The Aries Simcountry Priority Wishlist - 3/1/2016

I think you're looking too much towards what you know and not enough towards the past when there was an actual war game Aries. It's pretty simple logic for me, past=very active war game, now=very dead war game. So, were people participating in the war game in the past in spite of it being worse (possible but not very likely) or are people not participating in the war game now because it is worse (very likely but still possibly wrong). There were problems in the past and there will continue to be problems, but in the past there was an active war game and now, there isn't.

I didn't bother to provide explanations for my suggestions but since you are questioning:

1. The rate of GC exchange used to actually be 460B per coin FROM THE GM's and when the market was flooded with cash from war conquests you could get 550B+ per coin. Talk about a stimulus to the war game.
2. Again, this goes to being able to cash in on the spoils of war. If you've ever turned over a country to the GM's with 80M in pop that you don't want to keep (and there is no direct trading market for countries anymore), you should understand this frustration. There used to be an extra 240-360 GC's in profit in countries than there is now. That difference is further hurt by the welfare penalty which you mentioned which causes the profit potential to drop by even more.
3. You're focusing on the rate of reinforcement, it has very little to do with that. It has to do with understanding your opponent/having any knowledge of what you face. In our war there was every chance that I was just a dead account at that point and you could have taken my countries with little resistance or instead, you could have spent tons of assets and gained nothing except for a good experience. What I don't get about anyone's disagreement about this is that there are zero posts about getting rid of general spending limits or military spending limits but everyone is completely against space transfer limits. This is how I know that everyone else is in it for their own game and not for the betterment of the game overall, I'm willing to significantly hurt myself by saying that there should be a spending limit for space as there already is for general/military spending even though I have probably the most (or close to it) space assets. I get you guys have invested a bunch in the space game and like your ability to have super powerful militaries at no monthly cost to yourselves, but it's bad for the game and makes no sense whatsoever.
4. The balance between offense and defense is terrible, I do like the MRMB covering OAAB but you're still left with extremely expensive options that also happen to be very time consuming at that point to destroy garrisons/targets. If you've done the cost math on HT/HA or MRMB to destroy garrisons/targets, you know that they're 4-6x as expensive as PB for the same purpose. When it comes to mobile units you have a massive advantage in the air game as you get 3 wing defense and offensive mobile units of any kind are worthless.
5. This is simple, when there was no quality impact for weapons, very active war game, with quality impacts it's dead. You can't ever know the quality of units you're attacking or the quality of units attacking you. Quality takes way too much time and resources to develop and that is the last thing you want when you're trying to set up either for offense or defense. In addition, it makes the war engine far slower than it needs to be. Which I'm sure is further complicated by the 3 wing defense as mentioned above.
6. I'll be happy to take a look at your LU countries and all the more power to you for finding a way to make more money via the econ game but you could be making even more and people would be more willing to actually keep defenses in their countries if those maintenance units (which didn't exist before and it wasn't a problem) didn't exist.
7. "Plenty of reward" is a relative term, you've got (I'm assuming because I haven't looked) quadrillions in assets, it's easy to decide that plenty of award is a couple hundred billion. For those starting from a few trillion in assets it is not meaningful when it comes to being able to compete with large players.
8. If you've found a use for them then good for you, I've also purchased every weapon and have a stash of them all. But navies in general are useless at this point and I guess technically all of the weapons have some use but most of them are nothing more than distractions that confuse players that don't know any better.

As far as your post about incentives for moving up in WL, you're failing to mention that the rewards for each step only apply to when you actually make that step up in WL. As you move through that process you can end up with a couple hundred trillion in the end and it will make you nothing but a minor bit player/target. But, if you didn't have to worry about someone like Aries or myself importing quadrillions into your world then it would make you a serious player.

I do like the war college, I do like the battleground, but I know that for the GM's that is a huge amount of programming (which I've already stated). I just happen to think that people will be far more motivated by traditional warfare than they are by other forces and to get them involved in the war game they have to feel like they have the ability to re-acquire assets if they lose.

1. Yes, as said several times on this thread. Econ was practically useless, everyone who participated in PvP wars was forced to raid low-level c3s until their eyes bled. This introduced 100s of trillions of cash that just magically appeared into the game on a daily basis. This made cash to coin exchange rates silly. No, we should not go back to that.

2. I understand what you are saying here. I like the solution in my Total War idea better than changing this limit which rewards victory with coins in the first place which is balanced by the risk of open PvP.

3. I honestly have no difficulty sizing up my opponent. I predicted I might have to shoot down as many as 400,000 helicopters or more and I was prepared to do so. You did not disappoint. From a strategic perspective, I was prepared to make this trade as long as you would let me since I am aware I am unlikely to face a similar air defense anywhere else and I am confident in my ability to replace my losses. Do you believe I failed in this calculation?

I lose you in what you are saying about spending limits. Are we back in believing that entering space is expensive? Shuttles cost .27 coins per shuttle, or less, since I last looked. The lowest of game level or war level awards make space entry as simple as finding the link for direct trade. Oh, and I tested the other day, there seems to be a limit of around 240 shuttles that will participate in missions, at least for me, at a time. That means anyone picking up the game level 2 and 3 awards can move stuff just like the big boys.

On the other hand, spending limits pertain to purchasing from the world market. They are annoying in some ways but manageable with the addition of more countries and/or an enterprise. Even a player who plays peaceful might be willing to add that 80 mil pop country you were talking about earlier.

So space is very accessible, as I have shown. I don't see an issue with sizing up an opponent. Maybe I can give you tips there. I always seem to know what to bring in my dozens of conflicts. Does this solve your concerns about space?

4. Once defensive air wings are dealt with, garrisons are no problem, even with mid-range bats. I am curious if you could share your experience with that. I will share mine here. I took a very notable country, 2 countries total in this battle, on LU about 10 months ago. I was opposed by Stephen Ryan, who is not considered to be a slouch in the war game. My summary can be found here:

https://www.simcountry.com/discus/messages/4969/24866.html?1433621286

As far as the air power itself, I believe air wings are not overpowered. I will add that the last several players I have fought, including you, owned and deployed far more mobile units than I have, so I am not speaking to my benefit.

If your air wings only put up a 2-wing defense in our last war, however, I would have cut through them like a hot knife through butter. Even with your 3-wing defense if you made the mistake to take my attack lightly, you would have lost both of your countries. As it was, my data tells me you lost around 189,000 helicopters, most of those from mobile units and I have the firepower to repeat that attack and more.

5. Quality is supposed to take resources and time. It can be mitigated by effective management of your empire (and is a benefit to having an empire). Countries are for more than making a few bucks, a successful empire can manage very large upgrading operations. Quality should be a defining factor in war, though again I am aware I have far fewer mobile units than some.

6. If I understand right, I believe the costs always were there, the added products and corps just took out the void the cash used to go to. I could bend a little here if my first suggestion, Unit Simplicity, were implemented. As this would increase unit sizes, a corresponding reduction in price or consumption in defensive type maintenance might make sense.

I actually floated an idea that garrisons should not use maintenance at all in the past. This was based on the idea of giving players the ability to be more prepared for conflict on the defensive end. Players planning an offensive have such an advantage in choosing the time of war and such that it seemed somewhat of a fairness issue as well. This somewhat touches on the type of warfare you were pleased I did not wage against you. The disposable c3 warfare which I have faced myself in wars against Wendy and Gaz. Removing maintenance consumption for garrisons could be a good compromise.

