ahh, but even bottom feeders don't have enough defence to bottom feed successfully.

If not then that cheapshot on Hanlong's country wouldn't have happend last reset :)

Countries use their tag as "defencive protection". There's also the case of SS's country last set sitting on 5m turrets and $50bil cash.

Basically regardless of how much defence you have. If countries can not carry all military instead of stock, someone can always break you.

It's been like that since Mehul increased military costs.

So saying that they need to defend thier own land doesn't make sense unless costs get nurfed again so that people buy military instead of stocking bushels.

Topfeeding traders becomes the best strat then :P

But as a side question... in an alliance co-op server.. what's different between
Land Trading
FAing
Buyouts
Alliance members running Untags
Tag Protection
Research Allies
hell, even defencive allies.

They're all giving you something that you wouldn't have ability to get on your own.

Anyway Ivan, why are you complaining? You're in a warring alliance! It doesn't even affect SoF AT ALL.

Are you objecting out of principle? Are you looking for an excuse to war because there's no one left you can justify hitting?

At least be honest with your intentions. If you are just looking for any excuse to justify a war, be honest about it. No need to hide behind a facade.

@Hanlong

LaF's 60k guy was you right? I didn't say it was okay when you were topfed, but having a friend in PDM DH you and send a missile so you could get 6k acres off him is lame. I also assume that the friend was Pang, which is why it was brought up with respect to Pang's crappy grabs.

No hypocrisy on my part, topfeeding grabs like that are bad for anyone, but honestly you farmed another LaF guy for 22k+ acres... so having a 15k topfeed really isn't too surprising. I'm sure there's nothing hypocritical about your intraclan farming though.

wasnt that 22k acres twostepping the retal from a a 10k acre country which grabbed 14k and owed 28k when it was 24k or something like that?

get a fluffing clue pangaea.

it's not all about evo and laf. get off your high horse or stfu. you are talking about one player, namely lenshark running his mouth to you and then you trying to get in-game revenge. grow the fluff up.

There is no amount of defense to stop other alliances from grabbing you. There is an amount of defense to discourage it from them and to stop untagged from hitting you almost completely.

@enshula

In the news, I see a 10k grab by Sanct and then 10k in retals and then 22k from a LaFfer. So if you had a 300% L:L pact, I guess that was it.

You don't want to have your site hosted by him yet you play a game run by him(and 2 others)? Chillax dude.

Somehow I knew this thread would end up with arguing... its almost into a new laf vs evo thread too! Good stuff right? -_-

fluff. Locket is actually right about that. I hate myself for agreeing with him.

But if you got fluff tons of acres, there is nothing in this game that can prevent you from getting grabbed if someone is so determined.

And a certain amount of defense will prevent grabs from all but the most tenacious of untags.

Every hit is lowland trading heh.. No more l:l only 1:1 as Ivan says :)

look back more. i was topfed for 11k first by a 14k sanct country, and that guy helped me get my retals back from sanct fast enough within the 72 hour retal rule.

P.S. i just added up all the acres i took back, it was 21705A. you can do it yourself too if you don't believe me

