This is something which I have heard often and something that should probably be discussed. Personally, I think they achieve their purpose in encouraging land-trading, specifically to reduce the damage to players who are farmed off some servers, but it seems to have created an entirely new culture on alliance and FFA (for better or worse).

There are often debates on the forums about intratag farming and self-farming with the usual statement that it is a political issue and should be dealt with accordingly: you don't like it, then go to war over it.

I think that's reasonable, and if nothing else gives purpose for conflict and warring between alliances. However, there is also the general land-trading, official and unofficial, between alliances. Two opposing countries can hit, retal and still gain more land in ghost acres than DR-camping bottom feeders. This was probably the initial idea.

The ghost acres gained increases with land exchanged, and so at late-mid set the ghost acres can be rather large. One such example from this set in Alliance:

Jul/07/11 15:03:11 PS The Torn Hymenity (#672) (Paradigm) The Bangover Part 2 (#312) (Paradigm) 6165 A 10919 A

Granted, the attacker is a Dict and gains a bonus to ghost acres received, but 4750 acres seems too much; that is over 10% of the player's TOTAL land.


So I would like to start a discussion about this topic to gather everyone's input. Personally, I think Ghost acres are too powerful but the reason they were added is good. So rather than a removal, perhaps a tweak would be in order.

Keep in mind, there are two types of ghost acres.
1) Increases land gained and is used to encourage more attacking between players
2) Decreases land lost and is used to prevent small players from losing all of their land to bottom feeding.

Specifically I think there should be a limit on ghost acres gained. To get some numbers out there, 25% seems like a decent limit for non-dicts. Let the discussion begin.

a limit on ghost acres is only sensible if you intend to remove the concept of land trading from the game.
there is already a huge rebuild cost both in terms of cs and acres lost to hits. it's not uncommon to see a set of countries doing land trading building 2x their acreage over the course of the reset.

i should say, more limit than there currently is. right now successful land trading is limited by ghost acres dr, and that keeps the hits down pretty significantly. it's also limited by the amount of land you can actually build in a day's turns.
that dict would receive that many acres off any other country the same size as its target, whether it were land trading or land grabbing.
in fact, land trading will take a back seat to land grabbing at the same rate, because of the lack of rebuilding (apart from somebody getting pissed off and ABing you, which is a separate issue...)

I *tend* to agree, but at the same time everybody is all up in arms about people running all-x; and if you don't want people to all-x then they have to grab; and they're not going to grab if it's not worth it; and it can only be worth it if:

a) the strong can rape the weak without consequence
-> which is something everybody wants us to mitigate because it drive out new players, because they are inevitably the weak for a number of resets

or

b) there's some sort of land generation so even with 1:1 or L:L retals you can gain some; hence ghost acres;
-> limiting this would take the second option away; perhaps a cap i suppose, but then would it be worth it? hard to say

I don't think the reason for so few LG's and so many all-x is what the gains are from ghost acres. It the politics of the game. war clans pact with war clans and netting clans pact with netting clans. the war clans do not have countries that are worth the risk to grab and the countries that are worth grabbing are allies so you can't grab them. The real issue is going to be a lot harder to solve than just a game fix. Plane and simple we need more players in more different clans so that all like clans are not allied to each other. that makes for better grabbing and better warring.

land generation by Ghost Acres, may look bad to you people, but is the lesser evil of the art of Land Grab

GDI farm = BAD
Bottomfeeding = Idiots don't rotate targets and can't tell the difference of GDI farming and bottomfeeding, so BAD
Topfeeds = BAD
All X = Boring


Land Trading in short is the BEST way to keep everyone happy and won't force anyone out of the game, Bottomfeeding can be better than Land Trading as you don't have to spend your whole set rebuilding destroyed buildings, but idiots don't know how to bottomfeed this days.

