I suggested using MS Word form fill, or make a PDF document with form fields to do the same thing.

Word has macro thingies in it that allows you to insert fields that always prints today's date, for example.

Then setup a daily cron job or something.

The reason why LaF FSed SoL at the time we did was primarily because of the country makeup of SoL. If SoL had more commies and less monarchies switching into techers which would have indicated prepping for an earlier war, or detected SoL storing turns (we track daily Avg NW and Land of every alliance) we would have FSed even earlier, and asked our members to switch even earlier in response. Not that it would have mattered in a 69 vs 42 war, but no sense in dragging out a 3 day war into a 10 day one.

The other reason why LaF prepped for an early war is because KJ contacted us and threatened us with an OOP war if we refused an arranged war with them this reset - we did exactly that, refused, and prepped for an OOP war. Yes, it turns out Evo was bluffing about FSing directly OOP, but a day 7 or day 9 war would still have been considered a OOP war instead of day 5.

Yes, we agree that FSes are powerful, and should be nerfed. Wars are inherently not going to be fair unless both sides arrange to FS at the exact same time as each other with the exact same size give or take a bit. It isn't that we like early wars; FSes are just too good.

FSes are incredibly effective because for every enemy country you kill, you effectively take out up to 240 stored turns, plus their production, and that is why reducing turn counts and maximum stored turn count is an affective way to reduce FS potency - at 120(120), you can pretty much output 120 turns for 3 consecutive days after the FS. I gave this as option (C) in an earlier post the previous page.

Cougar, don't buy it today yet. Wait a few days, and it might appear again with a 75% off special.

Braden told a chemistry joke but there was no reaction.

The snow doesn't work from an iPad :(

@Slagpit If countries start off automatically in GDI on creation, I'll agree with you and retract that part.

If you have nothing to contribute, stay out of the thread Dagga. If we were really opposed to the idea of preventing early wars, we wouldn't be offering suggestions in this thread, or several suggestion threads on the B&S boards.

Emergent behavior always arises due to the underlying game mechanics. In this case, it is because FSes are too powerful, so alliances want to get the one-up on each other and FS first. As mentioned earlier, an alliance down by 20 countries can still FS and win an unprepared one - I'm not sure if this is the case of an FS being too big of an advantage, or if its just the defending side not being war-prepped.

I've said before earlier, the game mechanics are broken, as Hanlong aptly put it a month ago, Earth is like a game of Starcraft if 8 players are thrown into a FFA map, and allowed to do whatever for 1 hour, and at the end of the game, the game displays a list of stats like minerals harvested, gas harvested, workers killed, units built, resources used/lost, etc and the players are left to determine who has won the game based on the stats. It's meaningless.

The fact that countries can be so easily suicided on even in Express or Primary servers (and alliance obviously) makes it not newbie friendly and slows the growth of the game. The lack of an in game tutorial (new players do not want to read 1000 wiki pages) is barely improved on from 10 years ago and the steep learning curve is another problem.

Martian is taking notes right?

That's not true diez. A country with 0 D would become a very attractive grab whenever it isn't in 30% immunity (which has a sliding window of the last 24 hours worth of losses like current DR), and stand to lose even more land. The key thing is, if you spend enough turns and gained enough NW, you could exit immunity (say you entered immunity at 31% loss, you logged on and built 100 acres bringing you to 29%, you have exited immunity, and can be hit again.

The main problem with (A) is the loss of land generation, making all-explorers more powerful, which isn't necessarily a bad thing. L:L will need to be scraped in this situation, focusing on 1:1 retals instead, because you can't overretal a country past 30%, and (B) the game becomes more about looking for the best land trading exchanges (gain land by benefiting more after the retal) - ghost acres need to be significantly reduced or removed. (C) Pacts will be changed to allow single hits between countries, but no double taps.

This motivates countries to actually defend their land, because they can always be grabbed (but not double tapped). The end result of this tends to be the countries on top will tend to stay on top.

Martian, there are a few MAJOR ways of preventing early wars, or weakening the FSes, but you have to be prepared for radical changes.



A) If a country loses 30% of his NW, he becomes immune to all attacks except countries that he has attacked in the last 24 hours, which may retal until the country loses 50% of his NW. You can define "% NW loss" as being divided against the max NW attained in the last 24 hours, and only NW loss from defending and harmful spyops are counted.

