Actually, I think he was 522. It was purpled for the VPN previously. This is also why on team untags are killed off proactively.

Edit: Zen, give us back Req! Our discord misses him.

This set probably isn't the perfect example of a CI or farmer given the early grief, but we'll see how it turns out. I'm also very surprised at the number of people who continued with Fasc Farmers, but it would be quite strong if there were only a few - but maybe not the additional 30% necessary to come out on top. I think seeing how everyone jumps at the end of set will be enlightening, and maybe another set to see how it could be further optimized.

Personally, I'm glad that the land-drop oil destock is gone, but mostly because it never made sense (not that everything in the game has to, but it just seemed like a bug to begin with). At the acres that people are able to grow to, though, it was typically a choice of working backwards on a PM destock over time and/or banking on public market volumes. This was true even 14 years ago, where we would do TMBR for lower acres and as an alliance plan for enough resellers to help the largest have something to buy in the last day or three.

The "best 3" for NW leaderboards has always been challenging - a lot of old players who were quite good were superseded rather easily with the addition of bots. I suppose there could be tweaks to allow a generally upward trend of final NW to allow current players something to improve, but FA to the top will continue to be a way to weight that heavily in favor of particular players (like the current top two or so) so it's not like a perfect netting set will be knocking them from that throne even without these changes.

Some pretty cool things in here, thanks for the continued effort. The non-penalty of bonuses for govt change will allow for a bit more creativity.

Will military expenses be fairly similar to the most recent change set at low acres?

The main issue for me is repetitive actions, but that's probably true on the desktop version as well. Specifically, when destroying and rebuilding over and over (where having two tabs on a desktop is much easier) or selling private market goods every few turns in the early game.

You are so insane. Did Evo start anything with you to begin with? No. Yet here we are, somehow in the middle of your drama. You call out SF for lying, but your comments are the ones that are contradictory and duplicitous (and illogical!). You declared yourself the enemy by suiciding on us for multiple sets. Evo has never wronged you, but you are certainly persona non grata to us - and as Drow and G0nz0 have noted, likely to any clan on the server. You seem to like your principles, but you can't even keep your story straight most of the time (see your previous eternal Evo war thread where you blame mercs for defending against your attack and then give Evo false ultimatums to kill someone you can't, only to finally take my advice of talking it out with the leadership of mercs like you should've done last set).

I mean, I guess he should wait a year and then suicide you and Josey regardless of what tag you're in, and that would make more sense to you?

He's not in Evo, and it's not even clear this fishing expedition is meaningful. You'll find out at the end of the set anyhow.

It seemed like pretty reasonable numbers and apparently everyone knew it was coming (and both sides are happy to war?) - seems like a good shakeup on the server. It also looks like it keeps things open for future engagements.

Good luck, have fun to both sides!

https://images.app.goo.gl/GJ8yiWcVpiwv8uGj6

We stock up on soju juice boxes.

In my memory you had a lot higher post count.

Could probably use some tech start allies if anyone is interested.

Darkness is at least pretty accommodating with pacts after they stomp you =Þ

Congrats!

(bonus)

Given all the drama lately, I think it's important to point out that while Evo and Mercs are allies, we are not a coalition and we do NOT condone SuperFly's rude comments.


Specifically, despite my personal feelings, Evo is officially on team Pepsi. All statements from SF on behalf of Evo are LIES. *drinks a jack and coke*

Josey, very clearly Cath was calling out another Evo hit. Why even try to spin things after the fact?

Clearly, you're both obsessed with SF in the most psychotic way ever because you hit an unrelated group in the hopes they'll take out SF... I guess because you admit that you can't? Sad.

And the way Josey calls everyone out for a one-on-one war, even though he's NEVER accepted any of the actual offers that have come his way from SF and WeeZy, and then loses to rando's in express as it is. Maybe you're looking for an apology, so here it is - Josey, I'm sorry. From the bottom of my heart. You are so terrible at war that your only hope is to go against defenseless netters. I thought you had more than just bark, but you're just another one of the annoying yippy things.

It seems more likely to be someone who untagged from M4D - maybe even M4D would want to help against their recent untag (a lot of groups will police actions from those who drop tag within 72 hours)?

An in game option to streamline target searches would be great (especially for new players who don't use the forums, and won't see the stickies for 3rd party sites).

Side note - I've chatted with some in primary who don't use the forums because they don't have permissions and get deterred. I believe this was made to combat random bot posts, but is there some other (easy programmatic) way to validate that a player is active that bots would never do? It's not clear to most what they need to do to get permission, and unless they know someone else already active on the forums, it's not easy.

