot, which it should) The "no beige if you're engaged in an offensive" change. Let's say you're on the losing end, not looking to get back into the round/can't by this point. Beige takes away too much of your resource stockpile. What do you do? Declare war on an inactive; they don't log in, don't deal damage to you, and you're free to stay the way you are. Looking at it from the angle of a game theoretic model, the payoff for engaging in an offensive war means your stockpile doesn't get affected by beige loot. (Here, let's note that loot has been nerfed since the last mech setup, so it, proportions wise, is not as big of an issue as before). At the same time, you aren't allowed rebuild time. - TL;DR: Test that shit out before you push it to live.

this is fun, its playing a whole new game. its not bad, its just different and we will obviously adapt to it.

So when the tournament starts? No wait... this is not the test server

Even with all the problems we have had and the concerns raised to Alex, comments like this are pretty unnecessary. This community will become as vitriolic as we allow it to become, please don't contribute to that.

I'm open to offers

@Alex Rather than doing that, you could just: Revert back to the old econ system. Reduce the output of the first refined improvement by 33%, keep the second improvement the same, increase the third improvements output by 33%. Keep raw usage the same throughout. In addition to the cap of 3 of each refined resource type, create a total pooled refined cap of 6. If you want, you can do the same for food in smaller increments (8 slots, -20%, -15%, -10%, -5%,+5%, +10%, +15%, +20%) Voila, focusing on singular refined resources has better returns, you can at most max produce 2/4 resources, and diversifying between all 4 becomes both unprofitable and unsustainable. You don't kill the economy by forcing commerce (a static value not determined by the market) in competition with refined resources AND raw resources AND food AND uranium. You don't make native production of refined resources impossible for smaller nations who can't afford to import since you nerfed commerce and can't afford to buy refined because you nerfed commerce. You don't kill the refined supply stagnating the game and prolonging wars by months upon months. You don't render projects like ITC completely useless to anyone but the largest whales (we are talking like 2700+ infra), which you claimed were supposed to be hurt more by this update to make things fairer (but were hurt the least). You get to say you released a good update for a change.

