I maintain again and again that this server needs to be slowed down, turns are too fast. Probably the 10th time I've posted this. It also fixes a variety of other issues such as storing huge amounts of 360(360) turns, and the fact that Commies need a special rule (increased max market %) in order to be even playable on this server.

With such fast turns, you need at least 6 mods to cover all time zones so that response times are no longer than 3 hours maximum. Consider the Alliance server, a 12-hour response time is only 36 turns. Here, a 12 hour response time is 180 turns.

I respect Tellarion (and you too Warstar, you both are doing great), but with the lack of sufficient mods, problems like these will continue to exist. This is one of those reasons why we cannot expand the game to other platforms like Facebook, we already can't handle one server with a population of 100.

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.

Lower.

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.

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".

Coffee (depending on how it is brewed) has 2x-8x more caffeine than Coke heh.

mmmmmmk.

What is moot? The land/resource trade?

Technically, you also have more rank 1 finishes than I have on Primary (2 vs 1). ;)

So, something is inconsistent after those set of changes. Hmm.

Hmmmmmmmmm. You're right! Woohoo, you earn 1 "Xinhuan is wrong" cookie!

Ok, if this is even confusing me, then it's probably too damn confusing for anyone. :/

You don't get bonuses in the first 24 hours.

No they don't. What you failed to understand that the 18 hour bonus is 3 turns, not 6 turns. If you got 6 turns, that means you actually got both bonuses, and slipped at least 6 hours on the 12 hour bonus.

Example: You just got 6 turns bonus. So both have just reset. You login 13 hours later (get 12 hour bonus). You login again 5 hours after that (get 18 hour bonus). This doesn't reset the 12 hour timer, you next get it 7 hours later.

"Better than you"

Muahahahaha.

Harvests take 1 season to produce!



Hahaha!

Sell them to your PM! That way you'll have money to buy your PM! 12 seconds left!

Probably not, I don't work for a big company like say, Ubisoft.

Depends on whether you value using them now, versus later. Reasons for using it later include hoping to buy cheaper units and tech. Reasons to use it earlier include getting the income now to buy something with it (eg buy Turrets).

Considering I work in the games industry as a game programmer, those numbers aren't out of my ass. They are real numbers.

Believe me, making EE into an app with push notifications wouldn't make it any more appealing to play. Considering the proliferation of IRC bots for announcing attacks already, it would barely take half a day of work to add Android/iOS push notifications from the same IRC bot. What's the catch? You need to run a server (not an issue if you already run an IRC bot), and then you need to pay Apple $99 per year for developer status, and you only get 100 device slots during app testing (that is, you can only test your app on up to 100 unique test devices - The limit is only for apps in testing, not for apps approved on the app store).

If a game doesn't capture your audience's attention within the first 5 minutes of launch, your game is as good as gone. Nobody wants to sit down for hours reading startup guides, or figuring out what a "casher" is, particularly *mobile* games.



They are people who do it as a hobby to learn how to write programs, this also allows them to add it to their resume for job interviews, as part of their portfolio.

Most of these apps never see the light of day outside of the 500 downloads via a few Facebook posts to friends. If you don't market a game, no one will see it. The ones that do make it rich, like Flappy Bird, basically struck lottery, and that one only because a famous Youtuber happened to play it. There are 12 million apps out there.

The games that you describe, while they obviously take nearly no capital to make, usually also lack _depth_. Games like 2048 obviously are an exception, but if you read back onto what it is a clone of (1024, which is a clone of Threes), you'll realize that even Threes was in development for a whole 1.5 years. That's right. Threes, a game that can be easy cloned in half a week, was in development for 1.5 years because the game mechanics wasn't quite right during all that time. They tried all sorts of sliding mechanics, combining mechanics and over a hundred art styles (tiles).

Not only that, trainboy initially made the comparison to Clash of Clans in his opening post. If that is the triple AAA standard we are talking about that is referenced when making an EE app, then you better cough up the money, because the time needed to make the app is significant.

This is why most forums implement a "minimum character count" for posts. 10 or so.

Sure, go ahead and do it then. Even if you get number 1 that way, everyone will just ridicule you as a player that got #1 only because you have 50 players behind you sending aid your way. It is not that it cannot be done. Sure it can.

The problem is funneling resources into 1 country simply doesn't serve any purpose, and any country or clan that got a single #1 slot that way wouldn't earn any recognition for doing it. At least you won't, from me.

Not only that, you have the rest of your clan members all "giving up" their income towards one country. It might be fun for that one country, not so much for the other 49 people in the FA chain. I certainly wouldn't join your clan if all I'm going to be doing it just to help someone else finish #1. A great clan is one where everyone helps each other to get a better finish as a whole, not one that helps a single country get a great finish.

And it is easy to wreck one country. Just a few missiles, bomb buildings, a few harmful ops, etc. Blah blah, putting eggs into 1 basket. You won't win any late game wars with a super country and a bunch of weak ones either.

Sure. But do you have 500k capital to invest?