7. Check my Path of a Warrior Guide on the Beginners forum. There I describe in detail how to earn $78 Trillion and 640 coins (about $115 Trillion worth of coins) going no higher than Game Level 4 and War Level 6 on a few worlds. No one should be limited to "hundreds of billions" or a "few trillion" if they exert a little effort to follow my guide.

A handful of players have already found success in my Beginners Forum guides. How about Zentrino, who first hit War Level 2 in late August? He is now War Level 10 and looking at your challenge on the other thread. He also built a nice empire and acquired assets on his own. PvP? He was decced on by Blackeyes a few months after he was still learning game basics. I provided advice and support but the lion share of assets on the front line were his. Another new player Zen was also a big help. Read about it here:

https://www.simcountry.com/discus/messages/3711/25234.html?1447529218

The path to assets should be a bit easier for a new war player but it should not be taken to a point that gains are far out of balance of econ. Those are the goals of the War College and Battlegrounds ideas.

8. It used to be that fighters and precision bombers were the vogue. I think I took you by surprise a bit with my strategy, even though I well documented my use of them in the war with SR and I have even used them prior to that. I think similarly, navies are the new area of the underrated. Not sure I want to say more on that but, suffice to say, I am making some investments in this area.

A couple hundred trillion is a good start to get an empire going and a powerful defense as a part of a federation. Imagine where even three new players would rank in war readiness by combining such resources in a federation. War College and Battlegrounds would help these guys even more.

Are there bigger players out there? Sure, why not? There will almost always be a bigger guy out there. A lot of times, that is what makes it fun. The smart players will learn all they can from them, if they have the opportunity, before they choose to ally with them or another path..

Have you checked War College and Battlegrounds recently? War College is modeled very similar to gaining war levels. Battlegrounds was described by Dub in this way:

"I read this expecting to disagree with the idea because of excessive coding requirements etc. But from what I see it would actually require very little work from the developers, simply giving certain countries a [battlegrounds:defender/attacker] tag, and adapting either the daily reward or beginners income functionality to deliver required weapons etc. Good job, although it does bear many similarities to the two team solution I suggested to you in chat a number of days ago"

Battlegrounds would be an ongoing way to re-acquire assets. It offers the opportunity to earn up to $30 Trillion each month. Obviously, something we haven't talked much about is the higher level game level and war level awards and that these are repeatable on each world. Almost everyone, even long-time players, have thousands of coins on the table from awards they have not worked on achieving yet. The war level awards on Fearless Blue alone are jaw-dropping.

1. I don't know that econ was useless, I have heard from other econ players that actually found more places for profit in the game than there are currently and my experience has been that there are less possibilities in the econ game than there were previously but I'm certainly not the person who would know on that. I've spent little to no time beyond basic strategies (which again are also from days past). It also isn't at all true that people made their money by endlessly raiding c3's, there were very few people who were willing to put in the time to do that because the profitability was even worse than it is now. People (like me and the vast majority of players who were driving the war game) made their money by raiding left behind assets and PvP wars and then there were others who were investing lots of actual dollars in the game on a regular basis to build assets. And by the way, that wasn't such a bad decision if you were impatient when 100 coins could get you 50T and move you forward very quickly (also wasn't such a bad deal for w3c).

2. I think this is fundamentally where we just don't see eye to eye, I come at everything from a profit perspective (and subconsciously so does everyone else even if they don't know it). If you're going to take up that much of my time to set up on an opponent and then the resources to invest to go along with it, I want to see a good profit if I win. I enjoyed the tradeoff of being able to transfer in 200K people per month in the beginning until I realized that it completely warped the population aging spread and in a month or two of doing that your population died off because you were overloaded with old workers and not the appropriate number of children to go along with it. This is again where your support of unlimited space trading doesn't make sense to me, if you don't think space trading should be limited then why would you think that people trading should be limited so severely?

3. I'd love to hear how sizing up an opponent so specifically is possible, I haven't seen that and after poking around a bit tonight, I have no way of telling what people do or do not have stashed away in their CEO's and I know I left my secrecy off on my countries (because I was trying to sell) which helped you know very well what I had in my countries. As far as spending limits, I'm not sure why my point isn't coming through. Can you buy unlimited weapons/ammo every month? Can you buy unlimited non-military products every month? Can you transfer in unlimited weapons/ammo/products from space every month? One of those things is not like the other. If w3c was on their game they would have already sniffed this out and fixed it because it’s a profitability nightmare for them. But it also makes the game completely unlike the real world, in the real world there are costs that go along with having military assets, being able to infinitely transfer weapons while keeping those assets in places with no maintenance costs makes no sense. So, I don’t understand why you’re not making the argument that there should be no spending limits at all if you believe that you should be able to infinitely transfer weapons via space. In addition, and I haven’t even mentioned this yet, but space also allows you to just transfer assets out of your country if you don’t want to fight or if you feel like you’re going to lose a fight. The most likely scenario if you ended up taking my countries would have been that you were left with population and little else because I would have transferred it out once the air D was down and I didn’t have further reinforcements.

I have more responses but I’m traveling for work at the moment and I forgot to bring my laptop charger (ouch!). In general though, I do have to say that you’ve put a lot more thought into this than I have and I like many of your ideas. I just don’t happen to think they’ll have as much impact in reinvigorating the war game as correcting the issues I have mentioned.

1. You admit you don't know. I will inform you. Yes, econ was useless in those days as I have said. The two options you pointed out were about it for getting ahead, that being either endlessly raiding c3s or spending real money.

Parity for effort in gaining assets is more even now and that is a good thing. What is lacking is incentives equal to the risk of PvP.

2. Pop transfers and worker exchanges are more useful than you put there. Check out Zen's very excellent guide on the Beginners forum. It isn't as simple as "raid country a" then "transfer to country b", there is planning to it similar to setting up good econ. Ever since unbalanced worker transfers have been in the game, moving pop is every bit as easy as space trade ever was. The "limit" you identify here is false.

3. As far as seeing what players have, have you checked out my Player Power Rankings on this same forum I posted some months ago? Here is the link:

https://www.simcountry.com/discus/messages/1/25215.html?1447160799

Secrecy on or off has nothing to do with it. One highlight of standings as of 11-9-2015:

Super-Military Powers

1. Aries MP 11
2. Whiteboy MP 10
3. SirSmokesAlot MP 9
4. Blackeyes MP 9
5. SuperSoldierRCP MP 9


This means your military was about double that of Smokes, Blackeyes, or Super, where mine was about double yours. This is available to see on asset pages. Been some shake-ups in this with Blackeye's military split up between several players. In addition to asset numbers, I had the added intel of your post about what assets you had when you were selling things and I tend to notice what players have available to sell in space. I knew you were weaker on helis than ints. I maintain significant ability to go either way.

Actually, I have start disagreeing with your point on space. There is indeed a limit to transfers, as I have pointed out earlier. Again, as I have said in the prior post, only a bit over 200 shuttles will ever work at one time. This is a low bar that can be met by any player that has the military worth transferring in the first place. It is also, indeed, possible to give transfer orders that take more than one game month, in some cases many more, to process.

In a losing situation, it is not as easy to evacuate as you say. Shuttling takes time. There is reward to a quick attack. I will give an example and touch on something you said earlier. Does it cost more in ammo to destroy targets with mid-range missiles? Yes, it does. It is much cheaper to hit many targets with conventional missiles and cheaper to hit forts with cruise. For raiding, the answer is no, I don't advise hitting targets with mid range missiles. For PvP, I absolutely use mid range to hit targets. Why? Speed. Much more likely to end up with more of their stuff. PvP has much more strategy than at first glance.

