how would a critic of yours describe your efforts to create/maintain an environment where griefing is fun/effective if they knew all of those efforts?

oil has an auto sell that sometimes gets hit

food had one that used to be hit but i think it was 1 and then i forget what it was when food volume went down by 10 and price wennt up by 10

not sure about mil i forget

but yeahh most of the time its just a forotten digit

particularly if you type say 11- or 11= instead of 110 it still lets you sell with the wrong price

looking over old threads

compared to tyranny in attacking for tyranny in 7 hits you get

5 * 1 * 1.5 * 1.2 = 9
2 * 1 * 1.2 = 2.4
11.4 in 7 hits

7 * 1 * 1.5 = 10.5

less land in same amount of hits combined with 7 ps's becoming impractical

ao it sort of leaves you with a decent stocker and decent grabber but without the market options of demo

the income would be better than tyranny, but food cost and tax income are pretty small for non cashers, this could be a grabbing casher thing, since obviously demo cant grab and rep isnt great at grabbing, without checking the numbers id expect maybe 8% less income than rep casher

maybe techer ok

i think the risk of an unused government is very low though, its not going to damage anything if its not good, and if were not sure that it is good for anything its unlikely to be too good and break stuff

https://www.earthempires.com/...402/news?types=60,61&

once you have past country status viewable they show up like that, you just click news then spy op and it displays the spyops

Game Profile Privacy
Allow other players to see your previous countries created before 2021
Allow other players to see the status of your past countries

only the second one needs to be ticked, you used to even need it ticked to see your own but theres a chance thats fixed now

disappointment :(

went here to check what was up and saw the edit

i assume this is due to technical reasons because there was already notice given

did you check who opped you cuban?

its been the same for years, and before that i think it was only 33% higher if im even remembering that correctly

yeah its always been capped, i think it might have decreased by 25% at one point but that probably wouldnt stop 'hidden troops for walling' being boughht at this point anyway

theres sets when netters cant even put oil on the market to hide it from oil stealers and that market cap is way higher than mil

typically oil+food are only a problem very late in the set once humanitarian restrictions kick in though

anyone remember the lulu tag bot?

it was a bot in ffa that had fair and standard retal rules, 1:1 3:2 etcetra

homer didnt accept fair retals and ended up getting killed by it then had to call in FDP's against a bot they picked a fight with

id be in favour of some bots acting like that again, but not all of them

its pretty odd to have a war still evenish and ongoing during the last few days of the set

and then its not every set you get empty market either, seems like a pretty big outlier condition

on a browser update recently backspace got disabled, which slows down land kills dramatically

never tried landkilling on a mobile browser but that might be a pain without the attack again button

sounds permanent for the worst cases

maybe something where you had to play a lot of sets under the restrictions without further bad behaviour before it got lifted automatically

so if i got punished for 2 sets of idiocy in express, maybe id need to play 4 sets worth of express turns without former idiocy before the punishment timer expired, and it could be set at admin/mod level so that the game would keep track of how much the punishment was winding down and wouldnt require further interaction except to increase it

with a sets worth of turns being set at normal turns for a whole set not bonus points perhaps

the highest food ever got on private was $42 which was considered pretty overpowered

$39 demo with significant tech investment is still a long way below that though

7) Is the only acceptable outcome a tag kill?

currently a lot of people see it that way, and it encourages weird play

some people do things like keep low defence and dont break enemies to limit the exposure of their stockpile just so they have enough cash to wall forever combined with high turn ratio multipliers when walling, cost to rebreak, DH's and sometimes at the extreme level even juggling humanitarians/gdi which significantly increases the commitment needed to start a kill run

combined with later starts to wars annd things getting uneven very quickly you can either have people trying to run out the clock, or you can have people dragging out a war when otherwise people would agree its over

at least those people chasing dumb stats will sometimes attack because they want to stonewall and pad their stats they need to annnoy the other side, some just talk trash on the forums though

but theres also wasting turns on inactive countries

my thoughts to change it would be both hard and soft ways of declaring a winner, the curent proposal is 5k average land to force peace, which if it comes in might fix land drop meta as well

but apart from that start making reports for formal wars, and give points for things like doing attacks and spyops, most pop killed or military destroyed on offence

but dont lean in as heavily to stats that will make people turtle up and avoid tagkills

could even subtract points for things like wasted readiness, or just give war participation forum or profile medals or badges

after the war have reports on how much each tag had going in, how much they destroyed vs used up on offennce, whether they closed the gap of an unfavourable position

maybe even simulate the war on an ai war server then note how well you did compared to thhat

