Well perhaps I'll add a declare war between clans mechanism then; a good chunk of the point, afterall, was the untag suiciders issue.

Hi All,

Just a quick heads up, I won't be changing anything currently; life's been busy and I haven't been able to digest the changes thus far.

I have a few specific changes wrt ClanGDI in mind currently for the reset that will be starting in October, and I'd like to field some thoughts.

1) If a clan wants to leave clan GDI, it will take 48 hours from clicking the button, and a message to *all* clans would go out that that is happening.

2) Something restricting countries from leaving clans in Clan GDI. Unsure what restrictions.

3) Make a bunch of the bots (33%?) tag up, so there's an advantage to not hitting.

I would also like to make some sort of formalized declaration of war possible, with a accept/decline or something with criteria but I have no idea what that would look like. In an ideal world we'd build some sort of pact-like system, but I think that's beyond the scope of this project.

I'd also like to hear from people as to how things went. I know there was much emotions on both sides, but I kindof wanted to see how things played out.

I would like to point out that part of the point of the entire idea is to provide a relative sanctuary for people who really have no interest in war. I would like there to be some sort of cost for using the system, but many of the ideas seemed a bit heavy handed or artificial.


One idea from... Marble? was to change the expenses formula. That might be in the mix for next reset, to kindof change the overall dynamic of huge countries.

Ty,

qz

it might have been allowed because of the spyop stuff earlier; harmful ops count as attacks

I'm working on it by i can't get my password to reset

Yes, mods have access to all the dev stuff, that said, there hasn't exactly been much discussion; the last two hotfixes, incidentally, were relatively little code, and what code there was most was Dev'd by pang like 4 years ago; when complaints were raised recently, I basically said, "well, we can try the clan GDI mechanic, because it's been idling there for years, untested". And so i merged it in.

My thought was (and still is!) that it's a mechanic that was envisioned to solve an ongoing vocal issue; and while it certainly may not be perfect, I get more data on how it's imperfect by implementing it than by people sitting and discussing it off and on for 4 years. Where's the harm in trying it eh?

What's the declare war bug?

To be clear: I've generally tried to do things that are balanced (often to LaF's chagrin), but griefing and long standing war grudges have been issues for a long time. I think trying this is worth a shot. It effectively isolates a clan from everybody else.

I *will* try to make some bots tag up, which will make it so there are effectively penalties for being in ClanGDI.

Hi All,

I've added spyops into the ClanGDI mechanic; hostile ops are treated exactly as if they were attacks. I was hoping to do this later, because adjusting the display stuff is slightly annoying. Consequently you'll just see an error code rather than an english sentence when you run afoul of the restrictions.

It would seem like this somehow offended both sides of the arguments in this channel, so, here it is!

Thanks,

qz

PS Let me know if there are cases i missed.

I mean, I would say it's a country game...

I don't think I've ever muzzled anyone.

Ehh the numbers were always kindof an off the top of my head sorta thing. I've always wanted to make it more like 20k bots per server, but I'm not sure my comp would like that. That said, I want to make 'em do more....

They will fight back one day!!! It's like 75% built...

At first glance this seems fair, but I realllly don't remember the math on all those things.

This is the sentiment I'm mostly hoping for. Try it!! If it's bad, I can change it. Honestly part of the biggest problem with developing for this game is that no matter what we do, or don't, we get like INFINITE flak for it. Hence why we've been doing nothing. I feel like it's worth giving this a shot for a couple resets, see how things shake out. Maybe there needs to be a cost, maybe we remove it. Maybe we make players in Clan GDI have 100x as many earthquakes, i dunno =/

fix how?

Maybe like, give it a chance for a couple of sets and see what happens eh? We can always adjust things. Better to try something new every now and again than to stagnate.

Hm I have some stats, but the number of complaints i've gotten has increased.

Part of my thinking is, the options are basically:
a) do nothing
b) do something

At this point, it's difficult to dedicate time to outrageously complicated mechanisms; so I'm working with what I've got.

Part of the goal is to not shed more users, of course.