I am not for a change in moving things in space. There is already a limit and I believe you may not know how much parity already exists here. Each of my 10 countries on LU completely refresh their $308 Billion military spending limit each month. You should know that that amount does not count quality. You can already store ammo, obviously, for no cost. All of my slave countries sit on as much ammo as they will likely ever need, I have seen countries of yours where you can relate.

This means with a change in space, I could still move over $3 Trillion in weapons, again before quality, to my countries each game month. If I wanted to concentrate weapons in a single county, that is no problem. I could have 9 of my countries purchase about $2.7 Trillion from my enterprise and use the "transfer goods" function to move all of those weapons to the country I need them in. That is a pretty impressive amount of stuff moving in a single game month. It isn't too shabby even compared to what space can do in 4 hours.

Again, I don't see space imbalanced. It has a limit. I mentioned it multiple times on this thread. Mega space powers really just have a bunch of shuttles piddling their thumbs. This is why I limit the Space Power Level in my Player Power Rankings suggestion to 4. It is important, but has a low limit that any war player can easily reach.

I'm mostly with Aries here. I'm a newbie, and not a terribly serious player, and I got a goodly-sized shuttle force together with zero difficulty. The hardest part was clicking those stupid buttons hundreds of times.

I had a massive response which was probably way too long but Aries would have probably enjoyed it but then as this wonderful site does, it crashed and I lost the entire thing so I'm going to briefly respond.

First Al, again, it's not a matter of access. It's a matter of strategy and being able to have infinite weapons without any costs to maintain them with the ability to transfer them anywhere in the SC universe with very little time required.

Second, Aries, raiding c3's is a newer phenomenon as it wasn't really profitable relative to the GC exchange during my time back in the day. And although I don't know how effective the econ game is now vs. then, I do know that I could have 400K ints and 200K helis plus max garrisons in my country and still make a little profit/break even with just basic econ strategies shared by others.

Also, if you think I couldn't have stripped out my countries in 3-4 game months, I'd beg to differ. I could have had those countries stripped out and left nothing but D mobile wings behind for you to destroy and then once I figured out if you were going air/land I could have transferred out the majority of either heli/int wings and left you with nothing but the population as profit. Which you could have then sold down to 80M but you would have only been able to sell about 150M of the 220M due to the welfare impact, the fact that you can only sell 3M per day and that there isn't that much of a market for population. So, you would have been left with ~300M pop to sell after taking down a couple thousand mobile heli units, at the current exchange rate that would be ~65T and you would have lost a ton in that encounter even with the W in the win column. That's for you as the attacker, I as the defender would have scored a 30M pop country that I had zero use for and if you smartly had transferred out the weapons (via space) that would have been my big score for losing hundreds of trillions in assets. Pretending like space is limited is ridiculous, I get that you've done tests on the number of active shuttles (although I think I know how that situation can be remedied) but have you looked at he dollar value of those assets vs. the strategy you discussed with direct trading and then transferring (by the way, I'm fully aware of and have utilized that strategy many times before space even existed so it wasn't something I hadn't thought about)? I'm not talking about 10's of trillions of assets per month, that's nothing when it comes to large wars, I'm talking about hundreds or thousands of T in assets being transferred via space. In addition, the method of surpassing the spending limits is not so simple/easy. If I declare on all of your 10 countries to distract you/spread your resources/ensure the greatest chance of profitability (which is something I would absolutely do) then you're now left with only the spending space of those countries and then you have to take 10 c3's per country in order to have that leverage in spending space. Spending space is not so simple as every country gets the full 300B per month, large countries do and small countries only get ~100B per month and that spending space is not impacted by quality when it comes to direct trading but is impacted by quality once the purchase is completed. So, you don't end up with 100B for the next month after the purchase is made, you actually end up with negative spending space and 2-3 months until you can purchase anything again. So, you have transferred trillions of assets at this point but that's a drop in the bucket to the 100's or 1000's of T that is needed to participate in a big war with a large opponent because space trading allows infinite transfers and the bandwidth isn't even close to the limit of spending space.

All that being said, I'm going to end this conversation in this forum from my side as I do think that your ideas will be good for the game and I'll reserve my further opinions unless the changes do not have the desired results. So, I support your suggestions and wish that the GM's will implement them. You've got a way better grasp on both the econ game and the war game than I do at this point so I'll defer to current knowledge.

On space limits: I don't see where you have made the point on a change here would add to strategy. There is already a limit to space, as I have pointed out multiple times on this thread. Further, you can see what players are transporting on the eve of war if they choose to use shuttles to do it. That sounds like some strategy right there. In fact, I often move things that I want my opponent to see. If you looked carefully, I moved fighters, bombers, and their ammo before the war and deployed them on my map. My attack strategy was already set at that time but I about always show signs that I am going to do something different than I end up doing.

You would have had to make the choice to pull stuff out shorty after the decs were made. That is your choice and I am not sure what your position on this is. Are you saying that a player that is caught by surprise by a war declaration should be limited by space to the extent that it would not be possible for them to remove and add sufficient forces to their country before the war goes active? The position of the game runs counter to this, believing that a defender should have this ability.

I think what you go into next cuts into this even further. I do think we see this differently. In my eyes, the attacker has a substantial advantage in a few key areas. They choose the fight, they choose where, and they choose when. Obviously, the attacker can certainly be prepared for battle at the get-go. The attacker can also do things to dictate the map, as I did in our war (you were stuck in your borders). They can also dictate the terms of battle even further, by making last minute adjustments to blacklist periods in relation to the timing of their war decs and even adding temporary war protection to countries they can leave immune to counter-decs.

Indeed, often the attacker advantages are too much. The first few years I played this account, it was almost unheard of to see a successful defense of a country. This was with space still in full swing.

Next to all this, the limitations you describe (but haven't yet detailed) would largely impair the defender. I disagree with this and the game disagrees with this thinking. The delay in the war going active was designed to allow the defender to play catch-up with all the advantages the attacker is given. If space was even more limited than it is now, it would make it that much more difficult to defend the assets that you already say are often to valuable for players to risk.

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Going to hit your numbers real quick. That massive 300 million pop country that you have that is so filled with weapons that it can very barely break even, how much in weapons does it have? $1000T? $500T? $100T? Nope. The answer: $11T.
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On raiding C3s: Lose you a bit here. You are saying you can deploy some weapons to your country and break even? Looking at your countries, you manage $350 Billion in INCOME on one and $400 Billion in INCOME on the other. If it still isn't clear, that is the amount of money your 300 million pop countries make before any monthly expenses. Currently, one of those countries, indeed, breaks about even and the other profits about $200 Billion/game month. The one making the profit does not have close to the forces you describe being able to base there. I would estimate the other still falls a bit short.

Next to this economic performance, you say you want to return to the ability to raid war level 4 C3s for $1 Trillion each. In my experience, the cash from closed corps can pay for the cost of the raid, so it is fair to say profit would be about $1 Trillion per raid. A week of your current economic performance would be 6 game months times 7 days times $200 Billion = $8.4 Trillion. Again, without the weapons you say and with 2 300 million pop countries (if it is not clear, most war players wont have these economic resources). You believe this is balanced with an unlimited ability to raid low challenge computer countries for $1 Trillion each?

