Aileron

Well, everything is gone now, the round it over...next round begins at 11:00.

1st Place: Dav of clan SSCentralGods 2nd Place: Suicide Run of clan Penis 3rd Place: Keiver of clan Vagina Best Attack: Dav Best Defense: Suicide Run Best Spy: JDS of clan Penis Best Sentry: Dav Biggest Bank: Rare of clan Penis Consolation awards: Most Covert Personel: Rare Most Attack Personel: wub Last person to attack: candygirl Last person to recon: myself Last person to sabotage: myself

I figured this was going to happen for some people. I know I posted the warning on ~relatively~ short notice, but I daresay if you are that inactive, you don't deserve to beat the players who have been logging on every day for the past month. Next month I will give a week's headsup. Just, if a message is pinned and has a !@#$%^&*le "IMPORTANT" in all caps, you should probably read it.

I can post the leader in each catagory, as there is a screen which shows the leaders. I won't however post the top 3 in each catagory as it involves manually looking through everyone's stats.

أخبار الامة الائلستية The resistance is finally winning! We wake up today to find that the Penis clan has been all but removed from the top 5. Officials fear that are trying to pull strings at the UN to freeze the bank accounts of some of the members in hiding, but the UN rudely has demanded that we release that bus full of children on a field trip that we took hostage two months ago, so talks collapsed. However, officials state that when the hiders spend their money to buy their armies, we will be ready for them. The conflict has been long and hard, and we have lost much, but today's sunrise shows that there is still hope of winning this fight.

...if it will make you happy attraction, though next round I think I'll go for 30% bonuses instead of 50%. It has no weaknesses anyway. Also, next round it will have access to the standard weapons. ( Thanks to everyone who reported this bug, and by 'everyone' I mean no-one because nobody reported this bug. ) I didn't fix it because fixing it means editing weapons, and the last time that was attempted was the infamous case where all defensive weapons got erased. However, after I take score but before I reset, I'll try editing weapons to see if I can find a way to do it mid-round. Also also next round, the "High Top Speed" weapon for the Javelin will cease to suck. As it stands it is a Repel with lower repair cost, but not low enough to make it worth repairing. It will be a 12,500 point weapon.

Well, that's the difference when you watch the speech itself rather than listen to some journalist give his rendition of the speech. When someone gives their own speech, they can present the logical sequence of conditions which can explain their position. I've been to one of Bush's speeches, and contrary to what is filtered by the media, he is a level headed guy who knows exactly what he's doing and why he's doing it. The arguement however is a lengthy one...too lengthy for a journalist to crunch into a 30 second sound-byte. I guess Howard Dean is similarly victimized by the media. His carreer was destroyed by a 30 second sound-byte of him shouting. I wasn't there, but I assume that he didn't start the speech like that. I'd bet over the course of the speech the crowd got riled up and he got riled up in response, and that sound clip was the apex of that speech. And the media for some reason does have their characters they love to talk about like Guiliani or Clinton. However, the main problem is tht most news programs want to talk about politics for about 5 minutes and then move on to entertainment news. Ron Paul isn't getting kicked out by Guiliani as much as by Britany Spears getting married for the hundred and nth time or the newest rap star going to jail. I don't care about that crap. I don't know anyone who cares about that crap. I don't know why they put that crap on the news, they just do, and because of it they don't spend enough time discussing all of the candidates as they should.

Um, that's just life. In the big RPGs there are a few players with only a couple of troops who generate income by stealing it, but in order to do that they need to *really* look through the field in order to find only the juiciest targets. Per every 1000 players at any given time, there are about two or three who have enough money out in the open to support an all-stealing economy. If you can't go all-stealing, you need income. If you need income, you need soldiers. However, if you don't want to attack/defend with a large force, you can divert soldiers to the other task as needed.

