I think sorting by date or country number would be nice (e.g. at the user's discretion), as I like to check if I've spied someone as an easy way to determine if it would break GDI in non-clan servers. I typically do that by scanning through the ascending country numbers in the list. Otherwise, my preference would be to continue to sort by country number, as otherwise it's easy to miss the number/name when there may be dozens. It's not the end of the world though.

Spy ops in game for clans is a nice win though! Any chance we could add in non-standard ops, like allies or market? Will this work with clan ops sharing?

Congrats everyone! Seemed like a quiet set.

I always appreciate the (informative) drama posts. You're welcome here, TAN!

Confirmed on both mobile and desktop. It's really nice functionality too, thanks!

I don't have that for either mobile or desktop: just the captcha timing (centered) and nothing to the right of it.

I'm not sure that I see the toggle either - should it be under Game Profile -> Options?

I use m.earthempires.com quite frequently too - it's the mobile redirected version when you log in (and there are options in the menu I mentioned above to make it easier, like drop downs for navigating etc) - and it works well.

It occurs if you have an event (food, pci, indy) occur during an attack.

Red was restarting TIE just a few sets ago, but then he disappeared. We all miss TIE.

I just hope he's doing alright ?and getting some time outside with the fam).

I think Josie used to go by comjam maybe? Comwood I believe is someone totally different.

Okay. So you didn't try to negotiate peace and you have no offer. This is all for show.

You're also blind to everything other than SuperFly's taunts, which I expect will make his day.

Such plan, so intelligent, much wow.

Did you talk to Dark Demon? I think he's the one you'd have to talk to. Once again, Evo has no say in your war with mercs (that you started). I would expect this is a consistent message you're hearing from anyone in Evo but feel free to PM me or post if you've had some other conversation that you think is relevant here.

I read that as you can continue to SS even if all of your PS are done, which is different from most servers where your limit of PS uses all of your generals and you're no longer able to attack. So doing SS is not if and only if you have completed your 2 PS, but instead you can always SS.

What exactly is your offer? You attacked mercs and they defended themselves. You grief random Evo players unrelated to any of that last set, and now continue this set (poorly)? You're the one who says no one will net in peace - it's not like we're declaring war on you, what even is the goal here?

Apr/24/24 15:55:46 AB Dawning robe and wizard hat (#126) () 10 in 20 (#5) (EvoEn4) 0 B
Apr/24/24 15:55:45 AB Dawning robe and wizard hat (#126) () 10 in 20 (#5) (EvoEn4) 0 B
Apr/24/24 15:55:44 AB Dawning robe and wizard hat (#126) () 10 in 20 (#5) (EvoEn4) 0 B
Apr/24/24 15:55:43 AB Dawning robe and wizard hat (#126) () 10 in 20 (#5) (EvoEn4) 0 B

Any April updates after your scan?

Would this cause more farming? The humanitarians go both ways, so if the small player ops them back, does it open them up for 72 more hours of farming?

Alternatively, should the humanitarians have lop-sided values? E.g. you can attack down by 4x or 12x, but the smaller person can hit back 5x or 15x etc. That has other repercussions, but maybe gets at the spirit of the goal in a slightly different way.

Super great add! Any chance we could add in acres or some other way to easily grow? FFA you can farm yourself, but typically you just wind up exploring for 1000's of turns.

I've noticed it on 1a. I'm not sure I declare war / peace too frequently on the other servers.

I think he hangs out on discord though (where he's not banned).

That's probably still true. During wars on alliance, people with 50+ SPAL would steal tech from bots and make as much tech a turn as outright techers on their acres. As a small country, getting 50 SPAL (or at least way higher than most players) is quite easy and it's quite expensive to prevent it (spy upkeeps in particular). Spies are already quite overpowered I think, and many of the top farming players are wary of grabbing someone who looks like they know how to use them, so this adds to their power (in a way I'd argue is probably too strong, unless you look for other balance like notably reducing spy upkeep or the amount pilfered).

The issue with lowering the price on the PM is that it would also impact how high you can sell them for, which would mean reduced safety from storing them on the market (for better or worse).

