My perspective is if they can hit me with missiles then it's my fault. And it's been my fault a lot this set :)

I agree with the support for the team server. I also wish that it would be more attractive to landgrab on teams. Currently the rules don't leave a lot of room for productive landgrabs, but that could be changed with a Primary GDI like mechanic.

1) You can grab any country once (maybe even time bound this per week) without risk of Missiles/AB/GS/Harmful ops
2) If you grab someone more than once in the given time period, then anyone from the defending tag can conduct harmful ops and attacks.

It will still be hard to outrun retals because of the OAs but it may reward a very aggressive tag. It also creates a mechanic that somewhat limits the role that "friendly tags" play in defense.

Cathankins, I don't know who #426 is or what he has done to you all. It is very possibly someone who detagged from EVO after last set and has not reported in to us this set. It is equally possible to be someone else from another clan. It is not someone who is sending spy ops to our site and we aren't benefiting from the intelligence being produced by #426. After reading through this thread it's unclear to me if the actions are harmful or just for intel purposes? In my mind there is a big difference between someone bombing your buildings or stealing your tech and a intel seeking ops. So in responding to Josey's post it's hard for us to say anything concrete based on all of the layers of assumptions we would have to make to come up with what the problem may actually be - much less how to resolve it.

I think Devo said it well. We are netting, not looking for war. It would be a large strategic mistake if we sent someone to do a bunch of harmful spy ops on war prepped countries. Clearly that is not what happened here.

Bonus

very nice

I just realized there was only 1 CI in the top 10. That's crazy.

oh good, now I can catch you....j/k well played this set LightBringer

I didn't play last set.

Congrats NiteIL on the victory.

Rank Country Land Networth Special
1 p h i l t r e (#1) 15,203 $33,745,815 RG
2 Land of Little People (#3) 17,452 $31,361,899 CG
3 The Bell Tolls (#10) 15,335 $26,833,630 DG
4 BiBiGoN (#16) 13,873 $25,465,200 DG
5 DogDiedtimeforaGerbil (#13) 13,211 $24,239,267 RG
6 Happiest Time of the Year (#14) 9895 $23,729,610 HG
7 Ok (#11) 12,318 $21,499,415 HG
8 Back to the Future (#17) 10,778 $20,400,554 RG
9 Arathodoxia (#4) 17,069 $18,403,071 CG
10 Tyri (#15) 16,517 $11,155,313 CG

Well, no wars between farmers and the prices are normalizing back to a reasonable level.

Don't delete...we need all 4 farmers...and maybe one or 2 more

I like this idea. But I would encourage you to go farther in limiting the damage of Bomb buildings in particular. It is overpowered compared to missiles and AB. AB is either successful or not based on total tanks. But If you through 35 bomb buildings at a country with similar SPAL there will be enough that get's through to significantly hurt the country getting hit. And, if I'm not mistaken, you will have even more buildings destroyed if you happen to have the same build ratio as the attacker...which seems to be an odd mechanic.

Spy's and missiles are the primary issue. It's almost impossible to defend all the ways someone can ruin your set. I agree with you though that getting grabbed 5 times a day and not being able to do anything about it is an awful way to learn how to play a game. Like most game mechanics, when you change it the dynamics will change and a new equilibrium will be found. I wouldn't mind testing it out for a set or 2 and seeing what changes. Maybe the extra SDI bought will finally help the poor techers to keep up. Winning primary as a techer hasn't been done in many years (maybe a decade?).

This is primarily an issue on Primary and this would greatly lower the acre potential in primary and introduce a somewhat arbitrary 72 hour retal period. The current GDI mechanic in primary has no such 72 hour rule and a 400 acre landgrab in week 2 can have a retal land in week 6 for 4000 acres. The no-time limit retal mechanic does make strategies that start slower (casher & farmer) possible...so I wouldn't want that changed (although I'm sure my country will be receiving a big retal any day now).

I understand that GDI can remain as is without a time limit, and the new Humanitarians policy can have a time limit...but that doesn't seem consistent to me. The result of this change would simply be that missiles, AB's, and harmful spy ops can be launched at anyone who attacks more than once. With the amount of players on primary today a country would be hard pressed to grow past 30k acres with only single grabs. On a solo server it is very rare that a war ends with one player better than they were before. So single grabs on opponents who will likely never grow within range to retal will be the new meta. Speculative grabs will be harder to execute because you won't have the growth potential to continue to pull away. NW finishes in the top 5 will be much lower.

I will

Who's farming?

I have run out of food many times cashing 50 turns instead of 5 turns. I support this.

The easiest way to add land grabbing to any server is to use the primary style GDI. I like that idea too.

What do you see in the team market to show that it's in a bad state?

I'm going to bump this up since there are currently some big ideas being floated around about entirely new servers. While I'm sure a "Team Market" isn't the quickest coding exercise, it's probably easier to do than other ideas being floated around. I've always liked this idea as a way to reward closer collaboration within the team. Currently a team can setup a techer to leach from and 4 FFOs and play the entire set without any communication. On the war side, there already is a need for collaboration, but it would be interesting to provide a better team dynamic for netting.

I had to take a retal. Other than that I was all X. It was a pretty good set to be a farmer. Oil was very inexpensive for most of the set. I actually bought half of the oil I used.

Tourney is probably the only server that can be won with any strategy.