Actually UP will be cheaper. Quadratic grows slower than exponential. Last round actually goes to show that you can do prediction curves but you can't predict human nature. It was balanced just so that if everyone stuck with level 2 weapons, they could buy all the UP upgrades, and income would grow faster than the bank accounts. Sabotage would've been worthless because all you could take out would be crappy L2 guns, and with a 90% resell rate would mean it would be cheap to replace. However, some people bought level 3 weapons, everyone else had to buy l3s to keep up, didn't have enough money left to buy UP, and ended up investing the remainder in the bank, and sabotage again became king.

To be honest, I can't state a definitive reason why the Nightwasp can't come in on day 10, or day 20 for that matter. However, the most overpowered ship is the Terrier, and strangely enough nobody is using it. It has very similar stats to the Nightwasp with bonuses to Deduction and Strike. Its not glamerous or mysterious, but I'd bet it is quite a powerfull ship that everyone has overlooked. But, Suicide Run is right. The Nightwasp's biggest strength is a 50% deduction, meaning everything is half price. However, if due to the bank people have 30 times more money than needed to arm all their troops, then that bonus means little. BMF is growing quickly, but most people are still saving interest.

People don't need to believe in an afterlife to defeat their fear of death. The relevant feature is not weather or not the organism will reproduce in the future, but whether or not the organism thinks he will. Most mammalian apex-hunting predators function in packs. If morality is based upon survivalism, it would be from the need to form social groups in order to hunt, not for fear of reprisals. If the thing you attacked is dead, there will be no reprisal. Such groups have alphas, team leaders, and omegas, villiage idiots, and a plethura of roles in between. Omegas don't mate because their superiors won't let them. Usually being an omega is a passing thing though. They grow stonger while their superiors grow older, or maybe they just leave the pack. However, suicidal tendencies can develop if the same animal stays as the omega for too long, because all they are is a waste of resources on the group. Now in our modern society, most people under 18 is an omega. Hormonally, those people are ready to take charge. Thus, they spend several years as the omega and after a while their hormones tell them that they are a waste of food. Ofcourse, humans are not animals, and thus we have reasoning ability that will override these hormonal impulses in most cases. (An evolutionary feature, as really human reasoning is the only biological advantage humans have over animals.) Still, even under Darwinism it is "Humans evolved from animals" and not "humans are the latest variety of animal", pending the day scientists can get a monkey to understand quantum mechanics. I know the Nazis weren't suicidal, but they can be used to show a point. We all know Darwin's Theory of Evolution. Hitler learned it too. His interpretation of that scientific theory was that the strong (the "master race") had a right to induce survival of the fittest by killing off the weak (jews for starters). The goal was to somehow induce human evolution by eventually using breeding to assign positions of power, and most likely would have moved on to arranged marriages. Theres nothing wrong with the theory when it is used in biology. However, it makes a poor political agenda. Similarly, if humankind threw out biology it wouldn't prevent groups like the Nazis from forming...they would just find something else to latch on to and twist towards their own agenda. Religion is similar. It is what it is, and what it is contributes to peace. However, there are always idiots who want to kill and are willing to twist and misinterpret everything around them in order to justify it.

!@#$%^&* you are arrogant. You state the obvious and then you talk as if you are the only one who knew it. [sarcasm]You know, you can buy weapons on the armory page, which really increases the strength of your soldiers. I had that figured out years ago whereas I'll bet you just learned it.[/sarcasm] As for the bank, keep in mind I'm also trying to attract new players, and given the plethora of questions asked this round, this game is confusing enough it newbies as it is. They can understand a bank, though saving up by buying weapons might be confusing. Your theory about people buying sentry weapons is flawed. First off, sentry doesn't seem to weaken sabotage. It only seems to prevent recon, as I for one can take out thousands of weapons of players who have sentry too high to do an effective recon. Secondly when given a choice between sentry and spy, enough people choose spy to create problems for everyone. Thus, if I did as you suggest, there would be atleast 3 or 4 people who would take the money that would have been banked and buy a bunch of spy weapons, and with that uber spy rating sab the crap out of everyone. The results of your "no-bank" suggestion would be uber-saboteurs, which by your own standards must make you a newbie who doesn't understand the game. The entire system is a bunch of pieces that work with each other, and after that you get human behavior. Every change has indirect consequences. In this case, remove the bank and spy becomes overpowered for the handfull of people who like to sab. If I moved as quickly and radically as you suggest, I'd destroy the game. And don't bring Suicide Run into this. He clearly has much more character than you do because he's offering suggestions in a productive fashion. Look, you've written enough to be banned from the forums twice over and you still aren't. Up until this point I figured you must have had a bad week and needed to vent some steam. If you want to make any more suggestions, take a hint from your clan-mate and do it in a civilized fashion. Otherwise I'm not going to tolerate it any more.

