Somebody is coming after my oil.

yea i don't think it does, i had someone raid my cash stockpile last set. i had also
thought gdi protected you prior to this.

Currently, with GDI ppl can only steal cash, food, and oil. You used to be able to steal tech from ppl in GDI before, but that was nixed a few resets ago.

GDI protects from most harmful spy ops, but not all of them.

You can notably still steal cash, food and oil. Stealing tech was put on GDI protection a few resets ago; I pushed hard for this particular change because mathematically, it is proven that ignoring tech stealing (and any form of stealing) is better for netting, even if you are losing 50k tech points a day. It'll lower your finish slightly (maybe 1-2 ranks lower), but not as much as eating missiles from the RoR would.

The other thing is that you can mitigate cash/food/oil stealing by storing food and oil on the market. You can mitigate cash stealing by stocking food and storing that on the market. But you literally cannot mitigate tech stealing (you can only put 1/4 on the market), there were countries that run 100 SPAL that did nothing but tech stole. If you were a 40k country, no way you were going to run 4m spies just to have a 50% chance to block those ops, the upkeep costs of that much spies is a few times higher than the cost of just buying back the tech points lost (and that you would need to dedicate a large portion of land, about 25%-30% to indies making all spies, lowering your income).

From the perspective of a netter, being randomly a target of 20 tech steals a day from someone you never even attacked before is not much different from being "suicided".

Dang it xinhuan, you just said the same thing I did in a lot more words!

<-- better than xinhuan!

missed those days where my tech got stolen

really rich ? :p

I miss the days when that was an op worth using. :(

Not a big fan of the tech change since good countries use the market to protect bushels,oil and cash. This gives the bottom fed country 0 effective retal options

The problem is that this "retal option" can also be used as a "suicide option". I agree that it gives a bottomfed country 0 effective retal options, but without the change, the large country had 0 effective anti-suicide measures from getting 100k tech stolen a day. The tech stolen per turn is more than what most techers even tech per turn. The moment you retal twice, they blow up 10k buildings and 2m jets.

The removal of Offensive alliances was another example. While it gave smaller countries the ability to retal better, ultimately, top players were abusing it to get a competitive edge by having large all-jetter O allies, so they can hold more turrets and become "more unretallable" to those that couldn't get O allies to retal with. This advantage is significant enough to snowball a top 20 player to become a top 5 player unfairly because they use significantly less jets and oil per day, and can make an extra PS a day as a result.

I understand the thinking behind a lot of the coding and rule changes that have been made but, so far, I'm thinking they add up to a change for the worse.

The problem is that the changes start with some game play idea which is perceived to be bad. And the change is designed to make the bad thing impossible or less advantageous. A sort of social engineering.

But rules need to create an environment where players find their own tactics and their own counters. Driving play into some particular pattern is not, in my view, likely to work.

A particularly clear example of this lies in the changes made with a view to eliminate co-operative play on the solo servers. A high reliance is necessarily placed on value judgment by the mods. Well, the Team server players are currently up in arms about mod value judgments made there and on Express the players are all agreed that two mod deletions made there are badly mistaken.

That is hard on the mods, who give their time to help us all, and hard on the players who are stuck with decisions which they heartily dislike.

So I hope we get no more social engineering. I dislike super aggressive bottom feeding and land trading in 1a. But I will look for my own answer to combat these things (and enjoy the process) not look to some change in the rules to do it for me.

In the case of the co-operative play rules I think the problems are clear enough that the rule makers could, with profit, back track a bit and reduce the pressure on the mods to make difficult value judgments.

Have these rules changes helped grow the game? Or sped its decline?

I'm not sure I buy into this story of decline, Vic.

Many of us remember the game around the turn of the millenium. There were many more countries, the boards were very active and clan websites even more so.

But the game had few competitors then. Players were predominantly youngsters. There are thousands of games for children and teen-agers now. They are not going to make their way here.

Those halcyon days were a dozen years back. Have numbers dropped over, say, the last five years? I don't know but my guess is that numbers go up and down as regular players leave and return. Plainly there are enough to make the various servers viable and I, for one, am having a ball as things are. Just possibly we have slightly more than our fair share of monosylabic insecure posters but hey, this is the internet! We also have way under our fair share of cheats and a high proportion of skilled, veteran players whom it is a pleasure to cross swords with.

I am currently advocating less rule changes but the fact that those who own the site and make the coding or rule changes are highly experienced and dedicated Earth players means it will always be easy to accept what they do with goodwill. They, and we, want the same thing. A fun game. :)

To be honest, I don't think the rules helped to grow or decline.

The game has always been played by old players who played the original E:2025 before, and continue to do so. People leave for a few months or years and come back once in a while. Ultimately it's the same bunch of players.

Allowing new players to retal by spy ops or whatsoever, really makes no difference, they are probably still going to quit the game if they cannot grasp the deeper mechanics of "country specialization", and of how important the first 2 weeks of growth is to "get out of the gutter". Once you start getting bottomfed on, there's no climbing out of that gutter, even for strong players. Anyone can see that if you start a country 2 weeks late, you might as well don't bother, you won't finish better than a top 30 even if you got lucky and climbed out of the gutter because someone noob you were warring put you in high DR by using GSes for a few days.

I would say changes to retain old players and stronger players by catering to the them are better.

If the game wants to attract new players, the game has to

* Undergo a huge revamp.
* The game has to capture the attention of the new player within 5 minutes.
* The game needs a interactive tutorial. Look how many rainbow countries there are, or just players randomly doing a few GSes or BRs and SSes.
* The game needs a low learning curve. The player shouldn't need to read 12 hours of wikis to figure out how to play.
* The game needs to show that this game has depth, so that the player has a reason to return to it.

My point is, doing all of these changes will make the game as we know it today, not be EE anymore, it will be a completely different game. At this point then, you might as well just make a new game.

The mods shoot themselves in the foot by not being more transparent in their policy enforcement.

It is a shame they don't want to help themselves by highlighting the good work they actually do and removing the veil of distrust surrounding most of their actions.