Just letting you all know, the ghost acre changes help landtraders. It weakens them very slightly, and makes them have to change partners, but with little penalty if they can find multiple partners and 'sleep around'. But bottomfeeders tend to attack the same targets over and over again, and they need to do many attacks to gain as much land as a landtrader gains in one attack.

This ghost acre change hurts bottomfeeders a lot more than it hurts landtraders. Thus, it in effect helps landtraders (since all-explore countries aren't a threat for the top 10). More than anything else, it helps makes all-explore more competitive compared to grabbing, but it will give landtraders a bigger edge over landgrabbers.

If you expected landtraders to suffer this set, you're going to find out that its the opposite occuring. It'll be even easier for them to dominate the top land charts.

Just giving you guys a heads up, so that none of you are at all surprised by what happens.

I agree with that. When I heard about the changes it took me less than 1 minute to think of a way to still make it work. And there are a lot smarter than I playing this game.

Users have a great ability to take a system and make it work to their advantage. The only way to get rid of land trading is to take away ghost acres completely.

Keep in mind I'm not against land trading in the first place. I think that the state of the game (so low on players) landtrading is fine and fun.

I want landtrading to be stronger than exploring and weaker than landgrabbing. And this change is counterproductive towards that goal.

i'm sure pang was sitting up at night thinking 'what does rockman want?'

land grabbing is more productive than any of it, its pacts and retals that are counter productive.

what you want to be awesome is bottom feeding, and bottom feeding is not the same as land grabbing.

i dont think youll see any landtrading this set.

There's a few ways to landgrab.
#1 Bottomfeeding. Hitting people who have zero chance of retalling
#2 Midfeeding. Hitting people who have a chance of retalling, but intending to bounce their retal. If they successfully retal, you'll lose more than you gain due to the high networth required to midfeed.
#3 Topfeeding. Hitting people who can retal, and relying on a retal policy to protect you from them retalling more than once. You expect to gain more from the hit than you'll lose in the retal. Rather than relying on your turrets to protect you from their retaliation, you rely on a policy which keeps you from needing to buy adequate defense when topfeeding.

Midfeeding is powerful, but there is only a brief period where its doable, and if done too much, it will start a war. Topfeeding is cowardly and if done too much, it will start a war. Bottomfeeding has extremely limited target selection, and with these ghost acre changes, gains for bottomfeeders will be severely penalized. Only midfeeding can be as effective as landtrading, and only commie indies or techers can midfeed, and it carries with it not just a high skill requirement, but too much of it will start a war. Topfeeding and Bottomfeeding will not match effective landtrading with these current rules.

Pang wasn't the one who made this change, but I'm fairly sure that he agrees with me that landgrabbing should be more powerful than landtrading, and that landtrading should be more powerful than pure exploring.



Or maybe by landgrabbing, you mean farming someone who agrees to be farmed by you and will not retal you, not because of your military power, but because they are giving you their land for free. RD does that all the time on alliance, but you've brought that practice over to the primary server as well. That's your "skill" at landgrabbing. I guess thats what you call landgrabbing. I call that pathetic.

The biggest problem in my eyes with land grabbing is the lack of players. Most players are in tags and landgrabbing between tags has got to a point where it cant happen due to policies, and also due to abusive players who over do it.

The few untaggs there are get hit 50 times a day. That kind of farming will never allow them to grow and will only make some of them quit playing resulting in even lower acres.

Right now in the current situation our real options are (assuming you want to live):
1. explore
2. land trade
3. grabbing pacts (which is just a less organized land trade)

We need bots to farm!

Rockman's generally right here. Landtraders will probably find themselves frustrated by the extra work, but ultimately, if you set up patterns of attacks that allow you to make max gains on landtrading, they're going to be far less frustrated than bottom feeders who will run low on targets.

Getting 50-150k acres shouldn't be too hard still. Getting those super-fatties like the TKO countries from last set or like llaar did back before the initial ghost acre changes will be pretty difficult though.

In some ways, this actually will protect the untagged countries, because once you do several hits on an untagged country that you're bottom-feeding, your gains, which were probably already not great to begin with, will tank so low that it won't be worth it.

We need pang ran bots to farm.

Oops. Look at me, forgetting which board I'm posting on. :P

Dirty FFA'er...

At least we don't take the game so seriously over there. ;)

A good portion of the *point* of these changes was to nerf the endless bottomfeeding, as that's keeping the n00bs down.

No the point of it was to try and eliminate land trading, there are much better ways to protect teh noobs ;)

It's just easier for you to say that when we pointed out so many huge flaws with this.

Ok so these imaginary people who play alliance server and are not in a clan and dont respond to the bombardment of messages from people are getting a change for them while the land trading countries essentially get less nerfed than the bottomfeeders which could be called a buff in relation to others... I dont even really want to try or be active this set when I know a land trader will beat me even if he destocks as a commie oiler with medical tech stock

heh, the change is for more than just alliance locket

And yet bottomfeeding is not an issue in FFA either. So it is essentially a change for Express/primary/team/tourney. Or in other words it is a change for primary I'd assume. Give primary it's own more noob friendly rules if you wish but making land traders better here is not good. Express already has custom rules so why not primary?

Yeah if we took things seriously in ffa, we wouldn't make 3 mil acre countries as its counterproductive to total net lol

People only land trade because of how difficult it is to land grab these days. Fix the root of the problem and you'll fix land trading.

We'll see if I'm right about landtraders being affected less than bottomfeeders.

It just depends if they are lazy or not. If they are not lazy then it wont hurt them.

There are still precious few acres out there for bottom feeders.

(ttt and bonus)

it's attitudes like "topfeeding is cowardly" that set the game back. topfeeding should be a legit way to gain land. I like these changes btw. moves the blatant landtrading abuse into mostly midfeeding type playing.

Topfeeding is relying on the person you hit to not retal you multiple times, even though they can. How is it not cowardly to hide behind a retal policy? If you don't want someone to retal you land:land, get some more fluffing turrets.

This doesn't move blatant landtrading abuse into mostly midfeeding type playing. Nothing in these changes has made landtraders have to buy millions upon millions of turrets the way that midfeeders do.

I don't think you have any clue what you're talking about.

i agree with rockman, i dont think topfeeding exists but if you want to grab someone one time for x amount of acers who is to say oh i hit you once, so you can only hit me once.

The people who can't get land and want to mess with those who have it make that arbitrary rule. If those with land decided they didn't mind killing to back up their stuff they could blow stocks and take all the land easy :P

My arbitary rule that I use is "Don't hit someone who can retal you. If someone does successfully retal you in whatever manner they choose to use, you deserve it."
The exception to this is when I am trying to provoke someone into a war, in which case any method of retaliation by them is acceptable, as I am attempting to start a war by grabbing someone who I know can retal me.

So, any big bottomfeeders out there?

Of the 10 current fattest countries, half got there without bottomfeeding, the others bottomfed either partially or exclusively. Ha ha?

How does that compare to previous resets?