Equal of each. Except maybe rounding error.

The bot strat percentage change is hard to balance and too heavy handed. My guess is it will cause new imbalances as bad as we had this round.

You should consider doubling the defense loss of units on attacks, and doubling the tech lost(without increasing the gain of the attacker)

And skip the changes to bot strat balance.

Unit loss: This will make military spending higher, meaning lower spending on food and tech and higher mil prices. It will make all bots get to food stocking later and when they do it will make them spend less.

Tech loss: keeps tech demand up slightly longer without raising it early. Will make all bots stock food later and less, but the techer bots may be less affected.

An easy change to manage tech prices is to aim for all techer bots to get to some acreage, then stock cash then growth when they got over 2b cash. That can be set for the first month, and then changed for behavior you have now.

Also Super cashing, while i think the feature looks interesting and solves some of our problems, has a poor name.
I think we need better branding.

Yes. And if you are PSed out you can't get back to war room to see the dec peace button.

To fix this, briefly log in to alphaui and dec peace, then log out and log back into standard ui. This is the one use case for alphaui. :)

In 1a it's always been the opposite btw... less farmed bots= dysfunctional market.

That dynamic might not be the same with the new bot code. We will see I guess. Just pointing out that the only experience we got suggests the opposite.

I think we will see t10 countries between 100k and 300k acres this round with 4 different strategies. When was that the case in 1a? Arguably balance and competition right now is better than it's been on 1a last 10 years, tho we don't yet know how that might change over the next few rounds as a new meta is formed.
Clearly some strats are better than others and people would have played it completely differently had they known the pace and market beforehand.

^^Are you sure its enough to make 5 bonus posts a week?

I think the NW/tech point thing starts to matter now or a little bit ago. But for the most part we have seen high tech prices due to just more demand for tech points than there was supply. the intrinsic NW value of tech just adds ~$500 to tech points value early on. Now its more I guess. I think its essential that theres a reasonable soft floor for tech prices.

Anyway my point is Im quite convinced we didn't see 10000$ tech because of 4NW per tech point. Maybe at some point later on we will see $1400 tech instead of $800 tech because of it tho. And I'm all for that.

CI has too much production in terms of raw NW/(acre*turn). If CI had any kind of half decent market for the early and mid round it would be impossible to compete with any other strat. And it's weird because we have all grown up playing a game where CI has a great early game and then tech doesn't go high enough to let it keep up unless it has a huge lead already.

I forget what mehuls indy tech max was, but it was lower(I wanna say 140%), and C had +25% indy production. Either way we are talking 15-20% higher production now than then.

What you got right now is that as soon as rep casher cant buy cheaper on public market, CI produces as about as much NW each turn as the rep casher can afford to purchase on its income. Thats weird from a legacy perspective. Rep casher is supposed to own the endgame because its been bad all round, takes forever to get techs to decent levels, and cs have to be built in a turn inefficient manner in order to balance income for getting those techs up or even run a tech start(the horror).

This is going to be really hard to balance unless you do something about indy production. Indy kind of HAS to be terrible for 4/5ths of the round in order for other strats to somehow compete against it. And I dont think indy players want that, they want to be able to sell their stuff at 100-150 and actually live on their ICs rather than being forced to build as a half rainbow or something.
Getting rid of the exponential expenses was a good thing but it hid the overproduction that CI had been allowed to aquire because expenses made CI impossible in the endgame anyway.

New permanent bonuses may be popular, and thats a utility in its own right, but its quite risky stuff, and I would recommend not adding anything like that for the purpose of balancing a strat. % goods sold could be a viable alternative to private market units after some strats stop taking turns(which is a useless bonus until you are done with turns). If introduced it should be balanced towards that purpose and against that alternative bonus, rather than what would make a CI/techer take this bonus early game rather than whatever their other options are. Theres luck too remember?

