and maybe planned wars only are the way to go. this would solve the RD aspect of this event.

i think PDM dropping harmful spy ops as valid retals would make it easier to not have as much misunderstanding in calculating what retals are owed.

i hope we can all see these events as things we need to tweak for a better future =)

yea i wouldn't have assumed #594 was trying to retal with spy ops in the first place and would've looked for a random suicider instead if it wasn't in PDM's policy to retal with spy ops. its added to the effect that PDM was already nuking us for retals at that point so we were alerted that they were obviously using their "special attacks" portion of their retal policy already.

like if SoF or SOL spy opped a LaF country, i would assume its a random suicider or they are looking for war. not retals.

and yes i'm happy that balin is going to address that issue. if PDM isn't that sore about working with us from this reset's events (and if they are i can't blame them since there is bad blood), then i'll be happy to work with them in a positive manner

aponic: good point. i'm trying to give a more personal note and not from a LaF hFA standponit so bear with me here:

1) if you are netgaining and someone is harmful spy opping you, you wouldn't try to find out who did it to retal?

2) and i wouldn't be quick to judge anyone. i'm trying to see it from everyone's persective.

from the looks of it (and dragonlance pointed this out, not me), RD pacted every alliance this reset except for PDM and clearly built for war. they had a one way street to FS PDM. whether they should've pulled a SoF and prearranged this with PDM so other's cannot potentially interfere accidentally is another matter/debate.

but i'm assuming after RD switch all their republics to dictators and tyrannies, it was a one way street (because netgaining was fruitless). i'm almost going to guess that because LaF started to escalate tensions with PDM, RD might have been afraid that LaF was going to make their reset pointless. but i don't know i'm just speculating at that point =)

LaF had their problem with PDM this reset. and the escalation with PDM came from both sides. like i said i had them set as DNH after the grabs from LaF that made PDM mad in a hope for peace, but the spy ops and nukes from them came.

i can actually side with all 3 alliances (RD/LaF/PDM).

PDM's side is they didn't want to get bullied by LaF yet again from all these years of bad history and wanted to defend themselves.

LaF just wanted to netgain and retal any spy ops and nukes based on their policies but didn't want to initiate any more grabs on PDM because that would be detrimental to treehugging.

RD was planning from the start to war PDM and at a certain point there was no point to go back to netgaining when ur guys all have 50 missiles and switched to ditator and probably didn't want to break a uNAP to war someone else so had to jump b4 the LaF/PDM tensions broke out too much where there was nothing left for RD to war on.

i can't see any alliance really at fault for what they are trying to do. it's unfortunate they all added up this way.

i sent this to Balin via private message but i apologize for the events on #594.

1) #594 attacked LaF unprovoked 3 times on the same day:
2) LaF does many retals.
3) LaF countries who did those retals received harmful spy ops on tech stolen but none of them were "unsuccessful"
4) I just did the networth matches and there was one consistent hit. #449. which is a different PDM country than #594. I apologize for assuming #594 was pissed about getting retaled like crazy and resuming retaling on him (it seemed logical), but in reality it was another PDM country that was causing it and we should've retaled that one instead.

regardless though it still came from PDM. i regret that we were hitting the wrong one.

i matched two of the tech losses from different countries to the same pdm country (#449) by nw:

here's one of the examples for guys who want to see the numbers:


#36 lost networth around 7:00AM on 2/23/11 from these spy ops

Feb 23, 2011 6:49 PM
11 hours ago
Spies infiltrated your research labs and stole 1800 points of technology!

11 hours ago
Spies infiltrated your research labs and stole 1805 points of technology!

11 hours ago
Spies infiltrated your research labs and stole 1810 points of technology!

#1 match (and the only one with multiple counts is this country. this guy had 3 networth changes, while all other countries that changed networths during that time all have 1. 3 is exactly how much ops was done.)