2011-09-11 06:03:19 PS myDONisHugeANdLONG (#44) LaF allHANdsonmyshLONG (#356) LaF 1329A (1533A)
2011-09-11 06:03:03 SS myDONisHugeANdLONG (#44) LaF allHANdsonmyshLONG (#356) LaF 953A (1097A)
2011-09-11 06:02:16 SS myDONisHugeANdLONG (#44) LaF allHANdsonmyshLONG (#356) LaF 1016A (1237A)
2011-09-11 05:56:10 SS myDONisHugeANdLONG (#44) LaF allHANdsonmyshLONG (#356) LaF 765A (964A)
2011-09-11 05:56:07 SS myDONisHugeANdLONG (#44) LaF allHANdsonmyshLONG (#356) LaF 794A (1125A)
2011-09-11 05:55:47 PS myDONisHugeANdLONG (#44) LaF allHANdsonmyshLONG (#356) LaF 1340A (1882A)
2011-09-11 05:53:18 PS myDONisHugeANdLONG (#44) LaF allHANdsonmyshLONG (#356) LaF 1144A (1797A)
2011-09-11 05:53:15 PS myDONisHugeANdLONG (#44) LaF allHANdsonmyshLONG (#356) LaF 1312A (2038A)
2011-09-11 05:53:11 PS myDONisHugeANdLONG (#44) LaF allHANdsonmyshLONG (#356) LaF 1518A (2329A)
2011-09-10 04:16:02 PS myDONisHugeANdLONG (#44) LaF allHANdsonmyshLONG (#356) LaF 1090A (1453A)
2011-09-10 04:15:03 SS myDONisHugeANdLONG (#44) LaF allHANdsonmyshLONG (#356) LaF 726A (1067A)
2011-09-10 04:14:32 SS myDONisHugeANdLONG (#44) LaF allHANdsonmyshLONG (#356) LaF 782A (1141A)
2011-09-10 04:12:15 PS myDONisHugeANdLONG (#44) LaF allHANdsonmyshLONG (#356) LaF 883A (1485A)
2011-09-10 04:12:10 PS myDONisHugeANdLONG (#44) LaF allHANdsonmyshLONG (#356) LaF 968A (1616A)
2011-09-10 04:12:05 PS myDONisHugeANdLONG (#44) LaF allHANdsonmyshLONG (#356) LaF 1069A (1767A)
2011-09-10 03:01:50 SS myDONisHugeANdLONG (#44) LaF AllXPnetter (#692) Sanct 625A (1140A)
2011-09-10 00:24:14 PS myDONisHugeANdLONG (#44) LaF AllXPnetter (#692) Sanct 964A (1764A)
2011-09-09 06:21:53 PS myDONisHugeANdLONG (#44) LaF AllXPnetter (#692) Sanct 1438A (2453A)
2011-09-09 02:32:28 SS myDONisHugeANdLONG (#44) LaF AllXPnetter (#692) Sanct 1008A (1715A)
2011-09-08 06:17:04 PS myDONisHugeANdLONG (#44) LaF AllXPnetter (#692) Sanct 1981A (2917A)
2011-09-08 05:27:35 PS AllXPnetter (#692) Sanct myDONisHugeANdLONG (#44) LaF 10999A (14564A)


our pact with sanct is 200% L:L. makes sense now? it was 21.7k total for a 11k grab. you must have heard wrong when you thought i took 10k off sanct and THEN 22k. it was more like 10k+11.7k for ~22k total ;P regardless it was dumb and it was caused by a stupid topfeed. that's why i totally agree with you that malicious topfeeds are horribad (don't get me wrong, i support your point, if people stopped doing stupid topfeeds for kicks my country wouldn't have looked so gay.. you make it seem like i wanted to get topfed so i can get a lot of fluffty acres and make my country be a subject for debates like this vs just happily bottomfeeding and stocking like my countries in the previous few resets). i just didn't like ur slightly political message you sent alongside a very valid point.

then i got topfed again for 15k like last week of the reset ;P

why would i "intraclan farm" for no reason when i was happily bottomfeeding

i saw a evo country help another get back his land after PDM did a huge topfeed him 2 resets ago making it hard for him to get back his land last reset.

it's not that big of a deal.. and if you want to call it you need to call both sides =)

im sorry but thats silly. there is no amount of defense that will stop a 15k acre country from grabbing a 60k acre country without the worry about having L:L taken. there are enough people in this game who would buy up any amount of jets they need, grab a huge landtrader and then sell all the jets while they wait for their 1:1 retal.

i would agree maybe raising the threshhold for what it considered a top feed in such an instance. for example SoF and RD (and i would guess maybe other alliances) both use 125% for the number that is considered a top feed. i think 175-200% would be the point where a landtrader could just break even on a 1:1 retal. theres no reason for anyone to hit a country with 300% more land then them and not expect more then a single retal.

yah of course Pain there needs to be some tuning of course to make it fair. obviously we dont want the abuse to swing the other way (10k countries grabbing 60k ones), but we don't want the 60k ones who got it from landtrading to run around with 50k turrets either

when you bottomfeed you actually need some defense and tanks/sdi/etc. so the guy you aren't hitting won't suicide you.

if you are landtrading you trust the other guy not the nuke the hell out of you. so there needs to be a balance at least in carrying military (not counting the imbalance that over 40k landtrading gains you acres much faster than bottomfeeding)

lets not turn this into non-landtrading thread...

i land trade on over 2m turrets worth of defense.

if people start trying to enforce 1:1 only retals on land traders, aside from starting a war it just going to cause people to start GSing landtraders into DR. i dont know about you but thats not something i want to see (either one).

it should be relative to your size.