Jade Penn: that's not entirely true; L:L started in a serious way when mehul removed ghost acres; it used to be acceptable to hit other alliances and get retalled, but then lack of ghosts *CHANGED* the politics in a serious way; ghost acres should allow that to relax a little...

a bit except at 1 point 1 alliance included ghosts on l:l retals (topfeeds).

I think perhaps the biggest issue is just balancing ghost acres from land trading and bottom feeding. Perhaps if the ghost acre DR between the same two countries had a longer "memory". Thus, land trading would still be profitable, but not for the same two countries who hit each other (even just every other day).

One of my main concerns is that two players, in the same clan or opposing clans, can hit each other every day generating 4k+ ghosties per hit. Granted, they do have to rebuild the 6k acres which at large acres is about $900M but at their production levels, that would only take about 40 turns of income to produce.

Maybe that's not overpowered (which is why I wanted a discussion and not a suggestion, I'm really not settled on the matter), but if we think that it is, perhaps increasing ghost acre DR to 72 hours could help? This would also encourage a rotation of targets in bottomfeeding as the ghosties are a big portion of the gains.

In essence, this small change would not affect most people, continue to encourage land trading, and do so in a way that encourages spreading the hits. If alliances or players want to self farm, they can still do so, but with slightly more forethought required (and in alliance, it would require more people to be involved and with more precision). Thoughts?

I was mostly talking about ffa where L:L was never much of an issue and was not accepted. But on the alliance server I can see what you mean.

72 hours?

way too long...

the game runs for more or less 2 months right?
so we are talking about 20 Land grabs per country? wtf

you may as well not have Ghost Acres at all

http://www.eestats.com/express/oldcountry/233/98

On many of those attacks, the ghost acres created are twice the size of the actual grab. That makes you complaining about the ghost acres being 2/3rds the size of the grab, look a bit silly.

Your original post was thinking about ghost acres only for land-trading purposes between similarly sized countries. But what about the exploitation of ghost acres in bottomfeeding significantly smaller countries?

Thats what TKO and PANLV have exploited in the past, its one thing that makes having a main country being fed land so powerful. When a really big country attacks a country much smaller than itself, the ghost acres created are significantly more than the acres lost in the attack. In terms of acres created compared to acres lost, having a main country and a bunch of farm countries is far more efficient than having equally sized countries landtrading with each other.

Exploitation of ghost acres from bottomfeeding can be done both by hitting your own farm countries, or by bottomfeeding unwilling victims on individual servers.

Bottomfeeding is extremely powerful, much moreso than landtrading. It takes more time, but less skill in developing a country's economy.

So what you want to do is to leave the time intensive skill-less bottomfeeding method alone, but to weaken the mutual landtrading method which requires less time but much more skill?

Should Earth Empires be a game where skill is marginalized, but having tons of time to waste is the only way to succeed? Or should players that don't have tons of time to waste be given an option, where with enough skill, they can match no-life bottomfeeders?

At Tertius'
"increasing ghost acre DR to 72 hours could help?".

So that Ghost acres only has a 72 hour memory between the two same countries. (Ie country A can hit Country B, C, D and gains as usual. But if country A hit country B, then 24 hours later hit country B again, it would have reduced Ghost acres). This would cause players to spread attacks around. Only issue is Ghost acres only really depletes after 3 hits anyway. So they could still hit once every 24 hours and ghost acres would be pretty much the same.

Ok, that just pissed me off

Land Trading takes less skill than bottomfeeding, Hey lets have almost equal networth, have matching economies, the right governments (dict) and lets duke it out at each other...

BIG deal!!!

Yeah, you need the BPT and Economy to support land trading, but that takes no skill, the targets are right there and everyone is setup to make it work and feed each other needs... spying? not needed, target selection? lol whut

Bottomfeeding isn't a low life skill, is a damn art that no one seems to do well anymore.

