Also if I mad add, one thing that will probably make everyone disagree with me is, I also think upkeep should go up significantly, I know players have already complained about Upkeep being too high but it is always coming from those players who want to have 300 chunks all for themselves. 5 chunks is more than enough for any person if you consider that some things such as EXP farms, SF factories and food farms can be shared, so not every single person needs to have all of those. In my opinion, upkeep should be made so that the amount of upkeep that is currently paid by towns on average should be enough for around 5-6 chunks. It is not a "duty" for a single player to pay for 300 chunks of upkeep and therefore people should not be complaining. IF you want 300 chunks get more people.

I agree with the main suggestion but feel that your little addition about raising upkeep is completely stupid considering we do not have a huge number of new players logging in everyday. Even fewer of those are competent. This suggestion would ruin the server, even a doubling of upkeep would absolutely wreck some builders towns. There is also no good reason to do it. There is more than enough space for new towns, you just need to open your mind and give up on Europe. To me, this sounds like a nonsensical troll suggestion where you are trying to annoy absolutely everybody who owns a decent town, or indeed any town at all.

Furthermore, where would this play into the use of forts and movecraft? You do realise that movecraft used to challenge regions takes up loads of space? Your suggestion would make it far less profitable to challenge the regions, reducing the overall enjoyability of the server for movecrafters. Also, forts are not really towns which you would want to recruit new players into. Are you perhaps suggesting the removal of forts? In essence, you want to kill the server, removing the best parts of it for every single group except slimefun nerds, who nobody cares about.

"who want to have 300 chunks all for themselves. 5 chunks is more than enough for any person"

Uhh its called "Nations" as in the goal of the game is to make a nation with many towns and build many towns and have them do stuff. In my opinion it should be quite the opposite and the gameplay should focus on the grand aspect of expansion rather than mfs living in a 3x3 bunker having everything they need

At this point it hardly feels like "Nations" since it doesnt have any nation building elements and is more like an smp on an earth map with sieges that happen on very small areas of the world. Sure you may have some cool aspects of the game but nothing really that requires bonding of people to work in the nation together nor develop the land

Masterbigbear, i think you are blowing it out of proportion, my town has 56 chunks and pays $76 daily for upkeep, it fits 2 huge farms, around 7 houses, big factory and even a parking space for some movecraft. I can literally go to my silver farm, do one run in about 15 mins and earn probably little less than 10 days worth of upkeep. The reason why I mentioned upkeep needs to be increased is because, clearly people are "getting away" with literally making a town and then doing everything alone and managing to pay for everything and even go inactive for 2-3 months at a time and still sustain a 300 chunk town. Upkeep is not a "troll suggestion" I just see it as a way to say "thats enough" and put an end to state of the game where everyone can just go and make their own town and not care at all about society or other people in general and then call it "geopolitics". I am pretty sure that my town could fit 10 more players and even if upkeep went up 10x with us paying $750 a day, for 10 players it would basically end up the same as it is now for me alone paying those 75$ a day. I am not saying "Everyone's town should fall so that they can join me" it's just that I think that there is no reason in first place for towns that have 1 player that logs in twice a week for 15 mins to exist, let alone have 300 chunks. If those players had to "band together" in order to run their town, then I am pretty sure that everything would be much different than it is now when everyone is basically perfectly capable of just claiming 300 chunks for themselves and not having to cooperate with anyone whatsoever. I am pretty sure there was some candymaker and dentist analogy that perfectly explains it. I am aware that "more upkeep" is objectively just worse for everybody cause it basically means "now you just need to pay more" but if it will cause people to actually form societies then it would end up better for health of the game in general.

And that does not mean "make a 3x3 town" to be clear here, My problem is not towns being too big, my problem is there being too many towns. so it is more like "join a town where someone else already pays upkeep"

bro people hv irl stuff to deal with and cant grind silver daily to pay for thier towns. i think you should focus on grinding your own loot instead of asking for increased upkeep so towns fall and you loot just cause you can spend 5hours on a block game daily. This is all i get from your argument tbh. i think you are covering this reason up

also i will add that if we had large towns like that the map would be completely empty and there would be no use for ziafy to expand the map more than asia

I don't know why people keep assuming my intentions instead of just reading what i meant. To be clear i never looted a town that fell due to upkeep in my life and I don't usually do that nor do I intend to. And as i said, takes 15 mins to grind up enough money for upkeep, you don't need to play 5 hours a day, if you choose to go and make your own town and grind 5 hours a day because you don't wanna have people in it but still want a huge ass town, that is on you. Also the thing that i kind of have to mention is "even doubling the upkeep would absolutely wreck some builders towns" like my man you are proving my point? what are even "builders towns" like it basically implies that One single person who has interest in building can just own a town cause towns indeed ARE just one person's property. Aren't builders supposed to be people WITHIN the town's community who plan the layout of the town and build it while others do their own things? "builder's town" pretty much explains what is wrong here

Looks like it will all work out for you. Please do realise that there is more than enough space for loads of towns, and that if you want to recruit most efficiently, recruit from off ccnet. I don't want to have to deal with recruiting, but since you want a community, that is a more than welcomed option that many people do. You can form societies, but if you need to destroy all other players options just to join your town, perhaps it isn't a good town.

