https://youtube.com/...nO1-E?si=WZIZv17_mapQI7YD

best_set_ever honestly, this is so much better. I havn't even beat my wife once for things going wrong in game this set. She thanks you.

OMG!

I have not beat your wife either this set.

All tree huggers check eachothers peckers for splinters

Wifes don't hit back.

.... and LaFers, check each others peckers for fratbois lipstick

BLEH... If there was a chick that ugly and she gave ya a BJ i do believe that counts as anal!

clan gdi is nice. nobody is killing me

Glad you enjoy Farmville 2025 👍

Some bots have too much defense though. We need to fix this. I would prefer 1 jet SS to break all.

I don't like too much hassle when i am clicking around in my game

Qz can fix this for you HH!

Feel like bots retalling could be a good way to shake things up, but then we're just back to bottomfeeding I guess

That will never happen, LaF convinced devs to change the code so they can't get hit, that says it all, Farmville 2025, hell no they won't allow bots to retal LOL

Bots retalling? The horror. I would have to have defense. Do you realize what that would do to my military expenses?

Bot defense should be doubled to separate the real from the fake

I think each country should be given 500k acres and we fight to see who keeps their land!

I say we just delete this game and do better things with our lives.

I have bought like 50 games on Steam I need to play.

DayZ is great

Hmm I don't have that game :)

Here is one thing ClanGDI did. Create a safe environment to max out decay and play turns with 200 billion cash on hand. Is this favorable gameplay? I don't know, but it seems the risk reward aspect of the game is out of balance.

I remember SG doing it with 60 billion, but at least he took a risk, lol!

Although it may open up some interesting strategies as a casher, so might not be a bad thing just saying it opened up that door.

I was just thinking this is how nice tmac had it for many resets, played with zero defense and not a single suicider. its nice.

but clan gdi still allows arranged wars. I think in a reset or two ppl will wanna FIGHT

Possibly, but I think arranged wars need some changes to be fun.

1. Missiles need to be nerfed OR SDI needs to be buffed
2. CD needs nerfed
3. Possibly demo needs to be nerfed
- spy ops in general are probably too powerful

Most of my arranged wars result in me being a missile dump. The current game penalizes people for building the best war country for arranged wars.

I'm sure there are other things, but these are some of my biggest beefs with arranged wars.

Oh also the restart bonus needs adjusted! Forgot about that one.

I agree with all of those. In addition, aren't there issues with exponential troop costs that penalize countries that grow too strong?


I've always thought it was odd that the ideal way to defend yourself is to just keep a ton of money on hand so you don't have any costs, and then only buy military when you're being attacked or doing an OP.

I don't know the right solution there, but it seems weird to me.

This man's on a role of conversational posts lol.

You're absolutely correct and Requiem isn't the only dog of war that has long advocated for both. They aren't mutually exclusive.

CDs to 3% or even 2% and lowering civilian returns to e2025 era levels where it took 500 hits to kill has seen support among players of all metas across all servers, with the exception of SOTS era team, which needed sorta buffed military numbers in order to effectively war.

In addition, the expenses formula continuously increasing the cost of carrying troops de-incentivizes being well protected. Several fixes to the expenses formula have been suggested, and particularly I've spreadsheet tested replacement formulas suggested by everyone's favorite player, Gerdler, and simply put they work marvelously (link: https://m.earthempires.com/...ormula-49843?t=1614959270 ) Not only would they improve a war players ability to defend themselves, they'd also improve strategic parity for now, more or less, un-win-with-able strategies like MBR and CI.

All of these changes in combination with a ClanGDI which still allows for declaration of war, barring that the clans aren't pacted in a built in-relationships portal shared by tag admins, but that has a 48-72 hour countdown to conflict would in effect eliminate blindsides, mitigate suiciding, prevent oop war, increase the importance of building well in war, allow strategical parity for netters, while still protecting people from broken pacts and being able to respond to griefing at the same time the griefing starts.

You've essentially wandered in through the back door to a conversation of every individual change suggested around this that received any support from players playing both the war and netting metas. None of these proposals really solve more than a minority of issues on their own, but do address certain issues. Together, they would massively improve the game.

🤘

And isn't that really the way to fix/improve a game? Incremental changes as time allows and as we can test things?


So I have a question then. If the devs can't devote the time, or don't want to devote the time to do that, what other options exist. Just from getting to know a bunch of people around here, it seems there are people that understands the engine that drives this game, from a development and coding perspective.


Can the devs open up the development team? Take on some extra help? Do we have people that would be willing to do that? Is EE open source, or could it go open source so that it could be developed?

Could it be re-developed by some in the player base?


Are there any options at all, aside from begging/hoping a dev actually cares to do anything about it?




I find the relationship with this game and the owners/devs interesting.

On one hand, they seem content to just let it be what it is, until it inevitably dies from inactivity at some point in the next decade or two.