2M turrets is ok on 20k land, but on 80k land that's a bit silly =)

you have any better ideas to balance out landtrading with other means of playing this game? unless the only path we can do as a community is to have everyone landtrade...

like i said earlier, not everyone wants to do that, and if you are closing off means of playing this game and be competitive then you will drive players away.

let's all work together (pro vs anti landtrade camps) to figure out a good way to make landtrading competitive with the other means of gaining land

1:1 on landtraders is the best idea i heard so far, maybe we can have a few rules to stop malicious grabs on landtraders, etc. (but the more we add the more complicated the rules get :P)

maybe 1:1 only applies for topfeeds by countries within 50% or 66% of your acreage.

then you can sometimes have "random" events where you can 1:1 him back but you won't gain any net acres (cuz the ghosts will cover your losses), making you spend the day building.

theres no way to balance it out unless theres a way to control people from grabbing them maliciously

i dont mind breaking even as a landtrader if someone grabs me. im fine with spreading the wealth so long as it doesnt negatively affect my country.

for example if i was 40k acres, i wouldnt have an issue with someone who was 22-25k grabbing me so long as they dont go and buy millions of turrets to try to prevent me from retalling them without blowing a billion dollars on jets, because no matter what i will break even or gain on that transaction.

figure no techs

22k acres grabs 40k. gains 3500(2000) now they are 27500 40k retals for 2500(1500) so they got their land back plus 500 and everyone is happy. if the trader is a dict they are going to get more like 2500(2000) so it works out even better.

after talking to a few people from a certain netting alliance they dont want to only gain 1000 on a retal. if you policy is 75% L:L they want the first hit to be 74% and then buy up strat tech and match nets and take 100% more on the next grab. thats why nobody wants to trade real landgrabs.

My biggest problem with the game right now is that if you're not landtrading, the advantage goes to those who can spend all day camping news for targets coming out of DR.

I have a job at a company which heavily frowns upon outside internet usage and keeping your cell phone on your desk is against company policy.

I can't spend my whole day hitting targets which are coming out of DR, even if I'd want to. Which, to be honest, is not something I'd care to do anyway.

There needs to be a way which encourages interaction between countries, increases fun play, without necessitating a need to have 24 hour connectivity each day or relatively mindless landtrading.

So long as I'm unsure as to what that solution is, I won't be griping about it. Maybe the answer is landtrading. Maybe some NPC/Bot countries are the answer. Maybe exploring gains should go down at a lesser rate until such time as the country makes an offensive action against another.

on the issue of defense, I'm fully aware that anybody can break anybody in this game. but it should definitely be proportional. hanlong probably deserved to be topfed last set for sitting on like no D. some of the landtraders this set should be penalized in some way because their D is even more pathetic. most untags could break them right now.

@hanlong, my 22k was also added up and included the ghost acres, because as your teammate has already gained ghost acres from his hits on sanct, why should you get L:L +ghosts from him? It's one of those small details (10k acres of detail) that is worth mentioning.

You're right though, this is off topic. The topfeed was horribad and poor taste. I didn't mean to get off on the issue of two-stepping for retals, because we know it is necessary for some cases.



In fact, I didn't mention any topfeeds on LaF originally, but you did in the post where you alluded to me being a hypocrite. My "slightly political message" was about Pang/PDM and their crappy grabs which was unrelated to any of the specific topfeeds in LaF's news.

I guess I have troubles with "ur slightly political message you sent alongside a" not so veiled insult. By all means, let's have discussions and use the news and facts to come to a conclusion. We're rational people, but you tend to put meanings in my post which are not there in order to show some sort of bias I may have. I can tell you now, I am not a big fan of LaF, but I gladly call these things against any alliance because I dislike the falsehoods which have become rampant on AT.

