Aileron

SeVeR, the statement he wrote actually requires the statement "The situations which allowed Hitler to rise to power should not be repeated." Sure he was evil, but if proper cons!@#$%^&*ional installments were in place at the time, he would have been irrelevant. I agree with JPC that disarmament is an essential part of running a dictatorship. We also agree that the military is run like a dictatorship. I'm just trying to explain why. There are just fundimental things about an army that forces it to be run as such. Truth be told however, college is almost as bad. I live off-campus and my apartment complex won't allow me to have a gun. They despicably put it right next to drugs in my lease. One's illegal and the other is cons!@#$%^&*utionally protected and the owners of my apartment complex can't tell the difference, and I'm not truly free to move to another apartment because ALL of the companies in my area do the same !@#$%^&* thing. As bad as the army is, they have a right to do this stuff. Private companies should have no rights to tell people what to do.

I can barely agree with any civilian gun law. Believe it or not, I'd venture to say if you want to own a tank and can afford it, you should be allowed to...just don't whine when the police are watching you like a hawk because of it. As for the military, yes, its run like a dictatorship. It MUST be run like a dictatorship, because if an army doesn't run on one, it is infact a militia, in every sense of the word. More importantly, it could only function in battle like a militia...it might get a victory here and there but will never be the workhorse needed to win the war. Actually, I think I know the problem here. I don't know you, so this is just a guess. I think you have a tunnel vision of sorts. Once you get your mind on something, you focus in on it and ignore everything else. In this case, you had a goal of joining the military, and focused in on it. After that point you ignored obvious problems with that goal until you were actually conscripted. That mindset didn't work out for you this time, but it can be a strength if you use it properly. Strangely enough, the military still is a good career choice for you, because steadfast dedication towards one's objectives is one of their defining qualities. I'd suggest you go to college, and then re-enlist but as an officer next time. You'd probably feel better on the giving end rather than recieving end.

Well, you also have to try to look at it from his perspective. Transfer doesn't tell the recipient who sent him stuff and how much of each. He didn't necessarily ask for all that stuff, and you yourself have had problems with that. He certainly cannot be held responsable for the source of the source of the source of a player he might not even be able to identify.

Let's stick to what we can fix, shall we? I hate the sab system myself. To be honest, I've never played the origional KoC, just spin-offs. Usually first thing they do when creating a spin-off is overhaul the sab system. Frankly, there is no way to balance out a system which at most costs a single unit if the operator is using it properly. Even if the odds are unlikely, its always worth trying because the cost is low. Maybe I'll tip the scales to favor sentry by making sentry weapons more effective. Most KoC games have some sort of miner or peasant class which only functions to generate income. This game doesn't. I'm running the calculations now...weapons cost will be such that people can afford to arm all of their troops. Repair costs will be about three hours of income. These will be ballpark figures obviously. However, one thing I will do that is the OPPOSITE as what most MMORPGS do, and that is to make weapons less cost efficient as they increase in strength. The advantage strong weapons have is that you can do more with fewer soldiers

Actually, according to the logs he got a lot of his !@#$%^&* from the people who didn't hack themselves but were the recipient of the hackers' stuff. Redwaller and Keiver acted as the go-betweens mostly. None of the hackers gave their stuff directly to Holes. The only flaw with the transfer logs was that while they state who gave how much to whom, they don't specifically state which weapon is being transferred. At the time, I was feeling nice, and gave the recipient the benefit of the doubt. I could have easily either reset all parties involved or just !@#$%^&*umed that all transferred weapons were thors and s+s and removed them accordingly. However, I felt I had done enough for one night. As for what will happen if the hackers return next month, if it happens again in a different way, the army system will likely will be removed entirely. The Core isn't as flexible as you think it is. There are about 3 or 4 security features I feel would be greatly helpfull, yet can't be implemented because the designers didn't think people would cheat in such a low-stress game. If cheating occurs again, we'll do what we can to stop it, but if no solution is possible, then the whole RPG might have to be taken down. Treat this game like you would a free candy jar at the office. If anyone abuses it too much, it will go away.

