Your bots are killing the farmers on EXPRESS:
Bushels 154,894 $29 $28 484,941 325,167

Nobody sells food at $29, and look at the volume already on market and it's still day 0.

Some sets the bots kill farmers other times techs cashes commies. One set there were like 5 etching bots. All undercutting the market by 20% of eachother. That set sucked for me.

But just like tech should never be bought at $9999, bushels should never be sold at $29.

A fair trade for free grabs, no?

29 bushels got fixed on ffa so maybe it gets fixed on express too (or ffa-bots moved to fluff with techmarket).

well, get some military tech at the start, and make profit from buying those cheap bushels

exactly, it's a designed opportunity for profit !

You would need an insane amount of military tech to take an advantage of it, unless you're a demo. Military tech doesn't sell the first few days and so you would basically have to start off as a techer., which strengthens my argument why low bushel prices hurt FARMERS.

Farmers have about a $2m per turn advantage over cashers every time they bomb banks when the bots get bigger, because cashers lose the 20% casher bonus when they bomb banks on the bots. That makes up for the $29 bushels.

I used to play as a farmer in Express but never ever since bot was introduced....;(..

three sets ago bushels were very expensive

Getafix, you get 120 turns max for spying.

1. Bots don't give 2 mil on the first 3 days.
So that's 1000 turns at 29$ food.

Not all the bots give 2mil cash or 100k food.
Most are spied out by countries who can afford to spend their turns early. Farmers have to play delayed. It's not worth spending early turns on spy ops vs building.

Max of 120 spy ops a day doesn't compensate.

class is in session kids!

Vic., the reason they spiked is because a player decided to suicide the market by buying up all the bushels and reselling on pm.

i didn't see a spike celphi, i bought 50+ bushels that entire set

did that in last ffa set (where sub 30 bucks bushels existed quite a long time) and got nice profit (and stocks).

It's not worth it on EXPRESS as a non-demo.

So perhaps I'll have to look into demo tech start with xfer to demo farmer. But then that means I'm tethered to my computer hitting refreshing looking for $29 food /fun!

Wanting a server this small to have a semi-stable and predictable market is stupid and a pipe dream.

Stop complaining and take advantage of clear opportunities.

I'm not looking for stability. I just want semi-balance between the strategies. Prior to bots, it was balanced. It's the coding for how much they sell bushels at is what's making an inbalance.

Farmers can't even use the market to sell their food, bc the bots sell at prices lower than our PM. So we are forced to either delay more or sell on PM.

Bots are killing the express server period...it lets no-lifers sit and farm the bots and get huge fast...then when they no longer get good returns from the bots they farm players...it shouldnt let people who have farmed bots hit real players. Kinda like gdi, they can only retal hits on real players...just an idea.

better yet, if you hit a bot more than X times in a reset it voids your gdi all together, oppening you up to anybodys whim.

call it twelve times?

That's actually a great idea Braden. +1

Oilers are making a killing.

1000 acres:

1000 * 285 * 1.5 * 2 = 855,000 (per 1k acres)

whereas farmer (max tech):

1000 * 36 * 2.2 * 5.3 = 419,760 (per 1k acres)

In fact, oiler could be selling at $143 and still be making more than a farmer with max tech.

Maybe I can get some followers to keep bots in DR :P

lol I'll sign up next week Koh

looks like its killing ci this time

This is exactly why I can't play on AI server. These things are selling food at $25 now... this is my last set playing EXPRESS.

You can't be a real Express player until you've quit in disgust at least a few times :)

Nah. These broken bots aren't getting fixed anytime soon. They may as well delete the bots, give everyone 1000 acre explore buttons, and add a magic market that lets you buy food at $25.

I'm off to TEAM. At least one server hasn't been turned into an AI server. L8rs ppl.

Good luck with that, lol

standing orders are great.

that is to say, if you hit twelve separate bots a single time, you void your gdi for the whole server.

QZJUL-

Can you tell us which player is selling 1 mil barrels of oil for $60 on market? That player is obviously cheating. (You can sell oil on PM for $60 instantly).

Apr 30, 00:00 Apr 30, 04:00 $250 $250 $250.00 10,775
Apr 30, 04:00 Apr 30, 08:00 $250 $288 $276.19 28,744
Apr 30, 08:00 Apr 30, 12:00 $288 $297 $296.52 14,701
Apr 30, 12:00 Apr 30, 16:00 $285 $285 $285.00 45,000
Apr 30, 16:00 Apr 30, 20:00 $220 $285 $276.31 199,624
Apr 30, 20:00 May 1, 00:00 $218 $285 $269.27 277,726
May 1, 00:00 May 1, 04:00 $270 $285 $282.51 319,611
May 1, 04:00 May 1, 08:00 $199 $285 $261.43 277,082
May 1, 08:00 May 1, 12:00 $268 $279 $272.19 656,808
May 1, 12:00 May 1, 16:00 $195 $310 $258.81 940,834
May 1, 16:00 May 1, 20:00 $217 $247 $221.36 701,832
May 1, 20:00 May 2, 00:00 $60 $220 $127.91 1,452,548 <------------------- happens every set. it's usually $21. Yet no moderator addresses it.

can someone confirm if this is true?