Again, I apologize for the off topic posts. In regards to the thread, I agree with Enshula on many aspects. I believe land trading is lame on the alliance server. I support it on FFA. The difference, you use 16 of your own countries to the best of your ability on FFA, on alliance you are best benefited by finding someone you can use (abuse?) to your advantage.

I made a thread on the B&S boards quite a while back to look for solutions but no one was interested. The first step is for the administration to decide the hierarchy of "acceptable gains." That is, should the mechanisms of land trading out produce bottomfeeding? If that is their decision, then we can accept it, stop that discussion and move on to political means of curbing the behavior (such as the negative view of market buy outs and mass aiding on alliance server).

The admin has never made any statement about their wishes or if they will make changes in the future. As such, it is up to the server to decide policy (presumably with force and not just AT debate).

tl;dr
Topfeeds are universally horribad.
Land trading is exceedingly lame on alliance.
Detah to the land traders.

it is inefficient for a landtrader to have milstrat therefore a tyranny with milstrat could treat a landtrader as up to 168% bigger than they actually are

making your example equivalent to a 22k grabbing a 67.2k or over 3x bigger

the obvious way to landtrade is have a set of conditions which if met mean a second hit isnt triggered

i hear all this stuff about getting just below the l:l thresholds but i never bother doing it myself and never notice other people doing it, assuming you want an extra hit all you ever have to do is gain enough nw to reduce the first grab, but unless it was an edge case i doubt its worth it, and people tend not to change milstrat % a lot either, but it boils down to you hit them trying to benefit, why should you expect them not to benefit? or to stop you from doing it again if it annoys them?

and yes there are obvious easy ways to balance landtrading, either boost grabbing (bots) and exploring (brackets, or send mil out exploring) or nerf landtrading (DR's, more csites lost, or make cs losses higher if nw of attacker is close to or lower your own nw, only affects landtraders not farmed countries, or convert ghost acres into lost acres in line with % of current acres grabbed per recent period, which would cause landtrading to slow down as much as desired, or do it with a flat rate so 100 acres grabbed meant 100 ghost were lost from you instead to completely nerf it, an exponential formula to make it begin to kick in at x acres and not matter much at 5k when exploring is still sort of competitive)

when the 6m acre countries were a problem my preferred solution was to nerf ghost acres based on percentage of land unbuilt in the grabbing country on an exponential formula, its easy to make a formula like that to make landtrading just plain stop working at a certain point

didn't read the thread, and prob won't be back to it, but if you need to landtrade to do good, then you are bad at this game :)

Landtrading is exploiting the system, just like GS'ing a target to DR. It is exploiting because it is using the attack system in a way it was not intended. It was never intended for attacker and defender to work together for mutual gain. If you landtrade you may show the best networths, but no matter how many good finishes you get, you still suck at this game if thats what you have to do to get that good finish, sorry. ;)

+bonus(the original reason i clicked on the thread)

The proper way to encoruage grabbing between alliances would be to agree to implementing policies benefitting this. a few sets ago SoF implemented a 125% rule for topfeeds regarding networth and acers so both the hitter and the retaller would end up a head on it without having 1k acer guys hitting 20k acer guys (in which case it would be L:L) I know that RD follows this policy now as well not really sure why others havnt followed but i guess they dont like it

the problem (imo) we face now is that its not grabbing its trading land, shared hits between "friends" to abuse the ghost acer system repeatedly basically the same thing as inter alliance farming just that its in different tags and someone here said that they do it with 2m turrets well the ones ive seen doing it carry less then 200k turrets.


As for TAN, me being in warring or netgaining alliance has really nothing to do with it just because i havnt netgained on a few years now doesnt mean that i respect that form of competition, its basically like 2 tags warring but one of them uses a bot on the other making it imposible for them to have a chance at winning and theres pleny of tags i can justify FSing if I/we wanted to dont you worry about that TAN and IF we wanted to war PDM I wouldnt need to hide behind a facade wed just do it.