Bottomfeeding takes too much time to look for targets? that is because you destroy them with excess farming

I was doing bottomfeeds for the better and earlier part of the set in FFA, and not for one country, I was bottomfeeding for 9 tyranies, and even though I had used my first 1000 turns prepping and warring, I was only 6K acres behind your own countries and well over the average land of all clans, BUT panlv and mercs WITHOUT SELF FARMING

What it takes?, a fluff load of country search at first, but after that you get 20 or 30 possible targets, is just a matter of switching them around and allow them to grow as you hit them.

I was growing at average of 4K acres per day, and I wasn't even trying too hard because NBK was/is in bad terms with pretty much everyone, and the more land I had, more retals I had to do (with interrupted my bottomfeeds)

and I call bullfluff on the no-lifebottomfeeders, because I can only play 3 hours a day (IF I want to sleep 7 hours) and I was playing once a day like everyone else (aside free days in with I can/could play all day).

Don't Compare GDI farming/Farming to bottomfeeds, because even if they look the same, only the good players can do the later, without doing the former.

Id argue against that statement. Talking strictly FFA here. A person who pumps 1 country up to 500k acres would finish with 1 huge country. But a person who runs 16 countries that land trade evenly will have a higher average nw. Cause the 500k acre guy is lucky to have half his land built, and the amount of tech it needs is insane. Therefore in terms of gaining land, 1 farming the rest is most efficient. But equal sized landtrading will most likely create a better nw.

To bottomfeed, you find a country significantly lower than you in networth that is out of DR, and ideally out of GA DR as well, and you attack it. It doesn't take skill to do that. And its a much smaller strain on your economy being a bottomfeeder.

Your ability to keep up with my countries with your bottomfeeding shows how extremely powerful bottomfeeding is, as does my test on Express this weekend. Bottomfeeding is very strong, and anyone can do it - even Chaoswind or me. On Express, you gotta do a ton of attacks per day, but on alliance you just have to login exactly when a country leaves DR and smack him before anyone else does, and then logout one minute later. On FFA, there's plenty of land out there because so few people want to actually take the time to find targets for 16 different countries.

You are not arguing against that statement, Drinks. My statement was only arguing about the efficiency of acres created, not about the ending networths of the countries involved. The key phrase was where I said "In terms of acres created compared to acres lost".

Rockman, from my understanding, those big bottom-feeding players would get that amount of land regardless. The ghost acres are only so big because they are taking away LESS from the defender, rather than giving more to the attacker. The issue of land gained from bottom feeding is unrelated to ghost acres and more so to the formula of land gain (as far as I understand it at least) and possibly to the role of humanitarians from server to server.

That said, I haven't made any statement on whether bottom feeding or land trading is the more noble of land gain methods. In fact, I am asking whether it is balanced or not, and have not made any final statement on it.

While I appreciate your enthusiasm in turning this into your own personal soapbox, there are plenty of other threads about what requires skill and what is more fun, etc. The argument will vary across servers as well: the best land trading in FFA may require skill, whereas in alliance it may require a patsy or fall guy. Perhaps we need to split this discussion by server?

Regardless, we should try and stick to the facts. For alliance, the average of daily total land gained by a country from bottom-feeding is less than the average ghost acres of a player land trading (no statement about skill of the various styles or players). Now we could ask the question of whether this should be balanced, and in what direction. Unfortunately that seems to be well out of hand already.

You are obviously of the opinion that land trading requires skill and that you are one awesome dude at it, and as such, that any fool who stumbles his way near your average land by bottom feeding somehow proves your point. However, I'm not sure that I share your certainty. What's to say that chaoswind isn't an excellent and rad bottom-feeder and that you're the noob with the most land because the game mechanics are in your favor?

Since the question can't be answered by sheer arrogance alone, I guess it is up to the mods to decide. It would be nice if we as a community could come to some sort of consensus of what the results would be were we to change something, preferably without all of the personal skill references.

@Drinks, great point. Perhaps a better option would be to have ghost acre DR fall off after the first hit, thus encouraging grabbing without encouraging farming or repeated land trading. That seems pretty reasonable.

