After trying to figure out what I'm supposed to be doing for two weeks, I've noticed a few issues that keep popping up in discussions around here. Let me be the first to say that I realize many of the rules are unclear. There are too many gray areas for my liking. I'd like to remove as many of those as possible, but I'd like to get some constructive feedback on what exactly you, the players, want from us.

To that end, I'd like a positive discussion on how to move forward and make express a more fun experience. I cannot guarantee that all of your suggestions will be carried out, but I CAN guarantee that they will be discussed in detail, with the end result being some worthy changes.

To get us started, I have a few questions for you all:

1) What do you think about removing ALL allies from this server?

2) What 'rules' seem too vague or confusing to you?

1) Good idea.Removing all allies will be a truely "solo" game and removes situations like tech leechers etc.
2) I'll think of it when i get my sleep.
3) Thanks for your initiative!

Removing all allies would remove most of the grey areas, esp tech leaches, and also the advantage of having better DA's than the next person.

There has been oligopolistic cooperation by the techers to keep tech prices artificially high, and they post signals on the forums. Maybe random cheap tech could be thrown into the market by the "bank" to screw up their evil plot :)

That would leave black and white areas like friends running land farms and market manipulation to give a friend money, or coordinated attacks.

everyone complains about leeching so remove all allies.

everyone complains about market manipulation so remove the market.

then people whine about topfeeds, so remove attacking all together.

Now countries will have to be self sufficient and they wont interact with other players which is basically what all the whiney cry baby players want. However when you do all this things they will find something else to complain about.

Why don't you guys just play the damn game without finding something to complain and cry about every round?

I`ll be back to this thread with my opinion.

MegaHyperFly if you have something constructive to say please do. IF not maybe it is better to be silent. I am tired of being cheated of top spots on this server - something has to change.

1. O-allies are already removed, so the only leeching that remains is tech leeching. Tech allies can be fixed such that the TECHING player gets a TPT boost (10% of tech allies' TPT). So basically, a player needs to actively tech his turns to get any extra tech from his allies. ALTERNATIVELY, tech allies can also be fixed by multiplying the current gain from tech allies (when the allies tech their turns) by your (labs/land) ratio. This one is much much easier to implement, it is a 1-line code change.

2. Slow down the Express turn rate by half (and everything time-related by half). Have 2-week long resets instead. This means cheating players have a much larger window of time to be caught, and moderators have enough time to delete them before they can cause too much harm. The pace is simply TOO quick, innocent players suicided by multies or whatever can do TOO much harm. On Alliance or Primary or other servers, the pace is slow enough that if it takes 24 hours for a moderator to respond to a report, the damage is minimal. Not so on Express. Otherwise, you really need to have 4 or 5 moderators on Express covering all time zones.

3. Another reason why Express is broken is because of the qz/pang policy that a player should be able to be absent from the game for 2 days and still come back without having lost any turns. This leads to the 360(360) stored turn scenario, which is very unhealthy for the server. Change this to 240(240) or 240(160). Anybody playing Express should know that they are expected to log on to the server twice a day. Otherwise don't play it. Or implement suggestion (2) above.

4. Change the DR reset to something reasonable like 2 hours instead of 24 hours. DR-abuse is rampant. There is a lot of talk/discussion on how to combat DR-abuse. See http://www.earthempires.com/...omment-15332?t=1376854014 and guess what happened? Absolutely nothing, for 1.8 years. So Tellarion, I am very dubious when you say that you "CAN guarantee that they will be discussed in detail, with the end result being some worthy changes." I mean, yes, changes will be discussed in detail. But the end result is that nothing happens. Look, we've been discussing for years. Martian started the thread, Warster's posted in it, iZarcon even. Here is a related thread, around the same time: http://www.earthempires.com/...rs-should-be-...--16867/1 where again, Warster was seen posting in it, and defending qz/pang that they were busy.

