You don't quite understand the time investment required to make 350m as a techer (and many outside factors) vs a landtrader who made 260m on his first attempt.

The gap should be much wider, how we should approach that is up for debate.

its gonna be an interesting top 10 for sure ^^

Pretty sure I'm gonna be top 5 this set

Bonus!

And all hail Xin!

I'd like to offer the term "Ghost Gaining" into this to put off the stigma of "Land trading" per se... where the two parties involved hit each other and expect the retals.

regardless, I don't think it's fair to say that someone who takes advantage of this gaining to get a 50k acre country is going to get a 250+m finish... I admit to not being the most skilled player, but I've only gotten a finish of $135m using GG to get there, (That country was 50k acres with 4 weeks of stocking). I believe the market influences a finish more than anything, as Magellan I believe has pointed out in another thread somewhere. I believe this set will go to a casher around 30-40k acres. This is gonna be nuts regardless

?
Im only 32k rep casher but I think 150mil is possible for me this set. 50k would net me over 200mil.

that must mean I've been too generous in our FA dealings tella :P

Same here, but only in the lazy department!

SG, believe it or not, LOTS of people put a lot of time into their countries and still don't finish in the top ten. Complaining that landtraders are too competitive with traditional style players is like complaining that your horse and buggy isn't as competitive as those newfangled automobiles?

Evolving away from DR camping bottomfeed targets is ultimately going to improve the game.

Are you suggesting that Laf's elite netters are not flexible enough to adapt to the changing metrics of the game? Or . . .
are you afraid that with all of that spare time they would have landtrading, they may start getting laid and decide they have better things to do?



;p

"Complaining that landtraders are too competitive with traditional style players is like complaining that your horse and buggy isn't as competitive as those newfangled automobiles?"


listen. all you need to know is that xin won last set. set the record.
and didn't land trade.


so your analogy needs to be boxed up and smashed over your head

LaF's elite netters set new records last reset, not sure any adapting is needed.

I'm saying decent players shouldn't be able to hit 250m networth off 5 minutes a day. Otherwise exploring needs some massive buffs.

We could always arrange for that :)

lol dude. You obviously havn't played around the people that finish 300-400mill as a techer. No one puts time into a country like them. In the past I have done some random grabs on untagged and never camped in an effort to be as lazy as possible. This set I would have won the set putting in even less effort than that doing a landtrader. The wars put a stop to that but it is still laughable how easy it is to run a landtrader and how many bad ones there are out there still.

I also think exploring needs a buff in some form. That would be a good thing. Although I feel it should be later game exploring and not the early game so much.

It's that or landtrading nerfs, I think it should be a little of both.

I think your missing the point, I know Laf techers broke records last set. Thats the whole point, what your really complaining about is inflation. The rising tide lifts all boats, without the huge acreage land traders buying enormous amounts of tech, where would those techers have been? Still in first place but with lower NW.

The game is evolving, but its still the same trade-offs as always, just at a larger scale. In the old days a very well played all-x casher/farmer played for 5 minutes a day could reasonably expect to finish with a score of about 75% of the top score. Land trading, Big Ben finished with a score of about 72% of the winning score last set. Its more obvious now, because there is a much smaller sample size - but its essentially the same. I am having a hard time seeing what your point is, other than that your wary of exiting your comfort zone.

I never made any statement as to which playing style is more honourable. I merely made a statement as to how I (me, myself) define landtrading (and landtrader) and backed up my definition when qzjul questioned it for more details.

I did not expect everyone to agree with my definition.

WHERE IS THE LIKE BUTTON ON THIS GIZMO? ?!?!

HA!
BILL
LEWIS AND CLARK DIVISION
THE MIGHTY CLAN [DANGER]!

So with my less than 5 mins a day, I won't hit that high? :'(

Land trading is too powerful, needs a mild nerf and exploring needs a mild buff.

You didn't read his post then dude. What the techers did last set required time and thinking. A less than 5 minute a day landtrader does not. There should be something to be gained by more time spent. And he reiterated it a bit more in that post Im now seeing right above me :P

Can you really trade with 5 mins a day?
I don't think so.
Trading land also takes time. But still not as same with techers

To give you an idea of how much time I spent to finish rank 1 last reset:


A) Bottomfeeding. This meant being on IRC a lot, and looking at the news feed (and setting alerts for known suiciders). The moment a suicider attacked, I would be on it.

Bottomfeeding also involves looking at the country lists everyday, and compiling a list of what time each untagged country exits DR tiers and making sure to log on to grab at those times at the exact second.

As a bottomfeeder, I do not get 12 or 18 hour logout bonuses, I'm in my country ALL the time.


B) Studying of market. This means you need to study the market trends, compare it with past resets. You look at volume of food traded on a per-day and per-12 hour blocks of time (via eestats mainly), and looking at min and max prices, figuring out whether prices will stabilize, rise or drop. Many market signs will tell you whether food is likely to crash or not within the next 24 hours.

This also includes looking at the sizes of purchased food packages that hit the market via the boxcar market feed every few hours (the feed that says X food sold at $Y price Z minutes ago), and whether they were bought by SOs or not. For large food packages that hit the market, I would country hunt and NW match their NW increase from the food sale.


C) Studying of other countries. This means looking at when they start stocking, and when they start switching to Theos for a TMBR jump. I tracked every Theo on the server on a 12-hour basis to see if there are any new Theos and how their stockpile will affect the food market after their switch completes. This also includes whether countries went Decay bonus and when they reach -100%, tracking their estimated stockpile sizes and more.


