more bots?

Can whoever is in charge add 50 or 500 more bots please and see how it goes?

No

More bots need to have a purpose. Right now the balance is, while certainly not concievably perfect, it's better than its ever been.
The last 5 years of express can be summed up in 3 eras:
1. 35-bot era: Back in 2017 the only viable strat was tyranny techer to demo tech, because techer was best but the DR was so huge that the 1 turn attack was impossible to compete with. How good is a game if only one strat is viable?
2. The 50 bot era, with bots that buy some defence: This lowered DRs a lot which meant that theo techers, mon -> demo techer, and straight demo techers as well as commie indies could compete. Sure there was 1-2 cashers and 2-3 farmers that won in those 150 resets, but it was 70-80% techer wins and the rest CI wins. Not very balanced, tho better.
3. We got 60 bots since like April 2021 and some changes to bots tech buying and the way bots destock: Now CI, FFO, Demo farmer, dict Farmer, theo casher, as well as all the techers all viable.

Given more bots would reduce DR so much that it's likely that fewer strats would be viable. Further, grabbing would be too easy.
The state of balance on this server is better than it has been at the very least for the past 5 years. So many strats can win almost every reset. This is what made so many vets come back to the server this spring. We had Molotov, Tmac, Nitell, myself, Kingme, cordy etc etc all come in to try the new bots, and compete to try and find the new ways to play in this environment.

I would invite you all to grab to 50k acres fully built in 1500 turns on this server, without grabbing a player. This is something all decent players can do. If you stop there and get good techs + play a proper endgame, get you 65m+ NW. If you can't do this, it's not because there are too few bots, it's because you have a lot to learn and should focus on that.

I’d request 500 bots ASAP. Hard to find a bot that isn’t deep in DR already

Meh, its still the worst its ever been theres less than 100 players left and a good portion of them are non players, when there used to be more players before. Now it has less people is what am saying.. n yes add more bots please.

I just thought,

if you're going to go as far as to add bots at all, which means you admit that there are not enough human players for the server, why not go all out and add an extra 500 or 5,000 bots and make it look like it is actually still a popular game?

You are complaining about DR. DR is a mechanism in the game, I dare say its one of the central mechanisms to the game. If you add 5000 bots, DR will be <2 on all bots and therefore the mechanism will no longer be in use. So all there is to grabbing is govt, mil strat, target acreage and NW matching. Grabbing will be so simple and uninteresting if you basically just hit the bot closest to your NW or highest acreage.

So you essentially got a mechanism you dont understand and you want to remove it all together, rather than doing the work to actually understand it.

Here:

False. DR would still be in use protecting your land as a defender.

DR has been the same since february 2014. There are things I dont like about it but because I can understand it I can make a coherrent arguement as to why and what should be done about it. I have talked to developers about some of these issues and I've more or less realized they won't do anything about them.

Such as the reason for having an unknowable unknown in the variability of the DR halflife dictate my grabbing returns. What if the formula is bugged in some situation? We as players, even if we know 100% of the formulas concerning this, can never actually test them and evaluate them, because we don't actually know what the DR halflife is. I consider this a minor issue.

But by far the worst thing about the way DR works presently is that for most of the active interval, the curve is far too steep, the result being that the more hits a country takes, the less land it loses in total. Yes, not less land per hit only, less land in total. Look at which bots get fattest each set in express! Its always a rainbow bot that gets most land, because its least defended. THIS is a huge flaw in the current DR mechanism.

Fattest bot last set:
https://www.eestats.com/express/oldcountry/2905/57
Total defends 75
Land 13,951 acres
Total land lost 6,975 acres

Total land explored+recieved= 20,926 acres

its a monarchy rainbow with no defence. Why not a republic casher with lots of defence? No, because while the rep casher will explore much more, it will lose all that land and then some more because it gets hit half as much:

Some random rep casher bot last set:
https://www.eestats.com/express/oldcountry/2905/27
Total defends 39
Land 12,243 acres
Total land lost 11,322 acres

Total land explored+recieved= 23,565 acres
PS this is partly exacerbated by NW proximity but if you actually do the math, which I have you will see that I'm right; all other things being equal, more hits mean less land loss.