No one knows the exact details. Frankly, I'm afraid to click on the link that goes to the commander core until I really mean it, because messing with the core in the middle of the round has proven dissasterous in the past. I don't want to blow up everyone's stats just to find that information out. Rest !@#$%^&*ured that details will be posted at the start of the round. However, my guess is that it will be something like this: A certain percentage of the commander's income will be distributed amongst the officers automatically. Its usually a figure of around 10-15% per officer. By the same token a similar percentage of the officer's unit production will be given to the officer. Additionally, commanders should be able to view the attack and intelligence logs of their officers. No guarentees about the other way around, or of the ability for commanders to view the attack logs of the officers of their officers. Suffice to say, it is not beneficial except to allow late arrivals to make up for lost time, so no there's no need to plan its use in advance. If you start the round with a commander/officer relationship in place, what will happen is that you will have one player who's longterm growth will be stunted because he is giving up UP in exchange for a minor income boost, while you will have another player with a lot of troops but not enough cash to arm them properly, or furthermore, purchase UP upgrades. You don't need to be in the same clan to create such a relationship. That's usually how it works however. In most MMORPGs, even if the officer ISN'T in your faction, during a war enemies will count him as in your clan, because he's part of your clan's base of support. The recepients usually complain because the attacker didn't follow some UN approved guideline to politically correct warfare, but unless that guy's faction actually wins, it doesn't go anywhere. However, the cool thing about the Army System is that people can improvise and suprise each other. Two months ago I said the transefer service wasn't that effictive...even taking exception to the cheaters I was proven wrong. For instance, maybe a Levi, which will be a massing ship with a powerfull weapon, might decide to be an all time officer because due to the L3 bomb, they won't need many troops, but would like to offset their income penalty. Maybe a Terrier on the other hand, which will specialize in a large number of cheap weapons, won't need income as much as soldiers to man all those weapons. Ofcourse, in your case Animate Dreams, given your behavior you will probably pick up as many officers as allowed.

Opps, sorry folks. I figured that with a week left people wouldn't bother cheating. I also happened to buy Oblivion, so guess where all my computer time has been going. I'm sort of getting over the addiction enough to where I don't need to play it 24/7 now, so I'll watch the logs for the next couple days until transfer is removed entirely. Having several players help you is lame, but still legal. However, its actually easier this way than to face three seperate accounts. Yes, he's harder to steal from, but he's easier to m!@#$%^&* and sab him. I guess I'll be playing next round. While that does create a conflict of interest, this is a small-time game, and frankly it is hard to maintain my interest while spectating.

Post edited for har!@#$%^&*ment of the sysop. Its funnier this way besides. Race Changing is for the MMORPGs that do not have a system-wide reset. Those RPGs developed settings that cause players to reach a sort critical mass and thus anyone at any time can catch up to the pack. Under those cir!@#$%^&*stances, racial bonuses can be more valueble than time lost. Ours has it because its in the core and can't be removed. Casualties are based upon army size mostly. If rank is a factor, it would mean that you suffer MORE casualties because you outrank them so much. That's how this system works in general. All actions are most efficient when dealing with someone who is the same approximate strength as yourself. That's true in "most RPGs" as well. If you are lvl 38 with a +9 Two Handed Sword of "I hacked the !@#$%^&* game", and you spend your time picking on lvl 2 goblins, you don't get any gold or XP. Its similar here, except that this is multiplayer, and players are flesh and blood rather than scripted electrons. Getting god-smacked by people hopelessly stronger than them is a waste of time for weak players, thus the strong players get penalized in the form of high casualties, lower returns, and high repair costs. Its also realistic, as it reflects a weak enemies ability to engage in a hit-and-run war of attrition. You want to go for another MMORPG like this one? Go ahead. There are tons of them. Free advice though...they all suck. The players there take things much more seriously than they do here.