I kindof figure that changing things up a tiiiny bit every half decade isn't that crazy. We can always adjust things if it doesn't all work out. A lot of players don't have the time to attend war chats, and drop out when that becomes necessary. This provides somewhat more choice in that regards.

I'm actually somewhat motivated to do this, so we'll see

Very good question! It will be so that if you've been attacked, you will not need to declare war to hit back within 72 hours of the last hit by that country. I think that makes most sense.

Currently "has attacked clan recently" is 72 hours; and "has attacked by country" is all reset (well, 1 year technically, but only alphaffa is that long)

Yes, but I think the unknowns are easier to solve with it live than with it in a concept stage, at this point. See what it does for a few resets, adjust accordingly.

I swear I fixed that. Maybe there's just one more spot...

Could do that. I was thinking about making it buy up goods or something. But yea, something like that perhaps.




I actually really really want to do this. Also, it's like 50% of the way there, and has been for years. So maybe sooner than later.

That's very confusing though. Would need an intermediate or something. Willing to add in more complicated mechanics if there's a clear reason though!

Free currently. Wasn't sure how to integrate a cost in a meaningful way. Open to suggestions.

Nope. I didn't put in server display logic. Good idea though.

PPS: I may have bumped up the number of bots in alliance while changing things.

PS: I really tried to get this in like a week ago, but life has been busy.

https://www.earthempires.com/...lan-gdi-in-alliance-51945

As some of you who hang out in discord might be aware, I've been trying to resurrect & finalize Pang's Clan GDI mechanic, partly to shake things up a bit, and partly as a result of some concerns about dwindling player time, which I get, personally having not a lot of time to commit.

So what does Clan GDI do?:

1) Clans in Clan GDI have a Y in the GDI column in the Clan list
2) Countries in Clans in Clan GDI:
- a) Cannot attack countries in clans that
-------- have not attacked them personally (all reset) OR
-------- have not attacked their clan recently (72 hours)
- b) Cannot attack countries in ANY CLAN without declaring war on that country
3) ALL COUNTRIES
- a) Cannot attack countries in Clans in Clan GDI that
-------- have not attacked them personally (all reset) OR
-------- have not attacked their clan recently (72 hours)
- b) Cannot attack countries in Clans in Clan GDI without declaring war on that country (if it's been more than 72 hours since last hit by that country)

Clans that JOIN Clan GDI *may not leave* for 10 days; and Clans that *LEAVE* Clan GDI may not rejoin for 10 days.

(NB: We originally were planning MMR requirements, but frankly that seems to have been the sticking point of all of this and why it was not finished 4 years ago, so for now, we will proceed without that.)

Note, spyops are not currently included in this mechanic. I will add that if it seems necessary in a coming reset.


I hope you all enjoy the new changes!

Best Regards,

- qzjul, Pang & the rest of the Dev Team

:-) I Try!

(Incidentally there were no FA packages on any server other than Alliance during this window)

Hi All,

I went through some of the other sorts of things that could have caused issues with the country_events table, and remembered that FA packages create a country event. So there was a bug where you could SEND an FA package, but then *not have it removed* from your country. But the other country would receive it.

There were a couple of pretty minor packages that were sent, before a pair of countries seem to figure out that this was a thing, and sent FA packages in a loop a couple of times. They have now been deleted for exploiting a bug.

The initial few seem incidental and small, but I'll do my best to wipe away anything from the explicit exploitation.

Thanks for bearing with me,

- qzjul

For the record, I try to run my decisions through at least one mod, as I am often a little out of touch with the current state of the game. That said! I like to think I'm unbiased, because I have literally no idea what is happening day-to-day on any server.

hah! We have pretty stable power!

As far as I can tell, there were none other than the KR

Not a bad idea; but tools are complicated sometimes.

Further clarification: there was zero oil bought during the glitch period

Turns out the market abusers were all bots! Well that simplifies my life.

Oh, and thanks for bearing with me, it's sometimes hard for me to find all the time the game deserves...

