Aileron

Now that I look at things though, there may be hope here. What's needed to combat Islamic Fanaticism is Islamic Moderationism. Iran, in an effort to gain political support from Europe, is catering to a moderationist agenda. Such actions show that being Islamic doesn't contradict living in the modern world. For example, its famous in the Middle East that women have to wear burkas in public. However, Iran currently has a economic desire to promote tourism. The problem they had is that women obviously can't swim in a burka, therefore beaches and resorts could not service women. The fanaticist "solution" to this problem would be to declare beaches and resorts as an afront against Islam because it may cause a conflict. The moderationist solution was to take out their copy of the Quaran, read it over, and find our why the women must wear burkas. It turns out the reason some Islamic women have to wear burkas in public is to "cover their chests" in the presence of men that are not their husbands. So, they decided about a month ago to take some beach and declare it "women only". That way, Islamic traditions are upheld, but they still get to make their money from women going to the beach for vacation. As an added bonus, telescopes and binoculars are selling like hotcakes for no apparent reason. I guess birdwatching is getting popular. The serious point to all this is that while under this political pressure, Iran has done much to garner support from the west by modernizing. Maybe by the time this is over, they will modernize enough that war need not happen.

If you don't need sleep you can attack all night, and if you drink blood you don't have to spend time cooking food.

Being a vampire really helps in this game...

again, 2 hours is fine, but getting 60,000 units every two hours is a little much. It should get really expensive to start upgrading UP at 400 per two hours. First off, the cost of UP upgrades should be quadratic, though the effect of upgrading UP should be linear. I'd say it should start at 10, and every upgrade should add another 10. However, the cost of upgrading should increase over time quadratically so that its harder to go from 90 to 100 than it is to go from 20 to 30. Right now, UP doubles in cost and effect per upgrade, which makes the cost curve linear, which does not help low players catch up. There is some good news now though...the right person is back in the #1 slot.

Did you just call me an evil genius?

Excel quit apparently. Lots of people have. Polix, Syrus, and Veg. All three of them would be rivals of the big 4 right now if they didn't. I guess they got sick of having to get on every hour.

Well, then you would need to get on every 20 minutes. The problem is that people earn too much gold per turn. Income should be roughly 1/8th what it is now. That way, you have to wait two hours for the target to earn enough money for profit and eight hours to get a good haul. Right now, one of my turns equals 500 top-notch weapons. I was hoping that by now it would scale out...as armies grew, repair costs would grow, and people would need patience, but apparently that isn't the case. I'll give it a couple more days, but if things don't fix themselves I'm proposing we just all quit. We have to check in more often than a teenage !@#$%^&* after her parents came home early and caught her throwing a wild sex party.

I have mine too. The problem is I haven't been able to act on it because the server won't let me do anything to you.

I'd just settle for fixing that !@#$%^&* attack cap. Here's his attacks on me: 2 hours ago Ducky Lost 146,909,200 Gold 10 534 298 442,693,956 296,822,185 Details 3 hours ago Ducky Lost 128,848,382 Gold 10 1,838 4,068 348,274,460 205,878,431 Details 3 hours ago Ducky Lost 0 Gold 1 1,157 2,893 307,687,975 234,591,898 Details 9 hours ago Ducky Lost 5,334,582 Gold 10 51 692 386,152,568 77,082,385 Details 10 hours ago Ducky Lost 106,636,299 Gold 10 440 2,658 277,571,214 134,327,007 Details 12 hours ago Ducky Lost 369,101,718 Gold 10 126 486 181,409,291 59,922,986 Details 12 hours ago Ducky Attack defended 1 124 269 89,113,798 103,633,959 Details 20 hours ago Ducky Lost 3,340,751 Gold 10 53 396 143,072,201 88,618,019 Details A day ago Ducky Lost 35,014,362 Gold 10 216 174 93,328,037 46,962,045 Details A day ago Ducky Lost 107,187,727 Gold The worst part is I haven't been able to attack him back for this entire time. Every time he attacked, I tried to attack back but got the "too many attacks on this user" message. If it weren't for that !@#$%^&* limit, he would have had to build defense when he was building his !@#$%^&* uber-offense.

