Z-day or N-day, which do you like better?

[Escade]

1. I was decimated, my puppets all 10 or so of them were decimated. Guess what I like N day better even if did better on Z day. This was more active.
2. A system where leaving a faction helps you lose radiation but also resets your nuke\shields to 0 might help the balance. So would opt-ins only and time limits to each "game." Maybe a cool down period.
3. WA only OR WA +4 would be great because then it would be less about puppets and more focused on strategy, alliances (so I should not plan to make a puppet horde, yes?)


Other interesting things:
Friendly(?) fire - Some nations were generally confused and stopping fellow factioners nukes. Others were spying or otherwise engaging in sabotage.
Not having all my puppets in my faction saved some but also got one targeted by allies.

[Bigger-Brother]

Mechanics yes, but you might have forgotten the brief that not participating, and consequently not joining a faction, still made you liable to collecting radiation damage from anyone who wants to fire nukes off in your direction.

You can't even target nations not in a faction..

[Gnark]

How about this idea for reform: Make leaving a faction possible. When you go to bed, leave a faction, and you have opted out of N-day for the time being. Join up again in the morning.

That eliminates almost all the issues you have with it, right? It isn't even a hard change.

It's not only not a hard change, it isn't a change at all. I did it three times.

(The first time my production continued to accumulate while I was out, up to my cap, which I'm pretty sure was a bug, but either it got fixed or it was very circumstantial, because it didn't the second and third times.)

I'm seriously baffled by a lot of these complaints, because they're complaints that I've had about Z-day that N-day took steps to directly address.

But apparently I'm the only one who can see this button:


You're not in unless you actively opt in. It's fairly unobtrusive if you don't. The timer doesn't start ticking for you unless and until you do. You can opt out any time you want, and opt back in later. The whole interface is just a whole lot better.

I've had more than one Z-day where I was busy with RL stuff when the event started, and when I was finally able to log in, my nations were already more than 90% infected and all I could do was count the corpses. That wasn't a problem here. I was online when the event started, but I had RL stuff to do, so I played around a little, and then left my faction and did RL things for about five hours, and came back and picked up again, and that wasn't a problem. Having the five hours of production that I probably shouldn't have helped, but it wasn't the reason... it just meant I was able to get a good solid strike off when I came back instead of having to wait awhile. I did that again for about eight hours so that I could sleep, and came back in with nothing but what I had when I went to bed, and that was fine. And then I did it again for a couple hours and came back for the last couple hours of the event.

Now, I'm a Baldering. Z-day has historically been a fiasco for us, for reasons largely beyond our control. We're too big, too many of our nations aren't really active, and many of those who are have no link between us other than that's where we happened to respawn. We simply cannot muster a coordinated response, and even those who do attempt to respond are dealing with a massive reservoir of zeds in inactive nations that there's no easy means of locating other than manually flipping through 5000-odd nations. And we're geographically spread out - basically a random selection of NS's userbase - so no matter when the event starts, there'll be a sizable number of our residents who are sleeping and are nothing but zombie breeding grounds for hours.

We had 135 out of 5281 nations muster for N-day. That's 2.5%. I figure we get probably about the same for Z-days, which means anyone trying to salvage the situation is outnumbered 40:1 from the get-go, and that's before taking into account that some of the active nations are doing the exact opposite of helping.

For N-day, these things weren't a problem, and some of them were actually advantages. Opt-in meant all those inactive nations were irrelevant. Because there was a faction status page that gave an immediate overview of incoming and so on, we didn't have to filter through 5000 nation pages - or even the 135 active ones - to find problems. Not being targetable unless you were part of a faction meant I didn't log in to find my nation already destroyed before I got to play at all, and I was able to take a break when my friends showed up for Shadowrun, when I went to bed, when I needed to get dinner and do my laundry. Though I probably would have been safe regardless... the Einherjar did well at covering each other's backs, and that geographical spread meant we didn't all go to bed at the same time.

And that was the big reason I wasn't getting murdered within fifteen minutes of logging in. I wasn't jumping into the middle of a nuclear war as an individual with no friends or allies and wondering why I died. I was joining a fairly sizable faction - not the biggest by a long shot, but big enough that it took concerted effort to crack our shields - that had at least some people paying attention all the time. I not only didn't get hit all event, I didn't even get shot at, despite getting into the middle of a few ugly skirmishes. Some of that I think was because I was avoiding looking like an easy target, and some was because I was deliberately picking on nations that had made themselves vulnerable, generally by expending their resources against one of my teammates or our allies.

[Frieden-und Freudenland]

I think Z-Day is far better. I didn't quite like the N-Day, because...

1) As it was the first year of the game, our faction had trouble coordinating some things. Initially we could not come up with a strategy, some nations (including me) have targeted some factions randomly, and we got wiped out with their retaliatory attacks very fast. In addition I also tried to invest in nukes with my Military Specialist puppets and in shields with my Strategy Specialist puppets, but we didn't coordinate this as a faction, so I don't know whether other nations have been investing in nukes/ shields efficiently, according to their classifications. My region has quite some experience with Z-Day, and traditionally we have always been researching cures for Zombies, ending the Z-Day with very good stats. But the N-Day was a disaster.

Of course all this chaos had to do with the novelty of the N-Day, so if it happens a second time, we might plan for it better.

2) Navigation was difficult. It took me some time to figure out how I could switch between puppets and how I could target other nations, etc. And I once accidentally destroyed the nukes that I had launched against another nation with a puppet. So the page where we deal with all our nuclear actions can perhaps be re-designed. And it would be much better if we could coordinate all our puppets from a center rather than constantly switching between them.

3) The final reason is entirely personal. I am against nuclear energy IRL, and I have a more positive attitude towards the idea of working together to defeat the zombies than the idea of nuking other nations. Of course we do not have to reflect our RL views in NS, so I did take part in N-Day and played as I should (almost), but I guess I will always like Z-Day better because it is more in line with my political views.

[Freien]

N-day was better, because you were given the ability to nuke fascists.

[Nilrahrarfan]

N-day could be brought back with added improvements such adding Hazmat teams to maintain and cleanup radiation which might be more challenging to N-day.

Maybe combine the two to coincide with eachother? That way, on Halloween, it'll basically be not just zombies you have to deal with...

[Nilrahrarfan]

We should do both annually. Z day for Halloween, N-day some other time. Arbor day? Lol

Maybe both on Halloween? Or N-Day on December 21?

[Gnark]

N-day was better, because you were given the ability to nuke fascists.

I wanted to nuke fascists, but I couldn't find any who weren't already as nuked as they could get.