On the other hand, they didn't want me advertising for another game on these forums. So there must be some level of care about the success of this game, if they didn't want competition being introduced here.


If there is a care about the success of the game, is there enough desire to actually develop/improve it further?

We had active dev in short stints. They were driven away by the community.

Slagpits idea for how to change 1a that he was working on was pretty much exactly what derrick wrote up here a few posts ago... but at the time derrick got stuck on the plan to have retalling bots that he didn't like and joined the anti-changes posse.

Everyone complained on Express that only techers could win and a few other annoying things, Slagpit solved that and after then CI, casher and farmer win frequently as do techers. The bots were rebuilt from the ground up (and only implemented in express) so they act smarter and are harder to exploit, and those would replace the bots in 1a and FFA with some tweaks, was the plan. This didn't happen. He got tired of the community and the Derricks of this game before he had time to do that.

So the game stayed stale and people got tired and more toxic. Not saying Derrick is the only problem but he certainly participated in fighting changes that he now claims he wants, and which everyone really wanted.

Do your due diligence Gerdler and find a single post by me endorsing bots retalling, or fighting any of these changes listed above. Not only did I support the expenses formula changes in the tagged post, I also supported CDs to 2%, clanGDI in this format, and so on.

My issues with slag had nothing to do with anything you just said, and moreso his absolute NEED to put his spin on every suggested change, rather than just executing them as described by the community.

You know for a fact that guy would never just do a change the way the community described it. It had to be his idea or his spin on it, or it was a bad idea. You've openly agreed with me on this in private previously, but said at the time, I should back off because he's the best chance for improvements we've got.

Slagpit has always been a toxic developer. Even from my PDM days.

Yes.



Yes, they could, and have before. Just an FYI, there are differences in admins vs devs. Pang, qzjul, izarcon, and slagpit are the admins. A few of the short-timers on the dev team didn't really contribute after getting access and/or said/did something stupid to be removed. The ones that still have dev access don't appear to be actively developing right now or they were on the AI team briefly (Disclaimer: I don't know this for sure and only assuming based on what I can see. So if you read this and you are developing, my apologies). Unless someone is working on something and I'm not aware, I don't think there is an active developer. I'm not sure if the code is bulk available somewhere at the moment but I don't think its some secret. If someone wanted to actually put in the time to work on something, I'm sure code could be provided with a test area... but this is not a new idea. The code is old and likely somewhat cumbersome so it takes a good many many hours to both learn and then develop - and most people don't want to work for free.

Martian and I have elevated access to make certain game-related changes but its only through access to a small admin UI, not direct database access, and is limited only to small server changes. For instance, we could technically change the number of "multis" allowed in FFA from 16 - But I have no idea what other things in the game might be impacted by such a change so I've actually never used this area. We could do a handful of other small things like make rounds shorter/longer, start and reset them on different days, turn things on and off like clans, auto-gdi, allies, etc., or change a server turn rate, max turns, or max store. Among a few other things that wouldn't really contribute towards active development. Further, I don't know any code other than self-taught html/xhtml many years ago so I'm not much use in that area. I'm also turning gray and have other responsibilities that would pull my time from helping much even if I had the skillset. I'm loaded with ideas, and understand logic, but can't translate that to game code.





Find someone to commit time to developing for free or hope pang or qz win the lottery and no longer need to work for a living. This game is not a measurable revenue source for them so begging won't help much besides the occasional knee-jerk response to constant whining from a couple of the same people that results in what you see in Alliance server now. Time is precious and qz and pang aren't likely to decide they don't need to work for a living anymore and devote all their time here. I suppose the game could be purchased again as well.




People have said this game is dying since as far back as I can remember.



Promoting other games has never been allowed. The moderators enforce this rule and the moderators are still active. If an admin one day tells us they don't care anymore, then so be it. Until then, we enforce the same rules in their absence that have been around for a long while.



Care, yes. Ability, very little.



Maybe. And I'd say that might be true in a couple/few, but I'm of the opinion that far more devs have fizzled out for other reasons. The last real development seems to have been in different phases of bot edits and a few unfinished projects. Slagpit made minor changes here and there for a bit, some of which mentioned above, but I don't think he's been around for the last year. I did appreciate some of his minor tweaks to the mod/admin tools like disabling accounts and IP bans. I did not agree with him coding a military sanctions option into the game and gave my opinion on the matter during discussion and implementation, but there was never a way given outside the database to enforce it so it was an easy decision to phase that out. I can't speak for izarcon so I have no idea what happened to him. Its been a few years since I've seen him around or heard from him. Jabroni has dev access but I don't recall what he was working on and I don't think he's doing much at the moment either. Pang and slagpit have done the last significant changesets and I think the last one was about 2 years ago. In most cases, I'm sure its just a "life happens" situation.

