How about this?

* Players cannot play untagged or detag.
* Tag admins can assign roles to their members to limit how they can landgrab players in other tags.
* Special attacks cannot be done unless a tag declares war on another tag and a certain amount of time passes before war starts.
* A clan can send a UNAP proposal to another clan. If the receiving clan accepts then neither clan can attack or perform harmful spy ops on the other for the rest of the round. An optional part of the proposal would be for the sending clan to provide X worth of FA by Y week of the set. If the tribute isn't sent by the deadline then the pact automatically breaks. The pact is otherwise unbreakable.

The general expectation is that clans that wish to net would want to get as many UNAPs as they can as quickly as possible. Clans that wish to war would want to limit their UNAPs to what they need for their strategic interests. A clan's UNAPs can be discovered by performing an alliance spy on one of their tag admins. As a special exception, we would allow players to share this information on Alliance Talk.

I don't know what players would do this mechanic, but here are a few scenarios:

1) A solo player creates a clan and wishes to net by himself. He is able to get UNAPs with all major clans and nets in peace.
2) A solo player creates a clan and wishes to eventually suicide on an alliance. He refuses a UNAP request from his future target. His future target finds this suspicious and bribes a warring clan to kill the solo player.
3) A warring tag demands FA from a netting tag in exchange for a UNAP. The netting tag agrees and pays the cost for the UNAP.
4) A warring tag demands an unreasonable amount of FA in exchange for a UNAP. The netting tag either prepares for war or simply skips the round and plays their countries on the Cooperation Server instead.
5) Two tags war each other. They use the UNAP mechanic to make peace for the rest of the round.

Game enforced pacts combined with the inability to avoid by leaving a tag (essentially take it with you) would go a long way.

None of the rest is really necessary, or it's at least unclear if it would be beneficial or solves a real problem.

I would suggest supporting persistent tags and multi reset pacts for the lazy.

BTW as written you've essentially created cross tag FA as an abuse unless the game enforced pact somehow stops that as well.

What incentive does a large warring tag have to grant a UNAP to a small netting tag? I'll admit that sending tribute isn't much of an incentive but I can't think of anything else.

Can you explain what you mean by "cross tag FA as an abuse"?

None.

Big picks on small.

Small might have a fighting chance if big didn’t have a tractor trailor load of bots ready to be unleashed.

Small might have a fighting chance if it were a level playing field but if you are going to allow all sorts of outside tools, a small clan will probably never get off the ground unless it grovels.

If you don’t grovel, you’re targeted.

Make the game fair. Remove all outside tools and let the chips fall where they may. Otherwise the Server will become more and more inbred… Deliverance Empires.

Otherwise this game is Top Notch.

Josey, didn’t your spam tag of 7 attacked a warring tag of 12?

You’re full of fluff. Big picks on small… You guys griefed a larger netting tag the previous set and also got rekt.

More like small picks on big, gets tired of restarting when the attack dogs showed up. You’ve been the aggressor for 2 sets in a row

It means if you sign a unap with a tag but then they send mass FA to another tag which is used it to hit you, then the game mechanic removes your recourse.

Large warring tags have historically not had any problem pacting small netting tags, what this proposal does is normalize the extortion of small tags.

The recent problem isn't being unable to get pacts, it's the unilateral breaking of unbreakable pacts that is the issue.

TC - I actually think the prospect of proxy wars is interesting and would be fun.

All it takes is 3 netting countries to turn a 20v20 won war into a lost one, it's extremely powerful as you can create multiple hard to kill breakers every day.

If a clan violates the norms of the server then the victim can either get their allies to attack them, can ask for their police to intervene, or can get revenge in the next reset. I think it would be great if clans performed ingame actions that offended other clans which led to wars.

Let me explain it another way. It appears that there were effectively zero real wars this reset. Adding UNAPs to the game will by definition restrict player to player interaction. Is there some other way to balance that out?

