Aileron

You know, saying that Christianity is the same as Islam or Paganism would be like saying that due to my lack of knowledge about brewing, that fine wine is an equivolent beverage to ethanol or rubbing alchohol, because in all of them the primary ingredients are water and alcohol. Knowing a little about the chemical makeup doesn't make one an expert on the essence of the substance. Our society has only a basic understanding of religion and it is hurting us now because our society first off has a poor sense of morals resulting in increasing economic differences, and a poor sense of the spirit resulting in an inability to eliminate terrorism despite their ludicrous vulnerability. We for instance can't put a stop to crime because we have a weak moral structure. We can't recruit qualified individuals to stop it, we can't prevent criminals from recruiting talented persons, and we aren't agressive enough when pursuing justice. Terrorism is similar. We can take out their nests and capture their members, but so far we have not taken two steps towards crushing the spirit which is drivng them foward. To be honest, we can't even comprehend what is driving them foward because most people haven't identified the differences between Islam and our own culture. And our society will just keep weakening until we can learn this lesson: Religion is important. It is important to understand the differences between religions. Astro, the Romans were pretty much the only people writing at their time - ofcourse they weren't going to call themselves oppressive. Besides, are you trying to argue that the Roman treatment of Queen Budica wasn't a case of gender discrimination?

Recon seems to have a big random factor. I have had cases where I've reconed someone, got nothing, reconed him again, and then got everything. As for sabotage, the biggest factor is how many weapons they have. I will say that the formula has two checks. The first check solely involves the number of spies sent. Send one spy, and there's a 90% chance that you will p!@#$%^&* this check. After that, there would be a check based upon a bunch of different things. I must admit I didn't really read much about the second check, because that wasn't my goal at the time. There's a reason I'm not giving the formula, and that reason is that it is not my formula. supersmashbros designed the core, and I don't know if he wants that information public. Last round I tried changing the formula, first off to bring sentry in, but secondly because if I use my formula, I could make it public. I will note that for the round, I've noticed animoL has been unusually resistant to sabotage. From that and some glances at the names of some variables, I think the primary factor is not Sentry rating, but the ratio of sentries to weapons. animoL is hard to sab because he has a lot of sentry, while I can usually take 3000k weapons per shot out of JDS because he has a lot of weapons. You know what, sabotage isn't even a factor this round outside of Astro. JDS, rasta, quit complaining...my sabotage certainly hasn't crippled either of your armies any.

For reference, I'm not playing next round, so don't worry about the information gap. That isn't like the information is critical: All in all: only send one spy, and try to get a feel for things. Generally, start at 1000 per sab, and work your way up or down from there.

I've seen the formula, but no, I won't divulge it.

[sarcasm]I just want you all to know that because Drake pointed out that the US isn't a democracy, I called the secret police who promptly showed up at his house and hauled him off to some camp, because that's what non democracies do. So, um, Drake won't be posting any more[/sarcasm] I mean, come on! Stop with the conspiracy theory hogwash already! Its asanine! Its obvious that the country is democratic enough to allow you to have such an idiotic opinion, so your comments disprove themselves.

There is still a difference though. Subordination is different than "he has the right to beat you". I mean, most people have bosses at work, but bosses aren't allowed to beat their employees. I actually think its different here. I think that in our modern society, people don't learn about religion nor the differences between religions. Ask yourself, if you didn't learn enough about politics or history, would you guys criticise China for instance now? China doesn't really look evil, but we can tell because they are communistic, and communists have a flawed political ideology which leads to human rights violations which are covered up. I am beginning to wonder that maybe Islam is the same way, and people aren't educated enough about religion to know that. They do have "Jihad" as one of their pillars...the obvious interpretation is "wage war against other religions", though college professors are too PC to use that interpretation. However, I know that Christianity and Judeism do NOT have anything similar in the Commandments, Bea!@#$%^&*udes, etc. I mean, if you look at the deeds of Moses and the deeds of Jesus vs. the deeds of Muhammed, its huge. Moses lead his people away from their oppressors. Jesus sacrificed himself for the good of others. Muhammed conquered and killed anyone around him who disagreed with him, a trait which is also common among pagans and polytheists.

