Topfeeding isn't profitable any more. You can only get 10% of your land, or theirs, whichever is smaller. So at 23k acres, you get 2.3k+ ghost. Now you're 26k so the retal is 2.6k+ghost.

Should that formula be changed to make top feeding somewhat viable given you put up the effort to make that sort of hit?

What about the effort the other player put in to get the land?

They should have the advantage of networth and production from that land to buy/acquire enough defenses to protect it right?

Maybe I haven’t thought about this long enough, but at face value, the formula as is would reward a much bigger country when exchanging grabs one for one, which is counter intuitive. In a war of attrition, the bigger country should win out over time simply due to having more resources (because of the land) to engage in such attrition. The smaller country likely had to have blown their stockpile to even be able to grab the much bigger country in the first place, so they could get only a few grabs while the bigger country could strike back with impunity.

This starts to equalize the closer the land values are between the two countries.

I am sure I’m missing an important aspect here though, so please don’t hesitate to set me straight!

You can steal more than 10% of their land if the grabbing formula allows for it. What you can't get is more than 10% of your own land (not counting ghosts). So topfeeding is at least not auto-win anymore.

In my mind, it’s less of an issue of top feeding vs bottom feeding, etc, although normally a higher land target would be at a significantly higher networth. This also comes up in retals.

Sometimes you’ll find someone with huge land but not a huge networth, trying to save on expenses and not buy defenses to protect it. That could be a mid feed but the larger country would win in exchanges.

Maybe a better way for me to approach thinking about this would be to have use cases then define the desired outcomes.

1) Larger land country hits smaller land country once, then smaller land country retals once. Who should benefit most from the exchange?

2) Smaller land country hits larger land country once, then larger land country retals once. Who should benefit most from the exchange?

It's an opinion on how it should be. I never liked the idea that a 5k acre country can more than double their land on a single hit. Sure, the 50k guy can get more D, but I can easily stock 2b with a 5k tyranny tech. So I can easily get 15m jets with 150% weaps on 5k acres. That will typically break anyone unless it's the last quarter of the set.

Gerdler-so the extra land over 10% isn't simply because of mil strat? I thought that was it.

A PS can take more than 10% of target land given good NW ratio, MStrat and perhaps tyr govt. But the 10% of your land is a hard limi.

I advocated early on when this change was implemented on other servers for LG returns to just be a plain function of min(Your_Land,Targets_Land) but pang decided not to listen to me and make it so that neither of MStrat, govt, NW matching or MStrat does anythng about the limitation. But its been around in most servers for 2.5 years now, and we just entered the same changeset on Primary which is a good thing (it was weird to run on different changesets).

Topfeeds have always been easy to do(you can't be unbreakable) and it used to be impossible to lose out for the thinner attacker unless the target went to war with you. Now it's usually lose-lose for both sides which is a good thing as it should cease this skill-less venture.

I agree that there should be SOME limit, because doubling land like that doesn’t quite sound right, but 10% feels quite low, especially when the gain percentages of SS or PS could get you more than that alone, not even counting mil strat or government bonus. Maybe the way it should work is you only steal 10% (or another percentage) of the enemy land, but can get bonus/ghost acres up to another percentage cap.

That is how it works. 10% of defender's land plus ghost acres. There is some probs with it though. It seems like ss may be just as good as ps in some instances as well as not experiencing dr as quickly if you're hitting a fat country. It seems like if you hit a 50k acre country 4x before, you would get 5k, 4.5k, 4k, then maybe 2.5k with that fourth hit really showing dr. Now if a 10k acre country hit that same 50k acre country, the hits would prob look more like 1k, 1.1k, 1.2k, 1.3k.

I may have misspoke, I intended to say the max gain from an attack (if a smaller land country than the target) should not be a total of 10% of your own land, but 10% (or another percentage) of your own land could be the max you steal but the cap for mil strat and gov bonus could make that higher, so the “1k, 1.1k, 1.2k, 1.3k, etc” would be directly stolen from the larger country but then the mil strat the plus gov bonus could be a much higher cap than 10% for the total gain.