Dont tanks me (#449) Paradigm Feb 23/11 7:57:26 AM Feb 23/11 7:47:26 AM 3

add this fact with the second country i matched went to #449 means this is not a coincidence, but that #449 is our guy

i apologize to Balin and PDM for accusing the wrong PDM country of RoR. and i can understand why they killed off #36 now, because it retaled the wrong guy.

we should've farm or killed 449 instead of farming 594 from the knowledge i know now.

but what's past is past...

i don't know if doing such actions on 449 instead would've changed this reset's pdm/laf events though for all what its worth.

maybe yes, maybe no.

but like i said the whole time LaF had PDM on DNH the whole time after the initial 17 hits by us in 24 hours (which came after PDM's first 2 hits on us as we all rehashed), because i wanted to calm things down. and it is well known from our country makeup (theocracies and the ilk) that we were netgaining this reset, i had no intentions of escalating any trouble.

you guys can all argue about LaF trying to escalate things, but in reality we were stuck on 100% retal mode this whole time. you can give me the LaF hit on PDM (outside the 17 in 24) and i'll show you the matching nuke/spy op/etc. that we intended to retal for. and i'm dead serious about that.

i love all your conspiracy theories, however =) it makes AT an more interesting read.

like i said stonewalling is hard to master. i think the real time element of it makes it this way (compared to everything else which you can take 5 minutes making every single move so you can follow a canned strat verbatim).

maybe you get diminished returns in what you are doing if you are being too repetitive or something to that effect? makes you actually change up your actions and react based on what's going on insetad of just "explore 40 turns, build acres, log off"

unless that's the goal of this game (which maybe it is). for old retired vets to spend 2 minutes a day just to reminensce. if that's the only purpose of this server, then we all know it's going to die sooner or later since we are promoting it as a dying server

that's not good netgaining in the current politics of this server, because they will get pissed that you did that and retal you with SS/PS

baline: i'll make a post later about all the facts about PDM/LaF stuff later that you asked about. i just need some free time to dig through all the networth changes again.

i apologize for the delay

yea i don't think game design should take politics into its factor.

just pure min-max changing of the govt bonuses using the daily bonus points would be enough flexibility to give lots of creative options.

the different alliances/politics of the server will utilize them in various ways

so are you suggesting we get rid of the idea of stocking all together?

we actually promoted it more by removing the 2B cap bug. what you are suggesting would lean more towards putting the 2B cash bug back and ADDING a max food cap (no matter if you store it on market or not say you can't have more than 100M food for any country) or something.

might be interesting twist

and slagpit, i'm not suggesting it was the current dev's creation. most of the ideas in earth empires is actually mehul's creation and a lot of the tools are the old tool/site creator's creations (like gamerstown creators).

i have learned one important thing about game design working in the game industry for many years and that is the principle of a successful game needing to be "easy to learn, hard to master". this game (when i mean this game, i meant the alliance server iteration of it, which is what i'm addressing throughout this post) feels more like "easy to master, hard to learn"

to get yourself on even playing field you NEED to learn all the boxcar/(insert hosting site here) tools. you also have to learn all these policies and regulations of what's acceptable, what's a "topfeed", what's 1:1 retal, etc. etc. This is the "hard to learn" part. Once you get all those down, you can join an alliance like evo who will give you a canned all explore netting strategy or an alliance like sof who will give you a canned war strategy and you'd master the game. This is the "easy to learn" part.

A big reason why hard to master, easy to learn is bad is that it takes a lot of skill (aka fun) away from the game.

there's only ONE thing i can think in this game which i can think of which fits the "easy to learn hard to master" category and that is stonewalling (and that's the only time i had fun so far after coming back, when SOL was killing my country and i was walling).

walling is easy to learn (just get your SMS, log in on time and the mere presence of you buying stuff and taking turns means you are walling), but to do it right requires very quick decisions (since you are time limited while they are rushing the hell out of you), and flexible options (if you wall too much with troops and ur turrets gets weaked they might switch to BR on you) etc. etc. but other than stonewalling, nothing else captures the easy to learn hard to master mantra i was taught to foster a truly fun game.

the generalized rules which i can use to make an algorithm to guess the actions of what people aren't doing won't apply to imagnum

i'm not saying you guys aren't structured in the sense of having leadership and members who listen to you. i'm just saying you aren't' as easily predictable with the generic algorithms i can use to guesstimate what say NM or Evo or SoF is doing.

it's nothing against imagnum, merely an observation

how about the government changes?

if i put my points into bpt gain (which can only effect to dictators but let's say a monarchy can stock it with no effect so you aren't forced to roll with a low bpt but switch when you are ready) and max it out over the course of a few days, i would be at a normal bpt and say half of the military might bonus (or maybe i would lose all of it since the spy+building bonus is still beneficial to netters).

then you would see monarchy->dictator->demo netters (the last part which in itself is a problem, all netters will always end up going theo/demo in the end so apply similar logic to what i just did for dictators to the demo/theo phase).

but at least the mon->dictator phase won't create any certainty that the guy is netting or warring.