I don't think so. The spy DR takes care of a lot of it, and you can certainly have wars with multiple people that may require that many ops.

But this should require way more optimization? I mean balancing maintenance and jets cost to blindless grabbing, plus having to ensure you have smart and capable offensive allies that you trust not to eat your jets up. It's whole new areas to learn how to optimize, and you can continue to work on new strats based on the changes for turn optimization too (medical and weapons tech starts anyone?).

I think it depends on the server. CI are still the early leaders in primary and tourny, but maybe the express market makes it less of a win there? I think to run hundreds of turns you practically have to sell to your private market at much less profit.

I agree with your sentiments on game changes - it's good to let it settle before making a new one unless it was really just the wrong / unexpected direction, but three full sets in alliance seems pretty reasonable given the flurry of new ideas. I do also agree it would be nice to see some of it in a test server, or have a chance in express / team before it gets to 1a (mostly because the turns are faster and the sets are shorter, not because I think less of them) but that timing won't always work out.

Congrats to all the top, some very impressive finishes!

I think next set will be interesting, but not as unbalanced as you might think. Both CI and techers are really limited by market demand, whereas FFO is somewhat agnostic (they use tech and jets, but if there's "too many" FFO it doesn't really impact their play as they stock way more bushels and oil than they sell). This was a really nice set for commie, and that strat is pretty new (the expense formula / constants had to be discovered with play and then determining how to plan for the destock is all new fun for the math nerds) - so I think it can be improved, but I also think next set with even just a few more CI trying it out, the market will limit it closer to 1.2B, pretty much in line with techers - and even a casher. So the main aspect of the balance is that FFO will need to do more of a hybrid destock like everyone else. They still get a bonus bonus and produce the goods they need so they'll be less impacted by the semi-expected food and oil spike to come as things rebalance. They'll just have to destock like in the old days (e.g. start buying off their PM quite a bit sooner and/or balance out the costs of oil purchases without MB).

All that to say, the main balance is this will reduce FFO's top spot in the meta (which honestly is good, because as I mentioned, they don't see the impact of market pressure as much, which sort of reduces a major aspect in the game) but everyone else can see some success depending on market conditions. There could be alternative ways to mitigate the low acre oil destock, but change can provide a little bit of fun as everyone works to figure out the new meta together.

I lol'd

@Andrew - same farmers as in tourny is my guess - I feel like the prices are in lockstep.

That would be great for allowing a bit more flexibility with interesting government changes!

I like 1 and 2, but I'd be curious about the war perspective.

@Leto - gross. That could make premium a large influence in a war, which I don't think has ever been the philosophy here.

I think the argument is that it lowers the barrier of entry to finding a community. Now they are given a group they can ask questions to rather than trying to figure out who might be a good contact, etc. It won't solve all the problems, and players may still go inactive, but it could help.

In your stats for new accounts, do most players start with a particular server? I wonder if they should be pushed a little towards some of the solo servers, though the community is the best way to learn, it's focus isn't always on gameplay that works universally. I think primary is quite nice - with the way GDI works there, along with the expectation that you'll get grabbed.

I was really confused at first because I'm so used to selecting and overwriting them that when I clicked in and the 0 still showed up, I thought it was going to be a problem like Andrew noted. I'm sure I'll get used to it - nice quick fix!

I could provide a similar but opposite anecdote from Asheron's Call (similar to Ultima but less popular) where they had the Darktide server that was for always-on PvP versus the 6 other servers that you had to go on a quest to enable it. The PvP server was horrible - new players would get ganked right out of training. People would offer "help" and then take new players far away, suggest they make a new save zone there, then kill them so that they'd spawn in that death trap forever. There were a number of players who pushed through and enjoyed it, but the numbers were always small and the cruelty ran most players off. The servers where the players had the choice had the most players and the most dynamics (market prices, alliances, raid quests, and community).