I'm always a fan for specialisation and all, but really what cuts me most about the update and its long term effect is how commerce has been impact. Now I know, you'll make the argument that upper teir should make commerce and lower tier should make resources etc etc Here's why that's not working under the current model: Commerce gives a flat bonus to income per citizen. This has some interesting effects: Commerce becomes better with infrastructure Higher commerce means the population lost to disease and crime hurts more Due to base upkeep, some higher commerce improvements are worse than lower commerce below 700 infrastructure But for the most part people are above 1k because you really can't do much. Consider 1.5k, 2k and 2.5k. To maximise the bonus from commerce and generally the bonus from any improvement you want to pick the ones with the highest profit per slot. At 1.5k there's a bit of a triple point between Subways, Shopping Malls and Stadiums at around 14k profit per slot. Subways are the best due to also reducing pollution, followed by Mall then Stadiums, then Banks. The benefit from Commerce is 0.725 * (1 + Commerce / 50) per citizen, using 8 slots at 1.5k (4 Malls, 1 Subway, 3 Stadiums) gives 80 Commerce, which is 2.6x more income per citizen than 0 Commerce. For 1.5k this is ~112k over the 8 slots. At 2k everything from 1.5k gets even better, more people to use it, and the size of the population is large enough to counter the larger upkeep on all commerce so Stadiums are the best at 22.6k pps, Malls at 20.7k pps, Subways at 19.95k pps, Banks at 12.7k pps. If you didnt get any more commerce you'd make very roughly 50k more from the 8 slots. Wow!~ 50k more! Everyone should build to 2k! And that's where infrastructure costs kill the dream. 0 to 1.5k infra, 6 million, 1.5k to 2k infra, 9 million. If your nation is going to be in a war you'll need to rebuild. You could build from 0 to 2k, or you could build from 0 to 1.5k and rebuild another 1.5 cities. Now there's other arguments to be made about infra paying off over the longer term (ie about 4 months, and you've got other slots which is why 2k is more or less the meta if you avoid war for 4 months or dont get completely destroyed, but realistically if you drop from 2k to 1.5k then thats more than half of your infra value gone so you should be crying) but on the margin its not great, even if it works out on the war cycle. Supermarkets still suck at this point (8.1k) so ITC is useless. If you've got 2.5k land like any self respecting person at 2k infra should (Land is cheap and cannot take damage) then under current market prices (151 ppu) farms win by 400 pps, and even banks are beaten by the current iron market. At 2.5k commerce is back, you get a huge 31.35k pps from a Stadium, thats most likely the best a single slot can do. Malls and Stadiums are above 25k, Banks at are 16.3k, Supermarkets are at 10.2k. oh oh dear the ITC is still useless, and 2.5k costs 16ish million just from 2k. You could build from 0 to 2.5k or you could build from 0 to 1.5k in 6 cities... If you've got the food project at 2.5k land or 3k land then food wins again! Sure an extra 16k from a bank could be nice at 105% commerce but its not worth a project slot, not when at 4.6ppu importing oil and producing gas gives a massive 19k pps. Commerce at 1.5k? Nope, sell gas with a project, although thats the only one that beats 14k right now. See the issue is, Commerce is both too good and too bad. At 1.5k which I'd still class as fairly lower or mid tier, malls, stadiums, subways beat any resource without a project. At the same time supermarkets and even banks in certain cases are trash so you NEVER want the ITC unless you have like 3k infra. If you have 3k infra you should feel bad for having $56,124,587.90 in infra value when 2k is only 15.2k. 1 City of 3k or 3.5 Cities of 2k? Losing 10% from beige at that level is over 16 million and thats only 300 infra vs 2k from nothing. See this sounds crazy but even with these insane market prices that have effectively killed global war as the investment is far too high, resources are still inferior to commerce at 1.5k infra. Now if prices went EVEN HIGHER to make it worth it (ie above 14k pps), what does that mean? It means every single rational player with a 1.5k infra build would cut commerce to produce, lowering their cash income by 112k per city for a higher amount in resources. But you buy resources with money, and these nations would want to specialise for project boosts and because you need to with continents. They still need to buy other resources to run a military with less cash and sky high prices. The supply of resources goes up BUT the ability for nations to purchase the resources goes down because commerce value is flat and not tied to the market. Anyway I've run out of steam for a bit, I hope I made some sort of point with these numbers. If you want trade to increase, buff commerce. If you want more nations to sell resources, buff production. Sounds a bit like something we had before no? I'm a fan of specialisation as I said before but its a bandaid fix on the wider issue that people dont have liquidity to buy so the market stagnates and cannot clear properly

smh @Alex You could have implemented a simple scaling output for resources to achieve specialization, rather than upending the entire system and throwing the entire economy down the toilet. What is the justification for gutting commerce and then forcing it into competition with resources for slots? Or lowering the overall value of slots crippling the profitability of low infra builds which are primarily used by noobs, raising the minimum level of infrastructure and investment required to turn a profit to levels higher than the average noob can reasonably sustain. You literally chose the worst possible solution to the problem by reducing overall output by such a large amount that it takes significantly longer to stockpile any meaningful resources vs before. Despite what people like @James II are trying to say, its not a question of "easy" or "hard", its an question of balancing, not creating ridiculous long term resource shortages, and making it viable for players to fund large scale military campaigns on a shorter timeframe. If you care so much about "fun gameplay", more wars and dynamic politics are needed to achieve that and you've done very little to help. Also there was never a "generic cookie-cutter build" for everyone, there was a single optimal profit build per continent, and then a mix of other builds designed for self sufficiency or convenience. This is literally no different than now, the only change is what those builds are. You literally did nothing to change the variety. 99% of people did not have the infra levels to self sustain to the point of there being a singular build due to an abundance of slots, and those infra levels were not financially "safe" as being hit there would result in losing large amounts of money in damages. THAT WAS THE VARIETY. Your argument isn't really against returning to the old system. You can still incorporate specialization into the old system without bringing along all the stupid side effects that have come with the change.

@Alex You gonna respond to the most liked comment ever on the forum, or what? Don't just sit there, say something. It's obvious people want something to happen, why don't you put in your two cents.

Not really. You need all your 5 slots filled. In my experience 1/5 raid targets is profitable, rest are shit. Raiding is before all else, a gamble, a sustainable, but a gamble non the less. And who in their right mind would limit himself to 2/5 of his raiding potenital to avoid a potential 1/3 of damage? So again this only helps whales, and affects pirates in a way that doesn't change much for them (except for decreased loot in general) and having more people with less hitting targets other than pirates.

I think it's time for projects for raw resources