"NPC countries on the FFA server will change to the newer "Express" style and there will be about 3.5 NPC countries created per player country. This will result in fewer NPC countries than the current fixed amount of 2000. It is likely that we'll implement this change during the final few days of the current FFA round that ends on June 11, 2024."

Ask any questions here.

Why the change?

and.. I havn't tried express in a long time, how are those NPCs different?

Why make changes end of round vs beginning ?

As Troy said what's the difference, is there a link ?

We're changing the bots because we can't support two different versions of the bot code forever. It's also confusing for players. The bots need to be changed before the end of the round for technical reasons, but I can't foresee any problems caused by doing it in the last couple of days.

There are a lot of changes for the bots. The most important ones are that they act more like players, pay more attention to market prices, and will stockpile instead of leaving > 2 B cash around or infinitely buying tech.

The bots have been switched over. They will all dump their stockpiles until the round ends (I'm not sure what the old style bots do on the last day).