Hi All,

**These changes are live in Alliance & FFA (& Alpha Servers), and roll into the rest as they reset**

Change #1:
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I finally got some time to add in an actual new feature!

For the record, this is Slagpits idea which went up on the game dev board in Apr 2011, so it's been a while...

You will now - on the Private Market page - be able to burn oil (in multiples of 40) to generate units available for purchase on the Private Market.

The description is thus:

"Get your local industry to generate more private market units by giving them oil.
Spend 40 oil generate 30 troops, 25 turrets, 25 jets and 10 tanks to be available for purchase on the Private Market."

This is, according to Slagpits analysis, balanced such that a full TMBR ought to buy oil below $80 for reselling at end reset. Our working theory is that this will provide an alternate stocking market to bushels, bolster the oil market a bit, and potentially reduce destocking times for TMBR's. We shall see how it works in practise, but it sounds nifty :)



Change #2:
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Reversion to original build cost formula. This is partially because the build cost change seems to have been ineffective - and we have since moved to using unit caps - and partially to allow TMBR conversions as per the previous change.

For the record the formula will now be (and originally was):

BuildCost = 3*land+1500



Change #3 -- FFA/MULTI-ALLOWED ONLY
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The ghost-acre unit cap is being REMOVED for FFA/Multi-allowed servers. Because they like land. ;)



Change #4
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Earthquakes reduced from max 1 building destroyed per 300 buildings to max 1 per 500 buildings.


As usual, leave your comments, thoughts and suggestions below :-)


Regards,

qzjul & the EE Dev Team!

except ffa started 2 days ago so question is did ffa get those changes?

eqs: got eq which destroyed 5 buildings (fluffed up my plans as usual) and have over 500 buildings and yesterday 1 building eq and barely had 500 buildings.

ghosties: bye bye all-x to get into top 100 w/o major warring.

oil: meh, maybe it helps hybrids a bit although oil needs to be cheapish that there's benefit to buy oil to transform it to units.


oh and bug to fix: earthempires(dot)com and www(dot)earthempires(dot)com don't co-operate aka if logs from earthempires(dot)com then isn't logged in www(dot)earthempires(dot)com and vice versa.

I think this took effect early because I had noticed some otherwise unexplained inceases in my private market.

Anyway I used to play TMBR so welcome the changes and will have a go at one - in the (highly) unlikely event that I reach stocking stage w/o running into a heap of trouble.

Thanks for the time spent implementing this.

Hope you don't mind my adding a plea to put sorting out Boxcar as a priority. A new clan or two in Alliance would help to break some of the stagnation and being easily able to start a site and easily able to get access to existing sites makes quite a difference.

Am I correct in seeing that nowhere on the new PM page can you know how much oil you currently have? Might be handy to know how much you can burn.

So is burning the oil a permanent PM increase to your size that you generate every turn? or is it an instant change, and once a turn is acquired you lose those extra units and regenerate your normal amount of units?

LI: The latter, not the former. The units would decay according to the normal formulas once the next turn came up.

Good deal. I like.

interesting i like new things!

nice changes

Thanks for all the efforts qzjul and team~

Interesting. Thanks team for the changes. Might be something for me to give a try to.

I like it.

Thank you

I mentioned this on IRC so it isn't new feedback, but just to throw it out there for discussion:

The public market is one of the best mechanisms in the game since it allows for some automatic balancing between strat types from 'set to 'set, as people have to adapt to each other. Where the game tends to get unbalanced (as I'd argue it is now, with farmers finishing theo) is in situations where the private market is relied upon. Accordingly, I'm not thrilled with a gameplay change that is likely to increase private market usage.

/me thinks frequency of earthquakes was increased not decreased

2 earthquakes inside 160 turns is 2 too many.

edit make that 3 eqs inside 220 turns.

I think you're literally the unluckiest person in the world.

I think he is probably running ffavturns.. i imagine with 16 countries tje frequency goes up!

The theo jump doesn't rely on public market as it is now so I don't see how this really matters. This just means people can play turns longer in the set and jump with fewer days left. I see it as a good thing. Besides we need more than 4 different strats to play :p

Interesting.

I like the oil burning for units change, but I have a couple questions:

1. Does this change the limit of how much my private market can hold or regenerate (like the bonus) or does this accumulate just the one time after I spend the oil?