America got all those immigrants because while at the time other countries were richer, we didn't screw people over. The rest of the world had set up a system whereby if you were poor, your children and their children were destined to be poor as well. The US set up a system where if you worked hard you could move up a notch. A poor immigrant fresh off the boat still had no reasonable chance of reaching the top, but atleast they had a chance to move up, as well as a chance to ensure that they prodgeny did not end up the same way. Because of this, people moved here. Because we gave them a true reward for their efforts, people had motivation to work, and thus our economy grew. Other countries have as many natural resources as we do. However, the system they have makes it so that people won't make enough money to change their social standing. Thus, they don't have motivation to work, and thus the economy languashes. Wars are not won with armies. Battles are won with armies. However, over the course of a long-term war, like the World Wars, its not the tanks you have but the gas and parts you have to fuel and repair the tanks. Its not the soldiers you have but the food and ammunition the soldier needs. Wars are won with economies. Economies come from the people. In some sense, the war is irrelevant to many things. The Soviet Union was involved in WWII from the beggining, and lost more in it than any other country involved. Yet afterwards, they emerged as one of the two superpowers. They did so because they had a strong economy. No matter how many resources the Nazis destroyed, they faced wave after wave of Russian forces until they were overcome. What caused the USSR to win WWII was that they had a stronger economy than Germany. After the war, that economy allowed them to compete in the Cold War for a good 40 years. So how do we have a system that doesn't screw the workers over? We have The Bill of Rights. Lets face it, government tends to be run by the upper class. That's a anthropological constant. Having a cons!@#$%^&*uationalized government prevents the government from being a tool used by the uppoer class to keep the workers down. Granted, now we aren't the exclusive country that has those laws in place. Europe has learned, albeit not until after we passed them. You may note that Europe did grant freedoms earlier than WWII. However, what's important is when did their economies be based upon workers who had freedoms. While 19th Century Britain had guarenteed rights to British citizens, their economy was based upon colonies such as India, in which the workers had no rights. By the way, Britain's economy collapsed when they lost half of those colonies and gave up the rest. Back to the topic. I can only think of one time and place where governments would ban weapons in order to control the populace. The place is planet Earth, the time is all of human history prior to 1776. The definition of 'weapon' varied. In medieval Europe it was mostly restricted to swords. In Japan it was anything with a blade or long handle. In Bronze Age China they just flat out banned bronze amongst the lower castes. The concept was the same in all cases. On the obvious level, you need weapons in order to revolt. However, the banning of weapons is more subtle and pervasive than that. It makes the populace dependant upon the armed in order to depend themselves. It creates a government-enforced monopoly in the security deparment, and since everyone needs atleast some amount of security to live, this allows the government to set whatever price they want on a needed resource. Have you seen those Geico commercials which feature "cavemen" who were offended by a comment? Believe it or not, it is true in concept. Anthropologically speeking, humankind has not had any major evolutionary changes in the past million years...the biggest one we have had is the ability for adults to process milk. The cavemen did have the same brain size and intellectual capacity as we do. If you transported a caveman foward through time he could live amongst us like everyone else other than a case of lactose intolerance. Mankind has not evolved since the dark age, the bronze age, or even the stone age. All we have done is learn. We have learned that when government has the power to limit speach, officials will use it to silence compe!@#$%^&*ors. We have learned that when the government is allowed to freely search private properties, officials will use it to dig up dirt on their opponants. We have learned that when government has the power to station troops in private homes, that officials will use it to limit the resources of their rivals. Finally, we have also learned that when the government has control over who owns weapons, officials use it to create a security monopoly, and then charge peasants most of their livelihood just to live another day. It is not wise to ignore a lesson we have learned. That being said, JPC started this topic under the wrong name. He should have written "The Armed Soldier" instead of the "The Armed Citizen". Frankly, I don't know what to say about JPC. The military is an organization that while you are commissioned will make you wear and uniform and tell you what to do every hour of every day, even if those orders might lead to your death mind you. Frankly, a soldier doesn't get First Amendment rights, let alone Second Amendment rights. JPC asks if it is because officers either fear their soldiers are seek power, and the answer is a little of both. There are countless instances in history where armies have !@#$%^&*ed defeat from the jaws of victory for the exact reason that officers could not control those under their command, or the similar fate of having a general who couldn't control his officers. One army of 100 will defeat 100 individuals every time. Realistically, an army of 10 will beat 100 individuals consistently. Having disorder in the ranks can and has ruined entire nations. The officers are correct in fearing the outcome of disorder, and should use every dictatorship style tactic on the books in order to keep that from happening.