I dont even see the need to argue about this form of grabbing, some will do it and some wont and im sure that sooner or later it will create more fun wars whether its next set or a year from now who knows

As for Locket when a gameadmin or any other person in this game makes a personal attack on me I have no issues making one back at them no matter their title/rank/ownership or fluff

Ivan

farming untags takes skill though right? getting FAed does too right? market manipulation?

those all take skill right?

oh thats right they dont, and theyre all tactics that "skilled" people use. last time i checked skill included using whatever technique works to win.

The issue pain is that market manipulation and FA does not take skill, it takes numbers. Whoever has the most friends wins is not a game I want to play.

meh not particularly. i would guess most FA chains and market manipulation is done by a half dozen or less members at a time. thats pretty attainable for any alliance

Farming? I think you and me see farming as very different things tertius 5 hits on an untagged i dont see as farming but if your talking about people doing 40 10a hits on an untag i find that rather despicable as well

and no i dont support FA chains or market buy outs either

the annoying bit is needing to keep lists, why not just chuck a system in where people can nominate as being landtrade friendly

have it note in the news too so people cant turn it on and off fast or whatever

if needed have it set to only show between clans who agree to share status with eachother and have the clan news report hits that were landtrading friendly to the tag admin

not that im really in favour of landtrading but it wouldnt hurt to reduce the paperwork

while your at it chuck in a system where you can tag land as yours then have your allies warned they would be twostepping you, would make one of the other paperwork nightmares at the moment simpler

and for people bringing up fa and market aid make it transparent end of set, multiple leaderboards if you want, 3 set netting averages, whatever, more metrics and transparency wont hurt

I assume this is for Pain and not me? =P

fine =) let's get back on topic about landtrading. =)

there are a few game mechanics that can be abused to make this game unfair/unfun for many. so far we've always depended on the community to do it because historically mehul didn't give a crap.

but balancing this game is harder than it sounds though, don't get me wrong... might been the reason why mehul gave up and why our current admins probably still can't figure out the best solutoin in dealing with ghost acres, etc.

so SoF wouldnt consider 5 hits on them from 1 country farming, or a killable offense? just because someone is untagged doesnt mean more hits are required to constitute farming.

If an untag can solo kill a SOF country for doing 5 hits on them then by all means do try and yes it was for pain tertius sorry

We just killed Silver's country. Everyone move along.

If a landtrading country has L:L guaranteed for most outside grabs that could get a bit ridiculous. FFA landtraders are kept in line by the lack of L:L pacts on the server and the anti-land trading war clans.

Next thing we know though clan A country is gonna be bouncing GS's on their clan B counterpart country once every 24 hours ;D

Just wandering through, but I can't see how playing the game, as designed by the "creators" of the game who implemented ghost acres, in an advantageous way is cheating?

How is Silver cheating? He is playing within the framework of the game.

If you have a beef, it is with the owners of the game and their rules.

But what do I know? I play in tourney, and all explore at that.

How exactly does landtrading teach people how to grab?

I don't follow, it just seems like a poor excuse to do it.

So you want the new grabbing policies to be setup such that no grab ever hurts your landtrading country? -_-

So who suicided on Mr Silver?

why would i want policies that hurt my country when im not the aggressor? is that a serious question locket or was it rhetorical? hopefully the later

ketchup. and its ironic cause hes the leader of the largest self farming alliance in FFA.

i selffarm in ffa too, but i think it has no place here in alliance

Wouldn't that just counteract the whole trying to make landtrading worse thing? if every grab people hit you with only slows you down a little and doesnt hurt you then its not going to stop you.

While we're still having internal debate about landtrading, we could potentially get behind something like no land:land retaling for land traders. That's a good player generated start.

call me old school but i miss the days were C:C retals were the norm

i know everyone argued that "oh just play primary/tourny/express (insert your favorite solo server here) instead ffs" and we ended up having 1:1, L:L, landtrading and all these dumb rules.

in pure terms of awarding player skill C:C is the tried and true method.

What is the definition of a land trader?

This is an alliance game.

i know it is, hence i already wrote my disclaimer =)

we need to collectively figure out a fair way for the alliance game to encourage skill as well as promoting an alliance based play

As SS pointed out that heavily favors techers though sadly :P and Laf would war every set :(