Those changes you made for alliance shouldn't have been implemented in solo servers, now it's open season for farming due to the fact that special attacks don't do fluff, this will only accelerate people leaving since they won't be able to fight back against people farming them, makes sense for alliance but not in solo servers, I hope you didn't implement it in Primary too, if so I will exploit it and farm the crap out of people 4x smaller than me, cuz their special attacks won't hurt me.

should be out on all servers (pang's post didn't exclude any server).

Irrelevant, it creates a problem.

i wholly agree.

Disagree. The changes for ABs and BRs are bad on ALL servers. The changes to landgrabs are good/acceptable on all servers.

just make sure you kill them on your first try and you wont care. on express any decent player can kill another if you build your country right and have 360 turns.

Its a little bit too one dimensional if that is the only option on anyone not sharing your strat. I guess that killing was always the gold standard in express but actually with the grabbing changes it could actually make ABs and BR-maiming a viable option against jetters since their gains are limited by their buildings, and thus if only the grabbing change was made it would add a new dimension to warfare in express. A needed one at that.

In my personal opinion, the game should, at the very least, be somewhat realistic .... that's a big part of what makes it fun.. it is a somewhat realistic war game... or it used to be

Efforts should be made to make sure things in the game make sense.. and the idea that my tanks can only destroy the type of buildings that I have at home just isn't realistic and doesn't make sense

ohh yah thats part of what I like about the changes to grabbing since before luxemburg could switch tyranny, burn their cash reserves on jets and capture 40% of russia, 40% of china, 40% of canada and 40% of the USA in half their turns and then buy some tanks and level Brazil with the rest of them while turning Japan into a nuclear wasteland and Gas 90% of the population of France while they are at it...

Wut...are you still talking about earth empires, Gerd?
LOL :P

Yeah the changes are horrible, meant to fix something but destroyed the war interface, can we get more turns since it'll probably take double the amount to do same damage as before?

No... The changes are not horrible. They are necessary. The fact that ABs and BRs were included in the building specific limitations is a bad choice tho. Thats a very small portion of the change. That part is bad, yes, and should ideally be changed to a limitation based on total buildings rather than specific buildings.

And yes Im talking about this game. In this game prior to the change if I controlled luxembourg I could obliterate NATO, China, Russia, Japan, India and Brazil in 20 minutes. This WAS unrealistic amounts of damage and that is what this change was meant to amend. The BRs and ABs were not ideally impacted.

It seems game changes are usually designed in response to the Alliance server but then employed game-wide. With fewer players than ever, why should we want attack gains (ghosts) to be lessened on Express, Tourney, or Primary?

Exactly

KoH has a strong point.

If you want to fully exploit this,. play commie and keep a decent amount of troops. Then farm everyone into the ground.

Yeah everyone agrees that BRs and ABs shouldnt be subjected to these building specific limitations, but talking about it as "the change is bad" is just misinformed considering the plethora of other changes that has been made simulataneously to all aspects of the war room. Some of these changes are logical, good and making the game far more realistic than it was before.

I don't want to see my ghost acres all but disappear unless I hit other countries running my same strat, if that's part of this. This is especially devastating in Tourney and Primary where the dwindling player base is already pushing the game to its limits. This could be the death blow to the non-bot solo Earth servers.

Its a choice for any grabber if you want ghost acres or not.

???

There are currently 24 countries in game A the Tournament server. Games B and C are at about the same when you discount the countries that never came out of protection. 25 countries in the entire server, that's it.

The last several Primary resets:
There were 193 countries in the Primary server. ->
There were 162 countries in the Primary server. ->
There were 144 countries in the Primary server. ->
There are currently 104 countries in the Primary server.

There are a crisis-level number of countries available to play with and landgrab. Taking more land out of the game by removing ghost acres, therefore, is devastating. I don't understand what your response is supposed to address.

Primary server always grows during the reset and you cant blame these changes on that drop in numbers since this is the first reset they have been active from the start.

Tournament grabbing has been problematic for years, and all xp often wins, its the one solo server where all-xp can compete.

But either way what I said makes more sense if you understand the grabbing changes I guess. Maybe it will take a few sets for everyone to adapt to them. I'm not sure I have fully. But it's an interesting change that forces people to make new considerations in a game that had grown stale.

I'm not blaming the changes for the player drops. I'm saying in an atmosphere of smaller servers growing ever smaller, taking land out of the game seems quite harmful indeed to everyone's ability to play and grow.

Well it doesnt affect Express that way for sure. I have played two resets with these grabbing changes and this server is still easy to grab in.

Primary and tournament could be effected that way, but I think we need some time to see if, once everyone has adapted to the new changes, it actually makes that much of a difference. These 5-10k acre techers who just stock and then buy jets to ruin peoples resets, their task certainly got less appealing and that is great for the game. And that has taken land away from the game very visibly when they also nuke/get nuked and when they drop the land they grab. This stops them from dropping land too.

So again I think the criticism should be focused on what we know is bad for the game, and that is that ABs and BRs are now useless for maiming as long as the strats are not matched, which makes no sense and removes options and complexity from warfare, which is definatly bad in every way.

Gdi skirts pffft

Thank you I will put the theory to the test and max out my SDI

Good man :-)

Ok finally I got ABd, I had 18k tanks and this is the 1st hit...

43.9 mins ago
An armoured division from Time to try something (#2) has invaded your lands!
Their forces broke through your defences!
They destroyed:
110 Buildings
Your military lost:
805 Tanks
Their military lost:
2400 Tanks

77 hits, this is last hit...


