qz, I think you're great, and most changes in the game are great.

What I see though is a propensity to do something not exactly required because it's a bit fancy or might be cool to tinker with/code.

Make stonewalling harder? Target the problem - stop allowing the spamming of hits via the OP Ajax attack button. That is an easy way to lengthen the time taken to kill a country without increasing the turns required to do so.

Stop dumb war dynamics? Promote even wars by coding alliance level war decs into the game. Do not allow alliances to hit each other until a reasonable amount of time has passed in the reset. Reduce the power of first strikes by giving restarts even bigger bonuses (this will also make tagkills* harder to achieve - instead of 24/48 hours).

The game is broken but not in the areas that seem to get the fixes.

* by tagkill I mean the common scenario where 99% of an alliance's networth is destroyed in a short period. By giving restarts say a 25% of everything the had before bonus (tech, military, cash, bushels, oil) - the most damage you can do in a devastating first strike is 75%. Still powerful but at least it gives the recipient alliance some real power (especially if they stocked well and played a good country)