2. If it's the latter, will it expire at any point? i.e. could I buy cheap oil and immediately use it to stack my private market throughout the set and wait until the last 2-3 days to buy all the units up?

This might be a good way to make the fascist oil strat a bit more viable. I tried it a while back and it didn't work so good. Oil needed a good stabilizer and this might be the ticket. Like Requiem said: we need more than four strats to play.

1) no; technically there is no limit, it just decays with time, and you get more with time, so eventually you reach an equilibrium

2) see 1 :)

I like the change because it allows for more oil usage.. I just wonder if the only thing it'll do is make oil sell at $80 minimum at the end of the reset (on primary at least). Although I suppose ppl could try TMBR with this addition.

It depends on how many people try to actively implement cheap oil as part of their de-stock strategy and how many suppliers of that cheap oil that we have. If we have a shortage of suppliers and the price goes over a certain point it won't be worth it. Constriction of volume will play in as well, especially towards the end of the set available volume seems to drop below 5m barrels for the last week or so (I only found one set this year where the volume was higher than 5m for this time period in Alliance).

Just gotta do the maths out on the fly and see if it makes any sense. Still, nothing wrong with taking a low average and setting a few SO's to pick up throughout the set. The great thing about the private market is you can control it (for the most part) and the math is pretty easy to figure out. Whether or not the public market plays ball is another matter entirely.

Change seems interesting for oil.

Remove earthquakes.

I'll take more earthquakes in exchange for oil tech!

Why do people want oil tech?

cause other strats have production tech(s) too.

Tying in oil production to industrial tech would be a clever solution.

Having an oil tech makes it just like food.. so don't do it.

My god, Slagpit is back

woah!

QZ...
I am noticing the ratio of oil burned to military created in private market is WAY to LOW!!!!!
Its to expensive to burn oil, not effective at all. The ration is was to low.
MORE pm units should be created. Like 10x what it does now.... :/

Troy for a normal country its just right... our ffa style where we can fa/buyout lots of cash into a few countries then try and load them with enough oil to make massive jumps isnt gonna work all the time esp not the first set its implemented and everyone is holding oil instead of selling causing ridiculous prices (which u are taking advantage of ) :p

Now as for what should be modded ffa wise is the ghost acer cap that was removed it should be in place for 100k + so we don't have these stupid 1 mil acer guys running around :-P

translation: crippy is green from envy cause he doesn't have 1m acres country.

Crippy is more efficient with less :P

Crippy want a cracker?

:P

so crippy won't take #1.

i'm not even trying for top 10 lol

oh pfffffft.

Oil is good, just stockpile lol

Very interested in seeing the $80 analysis. Can anyone provide?

all would be but 80 bucks oil is myth.

myth is one of the few words in the english language with a short y.
other words include:
gym, abyss, and pyramid.

Also syrup.
You know what is good with syrup? CHEESE!
I AM THE CHEESE! I AM THE GREATEST CHARACTER ON THESE THREADS! I AM GREATER THAN THE TOMATO AND THE LETTUCE COMBINED!

I recently did the math on it. I am not sure about the exact decimals but around $230-233/NW is what the public market has to be at for 80 dollar oil to be balanced. What puzzles me greatly is that it was once said that oil is balanced at $80 for the last day of the sets military prices (which is what it should be) but they are more like $300-500/NW which is balanced on a $280-600 oil price...

If my rigs produce $840/turn(280*3) each without a single tech point I will build rigs, thank you.

840 bucks after taxes is unrealistic but possible occasionally.

most fascist keep the majority of their oil and spend it when its worth what its worth on the last day.

If rep casher with maxed tech and cashing is making 750/turn/acre a fascists rigs cant be anywhere close to it and be balanced. It should, because of the lack of tech be well below commie indy at high techs. But ofc it would be balanced by fascists building farms if oil is too low.

there was spike in oil price in ffa recently (not current set) when 1k+ oil was bought, dunno how big batch it was but even 100k-1m batch would have given big pile of bucks.

Buyouts, deliberate or accidental, have no relevance for present discussion.

wasn't buyout, more like spike in need of oil.

Still no relevance. I'm trying to show the game is imbalanced, you are talking about a minute of play in an obscure server ruled by multies.