Keep ANW. But make a "combined title" that uses all relevant metrics; members, TNW, ANW, T10 countries, top rank and the alliance that scores the lowest sum of combined ranks in all of these gets put first. that way if you drop members you might gain on ANW but since you lose tnw and members its not very clear if its even an advantage for you.

Example
Clan A is
4th in ANW
top country ranked 1st
3rd in members
2nd in TNW
3rd in number of top 10 countries

So they get 4+1+3+2+3 = 13 in score which is a very strong score that might make them #1 or #2 among all clans (lower score is better)

If they drop 2 low ranked members they might be 4th in members, and they might even get a worse TNW rank, even if they get up to 3rd in ANW.

You can always make it so that you cant drop people unless its before the last 10 days or something, thereby making it a very difficult choice that most leaders wont see a reason to do.

the only way to find a specific op now is through searching with ctrl+f or find on page on mobile browser. I guess it works this way too. I forget how it was before, cnum without timestamps?

On the search tab. Make it so the name only remains hyperlink to the attack tab but the number is a hyperlink to copy the number into clipboard.

I think theres more than me who grabs with a country list open and writing/copy pasting into the attack tab.

This will leave both options available.

Demorialize takes out 5% of current readiness rounded to the next integer(and for some reason its rounded down on x.5). So its not 3% per success.

So 100>95>90>86>82>78>74>70>67 for 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 demos.

readiness has no effect on defensive military strength under 70% readiness. so 50% readiness = 70% break.
Readiness 80% = 80% break.

I believe what the code does is in fact creating an array of tries without simulating the turns(just the one op over and over again). Thereby, except for extreme conditions that can only be created artificially on alphaffa more or less you can't actually run the same op with the same conditions over and over again to test it.

Two clues:
1. The code is slow, you can see it takes time to run it after the page is loaded. We could perhaps draw some conclusion from this but we might not agree.
2. It actually changes back and forth as you said. This means its not running like 1k or more simulations. It's 3-50 or something such, otherwise the results would have been fixed in such a vast majority of cases that it would be very rare to observe this phenomena. Its not rare, tho.

Given that spy ops often take time to perform I will suggest (and you might not agree) that the code doing intel ops is one of the slower ones in the game. Which could also be why we are only allowed to do 10 ops at a time. This could be why we are seeing a great variation in the results of this feature, because if the code was fast there would be no reason not to run 1000+ simulations on it as you suggest.

That is why I have come to the conclusion I have.

So you are closer to the truth with your 10 sized vectors than with 1000 attempts.

I don't think it's a bug. It's because spy ops are random.

If you go back to espionage it will show high or moderate. It's not based on the op type. If you are getting that it means you are right between high and moderate. cheers.

what I suspect it does is it runs the code for spy ops and sees how many succeed in like X ops with these stats(without adding up spy DR) between the countries. It will come out 16/20, 15/20 and 14/20 all because of randomness and that could be the difference between high and moderate.

Yes

It's not a bug that the time to market varies. It should be random somehow. It is affected to a degree by luck (the permanent bonus) according to what is written about it.

Not sure if this is known already but the surrender button is bugged.

1. When the war is impending and you press it the result is a message:
"something wen wrong"

2. When the war is ongoing the surrender button seems to bug you out the game, but the war changes from ongoing to resolved.

The accept peace button doesn't seem to be working either, it just pushes the query to the other side back and forth, but doesn't end hostilities in any way shape or form.

Target.attack_bonus gives me a headache, lol. Better use the ingame name which is defense bonus or something, right?

More commies needed clearly. It's just 34% right now :P.

Sadly most of those M's will likely go T or I.

Every NW change of every FFA country since like 13 years back is stored there. Plus every news item but thats much less.

It looks to me like every market purchase that got uploaded to eestats is stored there as well, just it has never been presented other than the 6-12-24-48-72 hour summaries plus the market summary of the entire round.

When bots start retalling they will give much more land, first off they will regain land from bad players and secondly they will remove some of their DR every time they try to retal. Might be fun.