All that to say, there's a balance, and one experience in another scenario doesn't always match the goals here. We had some of this struggle in the original game - so there's a historical precedent for it, but there's a reason that the game died out from it's peak of thousands and thousands of players. We all agree netters shouldn't be covered in bubble wrap, never to be harmed, but that doesn't mean making it easy for a small group of griefers to ruin the experience of dozens of other players (look at Josey Wales this set, they have no real politics or communication, they've hit a variety of random players, and they're focused on ruining the netting experience moving forward). Luckily, you are a champion of the server and ready to meet them in battle, BH! =Þ

Suicides are quite frequent, and will be more possible with a future humanitarian change (as currently proposed on alliance). In Team, wars continue further along typically. For Alliance, when Evo was blindsided by LaF after they had won against the others, that continued into latter quarter of the set. With future restart bonus changes, that could be less necessary, but currently, restarts in the last quarter do occur, and at that point your country is wrecked, your CS are low, SPAL / SDI are terrible, and so given a large stock, dropping acres is typical.

So I would say it's more frequent than you might expect, and the impact can be quite large.

The land drop change will drastically impact FFO's, but also for countries in war (or who are suicided) where it will be prohibitively expensive to rebuild. Given there's already a mechanism that you can't drop land you recently grabbed, could there be an acre limit that you can drop instead? Like can't drop below 10k acres and/or below 80% of your max land for the set? (I think I prefer a percentile option, but it may be harder to code; a set threshold is unlikely to work in all scenarios.)

And those poker players fold a ton of hands that don't have the numbers to work - people don't want to "fold" two month sets repeatedly (though certainly you see that the longer you play, the more likely you are to get a top spot, say in tourney, express, or team, where there's a lot less formulaic approaches - which is nice because players have a choice of which server(s) and how they want to play).

BH - you've written a ton, so I'll just respond at a high level. You talk about the benefits of earning a reward: if someone wins the top spot because everyone else got suicided worse than them, does that feel legitimate? Griefing adds in a factor of randomness that many would argue removes the importance of skill, which makes it less like earning and more like luck that you survived.

For all of your other points, I don't think your arguments are as persuasive as you think. You can still create engagement and conflict without making people feel bad (to Ugolino's point). I'd wager the war groups would be happy to have a bit more engagement, which seems like a win-win?

I think 1) was a bigger issue a decade ago. These days, almost everyone farms bots (and purposefully tries not to run new players off the server). Team server is in the bucket you're referring to here though, where the 'best' policy is to kill off unknown tags - we haven't quite gotten to that here, so I'd say the main goal from the netter perspective at least is to help prevent griefers from doing so much damage, without requiring every solo / spam tag to need to be killed proactively. That said, your idea works pretty well for both (e.g. they will likely have to declare their intentions early in the set). Going back to my suggestion though, honestly having a declare war that takes 10 days or something to break the pact would help mitigate some of the problems people called out (and if you keep FA, I think that would be nice as a cost of breaking a pact so there's some teeth to it beyond just giving a long heads up). I actually like the FA part, for the reasons you stated, and because there's nothing to prevent people from sending FA currently - so it's not like it opens up a new avenue for abuse or anything.

The corollary with game-enforced UNAP's is that FDP's would be way more challenging - and I could see the argument that people need to determine everyone else's status with each other before signing (like it was done in the old days), but with the low member tags, they could say they're giving everyone a UNAP but then order of operations their way into 'missing' an alliance and the community would not be able to work together like they do today. Or do so with the promise of FA and then fail to do so. I guess to your point, maybe the war groups hold off any unnecessary UNAP's as security, which promotes some additional diplomacy between netters and warrers.

To Coalie's point, maybe the pacts can be breakable, but with a longer declare war option and at some required FA cost (perhaps determined in the initial creation of the pact, with an unreasonably high value set for the strongest of alliances). This could help with a number of the issues (FDP requiring help, another alliance saying things in discord or forums that pushes escalations, another alliance plays in a way that is 'harmful' to your gameplay, etc).

LaF attacks Evo because mercs is attacking them. This kills Cath.

He leaves the server in a huff for almost a year, and returns to maim an ex-LaF player who now plays in Evo.

He has a falling out with his fellow griefers and attacks mercs. This kills Cath.

Now Cath attacks Evo because mercs is attacking him.

"You've become the very thing you swore to destroy." This kills Cath.