Gerdler u know my style by now that it is hard for me to end up high given that I only hit a target once a round.. it only takes till near the end of the round where I climb up my ranks and land slowly that I become the biggest farmer.. by then the food prices would gradually start to slide.. I have been selling food at average market price and its cos of the guys stocking that cause the food price to go up.. I think this round actually got a lot more mid size farmers than previous round

That sounds like a fair suggestion twopodray. I just learned something new about the 10% rule if I'm understanding what gerdler said correctly. So the bigger country can get more than 10% of target's land because of bonuses, but the smaller guy can't get more than 10% their own land because it caps at 10%?

Bottom line, hit people without getting hit back. Even if you could get 10%+ bonus as the smaller country, it's still worse than hitting a smaller country that can't retal.

there is no 10% limit for the defenders land. The 10% limit is applied to the attackers built buildings.

So how much you get is ONLY a function of how much land the target has, but it's limited to a max of 10% of your own built buildings.

Land Grabbed = min(f(Target_Land), 0.1 * Attacker_Total_Buildings)

Where f(Target_Land) just means its a function of the targets total acreage. What you capture is directly proportional to that, but also affected by DR, govt, MStrat and NW ratio.

Thanks gerdler. So here's an example assuming both have 130% mil strat, fully built, and nw matching.

10k acre country hits 50k acre country=1k+ghost
49k acre retals the 11.5k acre country=1.495k+ghost

50k acre hits 10k=1.3k+ghost
8.7k retals 52k acre=.87k+ghost
8.7k country could gain more land before the retal though.

So it favors the bigger country, but still better for either to just hit someone who can't retal.

I agree with your last statement, being able to hit someone without recourse is always more advantageous. In your examples above with attacks and retals though, we can see how painful it is for the smaller country being capped by max gains of 10% of their own land, all those mil strat and gov bonuses are mostly wasted.

That’s why I was proposing that the “10% of own land max gain” be at least changed to “10% of own land max stolen from larger country, and also get more bonus ghost acres than current up to another cap depending on mil strat and gov bonuses”. The 10% stolen could then be evaluated separately to determine if that’s the most ideal percentage or if there’s another that works better.

So this formula could be something like below

Land Grabbed = min(f(Target_Land), 0.1 * Attacker_Total_Buildings * MilStrat * Gov)

I didn’t see where the ghost acres are accounted for in this equation, and I don’t think I have that formula, so I can’t yet comment on how to potentially change that to be in line with my above suggestion (and it’s possible the additions I made above would be better placed in the ghost acres formula, than here, but will have to wait to see that one)

I appreciate you all enlightening me about how the grab formula works, but now my motivation to play the game is pretty much gone. I'm absolutely baffled by views like:


Easy? It's not at all easy to be in striking distance of the top 10 players and be well enough defended that you're not a prime target for them. I'm sure many people put in weeks of work to get into that position, like I did. Top 10 countries can and should be pretty close to unbreakable. They should lose the most in a 1:1 trade because they have the most to lose, and because the density of their defense is small. That should be their motivation to keep a defense up. As it is, a huge country is going undefended with impunity. Want to talk about skill-less? That's the food chain of continually finding countries 1/4 to 1/2 your NW and bullying them with no chance of consequences. That's all offensive units are good for in this game with its arcane GDI and "double tap = war" concepts.

The payoff for doing something difficult in this game is basically nil, while the most boring kind of grind gets rewarded, that's my take-away.

Are you really suggesting that winning doesn't take skill, but breaking a top 10 guy takes skill? The idea that you shouldn't grab people that can't retal baffles me. Is your goal to be top 10 or to hit a top 10 guy?

As someone who has done many, many up grabs on this server, I can safely say, it’s one of the easiest things to do. Like Gerd said, everyone is always breakable.

Give any of the countries heading for a top 5 this round a day or maybe in some circumstance two days, and they will be able to have enough jets to break anyone in the game.

If the guy ending 5th can break anyone(while only trying for 1-2 days), it is per definition easier than finishing rank 1(while trying all set to finish with as high NW as possible).

My take - looking at who has won Primary over the past few years, it’s clear it’s the best players of the game (I certainly don’t include myself in this group).

The goals is the highest net worth, achieve that any means possible. Everyone has the same chance to win and environment to operate in, yet there are the same few who consistently out play the rest of us.