We've tried positive income...that was a disaster as the top 2 were ppl who simply bought all the mercs. We've tried zero income...that was still flawed as some people would buy all the mercs, and everyone else got massed. We've tried negative income, and we've only had a few cases of problems: One from somebody who intentionally shot himself in the foot in order to "prove" it was a bad idea, one from someone who wanted to quit but decided to do it with class, and now a third case from someone who inherited money from the third place player and managed to, in two days, jump from 30th to 5th place. Point being, positive or zero income ruins it for everybody, while negative income ruins it for a handfull of people in isolated cases. I tell you what though...if I can edit the core next round without tripping off the security device, which after double checking with the people who made it, I think I can do, I can put a cap on the number of mercs. After the cap, I think it would be best to take out the negative income. Then we could elimate the problems that remain, and also the tactic of buying a lot of mercs so that you can have a lot of soldiers, no defense, and still not present a good target. *cough* *cough* JDS *cough* *cough* Without the cap, its the least of three evils. I won't argue it isn't an evil in and of itself; its just the least undesirable of the three options. The bigger question is: "How is 'inheritance' going to be solved?" I could make it a rule, but that wouldn't be ideal. Idealy, I want to solve that problem for both the 'sell off your defense' and for the transfer service so I could put that back in, because the good things about that tool were that it provided a lot of role-playing options, more tools for clans, and has the best counter to the 'train all your soldiers so that no one can attack you' routine. *cough* *cough* Aileron *cough* *cough* Why am I *cough* *cough* criticising myself? *cough *cough* The bad thing about the tool is people would give all their stuff to someone else before quitting, or now people would give all their stuff to someone with a deduction bonus ship. Any ideas on stopping inheritance next round in a settings-based manner would be welcome...my best idea is to boost UP's effectiveness a little, crudely attempted in the past by increasing its degree. UP can't be transferred, and if UP is the strongest stat, then true inheritence can't occur.

There's probably a few. But the point being is that Europe is left wing currently. That still isn't a valid arguement though...all it means is that Europe is left wing. I could argue that Europe got to where it is by being more conservative than they are now, and have been holding off a steady decline. I will agree that political moderation is an aspect of what makes a society great, but I wouldn't quite consider it a strong enough statement to use it here. I'd say that "If a society has moderate politics, then that political stability will produce economic growth". Logic still doesn't say that if you have economic growth it is due to moderate politics though.

Good topic, but bad example. Abortion is controlled by the federal government because no aspect of the Bill of Rights may be overturned by any state. For a state to say that it wants to limit abortion would be like that state saying that it want to send soldiers searching up the woman's uterus without a warrant - quite literally mind you, because abortion is protected under the "search and seizure" amendment. The Roe vs. Wade decision was a two part decision which stated that a: "no search and seizure" equals "right to privacy" and b: that making a law against abortion would violate that right to privacy. No state government can overturn abortion. Infact, if the entirety of all 50 state legislatures, every local government, all of the governors, 60% of The House of Representatives, 60% of Congress, and Presidency all got together, and at the same time along with 99.9% of the whole national populace was in aggrement with them, and they all wanted to put the slightest limitation upon abortion at all, that would still not be sufficient. To overturn abortion, or even to make it legislatively debatable, either one of two things must occur: a: the Supreme Court must reverse Roe. vs. Wade, or b: the rest of the government must write a new cons!@#$%^&*utional amendment allowing laws banning it to be written. State or Federal is irrelevent on this issue. Heck, democracy is irrelevent on this issue. Five out of Nine lawyers in black robes said that no limitation upon abortion is made, and from that point on abortion cannot be questioned, refuted, debated, or criticised outside of an academic setting. Worse yet is that these guys aren't elected and get to decide when they want to resign. All they need to do before running the whole country with an activist agenda is to trick one overworked executive that they are on the level. We have several of these activists who won't retire while there is a Republican president. Thus, if the entire country was in total agreement about wanting to get rid of a certain radical left wing 65-year old Supreme Court justice who's going to live to 105 due to excellent health care, without the justice being replaced by a younger one who is just as bad, the country would have to elect Republican Presidents 10 times in a row, and hope that all ten of them aren't distracted by something and are good enough judges of character not to appoint a loon in disguise. And Congress criticised Alberto Gonzales. I for one was shocked the day he resigned. Gonzales was exactly the kind of Judge we needed. Yes, its fair to say he had a conservative agenda, but that was a step towards balancing out the four other judges with liberal agendas. Congress will criticise any judge who wants to "overturn Roe vs. Wade". Overturning Roe vs. Wade would not make abortion illegal; it would be abortion debatable. If Roe vs. Wade were overturned, pro choice people could still keep abortion legal, but they would have to actually get a majority vote on the subject. I favor overturning Roe vs. Wade, any person who is pro-life favors overturning Roe vs. Wade, and I say that even if you are pro-choice, but love democracy and the authority to vote for what you believe in more than the right for a woman to smash a screwdriver in the head of her birthing child, you should also favor overturning Roe vs. Wade, because it is a terrible decision which runs counter to democracy. Its this kind of insanity which makes some people pray that some of these judges would drop dead of old age. I must say I'm not in disagreement - it seems to be the most likely scenario of our country remaining a democracy. Lets face it, if Hillary Clinton gets elected president, all of these liberal Supreme Court Justices would retire, and she would replace them with a bunch of loons. In turn, those loons would keep making their "Freedom of Religion" = "Seperation of Church and State", "No Search and Seizure" = "Right to Privacy" kind of decisions. Decisions which taken one at a time seem to be synonyms, but are really links of chains which will twist our Bill of Rights step by step into something that it isn't. Chains which when used properly will bind our elected officials to not having the authority to even debate the real issues. With enough twisting, Five out of Nine lawyers in black robes, who were never elected by anyone, could rule this country without question, for life. I mean, how many of the Founding Fathers, when they were thinking up the reasoning behind making it illegal for soldiers to barge into people's homes, after several years of living under British rule where doing just that was a tactic to squash dissagreement, do you think had "We're going to make it a right for a woman to have an abortion" on their minds? The wording of the amendment in my humble eyes doesn't seem to have anything to do with abortion. And to me, the government sending soldiers without a warrant into the home of someone they dissagre with is an entirely seperate action than a group of people reminding a pregnant woman that the "fetus" inside her will soon enough be a living breathing human being. In the time around the founding fathers, if a woman was convicted of a crime and sentenced to execution, but she was found to be pregnant, should would be granted a stay of execution until she could bring the baby to term. Why? Because the "fetus" was considered a seperate en!@#$%^&*y who was innocent of the crimes the mother committed. That's called a legal precident. Any decent judge would have used that factor when making their decision on abortion. But I've digressed enough. Do I think abortion should be a state issue? Absolutely, though not because I think it should be a state issue as much as that I have more faith in the state governments' ability to represent the will of their cons!@#$%^&*uents than I do the Federal Supreme Court.