Secondly, one of my points was that builders and movecrafters might suffer to play with a significantly increased upkeep. You cited your town as an exception. Politely, your town is not it. I suggest you check map and see the movecraft towns near the regions, which was those that I made reference to. As for your buildings, they are cramped slum accommodations at absolute best. I should like to see a picture from ground level, but what I can see right now, is nothing much. You clearly don't understand builders and movecrafters, nor much anything outside of your little town.

You want to create a community out of a slum, some want to create communities out of actual cities, with actual lands and space for new players to create or explore. You can have your slum, but let us have our cities. They can work together.

Have entire empty, completely deserted city like Miami that has 1500 chunks and is completely ran by 1 person and call it "builder's town" and then complain if someone suggests something that would "harm" the "builders towns" like thats in my opinion absolutely unacceptable.

Miami doesn't pay upkeep anyway

masterbigbear, wherent those "fake towns" that are used just to park movecraft a problem in first place? also, town does not need to be a slum to house decent amount of people, if you have 10 chunks per person in a town, you can have 30 people, each having 5 chunks sized personal house and there is another 5 chunks of "public" land for each person, which means, with 30 people living in 300 claims, you would have 5 chunks of private space plus 150 chunks of public space for each and every single one of them. NOT a slum if you ask me, idk why are we arguing about this, it is evident that "communities" do not exist and reason why is clear, everyone can just go and make their own town for basically some pocket change, so naturally everyone does and nobody can ever "recruit" anyone. If it was not that way in the first place i would have joined some good town that has active community and wouldn't have been making my own, but those things don't exist and in my opinion that is a problem that needs solving

Okay, sure Miami does not pay upkeep, my bad for using a bad example, but it does not mean such towns do not exist.

I told you a way to recruit, in that you don't need to limit yourself to players that have already joined, and instead bring players in. There are many tools such as reddit, discord and etc to communicate with potential recruits.

Also, not really your land if it is public, sorry. btw, your 300 claims becomes $3000 upkeep <3 fyi. Communities exist if you look above a town level, to a national level. This is nations after all xD. I have been apart of such incredibly wonderous communities in nations and similarly wonderful communities in HUGE towns.

Movecraft towns aren't an issue, there is more than enough space, and it is a nice resource drain.

When i said "even if upkeep went up 10x" i did not mean "i want it to go up 10x" i just gave 10x as an example because even in that case it does not become unmanagable. Having 30 people pay 3000 upkeep is bascially the same amount of upkeep per person as it is right now when instead you have 30 towns and they collectively have 3000$ upkeep and people still pay it. This has kind of went too far off topic, point still stands, costs of owning a town are way too low

As if 30 people would stay active and then all contribute.

I don't think I need to argue anymore, my points were all made in my first paragraph sent. I consider your point now completely obsolete unless you systematically challenge every single claim I made. It seems you don't actually care about the server or people, just that you hate big towns and builders. You don't even stand to gain since you don't have a particularly appealing town to new players, who often want central city vibes, not outer city slum vibes.

Okay as for "systematically challenging claims", ill do it, no problem, maybe Im making a mistake for deciding to give in and actually argue about this when simple "Town upkeep is not as opressive" should have been enough but here we go:

1. We do not have large number of players logging in every day,

2. Even doubling of upkeep would ruin builder towns

See? this is the issue, here it is automatically assumed that a town is one person's property so some "builder" can go on and make his own town just to create a build. I don't think that should be a thing, I am aware that some people enjoy building towns, and i am not saying the "builders" should not be playing, i am simply saying that every town should try its best at being an actual and efficient town, at point when "builders" decide to make entire abandoned and empty city, just for themselves, it becomes unreasonable, instead builders should have their role within the organised towns to create builds that will be used and able to house players who will provide for upkeep. Builders can remain builders even if they don't create deserted cities.
I don't think it matters, you can set a plot tax within a town and person who is inactive and has no intentions of playing the server simply gets taxed out of their plots and does not use up space any more, i thought this was implied but when i mention "players" i mean those who actually play, town can have 80 members but still have just 2 active players. Idea is to have more active players per town, not players who have already quit.

3. There is enough space for more towns

Im not saying this because of space, my problem is not people taking up space, my problem is that there is not enough players for as many TOWNS, completely unrelated.

4. Forts and movecraft

Forts usually don't take up that much space, same goes for movecraft, to be clear i am not saying make upkeep 10x, just increase it, IF active towns were a thing, there would be more people to pay for their nation's forts and movecraft. Yes it would cost more to have movecraft bases and forts but i think it would DEFINITELY NOT make it all obsolete.

That is about it, don't know what else would basically anyone want me to adress to point out that costs of creating a town are too low.