Look, don't go around complaining that I'm not reading your suggestions when you hide two sentences which are actually constructive amongst 98 sentences of spam. I don't have time to read through all that crap. You would have more success with a "I think you should remove the bank entirely." Rather than "I hate you. You have no experience. I want someone else in charge. Remove the bank. My clan is winning. Check out my stupid website. Spam Spam Spam Whine Whine Whine." So why am I not listening to you? Your persuasive skills suck. Maybe trying to be polite would help. And for the record, you NEVER kicked my !@#$%^&*. The first round was a joke, I won the second, and quite the third due to the cheaters. And this round, JDS did all the work, so *HE* is the one who has the right to say that he kicked my !@#$%^&*. As it stands, I have one person who clearly is looking for excuses to hate me who is the only one who thinks the bank needs to be removed. As for the two clans idea, it doesn't seem to be getting much of a reception, so its off. But I won't remove the bank. Why? Because covert tools can't be sabbed or damaged, but can be resold. If somebody wants to bank, they can buy spy tools for safe storage, and sell them when they need money. The only thing having a bank does is simplify things. Generally, I've made moves in the correct direction but of insufficient magnitude. People were abusing the bank and I removed the super savings, turns out the free savings can also be abused. Sabotage was too powerfull, so I decreased the price of sentry tools, but that didn't do enough to help. Why the army size is insufficient: Say you have two players with 10,000 troops each. One player divides his soldiers 5000/5000 between offense and defense. The other makes it 10/9990. The second player then can m!@#$%^&* the first player for free. He has as many troops as the defender, so he's within the size limit, but he is only attacking with 10 soldiers so he's not going to have any losses. Ofcourse, that would make him more vulnerable to it himself, unless afterwards he retrains all his troops towards offense.

The round will end next Thursday, May 31 at about 8:00 PM GST. (Keep in mind that I have dial-up now, so times will vary by a few minutes.) The top three ranked players will be announced. As usual, the next round will begin at 11:00 PM GST. (Does anyone else find this time inconvenient? I would be happy to do the reset mid-day if you guys want.) As for next round, these are the announced changes. Nothing is set in stone until June 1st, so if you want something different and your account name isn't a two word name starting with A and D respectively please speak up. (Otherwise, please shut up and stop whining.) Economics: The price for UP upgrades will be quadratic. The price of the nth upgrade will be 1,000,000 * n^2. If people max out their UP, new upgrades will be added as needed mid-round. The bank will generate no interest. While this shouldn't be a factor if UP is fixed, its still impossible to beat someone who's income comes from the bank. Mercenaries: Mercs will generate at 1000 per hour. That should be plenty for everyone. ****Core permitting, mercenary income will be NEGATIVE two hundred. That's right, you have to pay mercs a salary per turn to keep them around, and you can't get rid of them unless they die in combat. Thus, people won't hoard them, and it would be impossible to hire more mercs than you have soldiers anyway because at that point you would have no income.**** Attacking: Attack size limit is 5 Because the size limit is not a strength limit, there are ways to get around it. Thus, a phase limit of 5 will remain to be in place. Repair, which is apparently still broke, will be fixed for the gun-class weapons. Covert: Covert weapons will be stronger. However, the covert level system will be changed. Instead of the 2^n system, it will have the 25% increase like siege and fortification. The jist of it is at the end of the day, the overall punch of a maxed-out covert weapon will be weakened. Clans:

