>CLOP has risen once more! Come play a fresh new round of the decade old browser game about building nations, geoponitics, and oppression!Build nations, make deals, forge alliances, BETRAY alliances! Pretend to be confused when they retaliate! Do whatever it takes to succeed in the chaotic political landscape.>Link to the game itselfhttps://4clop.org/>Previous threadshttps://rentry.co/clop-threadsCome join >CLOP and help make the drama happen!What's different?IRC is back!A new admin with more passion than sense!A slightly cheaper URL!DNA is plutonium! It'll make sense!A victory condition! First to ascend wins! Terrible idea or genius? We'll find out!Harder ascension! Now that it's worth doing, we don't want it to be too easy!>Reset when?About 5 days ago!
the ichkmareian government is excited to announce another 100 development bonds that we issued! our biggest batch yet!just 7000 bits each! that means you're getting oil for just 4000 bits! that's really cheap! get half of it immediately, the rest after all the bonds are sold out!more information at our web site: https://rentry.co/chechnya
I need input.Most of the game's problems are downstream from player count, so my focus is currently on recruiting and on boarding. Buffy had kindly offered to help with advertising, but sadly I belive that offer has been rescinded. I'm assuming the responsibility falls to me again, but I'm still hoping to get some feedback.The landing page is not welcoming, so I'm going to overhaul it. What does it need? I want the login parts to stay at the top so nobody has to scroll, but there should be something else.So far I'm got a short description of the game and a link to a quick start guide. Anything else?
>>43454320Err, Huffy. Not Buffy.My bad.
>>43454282is it too late to get in the game as a beginner?
Why do you have two threads?
>>43454332One thread was made by a mentally ill troon to tell people to stop playing the game. The other was made by a mentally ill horsefucker so we'd have a place to discuss it.>>43454326Nope! Building up gets easier as the global economy becomes more established, and there are softcaps on everything to mitigate snowballing. It's not too late until somebody is on the cusp of victory.
>>43454332Their little circlejerk is mired in namefag drama.It's just more poopdickschizo nonsense.
>>43454361It's literally one guy who had a complete meltdown and made a new thread at 400 posts while literally spamming his poopdickschizo shit over and over (which the jannies took over a day to wipe, and still left his thread up for some reason)Nobody else has any drama, other than in-game rivalries of course
>>43454326Like the other anon said, definitely not.You miss out on the utter struggle where everyone is poor as shit and trying to survive. Whether that's an important experience or not varies depending on your taste. But this is literally just the first ~5 days of any new instance and after that it gets into midgame and lategame for months on end.You're still early enough that you'll catch the midgame btw.
>>43454320just need a neater guide that makes it clear how things work. like imagine a new player. u start making ur account. it asks u what nation u want to be without telling u what that even entails - it's pretty easy to miss the guide and the guide is just a wall of old black mostly plaintext.also accept that players r retarded and like images being jingled. show them an apple pic next to burrozil or whatever. that'd make the page look more full n nicehow much would it cost to advertise? have we tried reddit? surely there's sites or even discord servers with players looking for games? isn't >CLOP based off of some other politics game? i bet that original precursor has players who miss the formula. could nudge them!
Were it not for my holy duty to eradicate TNN, I'd have dedicated all of myself towards revitalizing the free market properly.
>>43454499Attempts have been made on the PBBG reddit and MLP reddit. The former ate an instant ban since you're not allowed to mention a game without having enough post history, apparently. The latter had a bit of success, and we'll probably try again later.Advertising on the BLOC reddit is a great idea. And Derpi is like, 40 usd a month. I don't like how little they say about their metrics, but I've been told by some returning players that's where they first saw it so it's probably worth a shot.A better guide is a great idea and I shamelessly wrote a quick start guide while at work that will be linked on the login page. I'll hopefully have that up shortly after getting home. It will need expansion and iteration, though.