41.4 mins ago
An armoured division from Time to try something (#2) has invaded your lands!
Their forces broke through your defences!
They destroyed:
37 Buildings
Your military lost:
15 Tanks
Their military lost:
800 Tanks

I thought AB was supposed to be weaker and take out some civis..

civs? you know the difference between bugs and suggestion board and the announcement board right?

ABs are circumstantially exactly equally as powerful as they were before these changes. same with BRs, Same with GS, Same with landgrabs. The circumstance is less common for BRs and ABs than for GS tho. Which means BRs/ABs are very rarely useful.

Also I dont get why you take the time to complain about a change you didnt take time to understand. Either ask someone who knows, read what has been said about it or test it out yourself. But this shows why a democratic approach with polls about which changes should be made is going to fail miserably; only a tiny fraction of players actually know enough to form an educated opinion.

I think it's still an open question as to how it works now. It's still bad to have the way things work change and the masses not know how the new way is. Does the amount of buildings destroyed have anything to do with attacker's build style and attackee's? Could you explain why we saw 50 AB's do 500 building damage compared to Koh's post where a lot more was done? DR shouldn't have been a factor on the 50/500 scenario. Thanks

Damn, you're the Sheldon of earth-empires, quit being a buzz kill and let people enjoy this game their way, I did take the time to try to understand the changes, hence I made a country in this server and am playing it, I like to get my feet wet, that's how I learn, don't like it, don't look at me.

DR still dont matter on special attacks.

Pang changed all attack gains/effect to have a limit of 10% of the attacker has according to the post on announcement board. His implementation has some multipliers on some things which make it not exactly 10% of what you have for some effects but most are just 10%.

What you need to understand is that ABs/BRs building destruction limit is BUILDING SPECIFIC, which is a bad design imo, and building capture limit on SS/PS is BUILDING SPECIFIC, which is a good, nay a crucial design.

Also money capture, tech capture, oil capture, food capture etc on GS/SS/PS has a 10% limit of your own good (possibly with as of yet unknown multipliers), this is also a good design imo even tho it doesnt affect the GS half as much as it does the SS/PS in most cases.

I'm still waiting for one of the cashers I provoked to hit me hard so I can experience the difference....

https://www.earthempires.com/alphaffa

You can just AB a casher bot or try it with 2 of your own countries on AlphaFFA.

hmm, ok, so I agree that it's a bad design to make AB/BR building damage specific to your own. A player would have to build a certain building they don't want for their strat just to be enable themselves to do respectable damage. That's a waste of turns, money, strat potential, etc. (especially for larger countries). I don't think tanks or jets should care what kind of building they're blowing up. Also, indy's are at a disadvantage since other strats generally make some complexes for spies.

As for SS/PS, land taken is the same, but only captured buildings are limited? Does the not capturing buildings of a type you don't have reduce the total land you get? Or do those buildings just come part of razed land? If the latter, not having to bulldoze buildings you don't want (and pay for it) and getting it as unassigned and keeping what you want I think would be good too.

I don't think GS/SS/PS should care what an attacker has on hand. It would make sense to only be dependent on what the defender has available to take, then some sort of % of that. Attacking units should grab whatever they can. But for example, if I'm an indy I should get some bus/res tech so when I attack I can grab some of that too. I think I dislike this part, but it's not as large of an impact as the first item.

Since the introduction of ghost acres and later the addition of bots, two changes that can not easily be reverted and probably should not be, the ideal netting country and the ideal warring country has diverged further and further. This has caused huge problems for years which a fraction of the EE community has abused to it's limits and beyond.

The changes are a result of the abuse of this unintended discrepancy which now limits the damages that can be made. As for grabbers, be they warrers or netters, bot grabbers or player grabbers; they now face a new challenge in what strat targets they grab and how many buildings they should have of each kind outside their strat if any and this is an increase in the complexity of the previously quite simple task of grabbing, which is good. Complexity is good. This increase in the difficulty does not revolve around making defences of bots higher or making them fewer, which would have unwanted effects on markets and whatnot. Fewer bots would make grabbing simpler as we saw before with 100 bots that everyone played tyranny and just farmed with little regard for target selection, and higher defences would force grabbers to run much higher jets and thus, all else being equal, lower defences.
I agree very much with the spirit of the change but as I learn more about the implementation and the numbers behind it there are a few things I think need to be amended within this huge change that doesnt really seem to be balanced.

BRs and ABs building destruction limits are the obvious first things that need to be amended, its just plain wrong. I think the limits for building capture on SS/PS are a little too low as well.

Ideally, we introduce new mechanics and change existing ones to partially reconverge the ideal netting country with the ideal warring country. This change does that since it forces warrers to grow to a reasonable size while before they could just stock at 5-10k acres and be fully effective with that once they blew their stock.

More changes in this direction are comming from my understanding the next one is bots that retal which will attack the problem from the other end; Bots retalling, hopefully in an intelligent manner, will force netters who grab to get enough defence to stop those retals. This most certainly will mean turrets but probably also tanks, and possibly some troops.

This could mean a steady demand of troops and tanks (and turrets) in times of peace which would be great for the markets and perhaps enable reseller strategies again on some servers.

This game has been devoid of balance changes for years on end. The reason I speak up against voices that just say "the changes are bad" is that it creates noice that doesnt bring anything to the discussion except possible demotivation for the devs we want to work for us. If you dont understand the change you should first work on that and then critique it if you spot something that you dont think is good.
Because Im a numbers nerd and I speak almost daily with other number nerds I have a decent understanding of the effect of this changes and I have adapted to them quite decently I would say. I can also see that most have not yet adapted or understood it, yet.