Its 5x

Yay, I don't even have a position of real authority yet and I've already got a conspiracy theorist. But apparently I have something close because I have someone who's on the clan which is kicking !@#$%^&* whining to staff for me to make changes in order to enable his clan to kick even more !@#$%^&*. Do you think I am going to spend several hours sitting down manually calculating stats when everyone knows who the top three are anyway? It was a JOKE you idiot. Grow a sense of humor. Posting SR's name in the wrong clan was a mistake. For the previous two months he was in SSCentralGods and I didn't bother to check. The first quote was bragging/taunting. Kind of like what Redwaller and LiDDiS are doing right now. Again, grow a sense of humor. The second quote was poorly written. The core has a limit based upon army size, but not one based upon army strength. Even with the army size limit in place, you can attack with a couple troops with a handfull of attackers while the rest of your army is !@#$%^&*igned to defense. At the beginning of this round I removed the super savings account! Next round I'll remove bank income entirely! I even considered adding a deposit or withdrawel fees, but some people like the bank. But, you have no right to say that I'm not fixing the broken banking system because I am doing everything in my power to fix it short of resetting everyone's bank account mid-round. As for the other post where you accused me of being a !@#$%^&*, you didn't notice a very profound compliment I gave you guys. A !@#$%^&* will assume that his clan should win and everyone else's victories are the results of bad settings. I said that Penis clan's victory would have come in perfect settings and thus I have a difficulty determining what wasn't supposed to happen and what was. Most of the other people in your clan noticed that it was a compliment, but you are angry and !@#$%^&*umed it was an insult. But, in round two the winners were the ones who exploited the super savings account. That was removed for the next round. In round three the winners were the ones who got their friends to transfer a lot of stuff to them. That was removed for the next round. In round four the winners were the ones who overpopulated the field got their weak friends to constantly m!@#$%^&* their enemies.

sigh.... I like StarGate too, but... Those are CHARACTERS. Real people don't follow such flat roles. Weak minded fools are actually in short supply, though there are many who lust for greed or glory who are willing to play the role of a weak minded fool in order to justify their selfish greed. Belief in an afterlife isn't a factor. People come to terms with mortality regardless. Belief in God usually lowers the capacity for zealots to kill, because then they wish to convert their enemies whenever they can. The Nazis didn't believe in God, yet they were zealots. The communists didn't either, yet they were also zealots. The Imperial Japanese didn't believe in a diety, but they were zealots enough to fly kamikaze. The truth of the matter is that while the word of God is constant, people will decide if they want to follow it, and if their violation is small enough, they prefer to lie rather than admit their actions are unholy. Clearly, suicide bombing while citing the name of God violates "Thou shalt not use the name of thy God in vain", and "Thou shalt not murder." "Thou shalt not murder" is easy enough, though when origionally written it did not include properly justified cases such as self-defense and acts of war. "Thou shalt not kill" was a mis-translation. However, the violation which is relevant to this case is "Thou shalt not use the name of thy God in vain." Basically, unless the heavens open up and you hear his voice telling you to do it or a burning bush talks to you and tells you to do it or the angel Gabriel comes down and tells you to do it, God did NOT tell you to do it and you do NOT have His permission to say that He did! And if so, others are not expected to believe you until you show them a sign as such. Simply put, if someone wants to kill someone else, they will. In a non-religious environment, a sinner does what he wants, and in a religious environment he does what he wants and lies about it. To that end, religion helps, because if there is a religion present, the authority in charge has to deal with it. The leader could lie, but if the population has copies of the holy text a their home he wouldn't get away with it for long. He could twist, but only so far. Point being without religion, leaders like Hitler and Stalin could directly move on to "Go on my crusade because I said so" without having to deal with a divine authority which contradicts their opinion. So what makes a zealot? The book I read when learning history was "The True Believer" by Eric Hoffer. He states that zealotry is usually caused my socioeconomic conditions rather than idealogy. Infact, the idealogy is irrelevant. Generally, those who are content with their wealth don't engage in it because they have everything to lose and nothing to gain. Those who are too poor just are afraid of losing what they have left. Those who are somewhat poor but have a taste of wealth are the ones who can become zealots. This is how the Muslim Brotherhood formed. They got a little money from selling oil, and thus want to rule the world. Islam got twisted into an excuse for their behavior. Like the KKK, they don't do anything directly any more and instead form splinter groups like al Queda which does all the grunt work while the Muslim Brotherhood slips them money and does their propaganda. Then, the total organization convinces the suicidal or near-suicidal to blow themselves up rather than use pills or rope. So all islamic terrorism is is yet another case of greed and hatred.