I think after the initial rewards that exist now, and are largely detailed in my "Path of a Warrior" guide, that the next step should be more PvP prep, in my War College suggestion, and a limited PvP arena, shown in Battlegrounds. Battlegrounds is superior to unlimited c3 raiding as it would be more fun and adds the risk that should exist with ongoing rewards in the war game. The way it is designed, it is also not a replacement for income generated through econ.

I appreciate you like my ideas. I wish you would comment on them specifically. Are they good as is? Could you see participating in Battlegrounds? etc. For my own part, I have tried to setup mock battles similar to what Battlegrounds would be. Rather than mopping the floor with an opponent, as some would think I may do, I would seek to give an opponent a fair challenge (make them earn it) but would be inclined to surrender the reward in the end.

It's pretty simple on how it would change the strategy, people would actually have to have defenses in their country and incur the maintenance costs of those weapons instead of being able to magically change an econ slave into a war slave overnight. Because they are incurring the costs it limits the size of forces that can be there by your econ strategy and how much cash you can produce on a monthly basis. There will also be players who have more weapons than their countries can support and they will in turn have to raise cash via other means (hmmm...PvP wars perhaps?). To further increase the likelihood of PvP wars, players will actually be able to view the defenses of their potential foes or at least have an idea of just how much they have by their war rank (which is a completely meaningless stat at this point and should be improved in general).

Space also makes it such that you aren't just fighting what a player has on one world but instead, what they have in all worlds which is a huge advantage for the players with the most assets compared to players just starting out or even a year into the game.

I don't disagree that the attacker has advantages with regards to all that you mentioned and I have leveraged those things many times, but I still believe that the structure of the war game, weapons, mobile units provide more of a tilt to the defender. You paint that limiting space transfers would be a further benefit for the attacker, but it wouldn't because like I said, players would already have their defenses in place in their countries, just like real countries.

As for the speed of space transfers and how much you can move in/out, you do realize I had no defensive weapons at all in my countries when you declared war (other than jeeps in supply units) and because I screwed up the initial transfers, I really didn't have much time to get my defenses in place which I ultimately did in about 8 hours. Not only did I not have any defensive weapons, the only offensive weapons I had were about 3K bombers and 4K fighters. But before the war went live I had a couple thousand mobile units in each of 3 countries as well as all the nuke batts for my targets, over 100K AAB/MIB/DMB in each of the two countries at war about 25K fighters and 100K bombers in addition to many other weapons of various types. That's ridiculous, it would be the equivalent of the US declaring war on Switzerland and a year later when the first shots were fired Switzerland had a larger army than the US.

You keep referencing my countries in their current state and it's not really all that pertinent. All they have in them now are mobile units that I'm upgrading and I have put zero time into rebuilding the economic infrastructure that was and is in disrepair. The total value of the weapons also isn't pertinent, it's the maintenance cost and ammo usage of those weapons. My countries are also a poor example of anything as before you declared war on me, I was averaging about 1 login a week just to move the 10-15T per week into direct trading, peak in on the forums and see if there was any game news and I was doing literally zero maintenance on my empire for probably close to 6-8 months. I had 20M+ unemployed LLW's in each country and worker shortages in most categories, I was for all intents and purposes, an inactive player and yet I really wasn't worried about losing my countries at all because I knew I could transport 100's of trillion in defenses before a war could ever start. You did give me a nice scare and I did strongly think about just turning over the countries after I stripped them out and I absolutely could have, even at the end I could have gotten the vast majority of assets out once the air D was down while you were dealing with forts, corporations, etc. and I would have been driving you crazy just dropping and then putting back up air defense as well as creating painting nightmares. I do know it's a formality once the air defense is down, but I can make that formality take a very, very long time as I have done to others in the past and they have done to me and you were in the process of doing to me when you ultimately sent me the peace offering.

As far as it being balanced, I'm not particularly concerned with balance when it comes to war vs. econ. I'm concerned that with the harder you make it to acquire assets whether by exchanging GC's, raiding, etc. the more attached people become to what they have and the less likely they will be to put them at risk in PvP war. They also will be more likely to bitch and complain about the game and how unfair it is if and when they lose their assets and then ultimately more likely to quit instead of rebuild. In the econ game, you make a poor decision or have a poor strategy or test something and it doesn't work and you lose a little bit of game cash, your risk is not that you lose your enterprise or your corporations or your countries. In the war game, if you make a mistake you lose everything in your countries including all of the time you took to build them and any econ strategies that you worked hard to put into place. The greater risk in war needs to be balanced out with greater rewards.

As far as your ideas, some are very straightforward and obviously should be implemented because they've been complained about for YEARS, unconquerable countries and unlimited forts and your solutions are simple and make sense.

Unit simplicity is another pretty obvious one, there's no need to have hundreds or thousands of tiny units especially when the game can't support them without serious lag. The fact that I had to click 100 times to move 1000 mobile units from my space station into my country because the system can't handle moving any more than that at a time should have been a clear sign to the GM's that something was wrong. Add to that, it takes almost a minute to load your unit page once you get over 500 or so units and you can only build 50 at a time and further if you try to upgrade once you have that amount you get a stall out page that takes about 2 minutes to load.

I like the war college pretty much as is.

Battlegrounds, I'd have to think on a little bit more but I like the general concept, there are things that I might consider but they would probably increase the programming needed significantly which would hurt the simplicity of the idea. As far as participating in Battlegrounds, I honestly don't know that I'll even have an account in a month or two but if I'm still around I'm sure it would be something I'd check out if I was around.

The total/all out war is interesting but I'm unclear as to why a defeated country would be turned over to the GM with all assets instead of being part of the spoils of war.

Like I said though, rather than rehashing here and causing further clouds/opinions for the GM's to get distracted by, I'd rather just support the ideas as they are because I do believe they will be improvements over the current state of the game. Feel free to message me in game if you'd like further opinions/discussion. I'm not trying to shut down the conversation about these and other topics at all, just trying to clear the playing field so that in the small chance the GM's read your suggestions they will be more likely to implement the changes if there isn't a bunch of squawking back and forth about this or that detail.

Couple things there.

1. The reason I pointed out the value of your weapons it to point out the futility of some type of space limit lending itself to requiring country defenses. All ammo can already be there. Weapons can be moved very quickly since it is their value that is taken into consideration when moving through spending limits.

2. I am well aware you moved in stuff in the run-up to war, as you should. You had a good jump on it as much of your ammo was already in place. I see nothing wrong with that. As the attacker, I had plenty of time to have my stuff in place before even considering the war dec.

3. I am going to disagree with who it benefits to add this limit. I don't say this lightly. No player in the game is more experienced dealing with game limits as I am. I likely know limits that you don't even know about. If a change was made in space transport that affected war build-ups, this would not change who I would bet on between an experienced player and a new war player. It would be one more thing the experienced player is ready for that newbie would not be. It isn't just sitting assets that decides a war.

4. I know how to deal with pop-up air d as well as any painting things. This isn't my first rodeo. Gaz and Wendy are well aware of how to do things like that too. SR and Altered Carbon tried more of the full retreat thing. Your country wouldn't last an hour without a 3-wing air defense. Count on it.

5. Balance, what I call parity, is where we will differ. There should not be an unlimited open-ended money maker on one side of econ/war and not the other, outside of open-PvP, which carries the necessary risk. Though, you didn't carry this argument into where I would specifically differ, that being unlimited low-level c3 raiding. If there is PvP risk tied to it, I am all for it. That is where Battlegrounds I believe carries that balance. Limited to 3 contests/player/month. PvP risk, though not your own empire at risk, tied to large reward.

