I think you should get rid of bots entirely and let the dozen or so actual players fondle each other's countries, as God intended.

+1

Short of a harsh personal DR, idk how you deter the land greifers outside of limiting either total SS's or how many can be made in a period before they reset.

@a-rod
You can't. That's my point.

Only way you can mitigate it is by:
1. reducing turns on hand (means fewer attacks)
2. increasing the number of bots <--- yes
3. make bots attack back (which would lower their dr by 1 each time they atkd) <--- yes
4. remove bots all together.
5. disguise bots (remove highlighting & poor naming function) <--- yes

my only issue with removing bots all together is you'd have like 20 total players & the market would be worse than TEAMs.

This will solve the bot problem in all servers. Make it so that if you break GDI on a bot or if you attack a bot more than three times in 24 hours that bot and all the bots with the attacked bots government will try and kill you or you and your clan.

I'm still not back in the game deep enough to play express yet so I don't know how its been last few years.

Is the aim is to stop players grabbing each other? If so then there is a point where there are enough bots that there are always some that are not in DR and worth grabbing.

If the aim is to make it a "war game" then remove the bots entirely. >:)

I'm guessing the idea would be to make it an equivalent risk to hit a bot or a player, so essentially making the game feel like a 500 "player" game again, instead of 20 humans and 60 bots.

If you want it to feel more like real players - why don't you attract the real thing - Promote the game more, get the word out there. I am sure a lot of retro players out there would want to play if they were aware of the game and knew it wasn't 80% bots.

I for one am looking forward to being topfed/RoRd by someone other than you or ratski ;)

In the original subject an easy change might be reduction in bonus costs/increase in efficacy.
I suspect more regular bonus / more point at a time is out due to reliance on external sites voting for non plebium members?

It would be nice to have a couple of oiler bots on this server. It looks like that code was never completed.

Express already has completely custom costs for bonus points. The problem is that there's so much variance in when players are awarded bonus points along with how many turns can be saved. I don't remember how bonus point allocation works exactly, but I think that after the first 67 hours one player could have 40 bonus points but another player could only have 24 bonus points.

The round ends in 50.8 hours. - I have spent 16 on Free GDI, and have 11 left. For reference, so I dont know how I fit into that scale.

I don't know why some people would have more/less but I guess if they figure out how to optimise that then more power to them.

I see the bonus have been tweaked but it seems to me that still the only thing really worth doing is turns/booms with it being such a short reset (in terms of days worth of bonus points). Maybe im not being creative enough!?

If you had e.g build cost reduction at -2.3% and 1 point each, that would let a standard 9 points a day(45 in total) get to 100% build cost reduction by last day (similar to alliance) if someone could optimise to get a few points elsewhere too I dont think it would kill things, if someone was a little light because they aren't premium and didn't click well thats on them. The other bonuses could scale relative to the build biff. I dunno, I like trying unusual strats built around different bonus usage. (build cost seems to be the standard in alliance, maybe the others could be buffed? but thats off topic here I guess) anyway thanks for replying appreciate there might be more to it (im a coder, and there usually is when people ask for stuff heh)