Sorry if this is a silly question, but does this mean that if you send 100 jets, then you lose 99 jets.

(Ignoring med tech & govt bonus)

Yes, you will lose 98% of your sent units in that scenario for SS. PS will have the typical military losses that you are used to.

Interesting, so I am thinking this is going to slow down the hardcore farming a bit...

Yeah I dunno sounds like a bad idea because it detracts from gameplay

I thought you left, nobody is forcing you to play in this server, the meta is over in 1a, you go, you go now....

Exactly what I'm thinking, everyone wins with this.

Some of the reasons for the change:

1) Make offensive allies more important which encourages players to find a tag and allows elite tags to differentiate themselves by managing offensive allies well.
2) Make spy ops more useful along those same lines.
3) Make landgrabbing a meaningful choice in the early game and punish players who grab carelessly.
4) Increase public market demand for jets, medical tech, and weapons tech.
5) Shorten the overall grabbing phase which some players find to be tedious.

If the mechanic doesn't work out well then it will be replaced with something else.

I tbink this is fantastic. More strategic PSing.

Without turn optimization it's not a competitive server.

But this should require way more optimization? I mean balancing maintenance and jets cost to blindless grabbing, plus having to ensure you have smart and capable offensive allies that you trust not to eat your jets up. It's whole new areas to learn how to optimize, and you can continue to work on new strats based on the changes for turn optimization too (medical and weapons tech starts anyone?).

Yeah, this is a weird comment. Every rules change shifts what it means to optimize your turns. This basically amounts to "without people being competitive it isn't competitive."

The best part in this is after 20 years, we've found a way to create demand for med tech. lol

TC - Are you trying to say that because the server doesn't know what the optimal turn optimization is, it's not competitive?


I think one of the things that hurts the game so much is that it is a 'solved' game. The more we can break that solution, and force people to make decisions on the fly, the better.

This server rule isn't competitive because it makes SS unviable and in doing so gives a person a ton of turns and nothing useful to do with them. Earth isn't a time based game like utopia, it's turn based, so any good strategy requires maximizing the value of every turn. But as setup the best strategy is the one that has the highest amount of stored turns, rather than the one who does something useful with them.

There basically isn't any innovation or optimization to be done, which is why it isn't competitive. Offensive alliances and tech are just too simple to optimize beyond using them, and are best optimized by having people play feeder countries, which is the exact opposite of what should be encouraged.

Notice how it reduces PS from 5 to 2 as well. It's just a newb friendly casual server as designed.

To make it competitive give 20 PS.

There are a number of things that players can do to mitigate the higher SS cost:

* doing a tech start
* getting offensive allies
* getting medical tech, weapons tech, and mstrat tech
* having your clan get a sufficient number of spy ops
* saving turns
* building cs later than usual
* playing as the right government. dictatorship is the obvious choice to reduce the cost of SS but there are others that are helpful

Your ending networth is entirely up to the choices that you make. I expect elite players to make the right choices to maximize their networth. If anything, I expect this server to be more competitive than Alliance in that highly skilled players are better able to distinguish themselves.

All players will do every one of those things, so there won't be any variation in gameplay. Everyone whos competive executing the exact same strategy.

Would you be so kind as to post the optimal farmer strat then? Since all players are going to play optimally anyway there's no harm in you posting it, right?

Ahahahaha!! So true.

For my 2 cents., this change seems good to me.

There’s tricks to calculate a bot’s defense just on networth and govt type; thus some players could perform a successful LG without using a turn on spy op. This at least makes the spy op more valuable.

Extra turns you have to cash to get enough money to grab again benefits one strategy: techer. Because it's turns spent earning are far more productive.

To balance tech with other strategies you need to have a tradeoff between income and growth. But in the rules you implement you need that income to grow, so the tradeoff is gone and it becomes the only playable strat.

With so many changes I have no idea how anyone could possibly calculate an imbalance of strategies.

It’s almost an entirely new game.

It also seems Slag is making changes to try out & not necessarily make permanent. The point of the discussion on forums is to point out an obvious imbalance which I don’t think there is one.

TC it definitely seems like you are being critical just for the sake of it here. This is an attempt to improve things, it can't solve every issue immediately, and until we actually see how it plays out everything is speculation.

If you have a suggestion to make techer more balanced I will consider it. The server isn't live yet so it's not too late to make changes. Perhaps it will help to know that the npc countries on this server will not infinitely buy tech like they do on the Alliance server. They only buy tech at prices that they think will benefit them.

Drop the SS change, change the PS count to 10, keep everything else. That adds new interesting things that I can't optimize without actually playing it.

If you want to go really crazy eliminate CC DR and decrease the build cost of large countries significantly, so they more out less cap at the 150k price (or something similar) to enable other strategies. It's much more fun and competitive to grab all set than just part. Add a new tech to decrease build cost.

Give countries 5 spyops per day that don't require turns.

How would a player's tag be meaningful under those rules?

Exact same way it is on what you wrote, those are still meaningful changes that will be utilized, they just don't overwhelm to the exclusion of all other choices.

Maybe you really want to create a ruleset that is all about aiding a singlw country to as high a nw as possible to the exclusion of the results of the other countries in the tag, but I don't suggest that.

FA packages aren't allowed, warfare and SDI tech are removed, tech leeching is less effective, countries can put goods on the market for up to 60 days, and standing orders were changed to make low price market transfers more difficult. The server isn't designed for players to aid a country to as high of a NW as possible, but of course players are permitted to attempt this if they like.