>>43454533You can advertise on derpi by uploading >CLOP images ^:)
>>43454320I think what's really missing is a>I just opened the site and what is this?section for completely brand new players.Like the other anon said, when you are new, it asks you to create a nation and you don't even know what it does. Then it just dumps you on the main page and you have no idea what the different pages even do.The guides are somewhat decent at providing a starter strategy but most people aren't gonna click on another page and read a bunch of text or someone's google doc, and not all of it is immediately relevant. I think the current guide are in a kind of weird spot where they're too wordy to be a good "I'm brand new wtf do I do" immediate helper, while also being too shallow to actually explain proper strategy to new players.But the other big obstacle is really the clunky UI, where every click of a button reloads the page because it's entirely PHP based. On the login page in particular, clicking "New User" (which should be renamed to "Register" btw, who the fuck calls it "New User") loads a SECOND form underneath the login, and it's very unclear at first that you are not in fact expected to put your desired username and password in the username and password fields, but must instead scroll down to only fill in the second form.More generally, people bemoan the javascript-ridden modern internet but a literal game is an actually good usecase for having javascript in the page, and this doesn't mean it has to be a massive React app or whatever, but simple stuff like doing an action should happen directly on the page rather than submitting a form and reloading. Basically I think the entire game should be redesigned/rewritten, but that's probably a bigger undertaking than anyone might be able to do right now. So for new users, tl;dr:>Fixing up the Register page to not be a mess>Giving a bit of info on how to pick a nation, right on the register page>Maybe making shit like the markets and alliance pages all public so people can look at what's going on before creating their first nation>A cut-down really short guide for "where do I click, what are the pages I should look at, what's the first thing I do in a new nation, help I'm immediately out of money what's the second thing I should work towards afterwards?" immediately shown directly to new users, not on a separate guide pageWould probably help a ton.
>>43454532I sympathise with that
>>43454549oh yea like as a new player. u literally dont even know that ur supposed to go to the actions page first. or the resources market. or the difference between that and the buyers market. it's pretty rough if ur not a horsefucker or already familiar with autistic webgameswhile we're here any former hacker wars players god i loved that game
>>43454323>Literally untrueI Evil Princess HuffyFilly(horse) never said it was off. The ad is still being produced anon, do not worry
THIS IS THE FAKE THREAD, IGNORE THE RETARDS IN THIS SLIDE THREAD TRYING TO MISDIRECT YOUREAL THREAD:>>43448194>>43448194>>43448194
Can we just ban Huffy (assuming it's confirmed he's the one shitting up all this)This is genuinely annoying and anons from the catalog are getting put off from the game because of all the schizoposting
>>43454696Banning Huffy from the game = More of the thread being shat up. Can't exactly ban them from the board alongside it.
>>43454696>assuming it's confirmed he's the one shitting up all thisDude has openly admitted to being, like, 2/3 of all the schizos on the board for the last five years.Of course it's him.
>>43454696>mindraped by huffy>>43454742>openly admittedThis was never said, are you lying or schizophrenic. Every 2/3 posts you've disliked in the past five years have infact not been huffyhorse and you are a nutjob.
>>43454717So what, are you gonna let him hold the thread hostage, because if we do anything to upset him you're afraid he's gonna shitpost more?If he shitposts too much and makes it extremely obvious he's just spamming, then the jannies will just have an easier time stepping in, so yes if he starts just constantly breaking the rules he'll ban himself from the board just fine.Keeping him in the game = he sticks around and has no reason to get bored or leave = this thread continues being shat up for the upcoming weeks and months. No thanks, I'd rather he either gets bored and gives up after the ban, or has a melty and catches enough 3days to where he's no longer a problem.
>>43454766Dude literally bought a banner ad on the entire fucking website linking to his personal youtube account where he had a video announcing he was almost done with his extensive research on darkdoomer and saying that when it was finally made public he would get canceled soooooo hard (it never arrived). Never underestimate a schizo THAT unhinged.It's not my fault you're not here often enough to see his many, many, many meltdowns.
>>43454801If you want a safe space reddit is that wayBesides, you need to be new to think there isn't worse shitposters out there, look at the marefair thread...