the likewise tech cap loss at the expense of bpt gain for theo would cause theo techer to be a viable war strategy. you would say reduce the tech cap con after half a month of working bonus points into it and your bpt slows back down to normal, but you end up having a lean mean breaking machine that gets cheap military to fund your breaking prowess without worrying about being a nuke dump (which is why theo is never a viable war strat). then someone wanting to war could run 10 theos and we can't tell if they are going to net or war

i know pdm and imagnum in particular are outliers. but every other alliance is pretty damned structured... too structured in fact ;P

i'm not saying randomness in the way that earthquakes and stuff occur to annoy poeople.

i do see the luck bonus being a good step in the right direction, but not everyone chooses that bonus.

i was thinking more of the lines that we should change this game fundamentally so i can't guess what you are doing by looking at your government. we are all so collectively skilled at this game now that in the past i couldn't 100% tell you were a techer or you are warring just from seeing stuff on the surface, while now its a telltale sign. by just looking at your government i can already deduce if you want to net/war and what strat you are playing

if we make all governments have methods to be viable in both war and net (let's throw out something like say a dict casher actually doesn't have as much of a bpt loss, or maybe they can get bonuses from the point system to counteract the bpt loss maybe at a slight decrease of military power as you go along (but not completely) to counter balance it, then it will be a viable netting strategy (for people who want to use that capture extra buildings as a viable netting bost), while maybe a theo can have a tech boost as the point bonus at the slight cost of its building cost (again not completely), so it can be a part of a war alliance's arsenal (because the market is too expensive on a FS, some theo techers that aren't just nuke dumps can serve to be breakers), etc. etc.

then you can't tell what an alliance is doing just from looking at it.

and then you would also create new strategies that people would have to learn and master again.

and that's just for governments.

i can think of many ideas for the networth changes etc. etc. i'm just saying just doing this step by step might revitalize the "fun" back into the alliance game.

detmer: "GS steal bushels" is a nice idea, but the problem is that's a tactic no real alliance would use but a terrorist tactic by untags. considering there's no more random untags (aka multis), and most untags nowadays can be easily linked to ex-vets of this game, it makes this just an open door for suiciders to push past grudges and not actually serve as a valid tactic for people on the alliance server to interact with each other from an established alliance to another established alliance except maybe in a time of war.

i'm not sure that really fits on the alliance server in terms of changing strategy, it will probably impact the individual servers more.

pang: i wasn't aware i was answered. i'm not saying my idea was necessary the right one, it was just a suggestion of something that worked in the past that got removed. perhaps you guys had a different game design goal in mind that could somehow fit something like this.



to be honest the new bonus system with the luck/d bonus/decay/building costs/etc. is a step in the right direction for everything.

it adds another dimension to this game, but a lot of it is a very slow (except for the turns bonus) and deliberate buildup in a game where everything else (except building CS) is an instant gratification type of deal.

and balin, honestly i almost feel like the easiest way for everyone is to accept universal land:land. either that or go country:country solely. the second method promotes more individual skill, which is something everyone on the alliance server hates (and i don't know why), because they go blahblahblah about "go play in primary", etc.

but regardless, there would be no definitions of topfeed etc. etc. if everyone did universal land:land because the game is structured with generous ghost acres. everyone would win-win and no one would be pissed in the end.

the problem with that is not all alliances want "win-win". some of the warmongers on purpose have different retal policies so they can cause wars... and that's what i see is the problem with pdm's policy. it seems like a policy that a warmonger would use =)

btw you seem so reasonable, i wish you were the FA and was the one responding to my messages once the LaF/PDM tensions broke out. i think none of what happened this reset would've happened, and i'm being 100% honest on this one.

i think that's a game design flaw, something that happened more with the rule changes.

we made offense too powerful compared to defense in this game.

there should be more logical reason why a 8k country should break a 40k country that kept up its defense.

i can see why topfeeds occur, it is retarded that a 40k country would run around with only 1M turrets. they deserve to get hit since they are just asking for it. but if you had 15M turrets and kept up your defense, it is pretty dumb that an all jetter 8k guy all explore can break you.

i already put some stuff in the bugs & suggestions (add the 3rd d ally back, etc.) but no admin even bothered to answer me

and P.S.

if i ran these algorithms on the market news/news/networth changes data on this reset, everything that happened this reset would be so obvious to everyone that we'd probably realize we'd been all flaming each other and guessing for no particular reason other than maybe naive ignorance and/or a pretense of entertainment

i also forgot to add we can smarten such a program by including the retal policies of the various alliances posted publically to get better automated deducing of specific events that happen (for instance, someone from SOL would 1:1 so them hitting twice on another alliance as a retal consistently means they are finding a war while if SoF/Omega/LaF/LCN/etc. retal based on land formulas it's probably not instigating war but just normal retals, and while if we see any other alliance send NMs it probably means war but for PDM it doesn't mean much, etc. etc.)