And as for my town, its literally medieval themed and i let people build their own houses as they like, small houses are there just for lazy people who would just prefer to have somewhere to put chests and lock them. Saying my town is a slum without even seeing it in a first place does not aid your argument.

Would be neat to be able to edit a comment, to be clear I did not skip the 1st thing, it just for some reason ended up below the 2nd one.

And my suggestion for you to recruit from elsewhere? Why would that be harder than ruining the server for a number of people?

A small town building wise takes up 300 claims. Medium would be 600 and large towns would take up to 1000 claims. That is buildings alone.

From what I heard custom crops can now grow even if you do not load the chunks so you can even spend quite a bit of leftover claims your town can have on farmland to legally paint as much of the map as you can with your nations color and still get some usage out of it.

However the biggest issue is that you gain nothing from building up larger towns other than pure flexing and coloring the map. I have suggested many changes that would fix this however none of them are even considered being accepted

Upkeep of a town sure isnt a lot, with a small size town you can pay it up with juts voting by yourself, however as you start to develop your nation and use proxy mayors to expand evevn more that cost can go up quite a bit. And do note half of the players do not have that much free time to play nor is it fun to spend that free time on boring money grinds. You also need to travel to all of those towns so that time sure adds up to the point of you spending more time keeping them alive rather than developing them

Overall the gamemode is called nations and should be focused on grander things and yet we are stuck on literally no town expansion since last year

as if "recruit from elsewhere" solves things, im not speaking about "me" problem, i am speaking of problem that is presistent on CCnet, you can go to some faction server and list factions by online members and you gonna have at least one that has 10+ members active at a single time, If it was solveable by "recruiting elsewhere" then at least someone would have made a proper town on CCnet, which did not happen

Well, this is pointless, you clearly don't know anything. I have seen such wonderful communities and towns which have recruited in many different ways. Your failings do not equal server failings.

I have recruited to the point of my town having 70 residents and it was the worst experience in my life. Biggest waste of time and effort

As I said before, the fact that I consider there to be no real proper towns on CCnet is non-negotiable because you can almost never see any town having more than 4 residents online at same time. This is not about "my failings" this is about a problem with the server, I don't know why does every suggestion that tries to address something end up with "personal attack" on me, in form of accusation. If you were at least a little open minded you would have logged in, typed /t list by online and had your own opinion on numbers you see. You would not outright try to deny that towns are not really having active playerbase and try to tell me it is "my failings"

That you are correct in, no town is an actual town in terms of activity. That is not a fixable issue since that is an issue of overall playerbase. Larger nations have around 10 players online at their peak while having 50ish total towns. There is no way to fix this. Partially because people who are residents of a town also quit due to lack of clear progress path and not having the power to freely do what they want in the town

The only thing that can be done is to make the game less reliant on extra residents by allowing you to progress and expand your town without the need for recruitment. I did suggest itany times however I did not get any response back

I have my town which is just 3 ppl including me, it's me and 2 friends, we don't want more people at the moment. In my opinion towns should be a safe place where you can keep you stuff from being stolen or robbed. I have a lot of stuff that I need my town for and my 2 residents also need the space.

You can easily restrict access to other people but then the issue isnt you keeping your stuff safe its their issue with the lack of freedom to play

... your over exaggerating with saying "CCnet is non-negotiable because you can almost never see any town having more than 4 residents online at same time."

"... your over exaggerating with saying "CCnet is non-negotiable because you can almost never see any town having more than 4 residents online at same time."

Unfortunately I have to agree with Nuxyr, most of the towns are dead. People aren't interested in playing as individuals being a part of a nation but are more prone to wanting to be the next great "President" or "Emperor", even if it means being stuck with only one other guy online with you at the same time. I won't go into the issue as to why this is the case, but it definitely is.

Just to give you a perspective. If magically town gameplay feels alive now and there is now only 125 with each one having 4 active players and being 1000 chunks big. That would only cover 13.7% of the total land area of the map not including water. When I say 13.7% I dont mean just that world will be wilderness, but rather the area that will be active. As another reference let me give you these numbers on how much percent each popular area of the world takes up of the worlds land:

Europe (including coastline of north africa) ~9%
Coastline of North and South Americas (East one) ~9%
India, Japan, Minor coastline of Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philiphines ~5-6%

I will not do the rest. Overall now you see that there is quite literally nothing to do activity wise with all this land compared to the amount of people we have.

While I do agree on the aspect of needing player interactions and that it should be somewhat concentrated more I do not agree with the approach. I would rather have 1 man towns close enough to where its within a minute of traveling (preferably towns that connect to eachother) instead of people living in the same small scale town

Aka it benefits players more to be free and do whatever they want with their own town in a nation and expand it and build it however they want but still be close enough to where you can come visit them, trade with them and help them out whenever they need compared to them living in your town full of rules full of rules on what they can do and what they cant do, they may not be able to build if they are bad at it or if it conflicts your plans and so on, overall it restricts them quite a lot and that is not just a skill issue and the towns issue