I think sorting by date or country number would be nice (e.g. at the user's discretion), as I like to check if I've spied someone as an easy way to determine if it would break GDI in non-clan servers. I typically do that by scanning through the ascending country numbers in the list. Otherwise, my preference would be to continue to sort by country number, as otherwise it's easy to miss the number/name when there may be dozens. It's not the end of the world though.

Spy ops in game for clans is a nice win though! Any chance we could add in non-standard ops, like allies or market? Will this work with clan ops sharing?

Congrats everyone! Seemed like a quiet set.

I always appreciate the (informative) drama posts. You're welcome here, TAN!

Confirmed on both mobile and desktop. It's really nice functionality too, thanks!

I don't have that for either mobile or desktop: just the captcha timing (centered) and nothing to the right of it.

I'm not sure that I see the toggle either - should it be under Game Profile -> Options?

I use m.earthempires.com quite frequently too - it's the mobile redirected version when you log in (and there are options in the menu I mentioned above to make it easier, like drop downs for navigating etc) - and it works well.

It occurs if you have an event (food, pci, indy) occur during an attack.

Red was restarting TIE just a few sets ago, but then he disappeared. We all miss TIE.

I just hope he's doing alright ?and getting some time outside with the fam).

I think Josie used to go by comjam maybe? Comwood I believe is someone totally different.

Okay. So you didn't try to negotiate peace and you have no offer. This is all for show.

You're also blind to everything other than SuperFly's taunts, which I expect will make his day.

Such plan, so intelligent, much wow.

Did you talk to Dark Demon? I think he's the one you'd have to talk to. Once again, Evo has no say in your war with mercs (that you started). I would expect this is a consistent message you're hearing from anyone in Evo but feel free to PM me or post if you've had some other conversation that you think is relevant here.

What exactly is your offer? You attacked mercs and they defended themselves. You grief random Evo players unrelated to any of that last set, and now continue this set (poorly)? You're the one who says no one will net in peace - it's not like we're declaring war on you, what even is the goal here?

Apr/24/24 15:55:46 AB Dawning robe and wizard hat (#126) () 10 in 20 (#5) (EvoEn4) 0 B
Apr/24/24 15:55:45 AB Dawning robe and wizard hat (#126) () 10 in 20 (#5) (EvoEn4) 0 B
Apr/24/24 15:55:44 AB Dawning robe and wizard hat (#126) () 10 in 20 (#5) (EvoEn4) 0 B
Apr/24/24 15:55:43 AB Dawning robe and wizard hat (#126) () 10 in 20 (#5) (EvoEn4) 0 B

Any April updates after your scan?

Would this cause more farming? The humanitarians go both ways, so if the small player ops them back, does it open them up for 72 more hours of farming?

Alternatively, should the humanitarians have lop-sided values? E.g. you can attack down by 4x or 12x, but the smaller person can hit back 5x or 15x etc. That has other repercussions, but maybe gets at the spirit of the goal in a slightly different way.

Super great add! Any chance we could add in acres or some other way to easily grow? FFA you can farm yourself, but typically you just wind up exploring for 1000's of turns.

I've noticed it on 1a. I'm not sure I declare war / peace too frequently on the other servers.

I think he hangs out on discord though (where he's not banned).

That's probably still true. During wars on alliance, people with 50+ SPAL would steal tech from bots and make as much tech a turn as outright techers on their acres. As a small country, getting 50 SPAL (or at least way higher than most players) is quite easy and it's quite expensive to prevent it (spy upkeeps in particular). Spies are already quite overpowered I think, and many of the top farming players are wary of grabbing someone who looks like they know how to use them, so this adds to their power (in a way I'd argue is probably too strong, unless you look for other balance like notably reducing spy upkeep or the amount pilfered).

The issue with lowering the price on the PM is that it would also impact how high you can sell them for, which would mean reduced safety from storing them on the market (for better or worse).

I don't think so. The spy DR takes care of a lot of it, and you can certainly have wars with multiple people that may require that many ops.

But this should require way more optimization? I mean balancing maintenance and jets cost to blindless grabbing, plus having to ensure you have smart and capable offensive allies that you trust not to eat your jets up. It's whole new areas to learn how to optimize, and you can continue to work on new strats based on the changes for turn optimization too (medical and weapons tech starts anyone?).

I think it depends on the server. CI are still the early leaders in primary and tourny, but maybe the express market makes it less of a win there? I think to run hundreds of turns you practically have to sell to your private market at much less profit.

I agree with your sentiments on game changes - it's good to let it settle before making a new one unless it was really just the wrong / unexpected direction, but three full sets in alliance seems pretty reasonable given the flurry of new ideas. I do also agree it would be nice to see some of it in a test server, or have a chance in express / team before it gets to 1a (mostly because the turns are faster and the sets are shorter, not because I think less of them) but that timing won't always work out.