>>43454808How the fuck is not caring to see someone literally spaming the same thing was wanting a "safe space"There's a reason not every board is just /b/>you need to be new to think there isn't worse shitposters out thereWhat's your logic, any kind of shitposting is fine as long as it's not THE worst shitposting of all time? What kind of excuse is that
>>43454533The most important thing you gotta add to the account creation/nation creation page is the following, add it right before the nation type selection.Burrozil:These nations are the sole producers of apples, coffee and drugs. The first two are used to keep your ponies happy the more you industrialize, the latter lets you turn relations with the superpowers into money, at a cost. There can be no industry without bread and circus.Zebrica:These nations are the sole producers of Copper, Tungsten and Gems, all of these are needed to produce parts for industrial purposes, there's no industry without these raw materials.Saddle Arabia:These nations can only produce Oil, but they produce it in vast excess. Oil is mainly used to make energy, either directly or by processing it into gasoline first, though it can be refined into plastics as well. There's no production without energy.Przewalskia:Unlike the other nation types, Przewalskians have no natural resources whatsoever, but their land is ripe for industrial manufacturing. They produce all industrial parts at a 10% the normal cost of, can build industries cheaper than normal, and get a starting factory to jumpstart their economy.Note: Przes are critically dependent on external resources for ANY production, and are by their very nature, extremely competitive with other Przes, take this into account if you choose to be a Prze.Aside from the aforementioned base resources, all nations can produce any of the refined materials if they get the precursor base material.
>>43455204good but possibly a warning about drugs. tanking superpower rep gets noobs killed for drugs they can't sell for a week
>>43455204Without copper, there will be no weapons
>>43454320Also semi-related, but shouldn't there be an actual prevention measure for destroying all of your buildings before being conquered? The rules say you can't do that unless you leave some arbitrary number of upkeep. Why don't just have it so that you can only destroy 1 building per tick or something
>>43455265Not a good idea, at the late game you could very well end up needing to demolish like 30 buildings if your economy starts going down the shitter. You cannot afford to extend that by 30 ticks.The middleground would be disallowing bulk building disabling if you're getting invaded the next wartick, but that poses the issue of people sending 1 horse with a pistol to every nation to stop them from nuking buildings.
>>43455286Just disable the buildings ez
>>43455379>Just disable the buildings ezdisabled buildings cost 1 sat each
>>43455442It's over. Well it's better than tanking the whole sat loss value of some buildings. It could also serve as a deterrent to overexpansion.
>>43455445disabling absolutely has it's place, later some of the sat costs get insane if you build big, unlike the 2-3 sat per resource building in earlygameas a feature suggestion, maybe it should take a snapshot each tick since an attacking army is sent, so the admin can at least easily lookup what existed for an easy restore if it gets spited
Go on Zaam. Fucking do it bitch. Be the reason copper dips below 2000
>>43455204I think, for a brand new player, this can be simplified a lot. What they care about is "what nation should I pick and why", not "what are all the resources each nation can make". Drugs for example are all but irrelevant in most builds except for special cases.Here's what I would put:>BurrozilMain suppliers of apples (and coffee), which are by far the main bottleneck for Satisfaction. The amount of burrozils determines the hard cap on how far everyone else can scale up, and more burrozil nations are almost never unwelcome.>Saddle ArabiaMain suppliers of oil, which is needed for energy to make everything run, as well as some advanced items and for war. Needed in fewer numbers than Burrozil, but nevertheless almost always useful.>ZebricaProducers of raw resources required for building all infrastructure and most of the advanced army units, but intense consumers of apples and oil. Often, the cap of how many materials can be mined is set by how many apples there are to feed to the zebras, unless there's a significant shortage of Zebrica nations.>PrzewalskiaProduces no resources whatsoever, but provides heavy discounts for production of advanced materials that other nations could otherwise make at great expense. As a result, a single Przewalskia nation can often supply 10+ other nations, and if there are more than a handful in the game it becomes a zero-sum competition.