You fought all his changes because he was for bots retalling. I didnt care much for bots retalling as its so easy for a dev to turn that on and then leave without fine tuning it so that they dont act in a way entirely detrimental to the player base. Its always been an idea that the devs/admin had and the players mostly disliked. That said its all a package. And the changes we got on express were guaged against gameplay and the players who were playing for those 2-3 months of development. You would have seen the same active back forth for 1a development if you actually responded with anything other than vitriol to the proposals and requests for feedback that were posted.

And yes, I didn't agree with all his ideas either. But I'm not going to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I tried to participate with constructive feedback as I and the majority of the express community had been on the express change process with great result.

Bots going haywire and attacking/"warring", going all Skynet on us players. Now that is something that would get me motivated! DIE BOTS DIE

This would be fun, players vs evil bots warring....hell yeah!

…

It’s interesting to watch gerdler talk about himself as the holy recipient of constructive feedbacks. There are significantly large amounts of anti-clan gdi players wanting that feature to be removed versus supporters. Many players advocating against it in numerous threads and posts (like this one), many players leaving the game because of it.

Don’t let his posts fool you. I dunno, just seems sketchy to me. I’m not criticizing him or anything, something just doesn’t add up.

Have a great weekend

That's only true in you circles. Don't like it? Don't use it. Just because you would hit us if we left doesn't mean we'd hit you. Even without it we would leave everyone completely alone, so stop projecting and grow up.

BTW admins only interested if a game benefits them somehow should be removed. Once that mentality gets in it's bad for everyone.

Says the cheater...

On May 2, 2012, the game administrators announced on Alliance Talk that Hanlong, with assistance from former game administrator Turtle Crawler, had gained access to the game's database, allowing the two to view all countries without requiring the turns needed for spy operations, change anything in any of the countries, and view private messages sent via the Earth forums as well as those sent in the game itself.

^

No offense but I don’t need to take any advice from a disgraced former game admin that cheated or helped someone cheat (which is the same thing). He can take his input and put it into the trash can, where him and his input belongs.

Sorry. Misunderstood you. But yeah I'm good on fighting bots. I fought enough of them when RD and SkyDeletez were around. Turns out its very difficult to beat a robot unless it's on easy mode, in which case, I still don't want to fight a robot.

Looking back at posts from the era, I agreed with the things I agreed with, and disagreed with the things I disagreed with. But it's not like slag was taking any suggestions anyways. I don't think a single change he implemented was as the community requested it. I make no apologies for criticizing bad ideas and endorsing good ones. And slag not being able to handle people being critical of his ideas is not something I find as a flaw of mine.

I honestly thought, btw, that most of the fluff he was taking at the time was thru sanctioning players, trying to stop people from using fake nicks in the scores list, some drama about some fluff a player said to a mod, etc. I feel like he was getting waaaaay more pushback on that stuff, but I guess if you view all criticism of all his ideas as negative, then I guess I agree.

I don't like to settle for less when I believe it's worth fighting for more. Perhaps that got in the way of some good, but I can still push for perfect.

First set I've had where I can actually netgain when I want a break from war. Also as far as bots retalling and fighting back, it shouldn't be an issue to create a clan of 7-10 bots for warring and leave the rest the same as they are now, might help out the market with the constant need of oil supply and military units. Surely there is a way to make that happen, could actually spice the server up a little bit without being a burden on real players.

Your*

The one good thing is laf's suiciders have been pretty inactive this reset

No offence taken, no one actually expects you to grow up.

I'm gonna take one out of TC's book of lame comebacks

"stop projecting"

At least I wasn't a scummy cheater or a disgraced former game admin that betrayed the trust of my peers.

Please stop and no one cares who started it.

fluff.

Great post Prime. Actually very insightful. When I talked to qz last, he made the actual quote, "...maybe one day we'll open source the code and accept PR's...in an ideal world we'd recode the whole thing to C#". I think he would very much appreciate willing (free) help on the game.

Prime also answers one of your questions B, which is essentially "admins and developers are different, however there are admins who care tons."

At this point I'd light a matchbook to the spark just to see if the inferno lights a fire under someone's ass. I'd take disgraced mod TC giving dev-who-pissed-in-pangs-cherrios-doing-the-right-thing Bug the ol' Hanlong back door to execute these specific changes widely accepted as helpful that Slag definitely had no interest in doing because they weren't his idea.

"There are two types of people in this world. People who were in RD, and people who think fighting bots is stupid." All I continue to learn is if one of these changes gets half-assed it kind of fluffs the whole game up.

Coalie - stop derailing this thread.

Derrick, sorry about that. Hopefully he will knock it off soon so we can have a productive conversation.



So in response to Primevals post, I think one of the first big questions is: Are there any players here who have the ability to develop that would want to help, potentially?

Ta Dum Tssss!