shut up :(

http://iwatsu.com/...s-telephony&Itemid=74

Snawdog,

I fought against cross retalling and other nonsense as a player. We made some progress, but every single set new "alliances" appeared which pushed new stupid policies. That's when I stopped playing on the team server. The "hit us and you die" policy seems to be a continuation of that.

I didn't want it to fall off the board before I had a cancel to implement it.

We've had the new system up for a while, but almost no one in 1a is using it. Curious.

He's clearly trying to shift expectations in order to influence the market!

Cool, I was wondering if that feature worked. Thanks NukEvil.

But players can overthrow their communism governments!

It's probably a bad idea to have no defense at all. Sometimes players will test your defenses by attempting a single jet PS. It's better to get a low amount of defense, which is big enough to prevent such attempts.

The usual method used to be to get a high nw/acre ratio and a lot of spies so you look like a bad target to grab and other players have a difficult time getting an op on you. You could also consider picking the dict government. Your spal will benefit and it might deter other players from messing with you, but if you have no defense you'd be missing out on the main point of the government.

I don't know if you'd be able to get away with such a strategy on the express server. Given the low number of players and the high number of turns, you'll probably be spotted by someone even if you do your best to hide.

"Mehul hits" (hits where the attacker randomly kills an amount of units and civilians proportional the target's DR level) were eliminated, which means that it will take less hints to wear a country's military down and to kill off its civilians.

My attitude reflects my expertise on the game. It is possible to stonewall at low populations for an indefinite amount of time without dying from PCI.

ok

I idle in that channel with highlights set to help out people and to answer questions. If someone sets off my highlights for such a disrespectful reason as that, they're going to find themselves banned for a few minutes. I don't think that he needs you as an advocate.

The bottom line is that no one is banned on irc or on the forums. So if you really think this place is so bad, fine, but you'll receive quite a shock upon participating in other communities.

Edit: apparently I responded to two posts that someone wanted to be deleted.

There are no current bans in #earthempires. You can rejoin the channel if you wish. You are also still able to post on the forums.

I wouldn't come into your home and say "fluff you". I expect the same courtesy from you. If you don't like that, stay out.

Of course you were complaining. I straight up told you what you needed to do to effect change. Barking in irc and on the forums and offering expletives isn't going to get you what you want. It's just going to annoy me and make me want to work on it less.

<Slagpit> so make a topic about it and decide as a community what is most important
<Slagpit> it's the first iteration

Your words would mean a lot more if you were willing to spend even the slightest amount of effort towards your cause, Desperado. It's a free game. The admins don't get paid to work on it. I don't get why you'd complain but do nothing to fix your problem. Is your sense of entitlement that strong?

I'll only grab you 100 times mazooka.

The next person to post spy op information in this thread gets banned.

Self PCI deaths are a result of improper walling technique.

Actually it looks like there are still a few problems.

<qzjul> problem fixed

Which country is yours Dragon? I'm going to create a country and landgrab you 200 times in a row.

"Anyway, we're implementing a new system soon so that untagged players can be recruited even more easily and all of them know exactly what it means to play untagged on a server like alliance. "

You didn't offer a suggestion dragonlance. You just complained. Your country did a small amount of damage because your country was small. Nearly all of the spy ops are limited by some characteristic of your own country.

Of course the rules aren't perfect, but changing them is not simple. If we changed the rules, most players would continue to ignore the op, warrers would accuse us of trying to make the game better for netgainers, and we'd have less time to put into other parts of the game that need more work.

So if you have a suggestion for a formula, fine, post it. We'll file it away for later use.

Why do players prefer to hit untaggeds (possibly "new players") instead of old players? Have you seen how the old players react to being grabbed? I've been told by alliance FAs that one grab per week is too much, that suiciding is justified after two midfeeds (even when the defending alliance gets their land back), and that "any grab over 1k acres is a topfeed". On other servers, I've seen players complain and threaten war over a single landgrab in FFA, suicide over a double tap in express, and other nonsense.

Let's do some simple accounting. LaF has around 80 members. There are around 20 alliances left. Suppose each LaF member wishes to make one landgrab per day. That doesn't sound unreasonable, right? If LaF doesn't pact anyone and spreads the hits around evenly, that's four landgrabs per tag per day. If LaF considers half of the tags to be their allies, that's eight landgrabs per tag per day.

How many alliance leaders here would be willing to accept four landgrabs per day on their tag? Eight? Is that too much? That's a shame, because all of those LaF countries still have 75-77 turns left per day. Your own sense of entitlement drives untagged players to get "farmed".

Anyway, we're implementing a new system soon so that untagged players can be recruited even more easily and all of them know exactly what it means to play untagged on a server like alliance. Will it become acceptable to farm untaggeds after this system is in the place?