Hey all,

Apologies for the craziness yesterday; fyi the timeline was thus:
1) Server had a power failure; sadly, the battery backups failed *last month* and I was still trying to find where I can actually buy replacement batteries without having ridiculous shipping from the US

2) The country_events table had been corrupted due to improper shutdown; this meant that anything that generated an event (like, that would show up in the list on the main window) crashed part way; where depends on the exact code path; this resulted in some things being finalized, and others not

3) I brought up the bots, and they were erroring all over the place because of this, but I assumed the errors were w/ the bots; after about 30 mins of messing around with this, it was brought to my attn that it was actually a game problem;

4) I took the game offline, repaired the table, and brought it back

----

Then:

5) It came to our attention that some kills had been made with infinite turns; and that the market was screwy

So, because this was unique, it was decided that we'd del the countries that abused "infinite turns" bug, and resurrect the countries that had been killed; because there's not actually a way to do that with any sort of tool, I did it badly, and one of them was "re-killed" while it was kindof half-undead. So I resurrected it again.

Now, today, I looked into the market transactions, and we identified 3 countries that used "infinite spend" bug to buy out the market. I believe they'll be deleted.


Now, couple clarifications...

"Infinite" turns/spend bugs: Because of the way the bug happened, basically the events that were supposed to be recorded crashed the process; these typically are finalized *before* the playing country is saved. As far as I can tell, this effectively means that countries were able to spend their money over and over again (or use their turns/attacks), without actually getting any of the changes applied to their country. So, they bought bushels, but didn't *GET* the bushels; and didn't lose any money. BUT, the countries from whom bushels were purchased GOT money, and had their bushels purchased. But they would not get a notification about it.

Similarly with attacks. Because if they had, the turn/whatever would also have been removed.



As for whether or not we should have resurrected the countries in question; as it was a result of an exploit, and it SEEMED like a clean fix (the first time), it was decided that we could do that without affecting much. The subsequent kill complicated matters, but I figured since I'd kindof botched it the first time, it would be more fair to fix it than not. Zero hour decisions are hard sometimes.

Heh, yeaaaa I can relate to that "the one time that!!!" feeling lol ;)

Does anybody remember the reset that Mehul forgot to reset the server on the last day of alliance (somehow??); the reset just kept rolling for an extra day for no reason if I recall correctly...

The bot's handle is "Earth Empires" :-D

Hi All,

I'm very sorry for the upset & disappointment many of you will have had with the end of reset yesterday/today; I very much appreciate the amount of work that can go into countries over the reset.

Just an FYI as to what all happened, and where things are;
- I initiated a quick reboot to apply some changes that had built up, partly to do with trying to get a new dev environment set up
- We'd had a hard drive fail a few months back, but I'd forgotten to install grub onto it, and the server choked on boot
- Creation of USB recovery disks ensued, and the reset clocked by
- We agreed rolling back the end time would be best, so I did that
- I checked the code, and found that I'd written a function that should return everybody's goods in the case of a market table discrepancy years ago, and thought, perfect, that'll sort itself out
- After hearing that that was not the case, I examined the code more closely, and it appears that we erroneously added a block that set everything to zero right before re-calculating based on the market table, negating the bit that would return everybody's goods
- I have since released and pushed in a fix for that

Unfortunately, there's no way for us to track what countries had on market at the end of the reset - those tables get wiped at end reset; and the code that was *supposed* to handle discrepancies didn't work properly, and in fact erased the knowledge of what was there.

The only consolation I can really give is that we're hoping to actually get some development of some exciting new features done here in the next year; Slagpit has shown interest in development again, which has drawn pang & I into actually looking at things again, which is kinda exciting.

- qz

it'd need to be backed up on a turn-by-turn basis for that; there's no audit trail, if that's what you mean. I periodically back things up, but definitely not on a daily basis

I looked into the code, there was a bug in it that prevented the auto-give-back code from working; which has since been fixed. =(

Fixed; I copied the wrong timestamp yesterday apparently.

extended

errrr it shouldn't end at 0:54; i added 86400, let me look

(it effectively silently returns your goods)