6. With Total War, like most of my ideas, I had it rolling around my head for awhile before putting it down. The real challenge with it was finding a way to prevent abuse, as in fake wars. Keeping it open, as in allowing the participants to be freely declared war on by anyone, regardless of war level, was one way. This prevented a private affair. I still thought that there needed to be a way to prevent "you take my country/i take it back" stuff to rack up coins. Releasing the country to the GM was the only solution I could see work properly.

I will add that the current space limits are already very real. As many as you own, only a bit over 200 will actually transport items while the rest sit idle. Obviously, each shuttle, in turn, has a limit on how much it can carry. I put in transport orders last night, they took about 12 hours to complete. I put in some more in about 4 hours ago. I will be lucky if those are done 10 hours from now.

Maybe something you haven't considered with a new space limit is just how much ammo is used by defensive weapons kept in your country. As I said before, I already do this. here is a look at CC2, an average country in my LU empire:

Ammo Usage per Game Month:

Anti-Aircraft Missiles 1,241
Defensive Missiles 1,941
Missile Interceptors 2,692

Again, that is one country's use. For those curious, this is about $60 BILLION in ammo consumed each game month. This is also omitting defensive air wings, and any other weapon, entirely. CC2 is actually below average in pop related to the other 8 slave countries I have with similar deployed defenses. Assuming CC2's, low, numbers were the same in all 9 slaves, my monthly ammo usage looks like about this:

Anti-Aircraft Missiles 11,200
Defensive Missiles 17,500
Missile Interceptors 24,200

Remember, this is usage in one game month. Obviously, there are 6 such game months in a "real" day and 42 in a week. Every week I need to make sure I am acquiring enough ammo to replace consumption (I am often playing catch-up on the weekend). So, how much do I need to replace?

Weekly Ammo Consumption Estimate:

Anti-Aircraft Missiles 470,500
Defensive Missiles 735,000
Missile Interceptors 1,020,000

Wow! That is ammo I consume on a weekly basis in my LU empire. That is about $22 TRILLION spent on defensive ammo per week. Oh yeah, what was I talking about transporting at the top of this thread? Ammo, duh! Maybe you should share how you would further limit space transport. Would the amount of ammo a single shuttle could carry need to be raised to support this? Would you simply lower how many weapons a shuttle would carry?

Would the change account for that space is currently limited by player? For example, would W3C want to place a player who chooses to pay for additional empires at a disadvantage versus a player with a single empire?

Further, Who is ready for the added expense of storing more weapons in their country with more shuttle limits? Obviously, I do it already. To be honest, the change would mostly benefit me. I might be forced to buy a bit more ammo at home (rather than aggressively seeking deals on other worlds) but otherwise I already put up with the added expense. Would more space limits help a newer war player more? I am interested to see what they think.

I think a lot of questions need to be answered about the goals of a new space limit change and the unattended consequences I outlined above.

Still not done with that second transport. A good ways to go still. Had to retire 8 shuttles too.

Very real limits means I can take a country with no weapons at all and turn it into defensive index of 2000 and an offensive index over 1000 in less than a day? Give that a shot with just buying military assets with spending caps in place.

With every point you've made it's as if this would be a completely novel concept on which we had no data and we'd just blindly be guessing by moving forward with it. But this game existed for 6 or 7 years without space at all and during that time, less or more PvP wars?

As far as how I'd limit it, if I had my preference it just wouldn't exist as it didn't exist before which keeps the worlds more unique and forces you to develop assets on that world if you want to become a power on that world. While doing so, you're at risk and would have to rely on fedmates/allies to make sure you aren't taken down while asset poor. But, I highly doubt that is in the cards, so, what is transferred in should count against your military/standard spending space limits depending on the type of product.

Yeah, you do go through a lot of ammo which means the market for ammo gets a boost, although I believe w3c has bumped up the amount of ammo used in order to counteract the fact that players don't need to keep weapons in their countries. That's why very early on I said that the maintenance costs would have to be reduced in order for it to work, I used to be able to run max garrisons in all cities and bases, half garrisons in all other targets (fort limit was only 100 I believe...maybe even 50) and then have about 100K ints and 75K helis with a strong navy and offensive air force and be able to come close to breaking even in a country with only 80-100M. Give that a shot today, which is part of why I don't buy the argument that the econ game is so much better today than it was then. But, I'd love to learn more about why you think that's the case.

As far as the parity argument, there are two factors that you are either ignoring or undervaluing. One, an active raider actually has to use their own time whereas on the econ side, once you get it set up, it's relatively minor maintenance. Second, the risk in the war game is not in going against the c3's, it's the fact that by doing so you put yourself out of protection and as you're developing assets other war players will then want to come in and take them. You may get wiped out a time or two (I did) and the ability to raid for assets is the balance to that risk so that you can rebuild. Again, on the econ side, basically no risk and limited amount of time spent.

On econ and supporting military, I have already gave it a shot. Have you checked out my LU empire yet? I have max garrisons in cities and bases and have garrisoned all forts. As far as whether econ is "better" today, it is about the same but more balanced with war as the war game no longer has an unlimited money maker outside of PvP.

I had an idea about how your idea could work. Spending limits should not apply to shuttles. Those limits should be unique to the other methods of transferring and acquiring products. It would be much simpler to stick with how space transport is currently limited, how many shuttles will work simultaneously. The most logical thing to do is relate that to the number of owned space ports of the player.

For each space port the player owns, whether in a country or enterprise, that player can operate, say, 10 shuttles. That way it appropriately scales with the size of the player holdings. For example, if you have built a space port in 3 countries and 1 enterprise, you would be able to operate 40 shuttles at a time. This will ensure the ability to move things scales properly with the size of player holdings.

On parity, I think you would be the one ignoring or undervaluing the time argument. I understand econ is not your thing, so I will tell you I have always spent much more time on econ than I did raiding and I wasn't the only one. Even during the days of unlimited low war level c3 raiding, it wasn't close. Try to match the econ of my LU countries and you will see. My LU main makes your FB main look absolutely silly in econ. You could employ all your unemployed to the man and this would not get you close to the economic performance of my average LU country. This did not happen by chance.

The risk you say existed on the war side only existed in theory. You know that most of those players never developed countries that existed outside of secured mode. I would be all for some relation to unprotected assets and the ability to sustain additional income. In fact, many of my suggestions including Battlegrounds and Natural Resources hinge on this relation. Your suggestion makes no link to needing unguarded assets whatsoever.

You said "on the econ side, once you get it set up, it's relatively minor maintenance"

Candinnalm versus WB 001 AB FB

Candinnalm

Population: 284,129,009
Workforce: 143,161,287
Employment Rate: 96.84
Number of Corporations: 453
Total Employment in All Corporations: 110,980,616
Worker Income: 560114.70M SC$ ($560 Billion)
Monthly Income per Worker: $3912
Monthly Production: 1,781.29B SC$ ($1.78 Trillion)
Monthly Production per Corporate Worker: $16050

WB 001 AB FB

Population: 298,093,041
Workforce: 136,443,906
Employment Rate: 96.88
Number of Corporations: 391
Total Employment in All Corporations: 99,750,534
Worker Income: 392085.60M SC$ ($392 Billion)
Monthly Income per Worker: $2874
Monthly Production: 1,138.66B SC$ ($1.14 Trillion)
Monthly Production per Corporate Worker: $11415

Yes, you can choose not to spend time on econ. The difference will be apparent however from someone who works at it compared to someone who sees econ as an exercise in "minor maintenance". You haven chose to close your financials. I bet you dollars to doughnuts that I own you all over that page too.