note: this has nothing to do with my alliance or any other alliance, this is my personal opinion on the state of this server

i came back recently from a 6 year hiatus seeing if this game changed and was it better because i was told the game admins were actually old earth vets who cared about this game

but i can see one very big problem that i don't know why anyone would think this game is fun knowing this...

as we all know we have full understanding of the game now (as the admins are literally part of the community). with that knowledge we know every single nook and cranny of this game now which reduces almost all of the suspense or mystery in what's already a pretty deterministic game (based on math and formulas)

we need more randomness in this game. the lack thereof is really killing it.

think of all the things you can automate as information:

1) which alliance is allied to what other alliances
2) what alliance is going to war what alliance
3) who did harmful spy ops on who
4) who is tech allied to who
5) who FAed who
6) who suicided on who (in regards to two-stepping/coordinated/etc)
7) who is cheating
8) who is doing buyouts

i'm happy that all this information and non-randomness has helped the admins solved problem #6, but at what cost?

anyone can create a website or a script to parse out all the information now given to us via ee apis and sites like boxcar and remove every suspense from this game.

why are all of these possible? because of the deterministic factor of the actions of people on this server (all not cheaters, all relatively veterans of this game, all have the same basic beliefs)

we are a community all trained not to run multies, that we try to retal with SS/PS whenever possible until things get messy, that we don't grab our allies, not to run rainbow countries but specific governments and strats for war and net.

for example let's take each example and i'll demonstrate why nothing is "secret" anymore. this is also made much easier than before because of the lack of alliances in the game period, make the error for mistake of guessing using these algorithms much less than before.

Q: which alliance is allied to what other alliances
A: write a script that parses all the hits done this reset, any alliance who hits each other (can take out the 1-2 hit outlier as mistakes by members) aren't uNAPed/LDPed/FDPed to each other and are capable of warring each other in the reset.

Q: what alliance is going to war what alliance
A: gather all the possible pairings of wars between alliances above. if one has lots of theos/repubs, they aren't looking for a war. if one switch their theos/repubs to monarchy and/or then to tyr/dict they are war prepping. list all the combos of possible nonpacted alliances they have as war possibilities.

Q: who did harmful spy ops on who
A: look at the times and networth changes of all countries and match them up. this gives you all the information you need from the game. in this case we are looking for networth loss from one country pair and networth change based on their usual turn taking patterns. this also going to include real attacks like AB/SS/GS/PS/missiles/etc. but those you can easily deduce those from the news. the stuff that doesn't "show up in the news" that is hurting one country at the same time someone is "playing their turns" based on the networths is going to be a harmful spy op.

Q: who is tech allied to who
A: variation of the earlier one, someone gains their acres plugged into the tpt formulas worht of tech in nw, some other country gains 1/10th of that amount.

Q: who FAed who
A: same thing as above, but the nw gain and lossed between the two matches the FA package size + 3x the average nw change of the FA sender's nw.

Q: who suicided on who (in regards to two-stepping/coordinated/etc)
A: same thing as above, match playtimes. if thye consistently match, you smell something fishy.

Q: who is cheating
A: the admins got this, i don't need to go detail this (standard ip matching, cookies, etc. etc.)

Q: who is doing buyouts
A: same thing, anything market related information is public, you match the nw you get by selling your jets, you can match who bought ur jets that time from the networth changes and market news. from this you can figure and match who bought what from who easily, and from all of this it's not too hard to see buyouts as well as a wealth of other information.

there's so much more you can do from just observing the game formulas in related to networths/land/etc./etc. that i can take forever to list them all.

you give me one week, and i can host a website that will list all this information nonstop to any person in this community who wants to see it. or we can pretend to have suspense and drama in this game ;)

given all this, like i said why are we even so worked up about what's going on all the time on AT?

we can all know the exact answer to everything.

what we need is more randomness imo. otherwise we are losing so much dynamics in the server game. in primary and other servers there is less widespread collusion because of the lack of alliances so things like this aren't as much of a factor.

Notorious: please tell him to come back ;)

i already told WoF that they sound like something a dog would make ;P

is silver even a legit color?

i thought silver was a mineral or something...

same with lime, isn't that just a fruit?

what happened to normal colors like red and white and black? pfft

oh i had to eat dinner, i thought i told you that LS =)

Thomas: I have one question for you....