Its still only 1m barrels and its late into the set. Its not significant.

Moderators can't do anything about the market, sorry.

I would have killed for oil prices that high a couple of years ago. with oil prices like that, an all-x demo oiler could take a top ten spot, especially if bots are selling food in the $29 range at the end of set. The oil price crash looks more like players dumping their oil after reaching their land goal. Possibly a good marker to convert to MBR and burn the extra oil for added units on the PM if the public oil price is too low. The latter would need to be calculated, to determine the break point.

btw a top 10 fascist farmer is possible, hard but possible, end of set low food prices is normal when players are destocking.

a demo casher could work if timed properly with the bot cycle of buying low at the start of the set and then selling high at the end of the set. could be interesting with low mil prices at the end of the reset, which is probably the excess CIs trying to get a few more turns in, by selling to MBRs... alternately it is just a handful of Theos making some additional cash to buy out their PM at highly reduced prices.

C/I was screwed this set (I did a glorious C->D->R conversion) but, let's not forget this is a free to us game to play. Some ppl are complaining about the game every freaking week on every freaking thread......as if they bought a faulty product. I am sure qz would appreciate the cash if we all payed to play, but we get to do this for free. Every week. Multiple servers.

Or, we can simply opt out and find something else to do if we think the game is fluffed up.

Just ban selfie, he whines too much

I think you meant to say 'he complains too much'. You can't tell if my voice is high pitched or not through text.

Also, hammar.., it's Qzjul who is posting threads in EXPRESS, asking US what we think of the bots, ect. So, it's not really complaining. It's merely feedback.

Just because a game is free doesn't mean we lose the right to express our dislikes about the game. A game creator / designer likes feedback from the community. It allows them the chance to tweak it, and to keep players around. If no such forums existed and/or we prevented players from expressing their dislikes, the game would never adapt. We've already lost one good player: Netsquash. Kingme refuses to play until bot changes are made. There would actually be a larger population on EXPRESS if some adjustments were made to the bots.

So we can either complain or quit. Yeah sure, it's easy to tell one person to quit, but when there's just 5 ppl playing and 20 bots it's going to get boring quick!

If food is so cheap.. why complain?

Demo resell that shii brah.

I'm complaining from a farmer's perspective, not a techer's.

You're only going to be able to take advantage of it if you're a demo techer.

The people arguing with me on this subject are missing my entire point. I know which govt types/strategies are *easier* and *better*. I play farmer, and I'm merely voicing the inbalance for that type of strategy. It's the only govt class next to oiler that needs adjustments to make their strategy at least competitive with the techer/indy/casher on EXPRESS.

It's an easy fix:
Just add a simple If statement:
If (sell_price <= 35) {
sell_price = 36;
}

which basically makes it so the bots don't sell food at or under $35.

You can literally copy paste that code into farmer_strat.php and it's fixed.

The problem the bots are having is resulting from this line of code:
$rmax = 1.30; //percent
$rmin = 0.70; //percent

These #s are simply too big. It should be more like 1.10 and .9
Because what is happening is BOT#1 does 70% below market price and then
BOT#2 does 70% below BOT#1 market price (and ect, ect.) until you get a crashed market price.

Again- if we were allowed to make bots on EXPRESS, I could have these bots in excellent shape.

Well, in theory the market is just responding to supply and demand; buy more food and the price will go up!

Would you all like more C/I's or techer bots, is that what you're basically saying?

Or perhaps randomize the proportion depending on the set?

The problem is, there's more supply than demand. Food should never sell at $25. You can sell food INSTANTLY on PM for $29. By selling food on Public for $25 the bots are not only making less per bushel but they are flooding the supply.

25 * .94 = $23 a bushel.

By making more bots to C/I's or to Techers will only shift the same problem to a different govt/strategy. The problem lies in the way they are determining their prices.
.7 is just too low.

No player would EVER sell food under $29. Just as players have limits as to what they would or would not sell their food/units/tech at, there should be similiar limits on the bots on how high or low they'd sell their food/tech/units at.

Tech bots should have a teir drop per day [limits]. Like 3500-3000, 3000-2500, 2500-2000, 2000-1500, 1500-1000. Day 0, 1, 2, 3, 4
Farmer Bots should never sell food below 36.
Indy Bots should never sell turrets/jets below 125 (if they do, you're destroying reseller strategy).
Bots should be buying oil. (seems pointless since they don't attack, but then again, they buy jets)
Bots should have spies.