>>43455286Yeah maybe something like>if you're getting invaded and your defense isn't good enough, you can't destroy anything>the sat penalty cap no longer applies: in your war-torn nation on the brink of collapse, your ponies can't find the resources or opportunity to rebel no matter how unhappy they are, so even if you disable everything and halt all production, the victor will enter a ravaged but still standing nationSo when an army is on the way your choices are either make a defending army or just take it.If someone sends 1 horse with a pistol you can just make 1 horse with a machine gun and continue destroying normally since the game will calculate that you are not going to get successfully invaded. It's annoying but defender upkeep is cheaper than attacking army upkeep IIRC so it's still a net loss for the attacker.
>>43455885maybe mention that pretzels benefit the most from being highly active, and require being the most social in messaging & doing deals. while burro/saddle are the most chill with only a single input each for upkeep and zebs in between
>>43455904>1 horse with a pistolHas this ploy ever worked?
>>43455937>Has this ploy ever worked?yes. often an 'activity check' is sent if a nation looks inactive. but some take this as an act of hostility
>>43455937Not literally 1 horse but "activity checking" is a thingYou just send a few horses with a few pistols and if the guy defends and goes "wtf bro" you just laugh it off, no harm, no foul, but if the guy happens to not be checking the game for a couple of days...I think last iteration someone sent activity checks against an entire alliance that looked sluggish and managed to nab literally half the alliance's nations or something which was hilarious
>>43455939>ast iteration someone sent activity checks against an entire alliance that looked sluggish and managed to nab literally half the alliance's nations or somethingOperation spice trade. Gytha is most certainly a war criminal, but did nothing wrong there. They would have got the other nations but they died to rebels proving inactive, and I believe one came back and the forces were recalled. Hive buggo? it's been a long time.Unless you're referring to Clopper taking like 2/3 the CEF nations. They were doing a mass ascend and every nation you own gets attacked, so offloading them was the only viable path
>>43455944Oh yeah it was Gytha and probably spice yeah, that's the one
>>43455944What does ascending do anyways in this iteration? I'm assuming it either makes your nation invulnerable or just deletes it with a "you win :)"
>>43455825He's done it. Copper is a worthless resource.
>>43455979
>>43455979Zigger bros.....our response?
>>43456038>Zigger bros.....our response?Holy jihad against the infidel. Behead those who insult the copper market
>>43455979Copperfags suffer TERMINAL cortisol spike after being price mogged by oilGODS.
>>43455951>dna is plutoniumyou get to nuke people when you ascend trust me
U guys realise this is like a diplomacy and shit game rightIf Zaam is crashing the market just get ur Non-Zeb buddies to embargo him and threaten to invade him and all that siht!
>>43456162Yes because all the non-zeeb nations are DEVASTATED by the free copper they're all getting.
>>43456166Power of Friendship bitch I said BUDDIES they should be able to UNDERSTAND and if u rlly wanna sweeten the deal u can give them temporary 1000 Copper and an assurance to help them with their trade bullshit in the future or whatever. But mostly friendship should be a good enough motivator
anyone up to invade iran for oil (in 4clop)
>>43456162We're still in the hunky dory era of 4clop so we've been making friends (for the moment)
>>43456162>embargoso he can't buy copper from the other zebs, doesn't stop undercuttingand noob protection so can't invade...yet!
>>43456162>>43456248>go to war with another country because goods are too cheap>win war and costs go up ????
Site may be down
>>43456410Can confirm. It's down for me too, and the "is it down" also says it's down.Before it died it was really sluggish, like a good 5m before a response parsed through.My guess is the pinkieschizo is DDOSing the shit out of the server, and since it's a simple host with no cloudflare sloppa, it's getting tanked.
For the few IRC-chads: I've tested and Goguma works really well as a mobile IRC client (importantly, with chathistory support).
>>43456410Zaam crashed the market so hard it took the world with himselfThe fire rises
>>43455937>>43455938When you see the same one unarmed horse in your incoming feed for a week even after you build defenders, you tune it out. That's when they add one more and give both of them guns.