5. There needs to be feedback from the mods if a cheating report is "in progress" or "resolved". I've heard Palemoon posted (see http://www.earthempires.com/forum/post/514628/perm) that reporting cheaters using the in-game tool doesn't work sometimes, where he had to contact a mod on IRC, and the mod said they never received the in-game report. What then? Is the reporting tool broken? Maybe the field that says to put in country numbers separated by commas doesn't work? Does it matter if I type in "1,2" in the box or "1, 2" with a space, or "#1, #2"? Or what?

6. Owners of deleted countries should be exposed at the end of a reset. Maybe not during a set because there is a possibility that the deleted country could be undeleted after an appeal. In fact, I think profiles of all countries should be public after a reset is over. There also needs to be more repercussions for cheating. Again, there has been a bunch of discussion on the B&S forums about it in the last 2 weeks, and again there hasn't been any result or actual action, or planned changes announced.


Edit:
7.


This is yet another problem, being unable to access pass reset data. Another reason that being such a fast paced server contributes to (see suggestion 2 and 3). Moderators need to be able to access past data of at least the previous 1 or 2 resets, if only to also be able to check for online behaviors, login patterns that could indicate multies across multiple resets, and the like. Moderators should also be able to access/view all ingame messages sent between COUNTRIES on that server (not forum PMs) in past resets as well as present ones (otherwise, how do you deal with reports of countries sending spam/advertisements?) if this isn't already the case.

Turnament has 0 allies play om that server if you want no allies.

This is a clean and cut issue too stop leeching and giving players an unfair advantage. 33% of a players land must be research labs for it to be considered not leaching. This forces players to rainbow their country at their own risk. Anyone caught with RA coordination without 33% labs is deleted for rule abuse on coordination just like a kill run.

I like the idea of a TPT % boost per allie instead of receiving tech.

First, I like the idea of no allies.


Noooooo! To me the play is already too slow but it works out perfectly that the sets are only a week long. I know I'm new and no one would really care, but I would stop playing express altogether is the pace was slowed. I mean if your set gets ruined now by a multi or suicide you only have to wait worst case, a few days. Make the round longer and then you're sitting out for a week or two.

HOWEVER, I agree 100% needing moderators at all times. Maybe assign one mod to the 'overnight' hours per day. Or maybe perhaps, put in a system of 'Trusted players' with the ability to 'Freeze' (stop a country from spending turns and placing them in a protected status) suspicious countries until a moderator can investigate.


I like the idea of all countries being public after a reset.

Tournament server also sucks. Because GDI is the Alliance-server style one and doesn't protect you from suiciders. It is viewed as a solo server, but doesn't implement any of the changes that go into Primary/Express which are viewed as the true solo servers.

I believe you are in the extreme minority. Sure, you can say the resets are so fast so that you only sit out a few days if you get ruined, but that is precisely the point. It is so fast that many people get away with it. The ability to store and offload 360(360) turns completely screws anyone over with a FS (say 120 ABs), with very little chance that you will have any ability to recover. On Primary, at least a FS on you is limited to 80(80) turns (25 ABs at best), you have a _significant_ fighting chance.

I'm pretty much the overnight mod, at least for US timezones.

Fair enough Xin but theres nothing broken about DAs or IAs thata what makes the game diffrent then button smashing.

Everyone has acess to them and picking good ones that are at your skill level and style is important. Otherwise we promote all jetters even more because the attacker has a huge advantage. Like I said in another thread it would become a how has the biggest fluff contest.
6 million turrets broken by 4 5 million jets thats roughly a 300 million dollar diffrence in forces.

Don't slow it down....Xinhuan's idea for tech allies is a good one. The More labs you have, the more tech you recieve from your ally.

Basically I'm trying to say, if you don't have the manpower or infrastructure to support Express, i.e have 5 mods covering all time zones and have a response time of no longer than 5-6 hours to any cheating report, then don't run the server. Change the server rules so that staff/moderators/volunteers can actually better support it. Nothing is quite as bad as having a bad play experience that is not fully supported/staffed, and then the "we are just volunteers" and "this is not our job" explanation really just leaves a sour taste.

