As one who hasn’t played a full reset in 5 years.

Oil is too powerful in the endgame.

The thing that made this game special was that everything ran through the market.

That with the 2b limit made the market very strategic. And made everything from startup to destocking strategic.

Now, dropping down to 100 acres, all MB using oil to replenish private markets has taken away the strategic aspects of end game jumping. You can now jump independent if the market all in the last hour. Not over 3-5 days.


I’m not saying oil to replace Troops
On PM is bad.

I’m just saying it’s overpowered:)

My suggestion isn’t to remove this feature.
It’d would be to lower oil production but maybe add an oil tech for those that want to specialize i. Oil or a FFO type strat.

So there was much more strategic to switch to Theo and use the private market over 3-5 days to jump?
instead of it being 3-4 things to do its 8-9 now and possibly a bit more with the "advanced" way of jumping.

It’s taken timing out of it.

Everything used to run through the market.

Now, one can almost play independent of it.

Nothing was run through the market before. it was all bought from private. just as it is now. the difference is that its replenished in a different way.

I agree with gains for once...

The only thing that really sucks to me is you get so little time to enjoy your jump. If you are really min/maxing you wait until you get the last turn you can and still jump. Then the game resets and you're in protection again! There is no relishing your scores list :P

The issue with the oil jump isn't the mechanics of it... It is just an imbalance of # units produced per barrel of oil. That could be tweaked a bit. There is no risk/reward to attempt the other way as it stands.

I used full land to destock and got 9th. I was suicided or may have finished a lot better.

Ebert is the man!

Oil destock is just as risky. It will become a thing of the past when bots start using oil.

How is oil destock risky?
Burn oil get pm troops buy up


There is no risk

Guysss, manbearpig is real. I'm ssssuper sssserious.

its risky if keeps oil stock in hand and gets suicided and oil is set on fire. no other risk (unless has too much or too little of it).

Why would oil ever be kept on hand?

It's risky because you either spend all set making oil or you have to rely on the market

I make it risky by stealing it from Weezy

Galleri makes it risky by failing.

I THOUGHT WE WERE FRIENDS!!! :(

Please explain how private market destocking is risky?

A lot of destocking used to be timing the food market. Not just selling to the PM.

Hence people would jump 10 days out
Spend the cash as it rolled in.

Having more than 2b you lost it:)
So you had to jump incrementally
Or you had to put all the food on at once and spend it as it came in.
Wait online till your food hit the market.


All risk has been removed from this game


Safety= laziness
Laziness= death

We’ve created a culture designed (unintentionally) to impeded growth of players and alliances

Oil+ lack of 2b bug has taken the risk and strategy out of jumping

I would never recommend reinstatement of the 2b bug. It was just too big of a pita.

Taking out the 2b bug just adds a different kind of strategy that is pretty present throughout the whole set. Not having it rewards people that have made good countries. It's not laziness. I don't net on alliance but I'm pretty sure you can still destock with 10 days out on techers (not sure how market reacts to tech here in last few days but I'm assuming not good) or sometimes other strats. People just prefer not to.

I think some of the people who generally do poorly (less than top 5-10) would greatly benefit from doing it this way but they're trying to mimic others success instead of thinking for themselves. This isn't the fault of oil being persistent in the game. If your running FFOs you have to come to a point where you decide if using or selling your oil would net you a better finish. And there is a point where selling is clearly better in order to maximize utility

edit: I actually have a model I built up for this game when I did my big FFA net set awhile ago. I ran the numbers in it to check if oil is op. Even at extremely low oil prices, 150$ a barrel say, it is a terrible idea to "play until the last turn" in almost every case (with a few exceptions). The marginal benefits of playing a few days of extra turns are not worth the costs associated with the land drop. The only way I could see it worth it would be on a country with 'low' land that couldn't PM destock (there is another couple outlier cases ie. with low enough amounts of oil at a low enough price its ambiguous which is better, although PM destock without buying turrets can still dominate in this case. With large amounts of oil PM destock dominates except if you have stocked in oil and crash the market trying to sell it... land and how fully built/teched a country is can have an effect but I favored the oil destocker here by assuming maximum gains by playing an extra turn). As the price of oil goes up, it becomes an even worse idea. Just saying, the whole "oil op" shtick just plain comes down to not running the numbers.

there was even a bug where if there was more than 2b food on the market at any price people food just disappeared

and food floor was 10 times lower then roughly

at 2 on public

and volume was roughly 10x higher

Oil destock is alot harder then a normal land destock, first you need to get to a massive size to make the most of it (250k-300k acres) then you need to aquire 500 million+ barrels at prices less then 200, then you are spending 30b cash on deconstruction costs end set to drop the land on top of the 100b+ cash spent building it up and the 50b cash spent on oil and units to aquire it, all so you can play the last 3-5 days of the set worth of turns.

If you did the same thing and did it smart and kept your costs just as low as the top 10 players do without oil you would finish higher if you planned your destock proper.

I forgot about tear down costs, actually. That makes oil destock significantly worse off. Ran solver on my model and with 500 mill barrels, the right price to buy oil at seems to be around 119 $ (at 200k acres, higher acres it is even lower). Anything more and you should have land destocked. It doesn't make it any more worth if you produced your own oil as you could have sold that oil at presumably market price (although, the extra supply would slightly lower the market price).