Then rockman. If they make a 500k acre country. And have fluff nw. Does it really matter haha.

I like this discussion! it's good :)


Also I have to commend Rockman for making good, well laid out arguments, even when I don't agree with them :) though in this case I don't think I disagree: more that I had never thought about it in that way; especially the FFA POV of land trading vs bottom feeding. Very interesting.


What would your thoughts on say adding a DR15 level of say 5% be?

Good point. Didnt even think of that

Since we are talking about skill/reward ratio lest do some comparison.

All X:
Skill needed? None, somewhat a little bit of math to optimize explore gains knowing when to mass explore and when to explore one turn at a time.

Reward: effortless and minimal land gained, the easiest and lames way to gain land.

Land Trading by Ghost acres exploitation:
Skill needed? If you know how to build a decent economy you are set to go.

Really!? Yes
PS before anything else, get mil strat tech and never hit more than 5 times a day.
Economy must be strong enough to support the strain of land generation.
Besides that what else there is? Break is low and strain in economy is manageable, you may as well call it the buy acres part of the game.

Skill needed? Like fluff, anyone can learn it and be somewhat decent.

Reward: exponential growth of land... Kicks ass.


Bottomfeed:
Skill needed? Target search, spy op update, threat level analyst, optimal networth calculation, assessment of all information to get optimal gains.

Common mistakes:
1) When you only have one country you go after total land gained per grab, but when you have several, you need to optimize and give the targets you find to the right country.
2) The amount of untagged countries in servers with tags is always under 30% of the total countries numbers, and as such farming them and making them stop playing is NOT what you want to do.

Rewards: steady growth of land (if done well), targets may outgrow your attacks, but that is fine and much better than them stopping playing altogether, or them going suicidal on you for excessive farming.

Farming: Skill needed? Not a lot

You just farm the fluff of any target until they stop playing and then jump to the next.

Reward: lots of land at the risk of a fluffload of special attacks on your country and the fact that sooner or later you will run out of targets.

--------------

Bottomfeeds: must be spread out in a lot of targets to avoid farming, and that means you need to keep an eye in the growth of several countries, not to mention that you should have different strats to avoid destroying buildings to save money/turns and keep networth levels of bottomfeeders, as when a target outgrows one, you can hit it with the next in line.

Rockman Land trading takes no skill, just be aware of basic concepts and the growth is exponential (1200 ghost acres today, 1500 tomorrow, 2000 the next day and soon 12000)

While bottomfeeding is a fluffing art...

No comparizon on skills needed, give FFA a couple of sets and even your dog will be able to land trade to +50000 acres, getting past that is harder, but when my 200 SPAL 10000 acres dictators can get to 45000 acres in 7 days while being farmed by other countries with almost no economy to start with (SPAL and spy tech HIGH, everything else not so much), that just means you don't need much to get to 50000 acres.

[quote poster=Tertius; 10807; 189571]

So your argument that bottomfeeding requires skill is that the only reason that I did so well last set in express is that the game mechanics are in my favor? Taking advantage of the game mechanics is exactly what bottomfeeding is about. Its what makes someone good. The game mechanics are already well-known, if they are in my favor, it is because I have chosen a method of bottomfeeding that is rewarded by the game mechanics. I'm not merely a lucky noob, I intentionally used that method.

Spying before attacking, hitting targets that are too small to be a thread, and not hitting targets that are in DR, that stuff isn't hard, and it doesn't take skill. I suppose counting to five, when counting the number of attacks on a country in the last 24 hours could be tough to some people, but I don't consider counting to 5 to be a skill.

Landtrading takes 'no skill', but the building expenses in both turns and cash are exponential in addition to the growth. Managing building expenses at higher acreages is difficult, and the calculations on when to keep growing and when to stop landtrading are far more complex than the equation on how to break a target 1/8th your networth. And if you want to hold onto your land and grow exceptionally big, you need to get a fair amount of military, so the break won't be extremely low.


