Had to cut a few things because I ran out of time. I also plan on addressing a few of the player comments from in the original thread in a different way.


GENERAL MECHANICS:
* Jet maintenance costs are reduced to the standard value of $0.14.

* The indy production bonus for the Communist government is reduced from 35% to 25%.

* The Communist government gets -30% bonus effectiveness.

* Food base purchasing price on PM is reduced to $100 and food replenishment rate increased from 2 to 10.

* Reduce public market arrival market time from 5-6 hours to 4-5 hours.

* Reduce custom market time minimum from 24 hours to 3 hours.



ATTACKING:
* The SS attacking military loss penalty starts at 98% for 0 buildings and linearly decreases down to 8% at 300k buildings built (68% at 100k, 38% at 200k).

* Attack success/failure is now deterministic with no "10% oversend random factor".



BOT BEHAVIOR:
* Bot farmers will be able to stock food and bot techers will be able to stock tech.

* Bot techer landgoal should be a bit higher and somewhat random per country.

* Adjust bot estimated land goals for non-techer to make sure they aren't overbuying tech by being too optimistic in their growth estimates.

* Change buying schedules to get more early military and a little less tech.

* Bots can now buy tech for $10000.

But what about the spy ops? 5 per day is unacceptable imo. These other changes sound a little Gerdler-ish. But interesting to see how this benefits the ones who know what they are doing. I still want to see bots retal, clan up and conduct killruns.

I would like to see ops increased as well. Blond sending is not that hard tho.

The last bit that would defeat the purpose of this server would it not? That would be cool on alliance tho

The name of the server is cooperation. I believe the point is you need to work with your teammates to conduct spy ops. Utilize a country (or multiple) to run a Dictator that can play a "support" style role. If you want to run a netter focused country, that's fine and dandy, but you'll need help getting ops. I think 5 is perfectly fine.

There were multiple Dictators this past set that ran hundreds if not thousands of ops, and still finished well.

I'm sort of interested in running another CI to tweak, but the bonus change seems unnecessarily harsh? No one running CI this last set was even in the top 5, and while some of those other changes might help balance out the market (I'm not sure if linearly reducing military losses will encourage people to grab enough to lead to any actual increase in market volumes), it's not clear to me they need a nerf.

More farmers might help some with the bushel peak, and since bots drive the market, less optimistic tech purchases could help with tech demand, but I think techers will continue to have quite the head start (in addition to being a benefit to their team with allies). I guess it's nice they have a server where they can be "meta" (besides FFA, though that's mainly because they require less time to play when you have so many countries) but this balance doesn't quite make sense to me unless the goal is to have techers > cashers > CI = farmers. I'm open to someone else with more knowledge of how the bots interact with the markets to come and sway me (not that my swaying would change anything).

Last round you were stuck in a clan by yourself. If you join a clan with others this round you'll find it to be much easier. Saved spy ops are at the clan level now so you don't even need a third party site to benefit.

I think 5 is too many. I would go with zero.

Sure force people to optimize turns :p

These all look to move in good directions

It would force them to *co-operate* ;)

Please NO, don't do zero. The support countries would be getting bombarded by people at all times of day to get ops for them. I'd never sleep.

Surely you must see that farmer was by far the best strat last round. Out of a great breadth of skill and competition only one techer managed the moves on the market relatively good enough to compete with quite poor farmers (heck a support farmer is 2nd of all farmers).

You were the highest ranked CI and finished with like a hundred untaken turns, and some other inefficiencies that may be due to the guessing game of the first round. All human CI did reasonably well. Was it 3 in the t10? And andrewmose would have been there too had he played his turns.
Meanwhile techer has 2 top 10s.

Techer is outproduced by all other strats on all servers. That is the only way they are balanced and thar happens here as well. What makes techer able to compete on some servers at some time is their great efficiency in using that production, particularly by starting to stock on high tech prices and low bushel prices, and then selling those bushels expensively. Due to the flow of the server most techers missed both of those aspects, and indeed the hoops you'd have to jump through to manage to do both would not be worth it. So I, as everyone else, bought bushels at 60-80. Meanwhile my 90k labs are supposed to compete with 260-310k acre farmers, cashers and indies.

You are greatly overestimating techer. A properly played farmer of any reasonable govt would have crushed me last round. I did some mistakes too, and gave away a lot of tech, but not nearly enough that it would have mattered if say evilzergling, slagpit or kingme played a netting farmer.

We will learn a lot about how to play this new server over the next couple of rounds. A lot of our beliefs were proven wrong.

The problem with CI at the state of last round was it was miserable to play for like 45 days, and if it wasn't, it would have been overpowered. Because the endgame is so phenomenal and you can stock so many turns meaning you can play like 40% of the turns in the endgame where you outproduce techers, cashers and maybe even farmers, and use stock incredibly effectively on top of that.

I would have tweaked it in a different way. But the changes seem to be in a good direction from what I can see. And indy may be too weak this round, or the market and lower expenses will compensate for the lower production and bonus. We will simply have to see.

I do think that players need more time to figure out how to best play on this server. We still don't have consensus yet on the best way to play a casher or a farmer. For indy I think it's possible to benefit from going past 250k acres but I could be wrong on that point for sure.

I agree with Gerdler in that if I had played farmer last round I would have won.