Alright this is irritating. Its irritating enough to have to bank my money every hour when usually you don't have to for this type of RPG. Furthermore, its irritating that it takes less time to execute an attack than it does to bank. Finally, it's irritating that when I want to get money back from my attacker, who seems to by the way to have next to no defense, that I get a message about too many attacks.

Catching up UPwise is possible. It gets more difficult to increase as you go up. The system is designed on a fundimental level to help low level players catch up. I'm not opposed to a reset at this point. I came and I've had my fun. I don't think I'll play the next round to be honest. These things can drive you crazy if you play them too much...I'm serious. All that sleep depravation and the constant fear of someone taking your loot can do mental damage. I've seen people crack.

I'm not sure, but I think what's going on is that they come out of phase and get attacked again. I have noticed that Ducky doesn't attack me when he is phased.

Sorry about backing out of the last contest. This new one is simple: First person to phase out Varsity gets 20mil Gold. (Again phasing = attack them until you get the message about the player receiving too many attacks.) PM me after you phased him out for verification and then reward.

Actually, technically all I've been doing is letting you acquire gold all night and then get up at 5 in the morning to take it all at once. Ducky beat my strategy by getting up at 4 in the morning. To be honest we are both sleeping, but implying that we don't intimidates our enemies!

AceSpades was the one who had the headstart. I know it doesn't look like it, but the lead the elites have over the 100bies is small. More good news: You aren't competing with the elites. You can't attack us and we can't attack you. More more good news: Even if we could attack you, large armies create large bills. My army for one can't attack for anything less than a mil. Otherwise, I lose money.

As I said, what gives us the right to do so is the fact that the person was found guilty of a crime by a jury of their peers. The fact that we put the person through the justice system beforehand is what makes us different than the murderer. Yes, usually the murderer will "justify" his case in his mind, whereas we created a system that eliminates our own individual opinions and tries the suspect objectively. That is ofcourse in theory. There's a little catch phrase going around: "The difference between a cop and a robber is not the gun, it's the badge." The cop's actions are justified because his actions are sanctioned by society. He is not acting of himself but as an agent of the public's will. Our justice system is similar, which creates the difference between execution and murder. War is different. Theorhetically if there is some overall moral cause the justifies the loss of life. In practice that is rarely the case, thus war is usually wrong. If the cause is unjustified the blame rests on the people calling the shots rather than the ones taking orders.

I wanted to get somebody to phase you, but apparently you have received too many attacks recently. Its odd that you can still attack me though... I'm not complaining though...I've come up with a new mas!@#$%^&*ly plan.

cough *build unit production fool* cough Seriously, Ducky has gone from last to second in about two days, and that was with me doing everything I could think of to hamper his progress. How did he do it? Unit Production. UP means more troops. More troops mean more income. More income means you can afford the next UP upgrade. It's a self-sustaining system. Use the change to build the rest of your stats. You'd be suprised how fast you can grow/catch up if you focused on nothing except UP for a while.

Alas, I can only go three days without sleep. Oh well, time to knock you back down to #3.

Hmmm...I've thought about it. Actually the logic of these extremists is impeccable. Why should the Israeli Jewish bend over backwards to keep the site a Muslim Temple? It can't be to better relations with their muslim neighbors. Their neighbors are engaging in acts of terrorism and protesting the Jew's very existence regardless. It can't be because its the "right" thing to do spiritually. From the Jewish point of view the spiritually right thing to do would be to convert the building back into a Jewish temple. It can't be to protect freedom of religion. Those of muslim faith in Israel can practice their faith in a different building. They really only need a mat anyway. It can't be to better their opinion the eyes of the world. The rest of the world doesn't really care about that building. As mean as discomp!@#$%^&*ionate as these extremists are, I think they may have an idea here...if their enemies are going to play them out as an enemy of the Islamic faith regardless, there is little point in not playing the role.