I have a surefire way of winning this round. My plan is to announce the winning clans by a rank per capita method.

Wrong again SeVeR. Darwinism only requires the organism reproduce before dying. Infact, in the case of most insects, especially the variety which lives in colonies (ants, bees, termites, etc.), males will commit suicide after reproducing. Given that humans are social, under the Darwinist method a group would maximize its chances of survival and increase the rate of evolution by sending out all adults who are not going to reproduce in the future on suicide missions against other groups, for as long as they remain all they do is consume resources which could be allocated to the next generation. Also, you can discount religion as the source of it by citing Japan during WWII, which though not having any religion (other than Buddhism, which isn't technically a religion) showed a lot of suicidal behavior, both in the air as Kamikaze pilots and on the ground. You'll say that this was due to imperialistic nationalism, but there were several other empire-wannabes at this time which did not use suicide strikes on the battlefield. In reality, the suicide bombing was based upon thier culture and history, and the Way of the Samurai which they believed in. They didn't believe in an afterlife. They overcame their fear of death by realising that it was inevitable and then by wanting it to be as 'glorious' as possible. The problem is that at this time in history teenagers and young adults have a high rate of depression and suicide to begin with. Deep down, these bombers want to kill themselves. All al Queda needs to do is talk them into it. Its probably very easy to do, as the person already has an immense amount of self-loathing to begin with, and the recruiter just has to get them to transfer that hatred to a large 'faceless' foreign government. Generally the difference between an al-Queda suicide bomber and that kid who went on a murderous ramapge at V.T. is that the al-Queda bomber was recruited first and pointed in a direction. Culture however is playing a role. In civilized countries, when identified such persons are given encouragement to live. In the countries where the Muslim Brotherhood operates, when identified such persons are encouraged to join a terrorist group. Thus, they can generate more suicidal persons per capita. (...and it is the Muslim Brotherhood who is behind everything, though they keep forming splitt-off groups with different names in attempts to confuse.)

I can only edit attacks per day.

Correct. Worse yet, the only settings change that would allow people to do something about it also opens up strong players being massed by weak ones. Either A: There is an army size limit in attack, and no one can attack the all-spy ASSS, or B: There is not an army size limit in attack, and any fool with a couple dozen troops can m!@#$%^&* the top ranked players. As it stands, this is the status of sabotage: 1) Its nearly free to carry out...all it can cost you if done correctly is one spy. 2) It cannot be destroyed. Spies can, but spy weapons cannot be touched 3) It cannot be prevented. As long as you have a recon, you can sab them. Last round, I thought sentry countered sabotage. Thus, I did try to nerf sabotage in the form of making sentry tools cheaper. Turns out that sentry only counters recon. Don't blame me for this. It seems the makers of the core cared more about options to give rewards for posting and starting new threads, as well as some very ridiculous options such as turning off income and unit production and such. If I wanted to, I could make the sole source of income, troops, and turns to be spamming the boards, but I can't change the sabotage system. I do promise that I will nerf the everloving crap out of sabotage. Something that follows the three rules above does not deserve to be that effective. But not only that, I especially have to nerf the all-spy ASSS. However, since it is grossly unfair for someone to destroy someone else 50x their size, I have to go with option A. The only thing that can be done at this point is to limit the benefit from it. That means that spies without tools need to be less effective relative to spies with tools. The best way to do that is to increase the strength of spy tools. However, that would make sabotage in general more effective, so we remove the top 3 covert levels. Overall, I'm thinking 60pt tools with a cap of lvl 7 covert, which is 1/4th of the effectiveness for tooled spies and 1/8th the effectiveness for untooled spies relative to the settings now.