^^Now if you said this, 'hey look the DR mechanic is bugged/suboptimal, lets change/remove it' then it would have merit. Now all you are saying is you want a key component of the game removed because you dont understand it and you think that players who have taken time to actually understand it and read up about it gain an unfair advantage against you.

And if you just want the TL;DR of this and the last post:
1. The DR number on eestats is WRONG. The real number is lower. DR decays smoothly with time from the time of the hit.
2. Continuous DR formula: DR_MULTIPLIER = DR_HITS<13 ? MIN( 1, 0.1+((DR_HITS-13)^2)/135) : 0.1
(DR under 2 means the hit is unaffected by DR and a DR over 13 means you get 10% of the land you would have if the target had no DR. In between 2 and 13 you get between 10-100% of a 0 DR target, dropping with more DR)

Honestly you don't have to do any math or know any formulas. Just build & train a NN model that will predict the value for you.

I appreciate your explanation of DR and how it works Mr. Gerdler. I had no idea how it worked and I still don't!

My suggestion of adding more bots was just based on the fact that this game was a lot more fun 25 years ago when there were a lot more players. If you look at express this round, the server has approximately one hundred players and Earth 2025 used to have several thousand players on each server.

It's kind of sad to log in and see that there are only 103 countries in the entire express server this round

I personally think it would be more fun and interesting if there were 500 or even 5,000 countries in the express server each weekend,

Obviously, we would all prefer to add 500 or 5,000 more human players instead of bots but it doesn't seem like there is anyone with a financial interest who is concerned with promoting and marketing the game in order to make it grow.

It doesn't seem like anyone in development or management of the game is doing any marketing at all for that matter.

Essentially, as long as the bots don't hit back or are otherwise redesigned you got a goldilocks zone for how many bots we should have on a server with bots.

Too few bots, and only tyrannies will be able to hit the bots. This is bad

Too many bots will circumvent DR altogether and create very easy grabbing as a result. But it will also shift the dynamics of the server in a problematic direction because all acreages will be larger, stocking will be later and there will be fewer strats because only a few strats can take advantage of this. This is bad.

The right amount of bots is an interval ofc and it will vary over time and with the bot code. I'm only comparing now to the last 5 years when I say this is the best balance have ever been. Doesn't mean its perfect, at all. Improvement can be made and should always be sought after.

The internet was different then. You are trying to play like it is 2004 in 2022. Everyone here is old AF. Everyone not here is YAF and playing PS5.

More bots please

This works great for you ..... see my signature

TL:DR

Qouted for clarity and cuz it’s trendy!

Yes I ll be able to get 100k acres no problem on express and bully everyone. N lol.

Why don't the bots retal? or why don't the bots make land grabs or special attacks?

This is also something that should be fixed,

I vote the developers add 5,000 bots and make them all crazy attack bots who land grab like crazy and special attack retal everyone :)

u gotta go call slagpit back!

he was almost going to make the bots retal us humans all!!!

Bots grabbing is dumb imo. Bots retalling could be done well and could make the game a lot better, but it would be so easy to implement it in a way that completely wrecks competition. For instance like what you described.

I think the main reason that it was not implemented by slagpit this spring/summer is because he got tired of dealing with all the griefers and cheaters with all his time here rather than develop nice stuff for us which was the reason he really came back.
So he redesigned the bots(implemented on express only) and made a few improvements in Express mechanics (such as GDI being automatic and you can opt out of it, humanitarians not stopping intel spy ops in the endgame, bugfix for ABs/BRs and landgrabs), fixed a few other minor/major bugs. This was all done in just a portion of the time, but the majority of his time was spent stopping a small number of people from abusing the staff, cheating/breaking rules and griefing a large portion of the player base.

We get admin activity in short bursts here. Looking at the announcements board its been that way since 2014.

...but people haedly ever grab each other, cause they're scared of ruining each others sets, so no point in not adding more bots.

I grabbed the fluff outta people last two sets, lots of rainbows..

Careful you don’t want to be accused of griefing here. Please be content with farming in DR bots it’s ok. Don’t hurt the snow flakes please

No, Kahuna is the greatest alive..Anywho Gerdler has no proof of his statement. No DR and what not, any strat can play with lots of bots I cant imagine any strat that can have a hard time with lots of land so ya. Maybe you would have to switch up how you execute your strategy? Idk what you really mean Gurdle.

Git em Koh!