That kind of makes having netting countries as part of a war alliance as valuable. Seems like something that would be good, no? Likewise, couldn't 10 netting countries turn 5 war countries into powerhouses vs 15 others?

There were some skirmishes. The warring clans destroyed the russian speaking players that decided to suicide on several tags. The warring clans also elimited Josey wales's crew when they decided to kill someone from a warring tag and then missile dumped the rest of the players.

Also adding enfoced pacts is pointless, because unaps can also be violated if a player decides to slander and libel on the forums. This is probably the reason why a disgraced former game dev is crying about. He thought he could hide behind a unap while simultaneously slander, libel, and prod his enemies.

Wholesale pablum.

Josey and crew have suicided every clan on the server and then blame others for uniting to fight them. How utterly ridiculous you look asking for development to support your bad behavior and sheer lack of diplomatic ability.

The corollary with game-enforced UNAP's is that FDP's would be way more challenging - and I could see the argument that people need to determine everyone else's status with each other before signing (like it was done in the old days), but with the low member tags, they could say they're giving everyone a UNAP but then order of operations their way into 'missing' an alliance and the community would not be able to work together like they do today. Or do so with the promise of FA and then fail to do so. I guess to your point, maybe the war groups hold off any unnecessary UNAP's as security, which promotes some additional diplomacy between netters and warrers.

To Coalie's point, maybe the pacts can be breakable, but with a longer declare war option and at some required FA cost (perhaps determined in the initial creation of the pact, with an unreasonably high value set for the strongest of alliances). This could help with a number of the issues (FDP requiring help, another alliance saying things in discord or forums that pushes escalations, another alliance plays in a way that is 'harmful' to your gameplay, etc).

Forget about the aid part of UNAPs, it seems that no one likes that. I should better try to explain the problems I'm looking to solve:

1) Big netting clans have a strong incentive to farm and kill little netting clans

Suppose a big netting clan got suicided on by a single country tag last round. They might conclude that the best policy going forward is to farm and kill any small tags. UNAPs provide a way for a small tag to indicate to a large tag that they mean no harm to them. If some tags, warring or otherwise, decide that they don't want to sign UNAPs that's fine.

2) Taking on new members is risky for netting clans

A new member could suicide on another tag, start a war, or even suicide on your own tag. Clan admins should be able to set their clan's policy ingame to make it safer to recruit new members. Ideally, the worst thing that a new member can do to a netting tag is to finish with a low NW. If this is true then we could easily add a feature to the game which allows new players to join a random tag that is accepting new members.

Slag, If you guys just put the bots as yellow in-game then we would know who is a person and who isn't.

There is a lot of growth right now, clans and leaders are actively nurturing and growing by giving the players something they want. There's no secret sauce to it, its just doing and networking. The heavy lifting is on the clans to do it and us getting older isnt an excuse. We either want to do it or we do not.

There's a huge block of players that is not playing right now and we need to do everything we can to get them back playing. A lot of the things you had proposed definitely goes in the right direction. Thank you for investing the time into it

I think 1) was a bigger issue a decade ago. These days, almost everyone farms bots (and purposefully tries not to run new players off the server). Team server is in the bucket you're referring to here though, where the 'best' policy is to kill off unknown tags - we haven't quite gotten to that here, so I'd say the main goal from the netter perspective at least is to help prevent griefers from doing so much damage, without requiring every solo / spam tag to need to be killed proactively. That said, your idea works pretty well for both (e.g. they will likely have to declare their intentions early in the set). Going back to my suggestion though, honestly having a declare war that takes 10 days or something to break the pact would help mitigate some of the problems people called out (and if you keep FA, I think that would be nice as a cost of breaking a pact so there's some teeth to it beyond just giving a long heads up). I actually like the FA part, for the reasons you stated, and because there's nothing to prevent people from sending FA currently - so it's not like it opens up a new avenue for abuse or anything.