Don't slow Express down. We would have to be up 24/7 for two weeks instead of 4 days

Def and Intel allies are perfectly fine. The reason why you want to have them is so that landgrab decisions are interesting. Say you picked a target to grab, and spied him. He has some D-allies based on his alliance cost. Now you have to make a decision:

1. Do you guess his allies def and blind send? (Eg, send 1.6x his defense to account for 2 allies of similar size?)
2. Do you perform an "ally spy", see who he is allied to then estimate the defenses based on their NW and/or saved spy ops of them from previous days?
3. Do you "Ally spy", then spy on those allies to determine their exact defenses, so you can calculate the exact break, and send the minimum amount of jets/oil so as to better use of your jets (more attacks = more land if you can send less jets per attack)?

These are interesting gameplay decisions because it comes down to risk vs reward. You save turns if you don't spy, but you add the risk that you don't break. Contrast this to the Tournament server which has completely no allies, and you always know the exact break on any country you spy.

Not really. Instead of grabbing every 2 hours optimally, you want to be grabbing every 4 hours instead. This means that if you are like any normal human being and sleep an uninterrupted 6-8 hours a day, you would be missing only 1 grabbing session instead of 3 grabbing sessions during your sleeping hours. This results in a better country for everyone, instead of the current system that rewards the players that opted to go sleepless.

This is also the only server where the 12/18-hour logout bonus turns is literally worse than staying logged in the entire time.

And because of how fast the server is, the server even had to make a special rule for Commies to be able to sell 60% of their units instead of 35% like all the other servers. The other servers are balanced around the fact that you maybe have to make a full 1/4 sale once a day (single sell) or twice (double sell), which works out to roughly one commie sale every 30-50 turns. This doesn't translate so well to Express for players that don't login frequently (say 4 times a day only). You go to sleep for 8 hours, you login with 100 turns, oh fluff, now I have to sell every 30 min to get rid of all my excess NW! That's why the 60% Commie Indy rule came in. A Commie cannot run turns if their units don't sell once your expenses catches up to you, and the 35% just doesn't work when a sale that small only allows you to run your next 30 turns before you have to sell again.


Edit: As a side-effect, this makes the Commie cash-out destock much stronger than intended. The Commie can store 60% of his entire army on the market so as not to incur food upkeep on that much more military units. This is one of the partial reasons why Commies are very strong on this server, coupled with the ability to switch between almost all-turrets to all-jets within 2 hours (2 max sales are you are down to ~16% of your original units of the type you are switching from). It is borderline overpowered.

This is what I hoped to see :) Keep the discussion going!

I just did the math, at a turn every 4 minutes, 360 turns takes 24 hours. That means after 2 days (actually less, I forget how many turns we start with) you'll have all of your turns and stored turns. That means means you have 360 turns to dump right away, and double turns for the next 24 hours. I see what you are saying. Perhaps just get rid of stored turns on this server altogether then?

At the end of the day though this is Express, its supposed to be fast pace. Perhaps I am in the extreme minority, but as things stand the way they are the server has a lot of countries. I honestly don't mean this as a personal stab at you but perhaps if you don't like it so fast paced you should take your own adivce:


Or, I doubt this is going to happen but, PERHAPS its time for a new 'Express-lite' server that is half paced and twice as long.

Dropping stored turns is a good idea too......

I agree with most of what Xinhuan has said. Particularly:

Truth is i like it this fast, i use the server to learn how to play my strats better. With the fast pace it makes it easier to understand and to change parts that need to be changed.

Also if i remember from back in the day of earth2025 didnt express start with the idea that it sould be a place like what i use it for. Also to test new rules that they wanted to implement in all servers.

So im just asking if you are making major changes just keep what i said in mind and try not to change how fast the game is, since thats the key on why i use express. Thanks :-)

Unfortunately, the playstyle in Express is extremely different from other servers, precisely because it is so fast. The tech starts and all might be the same, but the way you grab (the potential for retals is different when grabbing a late-start country that is turn storing), the way you stock (explained next sentence), etc are very different compared to other servers. Because the top finishing NWs are only about 30m NW, you can literally just stock all that cash (and eat a little bit of corruption) with very little buying of food on the market if food is high priced. You simply can't do this very well on other servers.