How come everytime we landgrab someone it has to be a conspiracy theory for you?

I remember earlier this reset you thought that LaF grabbed sanct earlier this reset because we were trying to help SoF or some crap...

I'm all for conspiracy theories, but you really think everything LaF does is that far fetched in conspiracy theory? you've been watching too much movies or something =)

:(

stay away from my country! :P

"land. If you are a landfat country who gets grabbed, and can't get the land back, have a clan mate running a retaller country get it. Oft times the retaller will be running landthin for just that reason."

there's already alliances who do this.

about single tap, single retal. i think the theory is nice, but we need to have a way that works where skill is also involved. there is no skill in me being 20k and you being 20k both no turrets and we just hit each other back and forth 1:1 gaining ghost acres all day.

the only rivalry evo has is with the lumberjacks that show up to their door once in a few resets ;)

DL: why? because Prometheus is from Canada? i guess that's a good a reason as anything! ;) jk

hm so for the age of consent rules it applies to the minor's home country? not the adult's home country?

i'm not a legal expert =)

well selena gomez is from the US and the age of consent is 18 here.

so it's illegal for her to get some of that beiber fever

MORAL VICTORY IS THE ONLY VICTORY!

selena gomez is 18 years old and justin beiber is under 18 years old.

she's a fluffing pedo!

i totally see your point. i'm a worn out vet myself. hell once h4 settles in and i don't have to do interim head duty, i'm going back to retirement where i belong ;)

i like the land exchanges. i personally think its much more amusing than all-x all day.

i'm sorry about not reading your wall of text rockman for your first few posts tho. i skipped most of that stuff because it just made my eyes hurt :( i just read the later ones because they were much shorter =)

too much stats, too big of a paragraph. nice work i guess haha but i'm too lazy to read all of that =)

like i said earlier, i never claimed LaF was right about everything nor PDM was right about everything.

i have stated many times LaF is wrong to hit PDM 17 times in 24 hours, PDM wasn't right to retal with nukes without letting me know first =) but its all done now, and i think in the end we probably generated enough ghost acres for each other and amusement for the rest of 1A that in the end it's not that bad.

i'm fine with not having this result in a conventional war. we obviously had that as a possibility, but we aren't going to be butt sore that it's not going to happen.

and rockman, you are right. LaFfers (including myself) used to be all anal and crazy to try to get those t10/rank 1 spots. i honestly play much looser now.. just like how you started this reset untagged, something which you wouldn't have done in the past.

the reason why, and we all rehashed this many times is LaF is an alliance built on landgrabbing. which worked well in the past, in these modern times i've seen only a few ways of real landgrabbing:

1) farming the same 5 untags all reset. (there used to be more untags) to do this effectively you have to end up DR camping or news camping, of which the latter pisses off other alliances because you are "two-stepping" even when you aren't really intending to do that.
2) farming a smaller alliance. (there used to be more alliance to grab so you don't end up farming the same alliance over and over, now you really can't grab any estabilished alliances effectively without pissing them off).
3) land trade with your own alliance. (seems like everyone was hating on RD for this last reset)
4) land trade with other alliances. (i haven't seen this done in everyone's best interests, if you work it so both sides are happy then its pretty much #3 with different tags, otherwise one side will be more pissed off about it than another)

other than that you have the trusty explore button for getting land, which is pretty much the only safe/publically approved way to do things.

so netgaining becomes just min-maxing your all-explore country to its maximum potential (public market playing, using formulas to figure out when to stock/destock/etc/etc.). another thing about min-maxing an all explore which i really hate is the fact that you want to run with as little military as you can get away with, because more military=more expenses=less min-maxing. this is a clear outcry from the past where you had much more options in the game and where you had a strategic component which is your military count of your country determining your might.

i can see why SOL/SoF is prospering, because tbh warring is definitely more fun than netgaining by far now.. and in the end playing a game should be about how fun it is... which is why this game is dying because the fun factor is decreasing.

i get a little tongue-in-cheek in responding to PDM this reset only because i honestly see them as a factor who plays loose and is probably open to using nontraditional means. maybe via messing around with them we'll figure out new ways to play this game again where it's fun for all once more

omg i love you rockman, but that post was too long =)

too much news makes my head hurt

hehe you know that both PDM and LaF gained in total acreage since yesterday.

see what happens if u dont use nukes at each other and just SS/PS?

it's win-win in acreage ;)