Declare War will NOT work around this, as the whole point of it is to limit damages to a country, but a organized clan can still organize chain gangbangs on a country to further weaken it by 30% everyday, necessitating a completely new warring style, focused on crippling.

This will also limit damages that can be done by a smaller suicider, and also limit the amount of times a large country can bottomfeed a smaller one. Many games have some sort of immunity system to prevent being griefed. It is NOT fun to lose 2 months of work in a few minutes, or wake up and see it ruined to pieces with no chance of decent recovery.



B) The focus on FSing an alliance can be shifted away by making kills less worthwhile, by allowing countries to restart with a portion (say 20%) of their previous country's stuff with 100 turn protection. This will force wars to focus on effective crippling during a kill because if you do not cripple a country enough, he could still have an effective mid-sized country on returning 2 days later.

There will be very little incentive to kill a 500k NW country to have it return with 100k that can build back to 500k within the 100 turn protection.

This will make GSes less useful though, so this can be offset by making GSes kill 10 civs and BRs kill 5 civs (ie. swap the civ killing values) or some other proportion. Or make GSes destroy 1% tech or something as well (i.e it can be changed to destroy some infrastructure).



C) Reduce the number of turns in general. 72 turns per day, 120(120) store is a lot of turns. If you half that to 36 turns a day, 60(60) store, FSes immediately become less effective and crippling becomes more effective. This also reduces the usefulness of landtrading, as a reset will have fewer turns and the finishing NWs will be far lower to warrant land trading.




D) Add significant DR to special attacks that goes lower and lower and disappears by the end of the first month. This discourages early wars by making it impossible to civ kill in the first week (imagine doing 5 civs per hit after 12 GSes, or 5 buildings ABed after 12 ABs, etc)

This adds a very small advantage to a CSing alliance as their CS will have a lower reset-DR with more effective attacks.

I'll tell you what's wrong with this game. It's the game mechanics.

A) Countries attacking each other can result in a win-win situation (land trading).

B) Attacking a country can cause the country being attacked to be in a superior situation (putting country in DR).

C) Warring offers no inherent rewards or recognition on the leaderboards. (The warring alliances do it not because they are aiming for the officially recognized top 10 or triple crown)

D) Countries can be suicided too easily by a single person/country. In no other MMO game, can a player be griefed so easily. Other games have immune protection after the defending country loses say 30% of their NW, and allow retals despite immune protection.

E) A country can die in 5 seconds, wasting up to 2 months of work. Again, in no other game is this possible.


I don't know if anyone has already realized it, but the game mechanics are broken to begin with. Fix the game mechanics that cause these issues in the first place. Otherwise, arbitrary rules get made by players (such as morality or certain actions, retal policies, etc) and they might hopefully be agreed and enforced on communally by the players. And you know what? It will just result in a fluff and toxic playing environment.

I'll tell you right now, that a lot of us play this game, because of the people that still play this game. Think about how much game tension the above 5 issues caused in this game.

@Slagpit: SWTOR!

There are no alliances close to LaF's size of 69. Are you suggesting that a larger alliance cannot ever FS a smaller one in this game?

I would say that it takes no skill to Chem a country to death in 10 seconds. It takes way more skill to manage your country between growing and warhitting and achieving a balance between the 2 in an early war.

Civ5 is definitely better than Civ4 for me, the corruption is way too unmanagable at deity or higher levels of difficulty in Civ4 [if you aimed at World Domination victory].

The main new thing in Civ5 if 1UPT (1 Unit Per Tile) which encourages strategic placement of troops, but the AI is notoriously bad at it unlike in the previous franchises, because the computer (and you) could just build a Large Stack of Doom (SoD) and move it around. Yes, these are actual terms used on the CivFanatics forums if you follow those.

In my opinion, Civ5 > Civ1 > Civ2 > Civ3 > Colonization > Civ4, in terms of difficulty scaling balance.

Bonus!

sg is fat.

PDM uses boxcar, so I'm not sure what mrford's issue is.

So, my 180m t10 cutoff prediction was accurate. :P

epidemic....

The attack again button is definitely gone on Alliance server.

Exactly. Further, things like spy production etc, will increase your food expenses every turn so that 25 turns at current rates could really be 24 or 23 to begin with.

A good player would take into account random events... and not actually spend 25 turns exactly if the max you can survive is 25.

I would expect top 5 to be about the 230-250m range.