1) Well, I certainly don't want to get to "never resetting at all" with these settings. How about I reword it as "long term stability". The idea is that if I set my goal as to make it that stable, that it will remain compe!@#$%^&*ive for a month. 2, 3, & 4) There is no way to change the sab system. I didn't make things worse this round, because I didn't touch spy weapons at all. Besides, a week ago you said I nerfed the spy system. Now apparently I've made it overpowered, all while not touching the spy settings at all. So which is it? 5) True enough about spy weapons being indestructible. The SSCentralGods never had a population greater than the rest of the game, but there isn't a point worth arguing about here anyway. And I know your members attacked each other, but I highly doubt you massed and sabbed each other. I know how the casualty system works. Generally, the more soldiers you have involved in the battle, the more you lose. You can counter massing two ways: Either buy defense mercs or train all your soldiers into offense. Thanks to you, there were no mercs on the market. Also thanks to you, I lost all of my offensive weapons thus making it better to train those soldiers as spies. Believe it or not, between all of you, you generated an uncounterable strategy. Kudos for that, but don't think I don't know what I'm doing. As I said, casualties get higher if you have more soldiers. What you mean by "gets screwed up" is that weaker players generally have the advantage in the casualty department. That's called an equalizer. It gives players who aren't ranked in the top 5 a chance of catching up to those people. And if everything you say is true and I am changing the RPG for my own benefit, then WHY IS YOUR SIDE WINNING? That isn't a complaint but a statement that if I were doing as you describe, I would probably be the one winning. Besides, I'm not even playing next round due to change in lifestyle. FYI, I have a year's worth of experience with text-based MMORPGs. Obviously I haven't played WoW before though. My chief qualification seems to be making positive suggestions without whining. If I wasn't looking for suggestions, I wouldn't have posted. Usually I don't post "that's a good suggestion, I'll implement it", so you don't notice, but I do implement suggestions. Already I've taken a few despite your complaining. -There will be no penalty for using the bank, as SR suggested. -Also, he made a good point about the clans. Admittingly I did have a plan to kick out inactive members, I just didn't mention it because I figured people got the jist of it. However, the point about clans being based upon friendship is true. Perhaps we can pick two captains and have them pick members one by one? -I thought you could sell mercs by buying a negative number, but due to comments and a subsequent investigation, its been revealed to be impossible. Because of this, the attack limit will remain to be 5 per day and army size limit will be 5. -I did pay attention to your criticisms last round about spy being too strong. I reduced the price of sentry weapons. The effect is that I can sab people whom I can't recon. The only thing different this round versus last round is that the weapons are ten times weaker. You did have a point, though you probably could have found a more rational and mature way of doing it that didn't involve a suggestion of suicide. The formula clearly involves the strength of spy weapons versus the strength of the weapons being sabbed. You are right, increasing the strength of covert weapons alone will make things worse. However, if I concurrently remove some covert upgrades, the strength of the maxed-out weapons will weaken by a factor of two for each covert level. How about I double weapon strengths but remove the 9th and 10th upgrades?

A merc pop limit is impossible due to the core. Limiting clans to 5 or 6 members looks good on paper, but in reality the clans would make alliances and gang up on each other. (Great...thanks for the profanity guys...as I write this in a public library there are young children running around...maybe there will have to be a rule against profane clan names as well.) All it would do is force P___ clan to split into P____ 1, P____ 2, and P____ 3. The process for making settings is to first build the economy. Then repair costs, and then weapon strength and price. Repair costs have to be based upon what the income is, so as to force people to wait. Weapon strength is then built upon whatever the repair costs are. If you haven't noticed, weapons are about as cheap as mercs are. It's already not cost effective to buy mercs...we have people doing it mostly because they know they have the numbers and if half of P____ clan exists just to mess up everyone else, that still leaves a lot of people in their clan on top.