It’s just a game, so play better if your unhappy but please quit whining about the “big countries” or the strategies they employ (which clearly work).

On a side note, I have take 40 missiles with little damage and a smile on my face because I took a particular action knowing the potential response. No whining here!

Good luck for the final run of this set. I’ve picked the winner.

Cheers

💯

I think we are still combining two separate topics. There’s the “top feeding vs bottom feeding” discussion and there’s the “land gained per attack cap/limit” discussion. While they could be related, I’m looking to address the latter of the two.

If there needs to be something in the “gains per attack” to reduce the benefit of top feeding, then that would require a separate discussion but would likely include a NW ratio factor, as Gerdler mentioned before.

For the caps on land gained for attacks, this would be totally agnostic of the networth difference in the two countries. You might have a techer who is at a high networth but low land (say under 10k) and maybe let’s use a Rep Rainbow with low networth but tons of land from all the exploring (let’s say 15k). Even though the larger country is lower ranked, he would win out on 1:1 trades with the smaller country purely because he has more land and because the land gain equation has a cap. That doesn’t seem to make sense though.

The 10% of own land cap seems to be *intended* to mitigate the top feeding issue that was being discussed but the collateral damage to the way it is implemented is impacting land gains in many other circumstances, not just top feeding.

Again, this all comes back to “what is the intended outcome of the change”. The change to 10% own land cap could arguably be replaced with a better factor in the formula (NW ratio?) to address the intended issue and not impact attack scenarios outside of the scope of that change.

Bottomfeeding gives very different grab results though. In your example, I don't think the 10% cap would come into play for either country. The real prob with your example is that the techer in the top 10 should farm the 15k acre rep rainbow =P

Per the formula Gerdler posted above, I didn’t think there were any terms/factors that were related to NW, so what would make the grab results different for grabbing a lower ranked, higher land country compared to a higher ranked, higher land country?

You get somewhere around 10% of target's land when nw matching.

When bottomfeeding they lose more like 4%-5%.

TwoPodRay, I think you misunderstood what I said. NW factor as well as MStrat, govt, PS bonus and DR are very much factors in the landgrabbing formula but not a factor on the limit.

It would be really weird if NW factor was broken out and as the only factor changed the limitation. That would encourage topfeeds. My idea was that ALL those factors affected the limit, not just one of them, and not like now that none of them do.

The reason I think its odd now is because on servers with bots, while grabbing them early on more or less in a topfeeding fashion(because I've saved turns) I gain equal land on SS and PS because of this limitation... which is odd. It is also odd that in many situations MStrat and tyr bonus doesnt increase land grab returns because of this limit. So this change was essentially a circumstantial nerf on Mstrat and tyranny.

That said we have lived with this change on most servers for 2.5 years and by now learned how to play around it. It has some side-effects but some very nice features as well, as it takes just a little bit more effort to ruin someones reset, and it ruins the worst of the worst of topfeeds, while still allowing for midfeeds and certain adapted topfeeds.

I think in some cases we are saying the same thing, but possibly talking past each other, I’ll break up the reply.



I did notice you mentioned those are included in the function f(Target_Land) but I don’t know what the function looks like specifically so I can’t speak to that. If my response indicated ignorance, my apologies. Once I understand the inner workings of that function I could propose a better final solution.



I agree, NW factor cannot be the only factor to change the limit. In my proposed change, I broke out MilStrat and Gov bonuses to increase the cap. What would that equation look like with your previous suggestion? Going back to the intent of the changes, neither encouraging nor eliminating the feasibility of top feeds is the intent. No strategy should be auto win (or never win/auto lose), because that creates a stale and restrictive environment for winning. If topfeeds used to be auto win, then a change was needed to make that less so, more in line in viability with mid feeds and bottom feeds. However, the intent by these current changes is to adjust the limit or cap from gains, which currently hurts more types of attacking than just topfeeds. You could be the exact same NW as someone else and as long as they have about 10% more land than you, with all other things being equal, you will lose in a 1:1 trade.