Because one is also able to play extremely delayed on 360(360), a late-start strategy can optimize on cheaper tech versus a early start strategy that tries to grow quickly and stay ahead (spending turns constantly) and out-run retals. No other server can you do this, and store up to 40% of the entire reset of turns.

Being able to do well on Express does not translate to other servers too much. Furthermore, precisely because the server is so fast-paced, many people just use it a merely a testing-ground for a 200-turn startup without much wait time, and abandon the country after that, so the number of actual players on the server is inflated slightly if only going by country count.

For a newer player, I understand that being able to just try out a strat for a week and call it a reset is great and all, but for the really competitive players in the top 10-20, all the recent posts and accusations and stuff about cheating, market coordination, DR abuse, and all that, it really is quite a flop of a server, one that is facilitated by the extreme pace that is really quite broken and very hard to police.

More importantly, being able to do well on Express almost always comes down to whether you have the ability to logon every 2-3 hours for 3-4 days in a row. This is the deciding factor for what separates the top 50 from the rest of the server.

Don't slow it down. It is short duration, quick speed, and fits a variety of work and life schedules, which adds another type of strategy to it - determining when to play turns.

If tech leeching is a concern, make an adjustment similar to the above pertaining to labs. Leeching does provide an unfair tech advantage, but leeching also exists in all alliance slots in general. If you are teching more than I, then I am benefiting and, therefore, leeching to some extent. Same is true for defense. If you have more defense than I, then I benefit more in that relationship and am somewhat leeching there. It will never be bulletproof.

If we delete the alliances altogether, then you have another tourney server. IMHO, tourney is the solo server (no allies, more war than conversation), not Express. Express, and through allies, is a great way to meet friends, retain players, and teach others to play. So what if the game rules/ formula vary slightly from server to server, it is still a great place to play a new strategy. Each can chose for himself which server he likes best. FFA is not the place to learn, and Primary lasts too long and will make a new player get discouraged very quickly when they see the final scores.

Having 360(360) is not the root cause of someone suiciding on another and screwing their set. It is usually arrogance or multi-tapping that leads to that. But, there are those that do seek to ruin it for others, so eliminate the ABs and specialty attacks altogether if you want to remove suiciding.

In the end, just play the game. I am amazed at how many experienced, champions of the game accuse others of cheating because they disagree with how something was done. I suck at it, but have worked hard and asked questions week after week to get better. I haven't asked for a rule change to help me master the Express server - only advice from friends on how to achieve the results I want. Without the alliances, I would not have the friends.

The downside to sucking at the game is that once one figures it out and hits top 10 for the first time, someone is going to say they must have cheated because they have never been in the top 10 before. Mods, you will always have something to investigate with all the complaining, so make it easy on yourselves. But I will say this, Express is the only server I play because it works with my schedule. Same may be true for others.

Hmm, why wouldn't other servers fit your schedule? They're less time demanding.

As a new player, I like the short and sweet, blid. I can assess in a few days and try something different next week. If I don't play for a few days, I'm still not behind. If i were behind or had to quit due to travel with job, I can start again next week instead of next month, etc.

Express got me back into the game after not playing for 12-15 years. I consider myself a noob because express wasn't around when I played then.

1. the first suggestion to kill off tech leeching is best i'd say. you cant leech at all that way.

3. i've suggested to reduce the turns available as well.. i'd say somewhere around 180(180) would be best. this would mean you only have to log in 2 times to play turns and you wont lose any turns. you can do it once in the morning after checking your emails and once at night after dinner.

4. DR should be changed to no more than 6 hours. this is already roughly the equivalent of two days in the other servers.

and also, this is why i love asking xin whenever i have questions regarding the game. :)

Remove Alin from express, should solve 95% of the problems - what a fluff.

LMAO@raz

Nice! I'm sufficiently happy to see that a number of people have now posted support for the fast paced speed of the Express server. I'm really not against a fast paced server, because it is really a different and unique environment to play in, however, I am against the fact that it is understaffed and not well supported.

