MPP update - What does it mean

Day 3,577, 09:12 • Published in Finland Finland • by TheJuliusCaesar
Updates keep on coming with a surprisingly high frequency. It is worth addressing primarly the upcoming MPP changes a bit, as the league event is only a short term panem et circences and ultimately rather inconsequental.


Priorities change.

So let's see what the actual update tells us:

What changes, transformed into simple bullet points:
i. Countries can only select 15% worth of world damage (the actual country in war included) to be used on your side in battles (Main beef).

ii. These selections must, of course, be from the respective country's MPP list.

iii. The selections can be done and edited at any point by presidents, dictators, prime ministers or defense ministers, but they become active starting from the beginning of the next battle round.

iv. To be able to fight from your home country in an allied battle, your MPP has to be active in the deployment list. Otherwise it works as your country and the fighting country didn't have a MPP.

v. The percentage of world damage will get updated based on the latest weekly challenge.

For instance, imagine Finland (2% of world damage) fighting against Estonia. Finland has nations like Serbia, (8% of world damage), Poland (6😵 and Romania (5😵 in their MPP deck. If a Finnish military leader deploys Serbia in their battle against Estonia, it means that they cannot deploy Poland in the same deployment, because the combined world damage would exceed the 15% limit (as Finland has 2%, Serbia 8%, Poland 6%, combined 16😵. However, Finland could deploy Romania instead of Poland, as the combined world damage would not exceed the 15% limit.

How does it (probably) affect the gameplay
i. It removes the purely damage based incentive of creating huge alliance blocs. Though, it doesn't disincentivise it in anyway, and having a nation on your side rather than against you always makes thing easier, never mind if they participate in your battles. Further, it's not like MPP's cost a fortune. 10 000cc is relatively little and doesn't cause inconveniences for nations, bar for the very smallest ones.

ii. As ghishae well pointed out in the comments, the damage of mid-sized nations could be efficiently up for grabs if the majority of nations divide the damage of big players like Serbia and Romania into small fractions. Rational nation leaders could exploit such possibilities if they are active and notice a suitable country without many deployment priorities. However, I believe this to even out in midterm to longterm.

iii. It removes the military incentive of having small nations on MPP list. Though, they are more or less done in diplomatic means anyway.

iv. It creates a game mechanical purpose for prime ministers and defense ministers. Earlier they were there only for information purposes, but now they actually have a function.

v. It makes coordination on country administration more crucial, as someone needs to update the deployment priorities regularly for maximum efficiency, taking into account geographical time zones and other things.

vi. Possibly increased moving around, resulting in a little bump in Moving Ticket prices (provided that the increase in moving is enough to offset the ticket rewards in weekly challenge). Alternatively it reduces the total amount of damage done in (big) battles, as less people are hitting there. The actual result will probably be a combination of these.

It should be noted that such thoughts of how would it affect the game are purely tentative and are ultimately based on the actions of often sometimes irrational players. It would remain to be seen how actively "military leaders" of each nation manages the deployment priorities, and whether the MPP decks or even alliance structures change to accommodate the change.

Talking about the change itself, this is something that goes into the core of the game, something which hasn't changed for nearly a decade(?). Does such update, coupled with lately accelerated pace of game updates, tell something about a changed attitude in the game administration? I don't know. But I welcome that they seem to have the guts to alter the building blocks of the main module in the game.

- Caesar