It's the first of the month, and of course that means an announcement. Here's what's in store for February:

It's Stimulus February! It's the shortest month of the year, and P&W will be running a bit of a fundraiser. For this month only, Credits can be redeemed directly for $10,000,000 each. That's a cap of $100,000,000/nation for this month. As soon as February ends, this will change, and the amount of money redeemed per Credit will be significantly reduced.

For new nations, the first 5 cities can be built without waiting on the 10 day timer. This does not apply to National Projects. If you build a national project, you will have to wait 10 days to build your next city, whether you have less than 5 cities or not.

It now costs 1 Credit to create an alliance. This change is less amount money or sustaining the game, but applying a bit of game theory to alliances. This change will encourage new players to seek out established alliances and learn the ropes, instead of creating their own alliances, getting raided, and quitting shortly thereafter. It will also discourage (though I am not so foolish to believe completely root out) alliance bank gimmicks where multiple alliances are created to protect money and resources from attackers. This change will make alliances more serious, more permanent, and new alliances more successful.

You can read more about these changes on the forums, here:

The Fortify action has been added to wars. It costs 3 MAPs, increases your resistance by 10, and while fortified any attacks from your opponent will result in them taking 10% more casualties than normal.

Executing any attack other than Fortify while fortified will nullify your fortified status.

I've fixed the score issues on test server so it's using the same score formula as the live server. I've also reduced the loot from winning a war to 20% of cash, from 25%.

Nuclear weapons no longer automatically cause the opponent to go to beige. Additionally, when you defeat an opponent in war, instead of resetting their beige timer to 3 days, you will add 3 additional days of beige time. This is a buff to the loser of a war so that if they are being pounded in multiple wars, they will have additional time to re-build or negotiate a peace agreement.

Sabotage operations have been buffed so that you can kill between 2-15% of the target's units if you succeed. It is not longer capped at what one military improvement can hold.