Ofcourse if you have a country wide ban, then people will get their weapons from another country, as what is happening in Europe. If you have a world-wide ban however, reality states that people will get what they want. Otherwise illegal drugs would not be such a successful smuggling industry. The truth of the matter is that the drug industry functions in a strange way. One way to look at it is that those addicted to drugs are actually the lowest level of employees on the chain. They steal money from the community and give it to the dealers in exchange for drugs, their defacto salary. Point being, drug dealers will always have the resources to get guns, and their source of income comes from these petty criminals, so they would be more than willing to provide these petty criminals with weapons. However, JPC is talking about the MILITARY here. It is understood that while in the military you have no rights. Generally, all politics aside, restrictions upon weapons are a method used to control the populace. The reason why its the Second Amendemt is because in the ages of antiquity when Kings needed to control the masses, restrictions on weapons were the second thing they tried, right after preventing dissidents from voicing their views. (and trust me, when they did, their excuse for doing so was always security related.) So the question here is: In the military, should the officers control the soldiers every thought and action? The answer is yes, because its a military organization and such control is needed to maintain the strength of the army.

I'm bumping this topic and adding more details. At around 8:00 PM EST, the game will be officially closed. Hopefully, we can post the stats of the top three players at this time. We should have two hours to change the settings around. By 10:00 the game will open up. On 10:00 PM EST on May 3rd, attacks should open up.

Sorry for the week long hiatus. Its been a really stressfull week. Suffice to say I had reports due for Arabic, and I had to even go as far as to buy a whole new computer so that I can type "في الّقة العربية". Wasn't my only reason for buying the computer, but... Oh, and just so you know, Vista sucks !@#$%^&*. It has so far caused 4 technical problems I had to figure out, and that one Mac commercial in which the Secret Service agents asks "Cancel or Allow" after every line of dialog is indeed an accurate representation of running programs on Vista. I wanted to opt for XP, but I couldn't. !@#$%^&*, I wouldn't mind using 3.4 again. I'm not quite sure what "casualies" means to be honest. (To demonstrate how limited the core is, I cannot even correct the spelling error as it will appear on the race selection screen.) Even from the core settings editing screen the description is vague. I'm pretty sure that -60% casualties means that when you attack an enemy or when he attacks you, he suffers 40% of the casualties he normally would. The weasel is my biggest worry in the ships, because I've been in games where that figure was -100%, meaning anyone who attacked that race would suffer NO casualties. In theory, that would make them good farms, because you could attack them and not worry about losing your soldiers. In practice, in that particular case the race had some big bonuses and since the game wasn't that violent, they dominated. However, here the bonuses are strong but not that great, and this RPG is very violent. Simply put, the -60% casualties is a very negative stat for the weasel, and the +60% casualties is a positive stat for the levi. If you want to however, you can double check on the KoC forums. It would be 11 attacks against any individual player. This includes everybody, so if A sabs C 8 times, then B can only sab C 3 times. I'd prefer have sabotage limited on the giving end instead of the receiving end, because if you pissed off a lot of people, you deserve to be the recipient of a lot of sabotage. However, the core is only programed to limit the recieving end. For your information, this variable is currently set to 5. Due to security contraints, "initial" UP cannot be 0. All of the upgrades are expensive enough so that it should take two or three days of saving in order to buy one, so yes, people will buy the 40 UP upgrade because they have to, and will likely not be able to afford the 50 UP by the time attacks open, and if they do they will still be seriously outgunned. However, the choice of "buy weapons now" or "invest in UP" is still there. More importantly, the core only allows for a finite amount of UP upgrades. It has to be set up so that everyone hasn't maxed out by week 2, because if that happens by week 3 weapons are building up faster than income, and by week 4 no one can afford to attack anyone. Thus I had to space them out over the course of the month. Why 40? I started with a base plan of people just having 1,000,000 troops at the end of the month if everyone is a pacifist, though I added a few upgrades on top so don't hold me to that. 40 was the starting value in the resulting growth curve. Actually, due to the nature of exponential growth curves, starting at a slightly higher value makes a big difference. If it started at 10 as you suggest, in order to achieve the desired count, the growth rates would be slower in the beginning and faster in the end, which would favor people who are ahead because their lead would tend to accelerate as time goes on. Why do I want 1,000,000 troops at the end of the month? Casualties are based upon troop numbers. Right now, we haven't been seeing fights where casualties are important because troop numbers have been so low that the formula barely kicks in. Usually, they start to make a difference in the 100,000 range. I'm aiming for a point where casualties are high enough that if a player is the victim of constant massings, he should lose troops faster than his UP generates them. This would bring his numbers down to a "floor" for his current UP, and while he is on that floor, weaker players can catch up to him. I could certainly split the one 40 UP upgrade for 10,000 points into four upgrades that cost 2,500 points a piece, but there wouldn't be much of a point. The point is that the formula works best and favors the lower ranked players if people start a little above zero rather than at zero.