You just opened up financials or my pages are wonky.

Candinnalm

Total Govt Income: 673,580.72M SC$ ($673.6 Billion)

Total Non-Defense Govt Cost: 222,392.88 SC$ ($222.4 Billion)

Total Profit -Defense: $451.2 Billion

WB 001 AB FB

Total Govt Income: 338,470.53M SC$ ($338.5 Billion)

Total Non-Defense Govt Cost: 196,557.94 SC$ ($196.6 Billion)

Total Profit -Defense: $141.9 Billion


I don't count defense costs due to my country philosophy. I see countries as tools and the ability to host a military as a capability. As such, I measure the might of an economy without counting what military forces might currently be stationed there. Basically, I don't see an economy as better or worse if you happen to move more or less weapons into it.

I don't think I am undervaluing the time argument, unless you are talking about econ in terms of trading in either products or stocks, I could see how that could take a lot of time. But, again, very little risk and I bet you could make some serious cash on a daily basis if you got very good at that...not as much as you could make raiding back when you could raid Lvl 4's at 1T payout each but I bet the return would be slightly better when you factor in the risk.

All of the stats you post are regarding country income/profit so I'm making the assumption that it is that aspect of the econ game you are speaking to and yes, you're right, that takes a good amount of time to SET UP. But, my point was that once it is set up, it requires relatively little maintenance. So, take your 300B per month difference (again, not really an apt comparison as you're basically looking at an econ system I set up over a year ago and haven't touched since but doesn't really matter for the purposes of this argument), how much extra work are you doing on a daily basis on that country to produce that extra 300B per month/1.8T per day? My guess is not much. Especially when compared to the amount of time it would take to raid countries, that would basically be two country raids per day and on the raiding side I am exposed to risk whereas you are not on your econ countries. And to be equivalent, I'd have to keep up that 2 per day every single day of the year. So, assume that I took the time to develop all of those econ strategies and make my country as profitable as possible because I wanted to make as much cash as possible to support my defenses and then Aries comes along and wipes out my country. I'm out all of the time I put into developing my countries/econ strategy/profitability, all of my population and any weapons I didn't get moved out AND I have no realistic way of building myself back up because I now have no 200 or 300M pop countries that have the ability to generate that kind of income. That is why so many players choose to stay in the low war levels and maintain economic protection, they can generate infinite cash at no risk to themselves, so yes, they should have less ability to generate cash than players who are willing to war/raid for cash because they have no risk. Now that the WL requirements have loosened, you're at risk once you hit WL4 so you should be able to get that 1T per country.

But, thank you for all of the econ shaming, give me 10 or so real days and lets get back and recheck the math again, I sunk a little time into analyzing what was going on and made some changes (spent maybe 1.5-2 hours looking and then tweaking) but you know it will take some time before they'll start to really show results. Honestly, one of the reasons I spent very little time on this after I came back is because I realized I didn't have to actually maintain a defense anymore so I really didn't care all that much about it. Another big reason is that the accounting system in this game is horrible, it's hard to tell whether you're just stealing from one pocket to put in another (country to enterprise or vice versa) made more difficult by the fact that the profit numbers from countries and enterprises don't seem to match up anywhere near the cashflow. But, that was lazy of me and we'll see if I can do better.

I did get a chance to look at some of your LU countries, it's impressive stuff, we'll see how much of that is daily work and how much of it is setting the right strategy and letting it play out. Perhaps it's time for a new Econ guide where you can share what you've figured out with all so that players have the ability to make cash and thus may be more willing to participate in the war game?

Oh and I just did my own test on space transfers, averaged 211 mobile units transferred per HOUR with 845 total units transferred in 4 hours (all different kinds). At 600Q each mobile interceptor wing has an imputed value of $230.37B, 850 int wings in a game month (4 hours) would be the equivalent of $196T in military assets per month, that's a limit to you? That's 1.2 QUADRILLION per real day in possible transfers. I'm going to test out just bombers and then just ints and then I'll test out some ammo. But, it's ridiculous, if you could buy 600Q mobile int wings with military spending space you could buy 1.5 per month without going into negative spending space the following month (depending on size of country) or take the quality effect out and you could buy 9 per month.

Oh and I just did my own test on space transfers, averaged 211 mobile units transferred per HOUR with 845 total units transferred in 4 hours (all different kinds). At 600Q each mobile interceptor wing has an imputed value of $230.37B, 850 int wings in a game month (4 hours) would be the equivalent of $196T in military assets per month, that's a limit to you? That's 1.2 QUADRILLION per real day in possible transfers. I'm going to test out just bombers and then just ints and then I'll test out some ammo. But, it's ridiculous, if you could buy 600Q mobile int wings with military spending space you could buy 1.5 per month without going into negative spending space the following month (depending on size of country) or take the quality effect out and you could buy 9 per month.

You still undervalue the time, effort, and skill it takes to setup "impressive econ". I teach econ and war skills and I will tell you what, it is more difficult to teach econ. I assume you have seen my C3 guide on the Beginners Forum, and if not you should take a look. Teaching raiding is as simple as step 1, step2, etc..

Teaching econ isn't as simple. It takes much more skill to do it well. It also takes continuing effort beyond what you give credit for. It would take you a lot of work to get close to the economic performance of my countries if you even knew where to start. I will give you those 10 days. Heck, I will give you 30. Good econ isn't as simple as spending a short time building it up and a shorter time maintaining it any more than it is simply building enough corps to employ all your people and setting a tax rate. See your country in 30 days (I will post your results) and we will see if you are undervaluing time invested in econ or not.

-If you have any econ questions, let me know and I will help. I am also as expert as you will find in the game to analyzing the game's accounting system.

I don't see where you addressed how unlimited raiding had little to do with having something at risk. In Battlegrounds, I require players to complete War College, which removes war level protection on the world. In Natural Resources, no country can benefit from a bonus unless it has no form of war protection. What would the return of your form of unlimited raiding do other than see war players raid from the safety of secured mode or simply have token slaves to take pop from? Without something substantive here, your "risk" argument goes out the window.

I still think a continuing system of earning awards should not be found fighting more computer countries with the simplicity of following a simple guide (a view shared by the GM). It should also not be unlimited. The Battlegrounds system, which allows players to get real PvP experience with limited risk to their own countries, solves the issue of an entirely "fake" experience versus the computer. This is then matched with a reward for victory of $10 Trillion and is possible 3 times per "real" month. I would bet it is a lot more fun competing with players 3 times versus repeating a guide up to 30 times against the computer.

Any comment on my space shuttle idea? I think tying it to number of countries/enterprises with space centers (only the 1st space center in each country/enterprise counts) and leaving it at the current model of number of active shuttles is genius. 10 active shuttles per space center strikes the right balance of addressing a limit that might otherwise penalize players who run multiple empires. This is an activity I would bet the GM would not want to discourage.