I myself seriously considered resetting, but then if I did then who would be around to sab away Astro's weapons?

oops... That was written before the core changes messed up. One of the changes was going to be limiting mercs to a certain limit. If that was in place, it would be true. However, now you can simply get negative income by buying too many mercs. In your case, just don't buy any mercs for a while. Its not really illegal to accidentally get negative income...just when you intentionally get it.

In one of those dumb snippets of celebrity news, it seems that Dog the Bounter Hunter was caught using racism in a private cell phone conversation and has since lost his job. He was talking to his son, who turned around and sold a recording of it to the tabloids. I view this borderline ridiculous. People threw this big !@#$%^&* on how a few years ago the NSA was going to keep track of the phone numbers of people who've been talking to Al Queda a dozen times over...where are those people now? In my mind, the NSA list would have been a legitimate cause, and the "due cause" for the "search" would have been the fact that the person has been talking to Al Queda a lot. However I digress. There is no way that the public needs to know if someone uses racist speech in a private phone conversation. Its not even celebrity news if you think about it...this guy never was a sophisticated high class public speaker, and poor political correctness should be expected from him. Heck, I've heard the clip, and from the sounds of it, he was afraid to be around black people because he knows he made a habit of using poor speech and was afraid of this exact thing happening. But what the point of this? Should the NAACP tap into every phone conversation in the country and fine any white person who says the "n" word on the phone? The speech can't offend anyone if its done in private. Not that they've taken action yet, but any action taken by any "civil rights" group against this speech would be far beyond their justifiable bounds.

Good lord, JDS! Are you deliberately trying to find the deadest topic to revive or what?

I live out in the boondocks. Its fairly infeasible to install any sort of cable...even the 'free' ones.

Putting information down means looking up information first. On 56k, that takes time.

Screw that...I've been insanely busy. If you two have so much free time, write your own comments.

Yes, but the reason why Hamas and Hezbollah are so popular is because they do a lot of social welfare activities. The reason they can afford to do those activities is because Iran is funding them. That's standard missionary tactics - send agents to a foreign country, give them funds, have the missionaries donate the funds to the poor, and the missionaries gain converts. The thing that's unique here is that after the missionaries get their converts, they get them to keep restarting the same war over and over. I admit this takes a very high understanding of good and evil to identify this. But one thing about evil and evil people is that their first order of business is to emulate good people, for the purpose of confusing their possible enemies. Otherwise they would be identified and defeated quickly. Here the emulation is in the form of social programs, but the glaring identifier is the fact that these groups keep starting the same war. Your statistics admit that 90% of Iran is Shi'ite. They also admit that Shi'ite Islam is the official state religion of Iran, so Iran doesn't believe in seperation of church and state. If they are even close to a pluracracy, then about 90% of Iranian Law is based upon Sharia Law, based upon the fact that 90% of the population's views are Shi'ite views, and there is no compunction about using religious views as official policy. Sharia Law is consistant with tolerating other religions to a point, but it will also brand them as infidels. But we have digressed. As for the question of whether or not Iran is radical enough to prompt radical action at this time, the answer is no or atleast not yet. However, Astro's suggestion isn't about "not invading" Iran, this is about forming some sort of alliance with Iran. So, the question would not be "What proof do we have that they are?", it is "What proof do we have that they are not?" If we wanted to form an alliance with them, we would have to absolutely positively trust them. Based upon past behavior, if we sold Iran a bunch of Abrams tanks, Iran would give them to Hezbollah and the next time we would see them, they'd be the spearhead of some attack on Israel, which would quickly destroy our alliance with them (as if the alliance with Iran wouldn't have). Or, they could be given to some Shi'ite faction in Iraq, which would use them on some Sunni faction, and then the Sunnis ask us why they are being attacked by American made tanks. You don't form alliances with people you kinda-sorta-think-they-won't-turn-on-you, you form alliances with nations which you are absolutely trustworthy. I mean, the concept of being allies with Iran is insane. Whether or not we want to be hostile towards them is debatable, but we don't want to be friendly towards them.

