Hi All,

Pacts/relations will no longer be allowed on Express, as of the reset *after* the current one (ie when a new reset is created on Feb 04).

The existing rules in Primary will stay as they are; while they are both solo servers, the pace of express makes relations make less sense to begin with.

As usual, if you have any thoughts or suggestions, post them below!

Regards,

-qzjul

Uhh. I don't really think a lot of people were clamoring for this and I'm not sure what it fixes, but oh well. I guess we don't have to worry about leeching and we don't need to line up tech allies if we want to tech, so that's something. I would've just removed the tech alliances if that's what this is aimed at, assuming they're not being re-coded to prevent leeching.

We were discussing this a bit in an Express thread just a few days ago about how having no d-allies makes attacking way more "simple" in a not necessarily good way. Not the end of the world though I guess but it dumbs down the game a little. Can you clarify what removing the d-allies and i-allies is aimed at?

intel and def allies should be kept on express so that 1.1 doesnt beat 1 with nary a thought.

Thank you Qman!!!!!!


/victory lap

agree with braden

You're gonna make CI the only way to win.

This buffs techer a little, I think. Though they'll need to carry increased defense during their stocking period.

but everybody would need to carry more def, blid, which only better serves commies who lose next to nothing from this change as their spy and def is already far stronger than the rest of ours (indies to produce more spies takes from my bus/ents, and more turrets kills my expenses)

now techers or commies need not spy allies and the such, which makes it stupid easy for them to prey on farmers and cashers even more than before.

this is awful. fix dr and then focus on ruining the game

(blid will correct me where i erred, i hope)

It was largely for the tech-leeching problem =/ and the questions the mods (Tella!) kept raising about what was and wasn't allowed with allies

Easier to just disallow them.


Blame Tella! ;) /me ducks

/blames tella! :o

Ehh that doesn't help commies because they produce fully while spying and can always have a good SPAL. It does help techers because it frees up more turns to tech and lets them go higher percentage labs. That's about it as far as removing DAs goes. It might make it easier for the commie to hit you early but you'll have an easier retal.

The reason I mentioned techers needing more def specifically is because they're the only ones with a hard-wired need to stop growing early (tech prices will crash Sunday), but they'll have to still keep their def up a bit more nevertheless to avoid the retals.

But the other reason this helps techers is because there's less tech on the market without RAs. Of course, techers also get less tech because of that, but it will roughly break even, while the higher tech prices will slow other strats down. Especially casher.

This start makes the 2 worst strats even worse LOL.

This will help the "get hit and retal" strategy the most. :P

All we need now is GDI Tourney rules and we got ourselves a badass wild wild west server!!!!!!!! That would be AWESOME!!!

i accept blids reasoning; thats why i added that caveat ;)

Uh, you already have Tourney for that

We had tourney for solo server, too, if we just wanted to keep to ourselves and not improve the social aspect of the game.

great news.



this will discourage people who grabs like crazy on thursday and friday expecting not to get retalled since they have 2 huge def allies.

[SUG]
Im suggesting to decrease the max turns stored since some players might play really slow just to get big retals on sunday.

My take on this:

1. There are better ways to deal with tech leeching. Change how tech allies work. Multiple suggestions were made. (A) Teching player gains TPT from tech allies instead of giving tech directly to allies, or (B) Tech received from tech allies is multiplied by your (Labs/Land) ratio, this is a one line code change.

2. Grabbing is now easier, so is retalling. Jets demand will go down, turrets demand will go up. It will not change demand for military units on the whole, and Commies retain their status quo. Oil prices will go down. Grabbing now becomes a simple math equation instead of a risk vs reward situation of whether to spy the allies of a player.

3. Techers do not actually gain much benefit from having more turns to tech with less spying required. The loss of tech from having no tech allies is counteracted by having more teching turns, so I do not expect techers to have any change in status quo either. Essentially, only tech starts just got worse by a tiny bit.


I don't agree with this change, when there are alternatives available to fix tech leeching.

and some of us play delayed with zero intention of purchasing a single jet until we buy out our private market on sunday with an hour left in the server, with our billions of dollars. how "some" "may" do something, it being perfectly legitimate, is irrelevant. "some" "may" play early on tuesday or wednesday just to get big and farm lowly players. lets change them being allowed to play early and we can change me being allowed to play later. the idea of your suggestion, of course, being fairness and not benefiting your own style of play?

[quote poster=braden; 29623; 531683]

you are wrong. my style is more balanced. not too fast nor too slow.
with these changes more players will play really slow in this fast paced game.

HA!

I may try playing this server again at some point now.

Serp, you should try it. Even if you don't have time perhaps you could all-x to a top ten. We could ally up. oh wait--

Based on talking to players & Tella, we may add def&intel back sometime in the near future, when I have time to recode that stuff.

That said,



I don't really like A) or B) from a gameplay point of view, because it means there's a tech ally for just *ONE* type of strategy.

I don't really like A) from an implementation point of view, because it means any time a player plays turns I have to reference another country =/ though i suppose teching is not as intense as attacking...

How about changing the "Tech Ally" to a "Production Ally" (or some other name) that works for all players. Basically just like a Tech Alliance, except it shares a percent of whatever is produced that turn (cash, food, oil, military units, and tech). Might have to lower the percentage shared with allies to reduce the overall gains. But the pact would become useful for most strategies and not focused on just the techer strategy and tech resource.

Disclamer:
This idea came to me after reading Qzjuls post here late night after my classes. I am pretty tired, and haven't given this a whole lot of thought. What do you think?