Did LaF killing you stop mercs? No - we are completely separate alliances. If you want to pact out with mercs, talk to Dark Demon not Superfly (and not Evo).

https://imgflip.com/i/8ljmph

I think you and I chatted about this on the Team server forum.

I didn't say it was improper? But it certainly benefited the single clan that was at war, who was the impetus for reviving the old project (with a few key changes, like there was absolutely no way to declare war / interact, and no cost). I was not a part of those conversations so I used speculative language based on what was shared in the forums, including from discussions with qz, mostly because I thought it would be helpful to provide that context. I know that you're friends with Gerdler, but maybe spend a little time reviewing the facts and not assume it's a narrative when it's been hashed out on the forums for months already? The reason I even responded to that is because you told g0nz0 it didn't happen, when you should be the one using speculative language when you don't know any of those details, which you openly state later in your same post.

The point though, as Req called out, was that it was rushed, didn't provide balance, and then was changed in live code within the same set, because of complaints from LaF that it didn't fully protect them as they had hoped (harmful spy ops were not initially included). As a suggestion, the admin team could make a post that they're reviving this older concept (that had a ton of feedback then and now) and solicit input for changes to occur in the future. Does every suggestion need to come through the forums? I agree, that's not necessary, but if it's a major change, getting multiple perspectives (especially with varying playstyles and a focus on balance) is key. When a developer only hears one perspective and uses that to make fundamental game-breaking changes that greatly benefits that specific perspective, then I'd say that's a concrete problem to avoid in the future.

I mean, the main point is that LaF leadership made poor diplomatic choices, doubled down on those, pushed for game-breaking changes to protect themselves from that decision, and then continued to suffer in game consequences of their in game actions, all while many of your members started cross-server attacks and suiciding for multiple sets on alliances/players not involved in the war, because if you are at war with most of the server, what's a few more enemies right (especially if those players are likely to break your precious server records)?.

This server isn't meant to allow alliances to make unpopular choices without consequence, but certainly there could be conversations on how to resolve those conflicts that don't lead to players entirely leaving the game (though I'm not sure a champion from each alliance dueling in 1v1 server will become the norm, it's certainly interesting).

Just to touch on this - that's the current state, but during the time, it seemed like Gerdler pushed for the implementation of ClanGDI directly to qz on discord (it may have also included others from LaF); there was no discussion on the forums that it would be coming or asking for input until after it was decided and ready to go. It was a complete surprise to everyone except LaF that it was coming.

So admins did do the gameplay change Gerdler wanted, and then the rest of the server revolted because it was too extreme (and while you can never please everyone, you can see in the comments that removing the politics and clan interactions for this server removed the whole point of it). That lasted for several months, until it was further discussed in the forums to be rolled back and implemented with changes in a future version. At that point, given that LaF had made a number of diplomatic missteps, even longer ago leading to the war, and now unilaterally pushing for this change that fundamentally altered the game (even after they had been given longterm pacts from their enemies), they did not return (as they reasonably expected those unhappy folks to further continue the multi-set wars once the artificial protection was removed).

KoH is referring to TurtleCrawler (TC), and commenting that I mentioned him in my post as TC. I think there are a number of threads from that era (and I think Coalie has the particular comment on TC he's posted in the past, which is helpful because it's hard to wade through so much) but it's from this sort of thing around Boxcar having everyone reset their password and Pang forcefully taking the code and pointing the DNS away from TC's servers: https://earthempires.com/...ng-hostility-18150#334934 where Pang said

"It still boggles my mind that to some folks in LaF, the net result of TC stealing a database password, exploiting it in potentially many forms for probably 2+ years and passing it off to the active Don of the alliance, who used it to form the basis of his political planning, is that I'm the bad guy for not coddling LaF's interests."

Which maybe gets to your 'rules of the game' comments around hacking, and the questions from the community around why is there a permaban for some things and not others.