Actually, while I've been trying to avoid using the admin powers to spy on people, when I was putting the Nightwasp in, I did notice that a couple players have noticed that while the bank's income is small, it is still exponential (the opening screen displays the best stats of each catagory including bank, and is unavoidable.) Just like it round two, the bank is still whacked. Okay, the problem I'm having is what my theorey was for this round. I wanted it to be compe!@#$%^&*ive the whole way through, and a precursur to not ever having to reset at all. I actually wanted to make it such that fleeting things like weapons and armies could be destroyed and repaired on a regular basis. I wanted people to sometimes suffer casualties higher than their growth rates so that other players can catch up. I wanted people to sometimes lose half the armory to sabotage so that weaker players can possibly hit them. I wanted UP, though expensive, to be the most valueble resource because UP cannot be massed or sabbed. Enter the Penis clan, a clan which consists of 70% of the field. In perfectly balanced settings, the game would still be unbalanced because of this hugely unfair odds. Right now, I'm still trying to figure out which effects were the result of my screwing up and which were the result of overwhelming odds. Its not so much that we got massed, its the fact that the big three *didn't* get massed which is the major problem. If they *had* gotten massed, then right now everyone would be contending for #1. This problem was half my fault and half theirs...if I hadn't remove the attack size cap, the massers would still suffer a lot, but if the odds were fair then there would have been atleast one low-ranked masser going after the big three. Because of that, UP wasn't valueble to the big three. While if you are under duress of constant massings, UP is extremely important, but if you aren't then its best to collect interest. I figured that if you have more money than you can spend on soldiers, there's always the next UP upgrade, which should solve the problem for you on both fronts. Indeed, there are a couple of players who if they wanted to could probably buy the 140 UP upgrade. However, I overestimated the effect, as UP is just far too expensive to be worth the result. Other than that, I didn't get repair costs right...I wanted the "just scrap 'em" point to be around 60% when infact it is around %. Spy weapons are not as effective as a lot of spies. Attacks occur too frequently. The maximum weapons aren't expensive enough. However, I think we are getting closer. The list of changes that I want to make is addressing smaller details. -Reducing repair costs. -(Possibly) Making Super/Shield normal weapons which are essentially the opposite of the shrapnels...insanely expensive to buy but free to repair. I'd have to come up with a new special for the Nightwasp. -Reducing turn rate to 2 per hour. -Increasing the effectivness of spy and sentry tools. That way, it will be just as easy/difficult to sab people as before. However, since no one is buying mines and decoys, they will be less efficient as strength goes up, like regular weapons. -UP will be fixed to make it more usefull - I'm thinking of using a quadratic price system with a bigger upgrade (like 30 or 40). If I overdo it casualties will keep pop down. I'd also increase income per soldier to something around 1000 per hour. Fixing the massing: The only limit that exists as far as massing is concerned is that army size limit. I'd have set that to a really restrictive value (like 2 or 3). To attack someone outside your range, you would have to buy or sell mercs. !@#$%^&*uming I fix the UP, the lower ranked players will have a low population to match. Untrained mercs will be virtually unlimited, though attack and defense mercs will *not* be. Mercs will also be more expensive. The general method of massing for a low ranked player to attack a high ranked one will be: 1) Buy enough mercs to get within half the target's population 2) M!@#$%^&* 3) Sell excess mercs Mercs will be expensive enough that the masser will pay the price in the form of mercs that die and can't be resold. However, defense mercs don't die in offense, so they certainly *won't* be unlimited. I'm debating whether or not to make untrained or attack the unlimited variety, and right now I'm leaning towards untrained. Now for the change which many people will hate me for: No bank income. Period. Maybe even charge a price to limit using it too much. Now for the change that a ton of people will *really* hate me for: Dissolve all of the clans. Replace them with two clans: "Freq 0000" and "Freq 0001". Generally, the clans will be forced to be of equal size and strength to start, while during the course of the game new members will be alotted to the side currently losing. Most MMORPGs wouldn't consider this, but most MMORPGs suck. Wheras every other game in the world whether in sports or video games, (including Subspace) has equal sized teams.

awwwww......sucks when you are on the receiving end of it doesn't it?