Edit: As in, the cutoff range, not that the rank 1 guy will finish in there.. the rank 1 guy will likely finish 280m ish

That's why you market camp for your jump...

Changes mid-set should be mass ingame mailed to ALL countries by the admin.

You weren't really rushed to death to begin with heh.

Well..... I just realized this change directly impacts camping for a country exiting DR in netting sets... If you want to hit multiple times at the exact second, you suffer the readiness loss. Or you can get less land with less readiness loss.

So perhaps the problem is the availability of news and market feeds?

Flamey, that can be solved if the developers (pang) sent out a in-game mass message to every country, instead of relying on an announcement and an email about a new announcement that doesn't get read.

Locket, the argument is that while it gives a small clan a shot at stonewalling, it ALSO gives the small clan no chance to rush kill the larger clan because they have that much fewer members to attack with.

This might be interesting. Res tech would then directly impact the ability to war: +10% res tech would mean you can war with up to 10% more units.

http://forums.earthempires.com/...-restarted-a-dead-country

I see llaar suggested this before! And qz thinks the idea is worth exploring there.

Basically, you want to shift the focus of warring to "maiming", you do that by making killing less attractive. You don't do this by making restarts more attractive, its counter-intuitive.

This in itself will makes throttling attacks for a kill run a non-issue.

Yep, but the second intention there is also to promote the use of the "useless spy ops". Make them really powerful, but make the news for them publicly viewable as well.

By taking a % of your dead country, it also alleviates some of the "being blindsided" issues of a stocking alliance - it can still win the war by unloading stockpile, although, at a much reduced rate (75% gone) and delayed rate (200 turns delayed in my example).

Perhaps, instead of throttling attacks, it is simpler to make death less of a penalty of losing "a few weeks of work in 1 minute".

What if a dead country can choose to restart as the dead country, but "revived" with 1/4 of its land/buildings/cash/military/everything with a 200 turn forced protection period? This means, killing a country would only just put it out of the picture for roughly 3 days, but can still return with a semi-decent country.

This will force war efforts to focus more on crippling countries instead, and if you were to kill a country to put it out of action, you have to make sure it comes back really small or maimed. That is, you might want to focus on nuking/grabbing/destroying away half a country's land/buildings first before actually killing it.

This will also mean killing a country with a large cash/tech reserve is less effective as it can still return with 1/4 of that cash/tech reserve. However, this could promote the use of other currently "useless" spy ops such as bomb banks, steal tech, etc, if they can be re-balanced properly for it. Make all harmful spy ops publicly available on the news just like normal attacks, so that it cannot be abused for netting resets, and that it can be properly accounted for in war stats.

With these type of changes, I think throttling wouldn't be needed. Fix the underlying problem, not the symptoms.

Because, the reason for clearing food for the whole server, is usually to ensure a military buyout occurs soon after as there will be a bunch of countries with 30b cash on hand on the last day, and nothing to buy on the market. (PS. this doesn't occur every reset.)

Then the resellers earn big. This is obviously good only if you know your entire alliance has already sold all their food.

This is unfortunately not true.

Evenly numbered wars (by number of countries) can and will become lopsided after 2 weeks, depending on walling rates, strategy employed, etc.

Very rarely will you encounter a situation where both sides are equally skilled, equally matched, have equal walling rates, restart rates, organization, etc, or even the same starting stockpiles/country NWs.

TIE vs Monsters this reset were pretty even in numbers for example, but other factors cause it to be lopsided barely 2 weeks later.

You can, but more acres does mean a slightly faster destock from PM.

You should also account for 20 acres gained per day when buying your tech.

Earth must be the 4th of your time eaters, Sifos.

Is this another #52 thread? :D
(He is commie!)

You're not getting it. The point is, one of the 2 sides will win and get the upper hand after 1-2 weeks, the winning side will grow, and the losing side will ankle bite, in your typical lopsided wars. From that point onwards, it will cease to be an interesting war. It's not that people aren't willing to restart - its that restarting contributes to nothing once one side has a 10x NW advantage over the other side, the outcome is fixed.

Also if the focus is not on top 10 NW, then there needs to be officially a different metric for measuring who is "t10" on the war server.

I looked at this thread again, and then it hit me on the head. Doh.

Bonus!

Sounds pointless. Because running restart after restart is not interesting for 70% of the server after 1 week.

Minecraft! Minecraft! Minecraft!

What did it do?