I think we all realize AT has long been light on truth and heavy on spin (spin dagga spin) - and while I'd like to think a number of us try to be reasonable and honest, you're right that's not always the case for players. That said, I'd also argue that the expectation for admins within the admin role (and not as an alliance leader) defaults to honesty. I can't speak to his co-conspirators (it seemed like the Bomb group was always a smaller group, and I don't think Weezy was part of it) but there's definitely a number in the middle of the pack who would appreciate at least some evidence. Permanent bans for doxxing etc have occurred, and I think people were pretty reasonable about it. With TC, Pang came out and shared the details that were known and the repercussions. If there's an old thread about this somewhere, maybe that would help, but I think this happened while I was away and given someone purposefully unbanned him, it's just a little unusual to see that unilaterally reversed.

I do appreciate the renewed efforts you're putting into the game, the responses you've provided, and your perspective, but just wanted to share the neutral view too.

For teams - I agree with Req, there have been a number of netting groups. Typically, if you want to net, you have to have fought for a pact against the warring teams; it has it's own version of politics, but there have been a lot of successful groups on both sides, a lot of commentary when Blackhole came to upend things (including making enemies of EVERYONE), and some tight netting competitions for #1 and ANW (along with some really nice team efforts with mass FA etc, which is a little more interesting when there's no single largest clan).

Congrats all, and I agree - that's a fantastic finish for FFO on tourny!

I think part of the issue is that in the recent few years, given the small player base, the mod team has tried to be very transparent in what happens - which has been much appreciated. I'm honestly not sure how many friends Chevs has (he is polarizing to say the least, and many of us have had run ins with him on the solo servers that have not always been... ideal). But it's hard to argue that he didn't bring some new life to the game, even when the first iteration of ClanGDI removed a lot of the inherent interactions. The videos and forum activity were certainly something worth talking about, and even the opposing team seemed to enjoy it and provided their own video (I won't criticize it, because you won't see me creating any videos, but Chevs quality has certainly been unmatched).

I think given all of that, this is a strict departure - there's zero transparency, and to your question here: it seems inconsistent given the nature of what's been shared for the reasoning. Based on what others have mentioned on the forums, it seems like Chevs is willing to make whatever public, because he honestly doesn't know what this decade plus ban is for. Certainly sanctions were likely based around him, but given those were pulled back - and TC of all people, has returned with qz publicly stating in discord that 10 years seems enough, it's hard to imagine what sort of action would match this punishment so long after.

You've stated you don't need the forums to approve of your decision - and you're right, you're the administrator and developer of the game, but I just wanted to explain why so many people push back at this. There's so few people left, any sort of lifetime ban has a relatively large impact on the remaining teams, and Chevs - whether you like him or not - is pushing the game to have more people involved than it did, which seems like the point of these threads.

I don't think that type of change is much of a deal breaker or really impact QoL. I'd argue the dropping land was always a bug / oversight, but even if we ignore that: oil still has it's value, it would just balance out (likely at some lower price point) for the benefits. And with the recent expenses changes, if people are shooting for the 700M range instead of 1.4B, most governments would be able to compete by a mix of private and public markets - you just might have to decide if it's more beneficial to destock off the private a few days earlier or play turns without expenses and buy oil or gamble on the public. That's not so bad.

I think part of the challenge is that there are pretty polarizing views of what people enjoy in 1a. I think the majority believe that diplomacy and politics should play a big role in that though, as opposed to the initial implementation of ClanGDI which made it so that you could never have a threat of attacking to get what you want (including if others wanted to net differently, say by mass FA - or historically, land trading). I think many argued that was a step in the wrong direction and that was undone. That said, there's always some compromise where war tags can't war the same group repeatedly or they'll just abandon the server, and netters can't ignore everyone all the time, or we lose the politics and war tags lose their purpose.

To the question of how to get players to join alliance: I typically point users that I interact with in Primary / tourney (and to a smaller extent Team) to the alliance server if they're looking for a group to learn from. You still see quite a few rainbows in the solo world, and I often provide a few tips for people who regularly get farmed (especially if they reach out about why everyone is attacking them, which does happen) that can lead to that. It's less persuasion and more of an opportunity. That's been historically true - and in fact, Cath for instance talked with people on solo servers including Tmac, who then brought him over to Evo (not because he was getting farmed, but because he was asking the top players questions on how to improve). I think Primary with it's GDI and tourney with the small player numbers per group are probably the ideal place for new users to practice in lower stakes. Express is also great, but very unique.