Shortening the entire game to a small timeframe is a great idea for a server like this. Working to match that time window for players would be an added bonus. I for 1 will probably never be available for the entire 21:00 GT to 22:59 GT time window.

I like the idea of various win conditions, but I would think that starting with 1 win condition would be best. Adding the additional complexity in future iterations is great, but I would think we want to see how the server works in practice before massively changing things.

Will the NPC countries change their play towards the same win condition?

this sounds like a fun new server. I'm not smart enough to figure out how all of the changes will combine together, but if this is easy enough to build it certainly would be interesting to see how it all works out. I wouldn't vilify the TMBR - oil destock method too much though...without it the value of the oil resource will drop significantly and the entire oiler strategy go away. I think there are more subtle ways to make the FFO->TMBR pattern more equitable with casher, techer, indy.

Sorry for the slow response. Thank you for working on the game. I would be careful making too many big changes all at once. The great thing about this game is that small nuances matter.

With that said, aiming to equate various strategies would go a long way. FFO is the only way to win right now. Simply capping the building cost bonus may be able to solve this without impacting other servers.

Encouraging wargaining would be great as well. To be effective, the expected gains would have to exceed what the bots typically provide. Because the cost and risk will be much higher. Implementing a country to country GDI, like in primary may be a first step towards enabling more player to player land grabbing. More than one grab would unlock special attack from the entire clan, but one grab is fine.

I think that systemizing clan to clan relationships would also be helpful.

Bonus

I'm going to tech full set.

Thanks all. I hadnt had a successful set in primary for a while, so I needed this one to rebuild confidence.

I've never gone farmer on this server. I'm not sure if it is possible to all explore farm past 35M in most markets. I wasn't going to play this set, but maybe I'll give this a shot.

Also I don't tech start, unless I am going full techer.

Congrats Ashe on the win.

Thanks all. I don't have any secrets. I think the 2 most significant differences between countries are well known. 1) Make every turn count. 2) Get as much tech as you can as early as possible.

A turn used at 10k is one less turn at 400k acres. I'm not saying you have to run calculations every turn, just the mentality of using every turn as productively as possible goes a long way. And tech creates a virtuous cycle allowing you to afford more tech because your producing more per turn. Other nuances like farm to rig ratios and optimal grabbing can make small differences, but are not enough to overcome inefficient turns or low tech.

I always thought an express set where everyone competing had to play the entire set without using the public market would be a fun mini-competition. Impossible to police though. With that said En4cer's re-build came close to not requiring a public market. I'm sure he sold tech but that's about it.

Harder still would be a set where you couldn't buy or sell anything even on your private market. You would just have to run a farmer->techer->casher->indy...which would be closer probably to what Ratski does.

Thanks everyone for the kind words. I had a couple RAs helping push me forward.

There goes the oil...

Cheap tech, Cheap military...food prices rising. Here come the cashers and farmers

I was feeling bad about buying 14k Agri tech instead of 14k Res a couple of weeks ago...but you win this round LB.

There isn't a lot of trash talk going on considering the fights I see around the server. We are almost in month 2, there are usually some shake-ups happening around this time.

as a commie/indy you will typically just run turns producing 100% Jets until you run out of money (Jets have the NW per turn yield for CI). Typically with all strategies there is a stocking phase and a destocking phase. The simplest method with a CI is to just accumulate $2B cash and then run turns until you run out of money. It's helpful to know how many turns you will take to run out from $2B starting cash. There are a lot of improvements from there but that is the best place to start.

Above $2B cash you will lose cash each turn due to corruption. Depending on market conditions you can stock food to keep expenses lower for longer until you stop selling. If you reach $2B well before set end then you can start your NW jumping phase early selling enough military every x turns or so to reach $2B again until you can run all of your turns before getting to $0 cash. At some point (rare in express for CI) it is more efficient to buy on private market then run turns.

Again it can get much more complicated from here but you should start with the basics. Sell until you get $2B cash, then run turns to finish the set without selling.

Bonus

Thank you for working on this. I agree with En4cer that it's important to be able to see this on the server ranks list.

In my experience, the 3rd attack has a noticeable return decrease. So I would have 1,2 as green 3-5 as yellow and 5+ as red.

don't waste your time on me... I've been irrelevant on this server for almost a year.

I'll probalby never play FFA again. It takes too much time and I couldn't really pay attention to any other countries while on that server. I just wanted to prove to myself I could set that record and take #1. I think there is a lot to be said about success across multiple servers though.

Congrats Cathankins! Well deserved. Looks like you only have a couple of servers left to conquer

happy new year

I forgot to login before end of set, but I don't think I could have taken first. You earned it.

Also I believe DH contributes as half of a break. To implement this I would calculate the DR contributions of each attack and sum the last 72 hours of news. Attack contribution to Dr = x*.5^(t/24) where x is 1 or . 5 depending on success or fail and t is the time in hours since the attack. t is a continuous number, not a round integer.

Hopefully someone will correct me if I'm wrong here. I know the exact calculation depends on forces sent.... But those can't be known so an as approximation is necessary.

It's approximated by a 24 hour half life exponent formula for all servers except express. Express has an 8 hour half life I believe. Only 72 hours of history is considered (24 in express).

Well earned victory.

Bonus

thanks for the update and glad to hear this! Well played!