I'm also unsure why no one has commented on the number of players who have left the game because they were randomly killed by bored warring clans. Is that a subject that we don't talk about?

Disclaimer: I've never played in LaF.

There's been a decent amount of talk lately blaming LaF for the decline of the alliance server. The principal reason is usually something about "overfarming". Why is this not the natural order of things? If a country is an untagged, it has deliberately put itself in the weakest position possible on this server. If an alliance is small, it needs to work hard to avoid becoming prey to the larger alliances. Small tags need to make up for their difference in numbers with well run countries, diplomatic skills, and allies.

I'm not sure which side caused LaF's current war. However, if LaF wants to farm smaller alliances in order to try to get the TNW title, it's up to the smaller alliances to stop it.

LaF has a clear goal. There are proven ways of stopping such behavior from happening to your tag. Yet there are a number of warring alliances who have the same plan set after set:

-Do basic political maneuvering so you have more countries than your enemy.
-Do a random, blindside FS on your enemy.
-Do nothing for the rest of the set.

The often unstated goal of these strikes seems to be destruction for its own sake. In some sad cases, the goal is to drive players from the game. Is this not worse than LaF's actions?

A few notes: suiciding is not a way of stopping farming. It's been tried before. It doesn't work. I'm sure that LaF has been suicided on hundreds of times by now. I also don't have a problem with war: I've led as many wars in the past year as anyone else. However, the concept of going to war without a good reason is a bit strange to me.

It's been that way for many years.

Tag limits mean you trade one set of problems for another.

Clan: La Cosa Nostra (LCN)
Average Networth Rank: 11 of 27

So no one has presented a logical argument for the statement that "a double tap is too much", right?

Huh, from the way some people in this thread are talking you'd think that SOL hasn't made a career out of hitting netting alliances not prepared for war and that SOL was somehow forced into this war.

I wish gregg would come back, he was a hero

Fixed, thank you.

I tried reproducing this and could not.

The cache takes an hour to clear.

No, it's clearly because imag is fighting SOL. SOL is so outnumbered!

Destocking seems kind of important.

dies in a stonewalling accident

qz already did a fairly good job, but it should be pointed out that the spy success formula was developed from scratch.

As for war formulas, stuff like the spy result ones are kind of trivial to find. Someone from SOL was the most helpful out of anyone and pointed out a few odds and ends that we didn't have. If you're curious about what formulas aren't exact and what we found difficult to find, here are a few examples:

-How exactly did readiness work under 70%?
-What was the precise probability of a "1/2 mehul hit" happening?
-if country A bounces an attack on country B, what is the exact distribution of B's military losses?

The tough guy attitudes displayed in this thread are completely contrary to what's good for the server. To be perfectly frank, many of you are acting like children.

Let's get a few things straight here: turns come at a rate of one every four minutes, the reset lasts a total of five days, and there are around 100 countries on this server. How can you possibly claim that "one hit on me only" is a good standard when it's possible for one country to double tap every single country on the server in a single day? If that happened, should the rest of the server band together to kill him?

The diminishing returns window is still 24 hours. In express, you are awarded more protection from grabs than on other servers. Perhaps you should consider why your country is getting grabbed multiple times. Did you play all of your turns but buy low levels of defense? That is the risk you take. Did you save 600 turns and get grabbed by someone who played all of them? That is the risk you take.

As of right now, the only feedback we're getting is that this server isn't fun to play because many people use it as a suiciding playground. So suicide away, but only if you want express to become a monthly event or to disappear completely.

3k acres with 15k nw, interesting.

Fixed now, sorry.

Sorry, fixed this.

So let me get this straight: players save up lots of turns then get angry when they get "bottomfed"? That's one of the risks of saving turns. What do you expect, no one to grab you at all? If you want to minimize attacks on your country, play your turns as they come in. You can't have it both ways.

http://wiki.earthempires.com/...ogy#Maximums_and_minimums

Tech effectiveness is based on exponential decay, so it would be rather difficult to "not have a maximum".

I'd rather see one country get killed with no justification than a whole tag.

Standard is a heavy defense CI to early TMBR.

I didn't say that I was necessarily capable of doing it, did I? I know players who are capable and some who have done it. It wasn't meant to be some kind of bragging point: as an untagged you are a weak country. That's how it is.

You seem to be slightly misinterpreting what I'm saying. I want alliances to interact with each other in meaningful ways. Landgrabs should be viewed as part of the game instead of as some problem to be solved.

Also, just because I posted the above doesn't mean that we're not taking steps to reduce some of the problems, but the main cause of it by far is player attitudes.

L: Dragonlance

This one is for Dragonlance only.