Um, let me try to understand all the leaps you are trying to make here. First off you are trying to imply that pursuing justice is somehow playing God. It is true that no one mortal is qualified to force justice on the world...that's why we have a justice system. Then you imply that justice is an entirely Christian concept when it isn't. There wasn't a civilization in history that didn't have a concept of justice. Then you claim all Christians are Crusaders, when there isn't a Christian alive today who deserves the !@#$%^&*le. Then you claimed that of all wars in history the Crusades were somehow one of the worst. Hardly. A lot of good came out of them. For the first time in history, people rallied under a cause other than "the King said so". They also unified Europe somewhat as various city-states united under the same cause. Finally they brought works of arts and sciences. Most of the Greek works, such as half of Euler's writings, had been lost with the fall of Greece and Rome but copies had been translated and stored in universities in the Middle East, and during the Crusades, Crusaders took those works back to Europe where they became the foundation for modern science. Were it not for the Crusades those works would have either been lost to the fall of Islamic science or the Mongols. Most historians that don't have an axe to grind will tell you that the Crusades were a partial cause of the Renaissance.

!@#$%^&*, nevermind...he seems to be already phased and attacking anyway. Contest Cancelled

I'll pay 20mil Gold to whoever phases out Ducky before the next turn at 8:15 EST. Just keep attacking him until you get the screen telling you that you can't attack any more. He has a 50mil defense. You don't need an offense higher than his defense in order to do damage towards phase, but it helps. PM me after you phased him out.

Hmm...come to think of it metal detectors in school clearly violates the Second Amendment. I'm not saying guns SHOULD be allowed in school, but if you are forcing someone to go to a school and then ban weapons from that school, you are effectively telling people that they can't bear arms for a certain period of time. Obviously that isn't what the second amendment is about, but still... Not likeing the IAEA is something I don't blame Iran for actually. "If you are innocent, you have nothing to hide." is the classic arguement used by tyrants to spy on their people. Besides, Iran is a sovereign nation with a right to controll what goes on in their own borders. The point here is that other sovereign nations are concerned what goes on. We are asking to see what's going on inside Iran and Iran is complying in a minimalist manner, as they should be doing. Those facilities answer to Tehran, not New York. Especially since, IAEA has often been accussed of having spies inside its organization. The Iraqis under the Baathists did accuse the IAEA of having American spies inside of it, as a lot of facilities the IAEA looked at were clearly well known by the US. I'd conjecture that they had it backwards...the US intelligence found out those facilities first and pointed the IAEA towards that location in hopes of making it public. Still, there may be a concern by the Iranian high ups that the IAEA is gathering intelligence for a possible invasion. Really, the only hard thing that distubs me about Iran is the funding of Hezbollah and Hamas. That doesn't really mix to safely with any step towards nuclear capability. Admittingly, Pakistan and India to some extent have had ties to terrorists and have nukes, but haven't used them yet. However, that conflict was territorial, not ideological. Overall, you can't blame the UN for wanting to tread carefully in this matter.

The debate is "life in prison" vs "death", not "death" vs. "mess with their head and let them back out into society". We are !@#$%^&*uming the criminal has either done multiple homocides or was in the miltary or some high ranking government position and has committed an act of treason. To my knowledge those are the only two crimes that can get a capital sentence. Lets assume the former case, because the latter is a matter of oathtaking. Are you telling me that its worth trying to rehabilitate someone who lets say is a serial killer who has 15 murders under his belt? I can only think of one way to do it that would reliably work...were it not cruel and unusual it still wouldn't be much better than execution. Even if you rehabilitate a serial killer, there's no way in heck that we would ever let him out of prison, so yes, I say rehabilitation in the case of the crimes which can get somebody a capital sentence is indeed "screwed". I've worked in a hospital and seen the dead bodies of innocents killed by murderers. I've seen first hand what murderers can do to people who may not have been falsely accused of a crime but also are innocent. The solution to preventing the conviction of innocents is to improve the judicial system. Forgiveness is one thing, but on the other hand there's just being naive.