Things I agree with:
--- farmers had a great set
--- people are still learning the game
--- mistakes were made by many in the top 10, including 130+ turns lost for myself that I missed playing
--- most of the tweaks are interesting and in the right direction

Things I'm arguing:
--- outside of the results at the final set, the market in the early and mid-set was strange in ways that are we would want to try and avoid
----- I blame techers for this mostly - the prices were much higher for longer than any other server; they were logging in to billions in cash, and since they weren't at 100% decay yet, were buying up stock as cheap tech, bushels, and possibly even oil? This raised the floor on tech prices further compounding the profit and led to farmers having the same problem as they were flush with cash with limited options to spend it. Interestingly, in 1a, tech demand usually drops in the early growing phase as the large grabbers don't have the cash to buy it, but that didn't seem to occur in coop last round (though it did drop over time, and prices did seem to drop significantly at the end).

--- the tweaks as is reduce some of the bushel peak, and might(?) reduce the tech demand by the bots. There may be fewer bots so that human players can drive more of that, but I expect demo techers will make similar choices this set and though the bushel peak may be smaller, that may also mean they'll be buying them for less, leaving a well-timed dump with comparable profits.

--- the changes to communism make it much less likely to be played. Yes, some of the changes help indies generically, but the perks of commies seem a lot smaller, and the commissions hurt a lot more when tech is so much more valuable. I probably spent 5B on just commissions for buying tech, which was a significant amount of the total stock collected. So adding on a bonus nerf seems arbitrary and unnecessary - which is my key point.


So yes farmers were great last set, but a lot of the changes will nerf that out, but it's hard to imagine it will proportionally balance techers in any way, which is why I think they'll do well. But the ending market was unusual too with how quickly bushels and tech crashed, which really helped cashers. We'll see if that continues next set or not.

As a side comment, one of the other interesting aspects about the tech crash is that with so many stored turns, and the ways the bots work here compared to 1a, the prices were just high enough to not always be worth it. Specifically, I imagine a player logs in to a lot of cash or run 200 turns, and then buys a particular tech's avg price up thousands of points. Bots see the average is high and sell for that amount, even if 90% of players aren't going to pay that much (dependent on stocked turns). SO's on the other hand have small trickles, even if you're the only one (in 1a bots seem to more frequently move towards the ask price).

In my calculations, I didn't find going beyond 250k with SS was profitable. If you have a 30% bonus hit to building cost, it's certainly not going to be beneficial, and because it will so harshly impact build costs is why I think it's a much larger detriment than you think.

I blame techers for this mostly

As a bad teacher last set; I disagree.

Be honest, that's all you really took from his comments.

Maybe I misunderstood your first post tertius. Your last one make a lot of sense. I agree with most of it. I blame the stocking behaviour of bot techers for the mid game, human techers ends up compounding that but the majority of the bushel volume is bought by the bot techers at least at that point.

In 1a because war countries are so often techers, netting techer is usually not viable because tech is oversupplied until war techers are almost all dead/crippled. Higher tech prices are needed to allow techers to compete. It's really the tech price:bushel price ratio that matters tho, and that wasn't very high at any point during which stocking was viable really. Techer bot stocking behaviour is my explanation for this, because when they stocked farmers could get rich to buy up tech prices higher and higher.

I can't predict what the new bot strat quotas will do and because I think the main issue remains we still get problems but they may manifest slightly differently, hopefully better for most.
Put another way I think the most obvious symptoms are being treated but not the root cause.

Agreed, with the exception of the bonus nerf to commies which seems like salt on the wound rather than any treatment.

So you're saying coop needs war clans after all? =Þ

Boo to this anti-farmer and anti-CI propaganda!

... I joke.


Agree with most of the points above, though framed in a different way:

It isn't bot techer's bushel stocking behavior causing the weird market, it's bots overall switching from getting enough defence early on to buying tech. There is a tipping point where all the bots start buying tech at the same time and it causes the price of tech to spike; this then causes the bushel spike because the techers are rich. The large human techers exacerbate this (i.e. 1 human techer is likely the size of 10 techer bots at this point in the game), supplying into the overwhelming demand from ALL bots (not just techers). This then creates the farmer cascade, where the rich farmers buy more tech, keeping the prices elevated.



The above should help address this, though perhaps what would be more helpful here, is to make it so that this change in buying schedule is randomized within some wider timeframe, not unlike the bot destock now. Perhaps this is already built into the logic, and is what is meant by "change buying schedule". Then we're good.

This is one of those situations where, if every bot adopts the "game-optimal" strategy, it quickly becomes non-optimal for everyone.

I applaud Slag for continuing to work on these changes, and taking this in the right direction. New server, having to make new strategy decisions, is a lot of fun! (And I'm not just saying this because I ran the *cough* biggest farmer.)

If anything, I would add that it appears that all 4 strats seem playable and winnable at this point, but the biggest question mark remains on CI. The top finishing CIs lost turns, and its hard to say whether it's the inability to generate enough cash to play turns that caused the loss of turns.

Also, can we get this stickied / have the changes added to the server mechanics post for people to easily find?

I don't see the loss of the ghost acres bonus for dict in the top of this thread. Was it missing that bonus last set too?

?

yes it was removed at start of first round.