Rank 127 is my best score so far.

Most strategies are now viable.

Best are probably Commie indy and Fascist farmer.

It's pretty nice to be able to sell your food at 38 on the private market. Indy is a bit annoying because you gotta sell very often to do well and therefore play very often, but it is strong and easy to do well with currently. I think indy will be the strat that comes most natural to you because I think it was played the same way at all times.

Recent changes to bots, private market etc have made the other strats a little different from years before.

I even finished top 1000 once!

It was quite important that the bots started to act more like humans in terms of stocking and jumping so Slagpit made them each to start their jump at a random time instead of all at the same time. He also made them stop buying tech when it no longer benefitted them, calculated correctly by how much time theres left of the round and what the price is and so on. This made sure that the demand side of the tech equation wasn't messed up.
Even if a player played correctly back before these changes he would still be limited by a market where most of the demand is not rationally driven. This has improved express greatly.

And to be honest it should improve you as well. If you just spy a bot repetetively and copy its look and add a few grabs on bots you will get a personal best for sure, and you will beat all the bots every round because you get more land than them. They will teach you to buy tech, specialize, stock and jump quite well.

I think that in theory and to a certain degree you would benefit if everyone else grabbed efficiently as there would be fewer hits on the bots in total.
That said you don't want to grab right after a good grabber, and the bots would also get smaller in general.

More importantly what matters isn't that you get X land on turn Y, but that you get more land than your competition or the same land in fewer turns.

What needs to be considered tho is that the DR number that Eestats lists for express is wrong for a multitude of reasons. While it can serve as a very rough guide to which bots are being hit the least (and therefore generally give the most land) it doesn't account for DR halflife. So if someone farmed a bot 15 times 20 hours ago and no one hit it since it may be quite a good grab again even if the DR listed on eestats is high compared to many other bots.

I'd prefer if you postpone posting status until after the round ended. But I assume it doesn't matter in this case.

You fought all his changes because he was for bots retalling. I didnt care much for bots retalling as its so easy for a dev to turn that on and then leave without fine tuning it so that they dont act in a way entirely detrimental to the player base. Its always been an idea that the devs/admin had and the players mostly disliked. That said its all a package. And the changes we got on express were guaged against gameplay and the players who were playing for those 2-3 months of development. You would have seen the same active back forth for 1a development if you actually responded with anything other than vitriol to the proposals and requests for feedback that were posted.

And yes, I didn't agree with all his ideas either. But I'm not going to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I tried to participate with constructive feedback as I and the majority of the express community had been on the express change process with great result.

We had active dev in short stints. They were driven away by the community.

Slagpits idea for how to change 1a that he was working on was pretty much exactly what derrick wrote up here a few posts ago... but at the time derrick got stuck on the plan to have retalling bots that he didn't like and joined the anti-changes posse.

Everyone complained on Express that only techers could win and a few other annoying things, Slagpit solved that and after then CI, casher and farmer win frequently as do techers. The bots were rebuilt from the ground up (and only implemented in express) so they act smarter and are harder to exploit, and those would replace the bots in 1a and FFA with some tweaks, was the plan. This didn't happen. He got tired of the community and the Derricks of this game before he had time to do that.

So the game stayed stale and people got tired and more toxic. Not saying Derrick is the only problem but he certainly participated in fighting changes that he now claims he wants, and which everyone really wanted.

Yes, if you identify who did them there should be a way to make sure during the round.

Spy DR yes and to find offender for hostile ops.

The intel ops should be given more power in general and this would be a step in that direction. There should be less things in the game that are unknowable.

I also want a news spy, and a spy on spies where you can see incomming and outgoing news(that do not show up on eestats) and ops.

I have suggested all this on multiple occasions. I'm glad I'm getting some support for it!

Absolutely wrong...

they can hit him back however much they want. Ofc without coordinating on discord or through ingame messages or elsewhere but there is absolutely no risk of deletion for retalling on a guy who suicided you.