That certainly is an oddity that seems to be an artifact of the previous change. A better adjustment to the limit equation might help address scenarios like these, while also still being in line with the intent of the previous change to limits to reduce top feeds to less than auto wins. Including MilStrat and Gov bonus into the limit part of the formula could serve to lessen those nerfs on those two aspects, which again is collateral damage, unintended consequences of the previous, heavy-handed change.



Duct tape can do a great job to temporarily fix certain issues, but that doesn’t make it the best solution. The previous change may have successfully solved some long standing issues like top feeding or ruining a set but had second order effects on other attacks because it only accounted for one way to fix the primary issue, a hard limit without exceptions. It didn’t attempt to both solve the primary issue and avoid impacting fair, valid attack strategies with a more customized approach. While folks have gotten used to this change, fine tuning this limit equation may well serve to create more successful attack strategies that won’t negatively impact the health of the gameplay.

I look at this as someone who played this game a good amount many many years ago and loved this game. I’m now coming back after a long break and seeing things in a new light, with significant experiences from other games and such, and can now see a few areas that might benefit from some improvement. Is the game great now? I think so. Could it be better? I think so.

Gerdler, Tmac, and Cumorah are spot on, re-read all they're saying TwoPodRay, most of the time it'll make sense after reading something few times!

Cheers!


BTW, I logged in to over $5b cash LOL, this moving weekend is killing me ingame, cracked a rib too so now laughing, coughing, sneezing (the worst) is very painful, gotta keep pushing through though, I despise moving!!!

I’ve certainly re-read all of it a few times, catching tiny details I’ve missed here and there. I fully appreciate the wealth of experience and skill all of these players have and am thus engaging in this discussion of potential changes. Looking forward to see if adjustments can be made to make a few improvements!

Best of luck on that rib, those are no fun to break, they stick with you and remind you they are there at all hours!

Thank you 👍

My suggestion was just that the formula which used to be:

Stolen land = Variables * Constants * Target_Acres
where Variables = Mstrat * NWFactor * Attack_Type_bonus * DR_modifier * Govt_bonus

would become

Stolen land = Variables * Constants * min(Target_Acres,Attacker_Total_Buildings * Factor)
where factor is something like 1.1-1.5 just to allow for retals on close grabs to work out even after losing land on the hit.

What I enjoy about this change we got is it stops the most blatant topfeeds by thin countries which could accomplish nothing else and it makes taking out the enemys buildings way more powerful than before. My suggestion would do exactly this as well, just without an arbitrary 10% limit where nothing else matters, which means Mstrat, tyr bonus, PS and NW matching would still have a great importance in all situations which today it might not.

Commies, when turrets are selling at 165 and 175, there is absolute no need to undercut to 139.

That is capitalist thinking though.

No he doesn't, he is an idiot, he knows it....I am #5

LOL

Time to start T5 predictions?

1. HappyHappyJoyJoy
2. Comirnaty zombie apocalypse
3. For A Few Dollars More
4. Dagagota
5. EEVIL WAR MACHINE (which is amazing considering he started like a week late i think?)

I'm not even going to be in top 10 this round, I'd be surprised if I did land there, next set moving will be behind me and I will be able to put more dedication, good luck guys!

I'm definitely going to be no.1 no doubt about it!

Probably not. I got bored and stopped grabbing a long time ago. Explored a bit here and there, but totally lost interest and kind of forgot/too busy to log in. been overflowing turns for quite some time now. Just cashed 80 turns now though. I’ll try to cash out if I don’t forget.

Don't give up!

Now who's going to suicide 24, 50, and 6 for me? I'll send you a bunch of FA, promise!

Drink enough mouthwash and maybe you will find the courage to suicide them yourself.

Hold my beer...

I forgot the reset finished tomorrow and I just logged in with 70 stored turns, how annoying! Guess I wont make the no.1 spot!

Doh!

I also won't be first. I needed to destock earlier. Selling 100s of millions of bushels on the public market is tough here! Sold over 100m on my pm =(

Looks like the 2 reps take 1 and 2 then!

Well played, sir, 10/10 excuse!


I think Rob will fail his jump in order for his prediction to be better.

Gotta say LB is doing very well compared to his acreage.

Getting hang of the CI endgame you are!
-Master Yoda

I made the jump, and fell a little short! Congrats Gerdler on the win!