Additionally, I assert that not anyone can learn to landtrade and be decent. I've seen a lot of people on FFA this set try landtrading and not do well. Additionally, there are still a lot of things people do wrong with landtrading, especially in not following the 5 hits per day rule. And I have to correct you - military strategy tech is not an aid to landtrading. It is not necessary to get it before landtrading, and spending time on strategy tech rather than on bpt or production techs is counterproductive.

Tons of people have mastered bottomfeeding, and I'm in an alliance with them on the alliance server. I believe that my exhibition last set in Express proves that I am one of the people who has mastered bottomfeeding, and contrary to what Tertius says, I didn't merely get lucky that the game mechanics were in my favor. But on FFA, where the skill level is much lower than other servers, I've seen very few people that have mastered landtrading.

Landtrading does not have to leave one vulnerable. It is possible to landtrade and war-prep at the same time. Its not that hard to do, in fact. But it will slow down your growth, thats for sure. No one has tried it yet (aside from the wargaining I did last set after winning a war early on), but that doesn't mean its not possible. Whenever Mercs gets a chance to war, you will see us doing it.

And if a tag is almost entirely landtraders, then I guess that means that almost the entire clan is first to die ... which doesn't mean much.

I probably could landtrade as a 16 country tag, but I had to expand my tag to 32 countries last set because an idiot with a 90 country tag picked a fight with when I was under 2k acres by farming me and telling me that the farming would continue until I joined his alliance. But then after I demolished his tag in a war, I landtraded later that set in my 32 country tag.

Another mercs member started over a month late last set, and tried out landtrading in a 16 country tag, and Focus killed one of his countries without provocation. But if he had started on time last set, I doubt Focus would have tried that stunt. And if they had, he probably wold have made them pay. So yeah, Focus are assholes.

qz, what do you mean by "a DR15 level of say 5%"?


Rockman, my comments were sardonic. Your arrogance oozes into this thread like a backed up septic tank. My point is that the argument between what is skill and what are broken game mechanics will not be settled by these repeated anecdotes about how awesome you are and how everyone else sucks OR if they can contend with you in land, it's because bottom-feeding is overpowered and they're trained monkeys mashing buttons.

You do see how much of an asshole you are in this thread right? You turn everything into something personal about how you did this and you did that and somehow bending it all to try and prove your point.

Let the mods decide how the balance should work out as far as "skill" and time put in to whatever techniques of gaining land. You and chaoswind can argue about it until you're blue in the fingers and neither of you will change the other's mind. That's not what this thread is about.

well, DR at 12 hits is 10% right now; so what if it was 5% at 15 hits

Tertius - I make it personal because my personal experience proves people wrong. The anecdotes are to show what is possible and what is not possible.

I'm arrogant because I'm right and you're wrong. And I see no reason to be ashamed of it.

qz, I think the main issue is how quickly it falls, not to how low it falls.

What if it were more like this:

13 hits in a row
acres gained = 1.0 * (base acres + 1.0 * ghost acres)
acres gained = 1.0 * (base acres + 0.9 * ghost acres)
acres gained = 1.0 * (base acres + 0.8 * ghost acres)
acres gained = 0.8 * (base acres + 0.7 * ghost acres)
acres gained = 0.8 * (base acres + 0.6 * ghost acres)
acres gained = 0.5 * (base acres + 0.5 * ghost acres)
acres gained = 0.5 * (base acres + 0.4 * ghost acres)
acres gained = 0.35 * (base acres + 0.3 * ghost acres)
acres gained = 0.35 * (base acres + 0.2 * ghost acres)
acres gained = 0.15 * (base acres + 0.1 * ghost acres)
acres gained = 0.15 * (base acres + 0.1 * ghost acres)
acres gained = 0.15 * (base acres + 0.1 * ghost acres)
acres gained = 0.10 * (base acres + 0.0 * ghost acres)

@Rockman, hahahaha, I'm not arguing with you about anything, so good to know that you are vacuously right.