The game needs oiler bots, not an oil nerf. The fact that people are getting these huge networths with oil destocks isn't because oil is op, it's because they're good players to start with and the injection of more bots into the game implies more networth records as people adapt.

119 bucks oil? get out of here.

won't get that cheap oil after couple weeks (if even then).

That's kinda baked into my point. Realistically, oil is nearly completely exogenous, the 119$ is a break even point at that specific acreage, tech %, volume and a couple of other factors like building make-up that I chose (the oil price is slightly variable depending on how much some of those factors change, I might add). At that point you'll be making as much running those turns as you would have not running them and have a slight advantage, all costs considered, over a PM destock assuming the PM destocker started with an empty PM and can't buy off public market for cheaper prices.

Sin are you accounting for hybrids that make either some or all of their oil?

My probably fluffed up math told me I had to get oil for less than $200 for it to cost me money to build rigs on team as a casher

It assumes that what you produce also counts as profit if you can sell it on the market, which is why there might be an instance where a country that makes so much oil that they would crash the market to below the equilibrium price it might be worth it to just oil destock even if oil is still above that price. And more generally, the equilibrium price of oil does go up for hybrids, I believe, since I don't have commission built in. I'm just too lazy to add that in :P

I still think the pm destocker is better off in most instances especially with oil prices generally being at 200+ on alliance.

It is interesting that oil generation was originally supposed to be balanced at $80 and now people are willing to spend upwards of $250 on it without a second thought.

80 bucks was total utopia (only if there were quite a much oilers maybe then) and many pay 500+ bucks from oil.

People rarely actually do math on a lot of this stuff. A lot of people just mimic and follow the advice of others because they are lazy or they dont really care that much.

It is a lazy way to jump for the most part and an entire jump can literally take less than a few minutes. Considering one of the NW records set by Gerdler was as a oil hybrid its easy to say it is a great strat :p

I don't disagree that it's most definitely viable and has some advantages. Mostly I'm just arguing against the point that it's overpowered. I think there will be a paradigm shift eventually where pm destocks see more use, as I do fundamentally believe they have a higher ceiling than oil destocks (when the price of oil is as high as it has been and people can build 200-300k acre countries), but we'll see. Some of my belief that it's not overpowered comes from the trade-off of selling oil. When the prices are this high, oilers should be, acre for acre, the most profitable strat if the oil is sold instead of used; which is a much better argument for oil tech than the argument that oil destocks are op imo :P

I think, at the end of the day, the destock method is fine. Mostly because you CAN'T get enough stock to win or get close to a win WITHOUT market play. You can run a strat beautifully all you want, but you're always going to be limited if you don't use the market until the end of the set or only use it in your destock. So calling out the endgame strategy just because you CAN do it without the market is nub speak imo.

Besides... I've seen PLENTY of times where market play (while using the oil destock) in the very last few hours of the set has changed entire outcomes...for better or for worse. :P

I never said it isn't fine, I said it's not optimal with the price of oil these days depending (key word) on the given inputs. I try not to speak in absolutes, but I can say that depending on the price of oil, making up the disadvantage with just market play is going to be extremely unlikely. At some other prices of oil, it wouldn't be too difficult.

I think SV on FFA is a good example of a guy that built his countries (this was before the addition of more bots) in about the same amount of time as people do on alliance these days and did full pm destocks with no help from his other countries OR 'market play' (he claims he didn't use the public market at all during the entire set) getting about 1.2 bill nw (my model predicts this nw pretty closely).

The way he built his countries and the fact he built them in the same time as say, the winner from last set, makes the difference between FFA and Alliance pretty much null and void here. Nub speak, real talk, call it what you want

ffa has way less suiciding and way way easier grabbing

i think it even has less topfeeding these days

its the last 2 sets that bots have been buying defence which made things harder, and easier in small ways

i cant easily identify any of his countries that wernt helped by others when he got 1.2bish

and they seem to all be theos rather than fascists which have tended to be the big alliance countries

It's too strong yes, but the game needs an endgame place to put oil.
I have said for about a year to halve the units that oil replenish and thus reduce the value (and therefore price) of oil. But we would still see oil jump with that, they would stack up more evenly with other forms of jumps tho.

If there is no endgame use for oil, however, there will not be enough volume to wage war without everyone making oil rainbows, which defeats the purpose of the market and specialization and thus EE as a whole and we should all go play utopia then.

I do agree with Servant that going through the market either with selling food only or with selling food and buying NW is more complex and interesting, which is why I value jumping in tournament and primary more than in 1a.

I agree with everything Gerdler said, minus playing Utopia, eff that game. I think the best fix is to just reduce the amount oil replenishes PM. I honestly haven't done a jump that wasn't an oil destock, but from the perspective of a new-ish (returning, but I was not even decent until this comeback) player I do like like this jump method.

I also think playing straight FFO with very little market play is viable. I don't think it is a guarantee or even a great shot at t10, but I do think given the environment of the set it might be able to pull off a t10. Again, not saying it is a recommended strategy, I just do think it is that strongk.

Huh?

i think its fairly closely balanced now

people are just dumb though

I don’t think Gerdler is dumb:)

Reduce oil power by 1/2
Add a tech to require more specialization which is what this game is based on

I don't think enshula was referring to Gerdler lmao.

LOL, after a full serving of protein Gerdler is ready to rock the fluff out of EE!