1) this is a question of tempo, it has to be low or wars are over way too quickly and FS has too large an advantage, if formal war start times came in then it can be a bit higher since both sides will be on

2) i dont think the time is the biggest issue, but throttling attacks is possible, perhaps just 1 per second might make a difference, its probably worth trying, but the change i want to see first is capping SDI tech losses so you can get 'enough' sdi then 'extra' sdi wouldnt cause you to lose more, just 1% of enough, or i guess you can drop loss down to say .5% from 1% and see what happens, the insane cost of buying 'extra' sdi currently for low benefit leads to more land dropping which isnt great

3) id lean towards a protection if kills are done too fast, or that needs to be broken before the real kill run giving time to get online, but throttling an option, something like 5 minutes to get online could be worth testing, it would need to be expensive enough such as 25% of the hits to kill so that you wouldnt want to do it on many targets without commuting, then once that time is up maybe limit it so that no more than 10% of the hits to kill could be done in 6 seconds perhaps, the goal would be more about slowing down the end than the start

4) its counter productive to make killing take less turns because then wars become unbalanced much quicker, and FS advantage becomes much higher potentially going from around a 40% country:kill ratio if everything is perfect up to a crazy 80% if it was just made twice as easy to counter falling numbers, and if you make it take more turns then you cant run multiple kills in a day which forces either a larger war or penalises less active people, i guess one potential solution would be if all the NA joined one tag all the Euro another and the AZN a third but that doesnt seem practical

5) i dont know about ideal, its really hard to balance as things get smaller, id lean towards generally inverting walling efficiency at high and low pop which would reduce the point at which you lose critical mass of turns in a war and advantage 'offlining' compared to kill chats, if thats not doable then perhaps a buff to the way bioterrorism works particularly at very low pops could be interesting, apart from that nerf pop regain when DR is high is something id look at, ideally to halve the effectiveness of walling at low pop and see what happens

6) the size of wars getting smaller has to be the biggest problem, if you get down to 15v15 how many warchat leaders and overall leaders is each side going to have? are you going to run 1 chat a day only? at the start of a war with 120(120) things can look fine, but as you have a lot of your countries dead, and turns start running low, particularly for people that try to hit multiple times a day wont be showing up with 80 a chat, youll get more variability as the people who miss a day will come with 120, normally you need 7 people for a kill and if some are dead that drops you under 2 kills a day really early in the war, and you have constant arguments between the people who want to hit at warchat time so people can know when to show up and not hang around for ages and the people who want to hit as soon as they show up or as soon as enough turns, especially when the warchats cant start on time because of enough turns and so people would have to wait around then anyway

it seems current response to wars being over very quickly is to start very late

to stop one side just being unable to kill id like to see offlining stronger but im not sure that would be fun or good

first ill post how i think it is currently:

1)
3 gs/br is what they should get currently
plus 1-2 cm kill assuming sdi
assuming 100% turnout so a fraction of that, probably 70% turnout used to be normal maybe a bit higher now

2)
with only 15 people id expect maybe 20 second cm kill, in bigger war it was lower down to about 5 seconds at minimum

3)
id say a kill is bad if its slower than a minute, and good at about 30 seconds, to go under that you need to waste resources which is a choice

4)
550 is considered normal at 235 hits, they dont tend to be more than that without walling

5)
in pure turns you max out at 18.666:1 ratio for gs, but that can go higher with DH's and lower with bio's
most wallers wind up facing BR with bio and need to sit higher on pop unless the nw difference is huge then returns drop earlier to 10, but that still makes it around about 8:1 turn efficiency

6)
choices here would be FS advantage/tempo, cd/gs superiority, inability to wall large chem rush, land drop meta, walling variability swinging wars, size of wars getting too small

my preference for bot retals is to emulate old school bottomfeeding retals

the basic theory was when a player logs in they look at their recent news and get mad at anyone who hit them the most, but most people arnt tracking who hits them every day

and as a rule of thumb you might get missiled if they had missiles on hand when they logged in but probably not if they made missiles while running their turns

and people tended to spy most targets and even diffuse most missiles

but rather than being fully binary, why not tie it to c:c dr, or just a flat 1 hit a day is ok, but 2 or more could trigger retals

heck you could even make it so the bots would reduce their 'hate' for you if you sent an old style message like