Main supporting points as above (2), (3) and (4) in my initial post, and to quote myself, "Nothing is quite as bad as having a bad play experience that is not fully supported/staffed, and then the "we are just volunteers" and "this is not our job" explanation really just leaves a sour taste."

I hope my posts have been enough food for thought.

i have to disagree here hammer.

these 360(360) enables the fellas who are just playing to screw up ppl's set to just pump jets for 360(360) turns then topfeed. and if you check the news properly, you'll see that most dbl taps or multitaps starts because of these topfeeds and not because of arrogance or anything else.

I would agree with both of you in a sense. 360(360) is good because people don't have to slave over a country every few hours, but it's bad because people can just have fun destroying/topfeeding people all set long, so the more idiots you have playing, the more chances you'll have some tard pump jets and topfeed you 4x.

But I do love the 360(360) for its all-x applicability. I can slow-play into Friday, pump land/tech on low def, stock more, and then log out for 20+ hours like I always do for one massive jump.

^The above post is one example of strats that work on Express that totally won't work on other servers.

Yep! I know. :)

But at least running turns in bulk allows those who are strat-testing or learning the basics to gather a lot of information quickly.

st0ny: I agree there are some that seek to screw someone every set and that is why I included the second part in my comment which references eliminating the specialty attacks. Regular spy op and grabbing for land could be the only offensive strikes.

But I also think some of our board comments and aggressive actions from past sets create suiciders for the next set. And this is off topic, sorry.



So what about an Express game as we know it now with Def and Tech allies, but without specialty attacks for suiciders and retallers to utilize?

In return, there would have to be some limit to multi-tapping since ABs and missiles are the retal weapons of choice.

at the time that was correct pang was busy and qz was in an australian hospital on the gold coast, qz listens to you more then he listens to me, so i gave up pushing for changes because they do as they please, when they please

i agree with everything xin has said. also d allies are great because n00bs have so much trouble calculating them

Def and Intel allies should be enough.

I like Xin's ideas. Great job tella, thanks for taking the initiative.

One thing you can quickly answer us is why the admins refuse to out cheats?

Rather simple crest, because they don't want to or will say they are working on other things at the moment and can't change the code right now but plan to :)

THats not a coding change though, thats just mods not keeping it a secret who they deleted.

Not a moderators call, admins tell us not to reveal that info so we have our hands tied.

And to do what some people have asked, the mod tools need to be reworked so yes coding would be involved

i very strongly urge you not to slow down the game or remove the 360(360)

we might as well let xin play our turns for us, he's sure determining how we play them ourselves.

dont slow turn rate down.

eliminate allies

Keep everything as is, or make the tech acquired through allies equal to the ratio of labs one has.

remove tech allies altogether, or add in a casher and farmer and indy ally too that significantly increases your production per turn

Tech allies are the worst thing. Everything else is pretty good. Its good to have some grey areas so people have to make decisions about ethics. Its interesting that Express is so competitive and that people are always looking for an edge. I like the 360/360 because it opens up all sorts of possibilities for how to play the game, and its fun to run 360 turns in a row when you see that its advantageous. Thats what I do with a rep casher sometimes, jumping in the game when a pile of cheap tech is on the market.

The 360 (360) has problems like Xin detailed, as does the fast pace of play (I log out top ten and then get grabbed all the time when I'm sleeping), but that's part of Express. I don't think there's a groundswell of support for changing that.

Yeah some of the requests (looking into past resets, making all countries public) would require coding. But just having a mod say "oh I deleted player X" does not. Admins tell you not to reveal it, sure, but uh... Why not? Why literally back up cheaters by keeping their identity a secret for them? It's absurd! Esp. since the admins themselves actually support making country histories public anyway!

Bring back the old turn bonus system, rewarding players for not logging in for 8-10 hrs or some such. It was originally intended too even out server load, but now could be used reward those players that have lives to live & can't babysit their countries 24 hrs a day.

That used to be the way it was on BBS's where only one person could log in at a time