You had 35,000 labs sending free tech your way - not against the rules, but needed to be offset somehow.

I'm pretty sure eating an early quad tap, 19 missiles, 30 successful bomb structures, 38 successful espionages, and a few GS's more than offsetss things.

That was your penalty for attacking h2o's landfarm, not for leeching!

I hope this is Rob: MyFarmerHasRisenALargefluff (#17)

haha only the missiles and half the bomb structures were from his landfarm. Although looking at my spy history, #269 did 25 espionages before I grabbed him twice for 537 acres.

A lot of shady business went on this set and I am glad I somehow managed to win. I always thought Grimstad has it won but I think his destock wasn't optimal, leaving me the small opportunity for the upset.

Another note on off and tech leeching - the benefits are immense when compounded. I actually spied on the top indies quite frequently to check my progress. I was certain I was the 2nd best Indy behind qwertyh until he got attacked and quit. How much ahead was he? Here's the truth on how much off and tech leeching can propel any decent player over the rest - this was back when I had about 700k tech points and folks like h20, herbs, serp had between 400-600k tech. Qwertyh had a whopping 1.4m tech points at the point in time. I was like "damn, I'm never going to beat him". We are talking about mid set when tech prices were still 2500 at least.

Also another note on the increased military losses from bottom feeding, I think that is easily 10-15m NW extra losses compared to past sets, taking into account that one had to sell more military (as an Indy) or buy more (as other strats) and this will affect the amount of tech one can buy while growing. This slows down everyone. The reduction in build cost did help but not enough IMO. This is one of the main reason for much lower NW this set. The tech prices obviously didn't help too.

Primary ended?? wow. I completely forgot to login and burn my turns and cash! Would've finished top 20 but that doesn't really matter.

and #66 is the obvious SAM_DANGER!

qwertyh wasn't leeching

He was leeching offense I think. I finished 10th. Did a tech start with only one ally, BobbyATA. Never really caught up. My destock was screwey at best. I was a farmer.

He had offensive allies but they all used each others jets. You can say it's not fair but it's not leeching if it's mutual.

He had double oldman's tech, I be dammed if he is half as good as oldman. So, no, he had a huge advantage.

I didn't say he didn't have an advantage.

You talked about increased losses on bottom feeding... Is there increased losses on top feeding too? I went almost all jetter to do those hits on qwertyh then couldn't afford to build the land until like a week later. Would it have been better to bottom feed and build as I went, I wonder. Although the main reason for the hits was to prevent my Indy competition from getting it first. Herbs woulda had a stellar country if not deleted, qwertyh too if not suicided.

I never got the full story on herbs - apparently there was a chat transcript that got him deleted?

@Serpentor The increased losses only work downwards (bottomfeeding), not upwards. Also it applies to all attacks as the intention was to slow down wars on Alliance and prolong them.

This reset has a higher t10 Avg NW than the previous reset.

Last set T10 Avg NW: $103,529,263.20
(4 Cashers, 3 Indies, 2 Farmers, 1 Techer)

This set T10 Avg NW: $104,798,371.00
(4 Cashers, 3 Indies, 3 Farmers)

congrats oldman. Looks like commies do a little better with the changes because more military losses->more military demand.

Hey Bobby, which country was yours this set?

Also Xin, most of the big NW jumps I made the first 6 weeks were all due to making huge profits on oil (went from rank 90 to top 15 in a week or so span due to high oil prices), I just couldn't build more rigs because all that oil wouldn't sell otherwise. Without oil there's no way I would have ended at $93m NW.. food prices didn't stay over $40 until day 42.

well, to be factual, qwertyh's 700k more tech than me at that point of time can be translated to about 2-2.5 days of advantage, which is substantial.

I think we are all in agreement that qwertyh did not leech (one way use of OA's jets). His allies did get to use his jets once in a while. Even so, the advantage he pulls out is immense. OA is hence way overpowered. I think Xin gave an example earlier in this thread on how much it can save the OA user everyday.

On a side note:
I lost 410k tech points.
Xin 490k and PaleMoon 650k.

All my tech was stolen by #269 (100 successful op out of 103 attempts)

Xin's tech were stolen by (24 out of 26 attempts by #269; 28 out of 31 attempts by #229; 21 out of 24 attempts by #132)

PaleMoon's tech were stolen by (31 out of 32 attempts by #132; 63 out of 63 attempts by #269; 44 out of 55 attempts by #18)

lol, success rate was 93.1%. The 3 of us were intel allies =P

And h2o's tech?

imo if h2o wasn't tethered to his computer 24 hours a day he'd probably be killing hookers in hotel rooms.

No idea. h2o's countries and profile are not public, so we can't add for him.

http://qz.earthempires.com/...s/###/news?allnews=1&

If you want to see who did the successful spy ops on you, ### is your country #

Heh, I lost more than half my tech stolen from fellow LaFfers! Ingle and Savage. The 250k from Savage probably cost me the 3m NW difference to Eugene's finish. :P

Isnt it concerning though that every change made in the last few months reduces the potential for high NWs?

Jet losses, construction costs... etc...
I mean CS costs did go down but still higher than they were before.

Curtate (#17). I deleted midset. I didn't like to quit, but I just didn't have much time last set:(