On transferring mobile units. Yes, these move quickly. A quick glance:


---Takes 50 Shuttle Trips----
50 Mobile Air Defense Units
(20,000 Anti Aircraft Missile Batteries)
(600,000 Anti Aircraft Missiles)
------------------------------

----Takes 128 Shuttle Trips-------
20,000 Anti Aircraft Missile Batteries
600,000 Anti Aircraft Missiles
-----------------------------------

----Takes 50 Shuttle Trips----
50 Mobile Missile Defense Units
(4,000 Anti Aircraft Missile Batteries)
(6,000 Missile Interceptor Batteries)
(10,000 Defensive Missile Batteries)
(120,000 Anti Aircraft Missiles)
(180,000 Missile Interceptors)
(300,000 Defensive Missiles)
---------------------------------


-----Takes 128 Shuttle Trips--------
4,000 Anti Aircraft Missile Batteries
6,000 Missile Interceptor Batteries
10,000 Defensive Missile Batteries
120,000 Anti Aircraft Missiles
180,000 Missile Interceptors
300,000 Defensive Missiles
------------------------------------

----Takes 50 Shuttle Trips--------
50 Mobile Attack Wings
(12,000 Fighter Planes)
(900,000 Fighter Missiles)
----------------------------------

----Takes 408 Shuttle Trips-------
12,000 Fighter Planes
900,000 Fighter Missiles
----------------------------------


Mobile units are special. The were made to be, um, mobile. They are not the basis for which space transport speed is considered by a long shot. No one is surprised if you add up the value of 600 QUALITY weapons and ammo compressed into a MOBILE UNIT and boast about how much value you can move through space in a short time.

Next time, Try moving the equipment to form 200 regular fighter plane or precision bomber wings and do it between worlds. I would also be happy to add up the other consideration in all this, which is the cost to field and replace shuttles and SC maintenance. On my end, I have retired 15 shuttles so far this weekend.

I'm not saying that I'll have the equivalent in 10 days, just that I believe I will have made up a large amount of the gap. I may be undervaluing the amount of time it takes to MAXIMIZE profitability, but I wonder what the difference between maximization and just good strategy/settings that required relatively minimal maintenance really is.

As far as raiding, once you are WL3 you are at risk and the way the system is set up, 10 raids and you are WL3 and now at risk of attack by other players. That's the risk that comes along with making money via raiding based on how the system is currently set up. I would say that econ players have a massive advantage in the learning curve of the game whereas someone interested in the war game gets 1 C3 at WL1, 3 at WL2 and 6 at WL3 and then they're fair game (with whatever WL to WL restrictions there are, I think FB is now WL unlimited once you reach WL3). Meanwhile, econ only players have infinite protection which is a nice advantage for them that never existed before (and I lobbied for it and I like that it is there now).

On your limitation on space it could work to an extent, but once you have 20 space centers you're now at the shuttle limit and that actually creates an advantage for players with multi-world/very large empires, they can now transfer pretty much unlimited while players with small empires would be pretty limited on what they could do. How about this, much like the docks on the space stations, space centers have limited capacity (would only make logical sense) and you're only allowed a max of 1 per 100M population (or 2 or whatever the right number would be). That allows you to fully utilize the space game but it limits the throughput on a per country basis.

I know mobile units are meant to be...mobile...but given that they are the most powerful defensive units (or I guess just the most powerful units period) in the game and offensive mobile units are the most terrible offensive units in the game, that's an even bigger edge for offense vs. defense. It is a big deal that you can pack that much firepower into a unit that can then be moved at a rate of 800 per month, it's a complete distortion. You and I both know that PvP war is all about air D and the fact that you can move over a quadrillion worth of air D in a day is ridiculous, even if it was half that and you only counted the effect up to 300Q it would still be 600 TRILLION a day.

This is why I'm still not the least bit interested in PvP war in the current system, am I facing 100 mobile int/heli? 1000? 10,000? I know they can keep pouring in at a rate of 800 per game month, so that's 4,800 before a war could start and then 800 a month after that. You know how much time and effort it takes to saw through huge amounts of air D, when you have no idea just how much you're going to have to go through and you face the prospect of 1000's (which is also A LOT of CASH to burn in assets), it just doesn't seem worth it.

You got 30 days to find "good" econ and compare it to mine. If it takes you less time and if your "good" econ is close to mine, those would be feathers in the cap of your argument.

Your numbers of early c3 war level advancement are a little off. You can have 5 wars and still be level 2, with a 6 country empire if you wish. Your 6th takes you to war level 3. War level 3 actually has a limited form of protection from other players, even on "Fearless Blue", check out the thread titled "No war with level 3" on the Problems Forum for details. Obviously, you get 4 more wars before advancing to war level 4, which is the open on FB and protection outside of 4 war levels on other worlds.

All that said, nothing says you need to build anything out of secured mode to take advantage of your idea. Ignoring econ fairly completely or building only within secured mode is exactly what the war players of old did. This is where your risk argument fails and you have repeatedly not addressed this.

I am not sure I understand your proposal on space centers. Are you saying that guy with 20 countries/enterprises has a limited amount of space in his centers and needs to continually switch entities and empty his space centers to keep shuttles going? If that is it, how about NO. I have no problem with the econ guy moving things at all and certainly no problem with the war guy, who has over a dozen countries to defend, having a bit more capacity to move stuff.

On transporting mobile units, you are the only player that you are describing. Only you, and maybe Sunny (who inherited Blackeye's stuff), have 1000s of Mobile Units now that Blackeye's assets were split up. YOU are the exception, not the rule of the game. Rest easy, there is no opponent that you are likely to face, ever, that can draw on the mobile unit reserves that you can. The vast majority of my air defense is plain old regular units. My military doctrine has had to account for being vastly outgunned in mobile units for quite some time. If you checked our war, you deployed over 5 million professional soldiers before the war went active, before any reinforcements. My peak strength (after reinforcements) in professionals was about 200k. You outnumbered me in mobile units in the area of 25 to 1.

Any change made in new ways to limit space should not act to your advantage versus players that actually need to move regular interceptors, helicopters, and their ammo, versus you leisurely moving mobile units. It certainly should not be any slower than it is now to move regular forces.

We'll see on the econ, in 1 game month in WB2 I popped up the income by 40B (literally from 1 month to the next) before I pulled all profit transfers the following month. My guess is you'll still have me by around 100B per month after 10 days or so if all goes well.

My apologies if my numbers are off, I was reading from the game docs which said 1 war takes you from WL0 to WL1 and then 3 more wars at that point puts you at WL2, then 6 more wars to WL3 and based on the documentation (Countries in war levels 3, 4, and 5 can declare war on any country with a president) once you're WL3 you can declare war on others so I assumed that meant war can be declared on them by other players. So, either way, your point is that I haven't explained why players that want to raid for assets have something at risk and I think I've made it pretty clear they do. You can raid 14 countries on FB before you're open to being destroyed by other players, so at that point you've gathered some coins and some assets, but you are then at risk to lose whatever assets you've gained and whatever else you've invested. I'm unclear how you haven't picked up on that point based on everything I've said. Unless you're referring to only having a secured main, which may be more of where you're coming from now that I'm thinking about it. Is this simply that my home world has always been FB in all of my iterations and your home world has always been another world where secured mains exist? It does make sense that in those worlds you could just keep your one country and constantly raid without ever putting anything at risk. Maybe we just have a FB vs. other worlds issue here?

I think you understood it somewhat well, there would be limitations on how much each space center could hold in the same way there is a limitation on how much each space docking station could hold. You say no because you ultimately still want unlimited space transport. But again, space didn't use to exist and we all got along just fine. The idea is pretty simple, you maintain your own defense (and offense in your country) and space is then just for supplementing your defense/offense if/when war is declared. For peaceful players or even for war players who aren't actively involved with a war declaration, go ahead and allow unlimited transport, once a war declaration is live, you're limited which means you have to maintain your own defense/offense which has three major benefits: 1. Players know what they're going up against, 2. You don't have to deal with unlimited reinforcements, 3. Players will have to maximize their econ or invest further in the game in GC's if they want to run at a loss to maintain an even larger military.