"Snapping" isn't like that. Imagine swimming accrossed a pool. If you are physically fit, odds are it is a simple matter to pull off. You reach the other side, and then you rest. You could repeat the proceedure many times to swim for many miles. However, imagine swimming in the middle of the Atlantic. Even if you are an excellent swimmer, there is no place to rest, no source of fresh water, and no place to sleep. No matter how much you are able to handle, you will eventually come to a point where you reach your limit. This guy wasn't suffering from the pain of 3 or so rejections. He was suffering from the pain of never having a relationship with a woman for his entire life, and eventually his willpower ran out. Its not the capacity of the individual to endure hardship, its the inability of that individual to find eventual relief from that hardship that causes him to snap.

The second and third posts have been deleted. Post once at a time please. Besides, you will find I'm a lot more tolerant of opinions that don't center around dismissing one's opponants as "asuras". Thanks for reviving a dead irrelevant topic just to spam by the way...

The public school system I went to had three acts of violence. One occured in the elementary school I was in, one occured in a neighboring elementary school to the high school I was attending, and one occured after I went to college. The first was a dumb kid who had a hunting rifle and wanted to scare students by shooting out lights. The second was when a guy with a machete charged in and tried to hack at the students. The third was some kid killing the principle in a murder suicide. Admittingly, 2/3 of those incidents involved firearms. However, given the range of the third attack, it would easily have been possible to carry it out with a lesser weapon such as a knife. Yet on another hand, the guy with the machete would have had a much higher body count if he had a gun. I can't deny that it would be more difficult for a psycotic killer to go on a rampage with more firearms restrictions. However, that's a type of obstacle similar to a speed bump in a parking lot. It would be more of an annoyance than a actual preventative step. I've thought about it, and given enough time and planning a team of about 5 psycopaths could reliably take out 300,000 people at my university without any firearms. Granted they would likely not be psycotic in the first place if they had friends and patience, and granted that having guns would eliminate two or three moving parts from the process, but case in point destroying life is easy, and as technology advances it will become easier and easier to do so. Mankind simply has to learn to actively prevent violence from occurring now. From a practical standpoint, guns in the hands of the victims would be an actual deterrent, even if they are untrained. Yes, they might miss and take out other students, but the laws of probability would catch up with the killer before 30. As I was telling Astro though, it isn't appropriate at this point to debate this.

