Where to start
First i'm pleased Azzer came out and spoke his feelings in a mature and direct way and also to notice that he is thinking of solutions to prevent stale situations in the future.
Second, i don't want to repeat what i said several times before so i'll try to say it short. Fighting for pure score (from acres) can get you in this situation. A top alliance to win needs a few things:
- Access to easy acres
- easy to defend them
- weakened competition
- uneventful round, just random vulturing and bashing.
So forming a temporary powerblock gives you access to all those, a round long one will give you access to easy acres for a while until they become extinct but you still end on top score.
Almost all top alliances that aimed to win played efficient to acomplish their goal. Which ofc means avoid damaging wars as much as they could and have the upper hand in terms of numbers and strength when they had to deal with competition.
So to conclude, when alliances play for pure size there will always be less action. They will temp nap so they don't get hurt or temp nap to overwhelm and kill without loosing much. Key word is avoid taking damage = kill action.
There have been very few balanced wars on top that i have witnessed when allies fight for size and to me that's a not so interesting game.
Compare that with effectiveness. That rank was the answer to all prayers. You could powerblock as much as you wanted, bottom feeding wasn't as rewarding, overwhelming wasn't rewarded, more balanced big fights where the way to go and often rank 2-3 score ally who had to deal with a lot of action coming from rank 1 and also attacking themselfs for land gave them well deserved #1 effectiveness. That rank was asking acres, big army, smart calls, good tactics and you couldn't get it by avoiding action.
In the unified score i hoped the new score can be just size but the size to be earned in action. I have no doubt that the current settings aren't favorable for that and something needs changing.
I personaly liked the idea of population happiness which depending of the action your company and alliance deals with can increase or decrease productivity of your acres. Those peasants are eager to get the ball rolling !!
On another note i can't say i agree much with what JJ/Steve/Twigley did this round but i can undestand their initial reasoning. They are all old chaps and grew old with the game. The game for me doesn't offer the same level of satisfaction as my first couple rounds since it's like eating the favorite soup every morning for a couple years. I guess it's same for them too, they are die hard allied members so for them it must be even harder. They can change their routes and go a crazy SA/tl combo, they can choose a funky alliance theme name, play ftw, play resistance but at one point you just do the same thing over and over again. You just need some diversity. So why not try a big group and play brute force for a change
I'm speaking from experience since i often change from solo round thugs to allied ftw, solo bunkers, cheerleading round, crazy army setup in an alliance, resisting, large solo group etc, because it's too damn booring to play same thing over and over, the game changes very little.
That's why came so many suggestions to scrap all the units and make new ones or others suggestions of same impact to change the game to almost a new game with taste of bushtarion and the old small comunity that you attached to. With the lack of extreme game changes players need to choose extremely different playstyles so they get the needed diversity and powerblocking to play brute force it's just another one on the list.