Seriously, all Sheepy had to do was add a possible benefit (e.g. conquering of land) to war and this game was solid. He, in spite of himself, built a good community.
Alas, away we go.
So, basically, the argument for why it's been hard for you to rebuild is the exact same argument we were making during the war about why you were getting stomped so hard -- low infra, negative income, etc.
I guess it wasn't such a "narrow win" after all.
Also, I don't think you know what the word "capitulate" means in your post above.
The funny thing is -- command economy would be the best in the long-run. It's just being run poorly.
Thankfully Mensa has PhD economists to tell us what to do. It's our version of a command economy -- listen to Kemal the Kebab and let the rest of the chips fall where they may.
But wait, building isn't the point of the game!!
And people say Syndisphere is the one causing the game to be boring -- not the ones deleting or artificially keeping cities low, smh.
ITT: Syndipshere will rebuild using our billions of funds still in reserve.
IQ will not, because they're broke, but at least they got us to admit (tongue-in-cheek) that they fought "valiantly"
I know I had to drop a lot of score intentionally just so I could get low enough to hit my IQ targets. I wonder how much Syndisphere losses would be because our enemies are too bad for us to fight in our natural score ranges.
I'd be interested to see the relative difference between the two. I mean, it's only a few, but the players I'm attacking have 300, 400, 700 infra maybe. That's gotta be negative income with any degree of a military, right?
Let's call this for what it is: exploiting a game mechanic. Just because it wasn't prohibited or acted on by the Admin doesn't make the use of VM in the way LPS did anything less than an exploit.
So, no, I don't feel bad.
The way to encourage more war is to have war mean something.
Resources should be scattered across the map. Winning wars earns you bonuses. Losing wars means you lose that bonus. Like a treasure, but more meaningful.