"Preventing" instances like this with security measures is impossible. Destroying life is so easy, and its impossible to protect the student body from the student body. This event doesn't shock me. I for one think its been a while since the last one. Society won't stop these shooters until we can understand them. By "understand", I sure as !@#$%^&* don't mean "feel sympathy towards". Infact, I believe it is sympathy itself that has lead to these types of killers. Suppose for some reason or another you really liked to follow rules. Suppose you were in a sort of long distance race. A short distance into the race the course crosses a street with no traffic. The streetlight says "do not walk". You stop, but your opponants jaywalk. However, the judges of the course are sympathetic and forgive the compe!@#$%^&*ors for such a minor infraction. Later in the course, there is a corner which turns around a lawn with a sign "Keep off the gr!@#$%^&*". You go around. Your compe!@#$%^&*ors cut accrossed the grass However, the judges decide that since this is a minor rule, they shouldn't be penalized for it. The rules of the race state "No outside help". About halfway through the race, you have to stop to drink water from a fountain. Your compe!@#$%^&*ors have friends who hand them bottles of water so that they can keep on running. The judges do not view this as unfair. Eventually, despite working harder than your compe!@#$%^&*ion, they still win, because they kept taking shortcuts and you did the course alone and by following the rules. The academic careers of these killers is similar. They like to follow the rules, which creates the situation in which anger builds up. For instance with a common homework !@#$%^&*ignment, they go home and do it themselves, whereas their classmates will form a group and do it collectively. Their classmates more often than not get better grades for less work because of this. The would be killer however has a social disorder and thus can't join a group, has to work five times harder for a grade that is much worse. They hate "second chances", following the logic that some people don't get their "first chance", and they deserve to have one before someone else gets two. Eventually they begin to lose the concept of fairness, and anger overwhelmes them. I don't know exactly how that anger morphs into psycotic rage. It easily builds up into a general desire to prove their superiority over others. I guess they pick up the belief that the act of killing somebody implies superiority from somewhere.

That wasn't what I was aiming for actually. I was thinking about two subaccounts programmed to reset and attack each other. Like so: A attacks B B resets A attacks B B resets . . . A runs out of turns B resets and buys one weapon B attacks A A resets B attacks A . . . . . Since new accounts start with nothing, it would require that B post and an hour p!@#$%^&* between attacks, which makes it both easy to catch and not worth much. More traditional multies are impossible to stop with preventative measures. However, they can be halted with reactive measures. The preceedure Suicide_Run described is the most common case. It doesn't usually bring in as much cash as you hope, runs the risk of somebody else taking the loot, and still shows up in the logs.

It's still possible to multi without transfers. According to the settings, all bank accounts are deleted when players are resetted.

You start with 40 UP, and it costs 4,000,000 for the first upgrade. However, to prevent people from exploiting some sort of respawn bug, all new accounts will start with nothing. To get the "initial" UP, they need 10,000 points which they can get from the arcade or by posting.