It seems weird to me that I would be the only one that figured out that mobile units create a very significant advantage from both a defensive power and a transportation standpoint. It also seems odd that you'd have to operate trying to deal with the mobile units instead of just having a bunch of your own (and I swear you were selling them for quite a while). If what I was dealing with was just non-mobile int wings, then the defense is even more slanted than I thought against air offensives. You do keep quoting our war as if both of us had completely open secrecy when it came to military, that was just me because I had been trying to sell the account, so I had no idea how many professional soldiers you had employed.

I'm pretty sure I'm not suggesting any change that would only help me, my argument has been clear that I don't think you should be able to transport insane amounts of military via space and clearly the most insane amounts come in the form of mobile units. Like I said, my preference is just to eliminate space trading altogether which would hurt me (if I really do have the most mobile units) more than it would hurt anyone else, don't try to twist it up as if I'm looking to develop an advantage when I'm the one with the weaker econ and the biggest mobile force (again, if that's true). I'm arguing against my own interests here, other than having to fight you I could easily deal with pretty much anyone trying to take my countries and if I wanted to up until this point, I could have taken downs tons and tons of cash by going after other people who weren't as skilled in the war game or as asset rich as I am. I haven't gone that direction because I'm not that type of player, I have always either gone after the most challenging targets or at times, the people that would mouth off and wouldn't heed the warnings (and no I'm not at all talking about you, I just want to be clear and honest because I have in the past taken down weak players after they wouldn't back off of their claims of how dominant they were or how much they could easily kick my ass, if anyone researched they'd find examples in the forums and I don't want to look like the guy who is trying to change history).

I enjoy this discussion, I just feel like at this point it is pretty much between you and I.

"It does make sense that in those worlds you could just keep your one country and constantly raid without ever putting anything at risk."

Glad you can join me on this side of the discussion. This isn't theoretical. In the era of unlimited c3 raiding, "war players" did exactly that. Maybe, they would build up a secured main but no more than your impression of "good" econ. They would do exactly what you said as far as doing "just enough" and maintaining here and there and spend most of their game time raiding for unlimited amounts of cash. Econ and raiding c3s each have limitations right now that make sense when considering time,effort, and skill. Returning to unlimited grinding of c3s for cash should not and will not return to the game.

"You say no because you ultimately still want unlimited space transport"

Is this what I said? I am pretty sure I have pointed out that space transport is already limited. I am also sure that I said that limiting the capacity of space centers to force players to police a few dozen, or more, space centers makes no sense whatsoever. I am also sure I made my own suggestion to simply relate the number of active shuttles to the number of countries/enterprises a player has with a space center.

If mobile units are moving too quickly, maybe a combination of balancing them with other weapons and ammo is in order first. Transporting ammunition and weapons piecemeal is, by far, a very different experience and should not be any more limited than it is now. Currently, most offensive ammo is transported 2500 at a time and most defensive is at 5000. You could double these amounts and a mobile unit would still carry more stuff/trip. So, we should start there. Double the ammo currently carried by shuttles. That would achieve more balance with mobile units. Then you could apply the active shuttles limit to the number countries/enterprises with a space center and say maybe 5 active shuttles per space center.

You are not the only one that knows the value of mobile units. From my understanding, you inherited much of what you have from another player. I recall calculating that just the professional soldiers and officers you deployed (not counting the cost of all the 600 qua weapons/ammo) would run about 7000+ gold coins.

I did not inherit my military assets from anyone. I had to acquire my stuff on my own. 7000 coins is not an amount many players stumble upon in the course of the game. Yes, I sell some of the mobile units I put together and carefully calculate the value of pros, weapons, ammo, and upgrades to make sure to recover my costs. When you sold mobile units below the costs of me making my own, I bought yours. Where did you get yours from?

So, we agree in principle on the issue of unlimited raiding while just hiding in your secured main = bad idea, so can we then agree that no secured main on FB means raiding strategy puts your assets at risk and therefore there should be a payout for that risk?

No, it's not what you said, I'll clarify, you want the limit from a shuttle perspective of around 200 shuttles to remain as is and you have 20+ countries/enterprises so you would still have the same amount of transport capabilities. I just don't think the limit on a per country/CEO basis makes sense because it means the more countries you have the higher your bandwidth which again is a further tilt towards people with large empires. Some kind of limit on the space center side makes more sense because that becomes a limit on the amount you can actually get into any one country (leave enterprises unlimited because it makes no difference how much you're moving in/out).

We agree mobile units are moving too quickly then, but I think the answer needs to go the other direction. Your solution is to speed up everything else to equal mobile units and that just means more and more stuff can be transported more and more quickly. I know it's more difficult because the easy structure is 1 unit/1 shuttle, but mobile units need to be slowed down.

Along those lines, you didn't address my point that int wings are far too strong if in fact what I was shooting at was mostly standard units. That was ~450Q PB, Pbombs, FP and FM that I was firing at you and those units were getting wiped out losing about 200 PB and 100 FP per shot (200 PB/200 FP mix which was the best mix after testing). That's to take down 125 ints? You were getting away with ~200 MRMB and some slight OA2A losses against 3 wing helis but I still have no idea what quality you were shooting (back to my annoyance about quality effects), so the balance is already terrible and even more terrible if you weren't shooting 450Q (as I suspect you were not). That's why I ultimately decided to just shoot through as I had no idea how much more you'd keep reinforcing and I could take out targets and only lose around 325 PB per shot while for the most part taking out 1 target per shot. Anyway, if we're going to talk balance, there needs to be some more attention paid in this area.

No, I know others value mobile units, but not to the extent that they should. I built my own force and after a year or so of constant raiding and figuring out a trick or two (let's just say there's a reason they will only let you move 10 mobile units at a time now) and then helping Xon with his experiment which gave me some spending coins based on the deal we made, I then got Serpent's account (I gave him and some others chunks of mine before I left the last time). But, the account was really just a shell at that point, he only had a couple hundred mobile units if I remember correctly and they weren't upgraded and most of the weapons/ammo weren't even 300Q. Anyway, I eventually sold that off in pieces for real cash and then I sent him the cash, he ultimately got almost the full $450 he wanted for his account when he was trying to sell it.

As far as the cost of the professionals, with the advantages the mobile wings provide I'd say it is well worth it (although I definitely didn't pay that much), but I've been actively buying professionals to rebuild my defenses in the past couple of weeks. But, this is the kind of stuff that your power rankings can't pick up, I've got 11K gold coins in my account right now and before this most recent spending spree to rebuild my defenses, I had over 500T in game cash just sitting in direct trading too. I haven't always been keen on the econ side of running countries, but I've always been very good about amassing assets. I've reached at least level 10 on every single world (level 15 on FB), WL 8 on every single world (14 on FB), I time up my monthly awards so that I can win for country/enterprise on multiple worlds at the same time to maximize the reward. There was a time when I was averaging probably 10 WL4 raids per day back when it was paying 3.2T per (ah, the good old days). But I also don't just let those assets sit and have to pay monthly for them when I don't have any use for them anymore, for over a year now my account has just been cash/GC generating and zero spending.