D) Lots of calculations on whether to stock an extra day, or grab an extra day, or jump half a day earlier, or calculating equilibrium PM sizes before the jump based on a strict X hour login cycle, calculating the different scenarios (pub vs pm jump vs partial pm jump, mbr vs non-mbr, theo vs demo, etc)

I havnt been spending any more than that? 5-10 on a long day?

And I helped... :-)

I wouldn't expect any of LaF's techers to be in the t10, as we lost around 1,000 turns of stocking due to joining a war - the slight increase in the techers' acreages just doesn't make up for those lost turns.

Wow. Can you do those things for me? :P

No!

Well, I enjoy Primary server a lot more now, because you are forced to get your 18-hour bonus in order to be competitive, and you don't need to DR camp. And you only need to study market trends if you're a techer, every strat that is non-techer sells food to PM and jumps from PM.

That's why I made the other thread about Primary server!

Cool, interesting to hear from the pro, could you please expand on this part?

1. Why does knowing the food package size matter?
2. What difference does it make whether they are bought by SOs? (How do you tell anyway? Other than the "0 Bushels bought" message indicating some people ran out of cash)
3. Why country hunt seller of large food packages? <-- particularly curious about this one
4. Additionally, boxcar misses a lot of sales, how do you deal with that?

1. Large amounts of food that sold as one large sale means food undercutting if it is a SO. If it is not a SO, it means someone has a lot of cash from reselling a lot of food and is forced to buy food in order to spend turns. Reasoning: You want to know who is dumping food and how much food, and whether it is cause for worry.

2) You will know whether it is a SO by the current food price. (Just ask on IRC), or just by looking at the other food sold. If 200m food sold at $46, then before and after that there are food sold at $47 in minute amounts, you know the $46 food sold via SOs.

3) See (1). You want to know whether they are converting, reselling or dumping. Too many people dumping means food is going to crash.

4) I live with it, knowing that the market news is incomplete (and that LaF has its own market feed on another server).

That's pretty clear, thanks :)

You must now join Laf Grady! Xin's secrets must be kept!

So you're the only person that does that and techers are the only strats that require and/or benefit from that type of play?

As a land trading farmer, there might not as many variables involved, but it requires more than 5-10 minutes a day if you actually want to place highly...

Doesn't a land trading farmer have very little to no money up until he begins stocking? So he/she doesn't have to worry about most of those things for more than half of the reset?

I'm not saying it takes as much time as a top 10 techer, but it takes a lot more to be successful than Xin is implying. There's quite a lot involved in rebuilding thousands of acres each day while finding suitable targets, worrying about pacts and who to hit, figuring out retals, and trying to stock as well.

Casher is much harder than farmer, of course. Farmer is stupid easy, but it still takes more than 5-10 minutes a day if you want to have a chance at top 10....

landtrading was very easy when used in FFA, less than 5-10 minutes a day/country

depending on how organised you are in 1a it would be tougher, but if your not seeing 160k landtraders your not seeing anything close to perfect landtrading

a perfect grabbing techer might hit 60k and people have gotten close so what were seeing as very competitive landtraders arnt being played very well compared to non landtraders

We had ~5 techers doing it, not everyone plays the market correctly though.

I did not claim that a landtrader only takes 5 minutes a day to play. Locket and Son Goku were the ones that claimed that.

It's really more like 20 minutes, since you spend about 10 minutes deciding who to trade with (and checking to see you aren't stealing retals, or RoRing), 5 minutes to do the actual grab (getting ops, jets, oil), and then another 5 minutes to build and logout.

A land trading farmer doesn't really need to care about food peaks, it stocks its own food, and sells to PM at the end, so it doesn't really need to monitor market trends nor track other countries, nor camp DRs to bottomfeed. MBRs are out of the question for a landtrader, so the only real calculations are really just calculating when to stop trading and start stocking, and when to stop stocking and jump.

It takes more time (and skill) to landtrade than to all-explore obviously, so I'm ok that landtraders have a better finish in general compared to all-explorers.

I assume it depends on how good you are at landtrading if MBR is out of the question?
At 50k acres it's going to cost $9bil to rebuild. But at 30k its about $3bil. That would still beat an all-explorer.

Magellaan, I'm assuming top tier game play and way larger than 30k. :P

Anyhow, if you're going to be 30k in size, MBR is probably still a very bad option unless you have over 150 BPT.

There is a reason we call Xinhuan Xin for short, it is because it rhymes with Win. Xin = Win.

This has been shown by his countries but also, more importantly summed up greatly by his posts in this thread.

You are doing your trader wrong then ;) I could have had top ten and probably 1st if it wasnt for this war and I was never in there for more than 10 minutes at a time max.

Maybe he's building up the land from his grabs 1 turn at a time? That would add some time to how long it takes to play a country.

Yea hmm, I was thinkin of doing TMBR. But I just did some work on my spreadsheet, it still needs some further refinement but it shows TMBR destock vs public market (or (partial) pvt market) destock to be quite close for my 32k rep casher. Slight advantage for non-MBR tho. Darn, you're always right lol.

Sepher Smells

this was the best post of the thread. actually made me laugh

lol

holy fluff, all laf ppl stop posting.

:

No

You are easily amused anoniem.

lol

Xin wins AGAIN!