I can't say much that hasn't already been said here. The NAACP has been overboard since the 90s. Before they wanted equality, now they wish to set themselves apart. About 40 years after Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat, I can get on the bus and all the black people will be sitting in the back ANYWAY. Its not like anyone is forcing them back there. Apparently, they simply don't want to move up towards the front of the bus. I keep seeing commercials about how is "five times tougher" for a black man to get through college. Yeah right! Do they honestly think its easier for us white people? Its a pain in the !@#$%^&* for ANYONE to get through college. But overall, these protestors seem to have forgotten what racial discrimination is. Racial discrimination is having a mob stand outside a voting booth and preventing minorities from voting. Racial discrimination is not hiring a QUALIFIED candidate because the person is a minority. Racial discrimination is using a mob to scare minority families out of a town. Now they have gone overboard into psychobabble. Saying "If you are walking alone at night and are afraid of a group of 5 black people, you are racist subconsciously." Okay, first off, my father and his father before him have been !@#$%^&*aulted by black druggies for cash. At this point, I don't consider it "racism", I consider it "learning from my forefathers' mistakes". If the NAACP disagrees with me, then I suggest they get their "brothers" to obey the law, stop doing drugs, and get a !@#$%^&*ing job. Secondly, people can't control their subconcious. Subconsciously, Frued claims that people want to have sex with their parents. The desires to commit murder, rape, arson, and baby-!@#$%^&*ing are all in every person on a subconcious level. The most a person can do is make sure that those subconcious desires don't carry over into their actions. If you have done that, then you shouldn't feel guilty. Besides, its not racist if your "subconcious feeling" goes away in other situations. For instance, I don't get that feeling from co-workers (who have a job), or my college room-mate (doesn't have a job yet, but does have a career). I only attach it to hoodlums prowling the streets. Thus, scientifically my "subconcious feeling" applies to hoodlums rather than a certain race. Face it, sometime 30 years ago the NAACP had achieved all the victory it needed. However, instead of disband and move on to other issues, the organisation decided to mutate into some pathetic organisation that will search for opportunities for handouts or settlements. I mean, compaire it to Women's Rights organisations. There really aren't many prominant organisations for women's rights, but right now there are lots of women in college and professional careers. When they got in, they didn't seek to "distinguish themselves" by anything other than performance, didn't gripe about "cultural differences", and didn't give into paranoid delusions that people were still trying to hold them down. They just got in, did the work within the system provided, and for the most part earned what they deserved for their effort. Granted, I'm painting a rosy picture. In reality there was still some small segregation, but they created small organisations to deal with them. Point being was that they didn't continue to sit in the position they were before and whine, nor do they have a large national organsation wander around the country looking for people to sue.

The bank interest should be countered by the fact that you can't reach the UP max. As long as you can increase your UP, your growth rate is exponential (sort of), and when it does reach the max it is quadratic. All that is needed is to keep the bank exponential growth rate lower than the income exponential growth rate. However, don't worry about the bank, I'll decide what to do with it only after I figure out exactly what the income is going to look like. The reason the UP doesn't have a max is because about a dozen problems start to happen two weeks after everyone reaches it. I'm used to a system wherein UP and Covert skills had no max. Don't worry, the decision making process is simple: If you can't afford the next upgrade, focus on other things for a while. At a later time you will have a greater income, or you could just get a lucky attack, then you buy the upgrade. It doesn't take a lot of skill to figure out when something is unaffordable. Oh, I forgot to mention: The UP mentioned above will be hourly.