It'll take about 1.5 years to get get such an app working, along with the network and infrastructure behind it. Say a team of 10 people (4 programmers (network, database, client frontend, graphics, game logic, etc), 4 artists and riggers (animation, 3D characters, environment, UI, promotional videos), 1 designer and 1 to handle business/emails), each taking $3000 salary a month for 1.5 years is 540k dollars.

For any business entity, you also need legal softwares, for eg, buying Microsoft Windows, and Visual Studio, 3D Studio Max/Maya, etc etc, so you can easily throw in another $10k dollars there. This even already assumes everyone works from home, so there is no office rental.

1 year is probably the minimum I see it takes to get a CoC clone up, and that's probably without any beta testing.

There are 3 official metrics in the game for measuring clans: http://www.earthempires.com/alliance/clans
* Total Networth
* Total Membership
* Average Networth
Achieving Rank 1 in all of these in a single reset is called the "Triple Crown". All 3 of these rankings can be viewed in higher detail within the game in a country that is logged on to the server under the Clans section.

Market aiding your clan member above someone else doesn't increase Total NW (you're just transfering networth), nor modify the clan's Average NW, and most certainly does not change the number of members in the clan. As such, market aiding isn't considered to be of any value other than to boost a single player's achievement, and doing so doesn't prove anything about that player's skill.

This is why market aiding is considered mundane because anyone can do it. Any clan can market aid. But not everyone can finish at the top spot without market aiding and that gives meaning to the number 1 spot.

That makes no sense because we know yo mama is so fat that she blots out the sun.

Pfft, that amount of Agri is less than my standing order.

Tech Agriculture you fluffers!

PHP sucks!

Stormbruins (#13), a Theo with 10m NW, seems to have just self-deleted.

For what it's worth, it's none of those. The target and his 2 allies didn't change in NW, I oversent 11%, target has no Def bonus, isn't a Dict, etc.

I was shocked enough to go back and recalc the break on the ops a few times, nope, nada. Couldn't figure it out.

>.<

I actually double checked all the numbers after the PS, didn't make any mistakes in the calculations.

Furious is just angry, because if there are no wars in the first 28 days of the reset, then everyone is going to be farming OMA rather than farming the alliances people are at war with.

That's abuse of linguistics by interpreting "mod abuse" as a noun followed by a noun, as opposed to a noun followed by a verb!

Big hits today.

2014-10-02 02:08:58 PS Sandwich (#76) If My Mind Puts Me To It (#100) 2177A (3066A)
2014-10-01 09:57:38 PS The 59 Sound (#90) LilAzNThatCould (#17) 2342A (3226A)

That's the second one on LATC.

Hey, I'm just trying hard to find loopholes!

For example, SoF could disband and form 10 different tags of 6 members each, SoF1, SoF2, SoF3, etc, so now none of these would be recognized as a signatory, but they could all FDP each other and each SoF tag could do 4 grabs every 48 hours on every other tag without it being an EAoW!

Well, aggressive farming would itself be an EAoW, since EAoW contains these 2 definitions:

--5+ landgrabs by any country on a single tag within 48 hours*
--5+ landgrabs by any tag on a single country within 48 hours*

So for example, if 3 Evo countries PSes a single OMA country 5 times within 48 hours, that would be a EAoW.

-If a set of attacks does meet an EAoW threshold but the parties are able to resolve the situation independently, this pact need not be invoked.

If OMA refuses to resolve the situation, then the pact could be invoked to destroy Evo. But:

--In the case the offending alliance wishes to resolve the issue independently, as long as a fair offer is made in a timely manner, this resolution may not be invoked.

So if Evo was able to make a fair offer in a timely manner, then the pact cannot be invoked. So OMA either accepts the timely offer, or OMA gets wrecked by a 1v1 war since the pact cannot be invoked even though Evo is the aggressor in this hypothetical scenario?

Did I get it right, or did I miss something?

That list is "faulty". It only shows countries that are still alive.

The restart bonuses seem a bit.... I don't know whether it is balanced. Currently, you gain 20% + 0.06% per defend of your previous country for your next restart, so it takes 1250 defends to cap out at the 95% restart cap.

So the weird part is that while my country is dead, it effectively didn't do much. My restart has 95% of everything the original had, and due to the restart bonuses, it actually has more cash on hand on the restart than the dead country. So to kill any stockpile, I would have to be killed again. The restart also has 600 more acres than the dead one, because it is the last week of the reset.

It just feels... strange. Not just that, the new BR formula makes it so that I lost no CSes when I get BRed, the only CSes I lost was due to CMs, so something like 450 CS dropped to like 410 after some CMs, it pretty much only took 3 turns to rebuild all the farms destroyed in some 20 hits. I'm also uncertain whether the BR nerf was "too much", I still have a ridiculous 90+ BPT, and it'll only take 11 turns to build up all the empty acres, fully functional country even before 15 turns OOP.

On the other hand, killing off most of the population though, completely killed production of any kind, even if most of the farms were still standing, so there's that at least.

95% seems like a very high % to cap at, although it is normally very difficult to even reach that.

Personally, I don't know if the restart bonuses actually achieved the goal of prolonging wars, although it is perceived to have done so.