kingkaosknows: i never said there's no risk. i said it was lower risk than traditional landgrabbing, but higher risk than all-explore so it shuold be slotted appropriately in terms of landgaining speed. please re-read my posts =)

and to answer the rest of you the only reason why some people "rarely get hit by missiles/suiciders/etc." while bottomfeeding/midfeeding is because they have to carry adequate defense. i see many spy ops of the landtraders and saw < 100k turrets and 0 SDI, which are things that no bottomfeeder will get away with (if you do that as a bottomfeeder, you will get raped). just the fact that you can landtrade and get away with such little defense tells me there's less risks involved. i fully understand why they carry low defense, because of the building costs of losing all that land.. they can't afford to both balance upkeeping military while gaining land at that rapid of a pace. if you want i can privately give you at least 7-8 examples of no defense landtrading countries going on this reset (and there's a total of 10-15 landtrading countries total, so just me casually seeing half of the spy ops having inadequate defense while landtrading tells me that it looks like it's the norm.. i'm willing to bet almost all of those 50k+ land landtraders didn't have the defense a normal 50k bottomfeeder would carry)

i guess you are right that you guys implied that landtrading is super expensive and forces you guys to not have much military which is why we see these < 100k turret > 50k land countries. the only difference is that a person getting bottomfed has the right to retal/suicide you, while what risk do you have when you landtrade back and forth? are you guys implying that third parties have the right to landgrab you? i was under the impression that it would start hostilities =)

that's why i suggested to both pang and qzjul to make ghost acres depend on the attacker's defense to force people to upkeep military while landtrading, just like bottomfeeders and midfeeders have to. it will slow down landtrading so the landgain is more in line to other forms of grabbing (aka balancing it)

and balin: i did not say i prefer an environment where the big guys rape the little guys. i just said landtrading should be balanced based on the defense you need to carry (aka risk) to successfully execute it. no matter if you topfeed/bototmfeed/midfeed (aka normal grabbing) you always kept more land as you kept more defense. like some of those untags (like croatia) can retal the fluff out of you, and if you could somehow bounce his retal, then more power to you... you get the land that no one else would get.

just to clear things up, i'm not opposed to landtrading specifically, i just want it balanced compared to the other landgaining methods. it clearly isn't balanced right now...