The sab system can't be changed without editing the core. If it could, I'd do my suggestion from the first post, but it can't. Instead, I'm actually planning on doing the opposite, allowing 11 covert actions per day, removing the army sized based attack limit, and removing that !@#$%^&* 5 attack phase limit. That way, you can sab someone's weapons or merely slaughter his forces by conventional means, provided you have the turns stockpiled, can pay the repair costs and don't mind the losses. There hasn't been any cases so far of a rank leader getting his !@#$%^&* pummeled by an angry mob of lowbies, chiefly because its impossible to attack someone for damage. Here's a gist of what I've got planned for the next round: First and foremost, by popular demand, transfers will not happen next round. Secondly, when you start the round or change race, you will start with NOTHING. No points, units, UP, or turns. The first UP upgrade will cost 10,000 points. Players can get those points either from the arcade or by posting once. Gross inflation should prevent people from abusing the arcade and from spamming. This should prevent automated scripts from rabidly reseting, as bots can't play in the arcade and if they posted like nuts it would be easy to notice. (Not that the old method doesn't light up like Tim Taylor's Christmas decorations in the logs.) Hourly income will be 100 per soldier, 50 per spy, and you don't get a !@#$%^&* thing for hiring mercs, though there will be more of them for those of you who like them. You will get turns at a rate of 2 per hour. If people don't cheat for turns this time, this should mean that you need to wait 5 hours between attacks. Thus, you need to make them count, and thus people can go to work, school, or sleep without having to worry about getting hit 20 times over. Now we move on to likely stats for next round, starting with UP. Please note right now that I will be running a few more predictions, and odds are some figures will be multiplied or divided by 10 as needed. My goal is to have the general population at the end of the month in the 100,000s, which allows for decent casualty rates as the game was designed for. Yes those numbers aren't very Subspacey. If I could edit the core so that casualties happened in the 1,000s, I'd do so. This is the UP Chart, V4.0: By the way, the idea is that people will probably not be able to afford any more upgrades by 140. However, people have been maxing out their UP really early so far, so I didn't want to take chances. I'll do some further investigation as to how fast income will grow in this system, but odds are Super Savings will be reinstated as they were in round 2, where it will proceed to contribute diddly squat as conventional income should blow it away. Seige and Fortification Technologies will be added. Prices will be set later. As for the ships, there will be 8 ships available at the start of the round. Halfway through the round, the Nightwasp will be added, which should be a more powerfull ship to benefit those who started late or just really sucked it up the first two rounds. Since Transfer will be disabled, the late bloomers will still have to start from scratch. I tried to attach a style of play to each ship rather than generic stat bonuses. Finally, that leads us to the armory. In addition to the stats above, each ship will have a special weapon which only that ship is capable of purchasing. All the others are universal except that the Terrier and Shark's specials will replace normal guns and the Weasel and Lancaster specials will replace normal bombs. Generally, you will have fewer options but more variety. Powerfull weapons will be LESS point efficient than weaker weapons. However, powerfull weapons require less troops to use them, so the player must decide if he wants to save points or save units. Also, there is a difference between bombs and guns, as well as their defensive counterparts. Guns will cost more up front whereas bombs cost more to repair. Two varieties of "Shrapnel" have been added. These weapons will be by ridiculous cost impossible to repair. Offensive shrapnel is for when your opponant's defense is a hair above your offense, whereas burst shrapnel is there to counter this. There are a lot of radical ideas here. If you people have any complaints about this system, speak up now before May.

Well, I guess that's it then. No transfers next month. I'm used to thinking in clan vs. clan terms. In those situations, transferring doesn't inherently improve a clan's position. All it can do is increase the strength of one player at the cost of another player, or it can move resources to or from the clan's unofficial supporters and their registered members. Either way the clans' true strength remains unchanged. I'm also unused to selflessness in RPGs. Most MMORPG players are immature pricks who wouldn't consider seperating themselves from their stats for anything less than real currency. The possibility of one player giving up his stats to another player is unheard of in the major MMORPGs. I've underestimated how mature Continuum players can be. Thus, next month transfers will be disabled pending an actual clan ranking system. To replace it commander/recruit options will be added.

Poll closed. Siege Techs won't be added.

The reset isn't going to occur until the new updates are ready, and they have been scheduled for May. I don't have permissions to modify the core, and most of the security measures needed to secure the game from cheaters require doing so. The Army Core was not designed as a stand alone RPG but rather an add-on to the forum, and thus really wasn't designed with hard-core cheaters in mind. I pmed Polix as to what is necessary for security, but it will take time. Essentially what this requires is to modify the Army Core into some kind of FrankenCore. The updates might get done sooner than May, but don't count on it. There are three options with transfer services: 1) Unlimited Transfers 2) No Transfers 3) Edit the core Unless the core can be edited, there will likely be no transfers at all next month. Also, I'd like to put a cap on the number of race changes, but since that also requires editing the core, new players will start with no resources and will have to post for initial supplies. Thus the era of people spamming the forums for points might very well return. There are two more updates that I feel need to occur, but I won't mention them because it involves a type of cheating that to my knowledge has not occured yet, and I don't want to give the cheaters any new ideas. Point being, a bunch of very pointless and annoying updates will occur just to prevent "intelligence" as Shock put it. I know most of the ways people cheat in the serious versions of these games and the settings of the Army Core simply cannot be modified to prevent all of them. If cheating occurs next month, we might have to remove the game entirely. If you people want to, I could salvage this round if I edit the settings so that while no one will lose their stuff, the game will become much more compe!@#$%^&*ive. All it would take is to add a few zeros to the end of some values.