If the defender's sentry is four times greater than the viewer's spy, the viewer can't see the defender's points. As you will find however, this game will pretty much always be 'fairly small'. There are too many features missing from the admin side, the lack of which starts to throw off the game balance when there are 30 players or more. For instance, Sabotage will usually have a limit on the sender, much like how turns limit attacking. With it, the sabber would have to pick and choose sab targets, and wouldn't be able to sab that target daily. On the other hand with the daily threat eliminated, the settings would be able to make sab a lot stronger over the short term. Overall, if would be a way to suddenly take down an unbalanced single target rather than a steady drain on the resources of everyone. As a steady drain on everyone's resources, Sabotage becomes unbalanced. Its strength is proportional to the number of opponants the sabber has, and no clan would ever need more than one covert specialist. There also isn't a turn cap. Thus, people who can stockpile can gain virtually unlimited turns by either being inactive or defensive. Then, they can suddenly start using those turns to shut down the income of two or three opponants. Thus, when there are a lot of people, each and every inactive account sitting on the bottom is actually a potential threat. I also have experience with an attack strength scale similar to the current army size scale. Currently, if someone's army is five times the size of yours, you can't attack him. The system I think is much more fair is that if somebody's defense is five times the strength of your offense, you can attack him, but he won't suffer the usual weapons damage and casualties. This lack of a feature limits size because even the mightiest defense is equally vulnerable to strong offenses and noobs who are barely within the size factor. When a lot of people show up, than any defense worth massing will always have some fresh noob who can and will do it daily for cheap. Mercenaries are another one. There's no limit to how many you can buy. If they had any kind of sane price, one or two people could buy all of them and make it impossible for most people to buy mercs. The only way to stop that was make them insanely expensive, but the loss of that was that mercs can't be used as mercs. And the worst thing is that despite the fact that these limitations have been identified, they can't be solved because there isn't a setting option that can change them and the core is resistant to tampering. Until the core is successfully tampered with, the game will be a vicious cycle of people showing up, the pop exceeding critical mass the gameplay going downhill, people leaving, the pop stabilizing, the gameplay resuming balance, and then more people show up.

As I said in the other topic rasta...sentry matters. At first I thought sabotage this round was more of the same, but when people suddenly started building Sentry I noticed a huge difference. When people without Sentry showed up I noticed an insane difference. I can take out half the armory of a player who's sentry sucks, but if their sentry is good I can barely make a dent. There's a reason UpC, after all of his attacks, is whining...he lost twice as much as he gained in sabotage.

Well, not entirely, but Sentry is having a huge impact on the damage that can be done.

If my recons aren't lying, then your '!@#$%^&*ty' attack power just got even worse. 25,000 weapons sabbed - ouch. As I said, thanks for telling me that you're back.

I'd say the history of Hamas would serve as the example. Its predecessor, the PLO, was mostly a secular organization. Israel and the PLO had managed to reach a peace agreement. Suddenly, Iran started funding Hamas. Iran in turn made sure that Hamas was a Shi'ite organization. The agreement between Israel and the PLO wasn't good enough for Hamas, so Hamas resumed terrorist activity. Point being, Palestine was secular and on the road to a two-state solution, but Iran swooped in and replaced the major party with Shi'ite fundimentalists who want to 'wipe Israel off the map'. Similarly, Lebanon was fast moving towards democracy, then Iran swooped in and funded the Shi'ite fundimentalists Hezbollah, who are currently demanding that the democratic government step down. Finally, you have Iraq, where Iran is giving weapons to Shi'ite groups in order to kill Sunnis.

Thanks for telling me ur back, though admittingly my attack logs said it for you.

That's what happens when you m!@#$%^&*/farm someone you can't see.