"Unwritten rules"

[Mr President]

You raise an interesting point and maybe it's just been the 10 years since I last played but is there always just 1 Indy that breaks away by the 5th day and then it becomes pointless to play for top NW?

This is something that has always bothered me. In a perfect world where nothing bad happens and you can just net the set away, then yes, I guess it's true that someone could just steal the set. And nowadays, I guess this happens a lot more. I remember back in the day when a nation had the top state, those leaders needed to do a lot of diplomacy to help protect this state. They needed to make deals and alliances and pacts in order to help keep that state safe. I never agreed with someone ruining someone else's state for "just cause" but at the same time, I don't think a state should be able to win a round "just cause". If a Nation works hard to help keep the top state safe and interacts with other leaders AND the top state works hard and makes the right choices, then yes, he or she deserves to win the set and I applaud them. Right now, no deals are made. Leaders are not interacting and it's the "norm" to just say, well it's just a given that they are going to win because they broke away after day 5 or 6 or 7 or whatever day and I think that is sad. We are missing a whole element that made this game great back in the day. Everyone wants me to hard code something to make it easier or harder but yet, nobody wants to put forth an effort to help bring, in what I consider, the best element of the game and that is diplomacy. The fact that the same state wins set after set doesn't mean they are good, it means people are lazy. We have all gotten lazy and maybe that is because we are older and don't want to stay up all hours of the night warring and maybe its because membership is low. Maybe membership is low because the game is boring without all of the elements being played. Who knows but we really should be doing more to make the game a little more exciting.

It does become less fun knowing that neither of us will ever have enough turns to actually finish each other off. War attacks need to do 2x the damage they do currently for 1v1 wars to result in anyone dying.

Agreed. It's basically a back and forth of attacking with no real outcome. This is where diplomacy comes in. Reach out to other states for help. Make deals and alliances. If you help me today, I'll help you tomorrow type of thing. Many wars were averted back in the day because we would know that if we attacked Nation A then Nation B would help them and attack us. We needed to prepare for that and have Nation C jump Nation B. All these types of planning no longer happen. And maybe it's gone forever (I really hope not) and maybe we should just remove all war attacks and make it a netting only game.