Actually zarcon and I have been talking about something like that for trade allies. Could be interesting.

Sounds like a very bad idea to me. Everyone gets 10% of whatever someone else makes? What the hell is the point of that? I can't think of one, tbh, but whoever can find the best people to ally gets the most free stuff.

Also sup OMA.

i don't dislike the idea, but make it not the set percentage, but based off of your own production- if i production ally with a farmer while a casher, neither of us benefit. if i find cashers then we share pci, or whatever/however it might be done..

but i have zero idea how this might work math or code wise.. i leave that to ya'll far smarter than me ;)

Ok.... as a result, you think removing ALL allies is a better solution? Now there are NO allies for any strategy!

-_-

Removing D/I allies removes the risk vs reward factor when landgrabbing - there is a conscious choice about whether ally spy/spy on the allies to determine the exact break, vs just guessing/estimating a target's ally contribution. You save a few turns vs the increased risk of failure.

I'd like to see some form of this, never really thought techers being the only strat that should benefit from having a 'like' strategy and ally ingame

Sounds like qz is confused as to the role of a tech ally on solo servers. Playing too much alliance will cause this.

Well, if people are anti-"leeching", the only purpose can be for techers to ally with other techers.

Despite the fact that you could say there's a legitimate reason for a techer to let say a super-def-heavy commie leech tech in exchange for a valuable defence pact...

people complain a lot about "collaboration" on primary. What exactly is it and what counts and what doesn't. Technically if I have a defensive ally then I'm collaborating with another player. If someone hits me and he retals then we are "cooperating" and it is "violating" the "spirit of the rules" or is it? It just become very murky.
Certain individuals (some of whom are posting on this thread) went so far as to actually organize blatant collaboration in an effort to increase the level of enforcement and disrupt the game. Those actions were not only counterproductive, but also causes the staff to waste time and resources hunting people down.

As it stands now enforcement has become subjective which makes life hard on the mods since his means there is no longer any fair way to do this and looking into these things is very time consuming. Also people will argue with you endlessly even when it's dead obvious that they were systematically and maliciously violating the spirit of the rules.

This is the simplest solution to remove some of the grey areas and moot many arguments. It is also the simplest solution from a coding standpoint. Now it truly is a "solo" server or at least 90% of the way there since we can't stop players in primary from messaging each other outside the game etc (duh).

It's not worth our time to have tech allies and determine what is leeching and what isn't.

I don't believe this to be true. I didn't do this, Xin didn't do this, crest didn't do this. Nobody did this...


This is overly simplistic. h2o had his friend run a land farm for him in Primary two sets ago, while his friend also stole loads of tech from the top players. Were they allied? No. Last set, when his friend dragged two competitors into war, and then took a spy op for him, were they allied? I doubt it. Alliances don't necessarily have much to do with collaboration. Making subjective calls is part of being a moderator.

The only thing I can think of relating to the first thing you're talking about is it was maybe Rockman and PaleMoon who fought Viva and his collaborator. They haven't posted in this thread, though, and they weren't doing it to "force moderation," they were doing it because they were policing the server because mods were allowing Viva's ally to give him free jets and then the ally would also top feed other top players.

Pretty sure Martian knows who did and didn't violate the rules.

And as qz said, with the way the code base is now, it's either all or nothing until he can rework some things. I think we'll see how it goes and perhaps add d/I back in in the future.

Well I'd like to know what he's talking about. Seems scurrilous.

To clarify, I don't collaborate. Unless you consider sharing country numbers as collaboration. And due to recent suicides, I don't even share my country number anymore.

good change

there should never have been allies in express

its too quick to make organically finding allies possible and play styles too variable to know who would make good allies

so it encouraged too much out of game organisation

i remember this being talked about months or years ago, dont put back non tech allies, it does reduce complexity but you could just balance PS around it if you want, reduce PS to say 25% bonus for example

there's no point in me singling out anyone for that or dwelling on it.
The other thing is that people often make suggestions to rule changes that benefit or center around their style of play. I don't think it's deliberate in most cases, but it's more because that has been their game experience for many years so their perception of the game is heavily influenced by it. And yes, we all do it to some extent.

@enshula: this was a change we wanted to do a while ago, it was just a question of having the time to do it. Personally I'm very much for not having allies at all in express and changing the PS bonus.

I'm not one for major changes. But, I do agree with enshula, there never should have been allies to start off with. His assessment is the only assessment worth listening to.

I remember a guy msging asking if we wanted to be allies, next thing I know when I try adding him, he was already allied twice. So, the sense of urgency in finding allies, rapidly that is, was more of annoyance and bother.

Sometimes, I like just bashing someone while attacking him quickly. Makes things more exciting, so having to spy him AND the allies list he has, you inevitably lose between 1-5 turns (depending how many turns you wanna waste) which is fine, BUT while ALSO either blindly attacking your enemy (very risky) OR spying their allies AND potentially wasting from 2-10 turns is just not worth it. Some players will spy me like 6 times (WTF?). The reality is that some players' spal is massive, and I mean massive. Those are hard to crack: do they have great defence and no offence? Or do they just have a fluffty all around attack and defence, but amazing spal? I do run either of those types of strats at times, because of a busy week schedule or what not, so I understand the relevance of running those at times.

Since this is the express server, this could happen because of the fact that many people can easily run commie indus strats. Sometimes, you wanna attack the person quickly for fear he will be online and unleash his 125 turns he got. May or may not happen. I personally don't do this, but I've seen people do that.

Couldn't stop the irresistible force

360 turns

Yes, slightly balancing down the PS bonus makes a lot of sense.