If you can't choose who's bond you buy it's kinda weird to take a counterparty risk.

The other thing is if the market is in any way illiquid it's going to be a disaster on solo servers because either due to luck or due to team play a player will get a huge advantage due to buying or selling bonds that are not priced right.

This would perhaps not be a problem if a solo server had 1000 active players, and 5% of those knew roughly how to price a bond. But now idk... It would be problematic.

A bond market would be very interesting tbh.

Have a flat 10% coupon each 24 hours, on bonds that last up to 7 days(or redeemable at choice) and let players buy and sell contracts worth $1m. If you can't pay your stock, military and tech is force sold to the game, and if that isn't enough your country is barred from the bond market for the remainder of the round and your country loses half of what it produces until its payed back in full.

Given how adverse everyone is to actually doing math this is unlikely to be popular. So let's do it!

"In the final six hours of the game, you will not be able to engage in any offensive actions against countries that have not hit you at least once."

Yeah, I don't think its a bug but it's not well thought out. Perhaps the report button should cease to exist after reporting it. Or it should link to a confirmation that it had already been reported.

I'm not sure what you are getting at here. As I understand it the mod in question did exactly what the community had agreed for him to do. SOTS disappeared when 3 tags got deleted for hitting one tag because they couldn't kill it without breaking the SOTS rules they had all agreed on.

It's possible, even quite easy, to just never die if 5 countries are the only ones hitting you. This was a 'feature' or a 'problem' of SOTS depending on if you were walling or getting walled.

That could be rounding in the PCI or some rounding error in your own numbers.

I always calculate;
tax income per turn
tax income per turn while cashing
tax income per turn - food cost of pop
tax income per turn while cashing - food cost of pop

I also calculate those per acre.

Once you did one its so easy to do all that in a sheet.

Just to be clear; there is no SOTS (Spirit of the server) rules anymore. They came and went before I even started playing this game. The community wanted them implemented and then some of them wanted them gone because they couldn't kill a waller with 1 team.

The experiment was probably valuable tho.

The PCI growth formula doesn't even matter because startups don't matter anymore. You will have equilibrium PCI more or less for 99% of the turns of the round.

We all know the PCI formula and thus we can calculate the income/turn per acre of a rep/theo/demo casher after food expenses. PCI growth formula will only really limit PCI growth beyond just the equilibrium for maybe 50 turns per round and only if you make a very low acreage switch or are agressively trying to push your income up very early.

As far as I know the known parts of the PCI growth formula govern PCI growth in all scenarios other than walling.

The expenses scale exponentially with military units but the cost of a point of NW is the same when you oil destock to 200m 800m or 6000m NW. This is fundamentally why FFO is the only strat that can consistently compete on long servers.

Buy 6 turrets on Alpha and your expenses become $1. Instead buy 6 billion turrets and your expenses are now 20 billion or something, so each turret now costs 20 times as much to maintain. This is quite unrealistic, if that matters, but more crucially as the NW potential rises above a few hundred million it makes CI and any endgame that takes turns quickly unfeasible.

If you think about it a Commie indy actually outproduce an FFO on a NW to land basis as max tech CI produce about 2.4 NW of jets per acre per turn, plus tax revenues minus the basic non-military expenses equal to about 0.4 NW while cashing. So we are talking 2.8 NW per turn and acre. This is nearly what a casher makes if he buy military on private market for all his income each turn.
For FFO that number depends on the prices at hand but we are generally closer to 1.8 NW.

Humanitarians, the extra bonus boost FFOs have also make a difference. But those need not enter the conversation as long as we have the current expense fomula.

Tl;dr the oil destock is a weak way to finish until the exponential expenses destroy every other way to gain NW.

The food prices took out a lot of NWs for people I think. I was one of the few non-techers that sat on a food stock I think.

I was hoping to spot that someone bought out the food market but it seemed to have just dried out organically. A farmer went inactive?

Grats LB on the win and everyone else in the t10