Congrats to all the top, some very impressive finishes!

I think next set will be interesting, but not as unbalanced as you might think. Both CI and techers are really limited by market demand, whereas FFO is somewhat agnostic (they use tech and jets, but if there's "too many" FFO it doesn't really impact their play as they stock way more bushels and oil than they sell). This was a really nice set for commie, and that strat is pretty new (the expense formula / constants had to be discovered with play and then determining how to plan for the destock is all new fun for the math nerds) - so I think it can be improved, but I also think next set with even just a few more CI trying it out, the market will limit it closer to 1.2B, pretty much in line with techers - and even a casher. So the main aspect of the balance is that FFO will need to do more of a hybrid destock like everyone else. They still get a bonus bonus and produce the goods they need so they'll be less impacted by the semi-expected food and oil spike to come as things rebalance. They'll just have to destock like in the old days (e.g. start buying off their PM quite a bit sooner and/or balance out the costs of oil purchases without MB).

All that to say, the main balance is this will reduce FFO's top spot in the meta (which honestly is good, because as I mentioned, they don't see the impact of market pressure as much, which sort of reduces a major aspect in the game) but everyone else can see some success depending on market conditions. There could be alternative ways to mitigate the low acre oil destock, but change can provide a little bit of fun as everyone works to figure out the new meta together.

I lol'd

@Andrew - same farmers as in tourny is my guess - I feel like the prices are in lockstep.

That would be great for allowing a bit more flexibility with interesting government changes!

I like 1 and 2, but I'd be curious about the war perspective.

@Leto - gross. That could make premium a large influence in a war, which I don't think has ever been the philosophy here.

I think the argument is that it lowers the barrier of entry to finding a community. Now they are given a group they can ask questions to rather than trying to figure out who might be a good contact, etc. It won't solve all the problems, and players may still go inactive, but it could help.

In your stats for new accounts, do most players start with a particular server? I wonder if they should be pushed a little towards some of the solo servers, though the community is the best way to learn, it's focus isn't always on gameplay that works universally. I think primary is quite nice - with the way GDI works there, along with the expectation that you'll get grabbed.

I was really confused at first because I'm so used to selecting and overwriting them that when I clicked in and the 0 still showed up, I thought it was going to be a problem like Andrew noted. I'm sure I'll get used to it - nice quick fix!

I could provide a similar but opposite anecdote from Asheron's Call (similar to Ultima but less popular) where they had the Darktide server that was for always-on PvP versus the 6 other servers that you had to go on a quest to enable it. The PvP server was horrible - new players would get ganked right out of training. People would offer "help" and then take new players far away, suggest they make a new save zone there, then kill them so that they'd spawn in that death trap forever. There were a number of players who pushed through and enjoyed it, but the numbers were always small and the cruelty ran most players off. The servers where the players had the choice had the most players and the most dynamics (market prices, alliances, raid quests, and community).

All that to say, there's a balance, and one experience in another scenario doesn't always match the goals here. We had some of this struggle in the original game - so there's a historical precedent for it, but there's a reason that the game died out from it's peak of thousands and thousands of players. We all agree netters shouldn't be covered in bubble wrap, never to be harmed, but that doesn't mean making it easy for a small group of griefers to ruin the experience of dozens of other players (look at Josey Wales this set, they have no real politics or communication, they've hit a variety of random players, and they're focused on ruining the netting experience moving forward). Luckily, you are a champion of the server and ready to meet them in battle, BH! =Þ

Suicides are quite frequent, and will be more possible with a future humanitarian change (as currently proposed on alliance). In Team, wars continue further along typically. For Alliance, when Evo was blindsided by LaF after they had won against the others, that continued into latter quarter of the set. With future restart bonus changes, that could be less necessary, but currently, restarts in the last quarter do occur, and at that point your country is wrecked, your CS are low, SPAL / SDI are terrible, and so given a large stock, dropping acres is typical.

So I would say it's more frequent than you might expect, and the impact can be quite large.

The land drop change will drastically impact FFO's, but also for countries in war (or who are suicided) where it will be prohibitively expensive to rebuild. Given there's already a mechanism that you can't drop land you recently grabbed, could there be an acre limit that you can drop instead? Like can't drop below 10k acres and/or below 80% of your max land for the set? (I think I prefer a percentile option, but it may be harder to code; a set threshold is unlikely to work in all scenarios.)

And those poker players fold a ton of hands that don't have the numbers to work - people don't want to "fold" two month sets repeatedly (though certainly you see that the longer you play, the more likely you are to get a top spot, say in tourney, express, or team, where there's a lot less formulaic approaches - which is nice because players have a choice of which server(s) and how they want to play).