"sorry just a landgrab, have a nice set" style messages that it was really common to send

also if you grab someone while they are playing it tends to make them extra mad

bots might be better set to play only once a day to do that

actually in express you could even consider doing something like allowing buying magic tech at 9999 or 10000 and see how that effects empty markets

nice goals

ive been spying bots a fair bit recently and the public market purchases arnt ideal

i think they decide to buy then just buy everything available, which can lead to a huge or tiny buy, which is nice from a randomness point of view but not from a country strategy one

and good to here the goal is to have countries doing different things, previously it felt like all bots tried to do as well as possible to code then the rainbows were added to be the 'bad' countries


for express if you wanted to make countries go for t10 for casher and farmer which can live without selling the easiest id consider coding some who play delayed, both to wait for food to rise above 29, and tech to fall, as well as preventing them from being grabbed as heavily early

indy is obviously going to survive ok with high defence, and techer can have high $/acre with a survivable endgame price floor but both of those wont thrive with full delay play

being able to run a 99+360 turns startup for a farmer or casher would allow a decent amount of tech purchases to be added to the market early to mid game as well for the first day boosting income then saving income at the end to buy some defence, countries could be coded to pause running turns if not enough tech was available

https://www.earthempires.com/express/591/ranks

i think theres something else going on there, you can see it say 96 countries in express last set

There were 96 countries in the Express server.

but there are countries that exist #97 #98 #99

and #12 isnt in that list at all and i presume there are two others missing as well

https://www.eestats.com/express/oldcountry/2271/12
heres the link to it on eestats

deleted countries still show up, 1 each swingliner and qwertyqwerty and 2 for kahuna
and 1 dead country for groovy land

i checked andd the other two missing countries are #16 and #48 which were alaso killed, so perhaps its a bug with restarts making the first countries private?


and kohhearts all the countries that are in the list have a link to who ran it, the status of the country is the only thing that can be hidden now

sorry for the dupe, im waiting on the next person to do the same thing as me :)

i was just looking through random countries to check how many turns most people get in a tourney set

is the error message server specific? if so you could maybe add that in for the tourney one

express used to be 450(450) i think and you only needed to play maybe 3 or 4 times a set

one of the reason stored turns was lowered was to help fix the market, and putting some turns at the start would help that a bit more with bots

it sort of functions as an additional rest day in other servers, but that isnt a problem in express, and its probably not good for the game to have a lot of rest days anyway, although i like them for things like tagging up in alliance servers (hoping for ability to have permanent tags and auto tag up!), or getting allies set up (although i like express not having allies so again it doesnt apply here)

it used to sort of matter to play fast because there was no 20 acre daily bonus which gives an advantage to waiting to play, and market prices tend to crash, particularly jets/turrets/oil

and with the old 25 acre explore, and the different explore curve it was actually viable to grab at turn 100, so youd prioritise 20k jets sell 5k at turn 100, wait for it to sell and some turns to grab then use that to build up land

theres no real difference whether that happens on 00:00 or more like 44:00 ish in the old game and perhaps 30:00 ish now for 20m servers

i like that express has a short amount of turns because its different but it might get closer to tourney, though thats weird because its both less and more with the bonus turns and bonus points, and express is losing the bonus turns

but overall its probably good to have turns given at the start of the set, particularly on express

https://www.earthempires.com/profile/981/tourney

im not even sure if this is a bug or whats going on

https://www.earthempires.com/tourney/99/ranks/11
https://www.earthempires.com/tourney/86/ranks/15

when you look at the set 86 and 99 country you get this:

This owner of this country has enabled privacy settings!

but most such as 100 behave normally:
https://www.earthempires.com/tourney/100/ranks/29


i didnt check them all so there might be a few more hidden but most are displayed

Since every other server besides express has 22h half life and express has 8 hour half life im sure theres people who start playing express and avoid targets that are in good DR while other people grab them.

Particularly when bots seem to go in very high dr.

https://www.eestats.com/express/country/23

First country i checked from looking for ones with high dr was 7 hits in the last hour. In other servers it would take maybe 12-24 hours to have ok DR. but in express its going to be around half that time. (forgot to post this at the time)

Part of my interest in having some of these rules on the server detail page is i liked the idea of a server with temporary rule changes, so you could have a set with very fast DR reduction, or even no DR.

no real downside

its obviously easy enough to work out how much of consumption is decay anyway

it doesnt need to be complex because if food is dropping then decay will be dropping as well so if you calc it simple that just gives a buffer

the only thing which can cause problems is if you get a negative food boom, earthquake wouldnt matter as empties will produce more food, and percentage of farms is pretty low in rainbow

.4 vs 5.3 implies 7.5% of land being quaked as farms would be neutral no tech, but they have tech so it would have to be double which i dont think they could be

although some of them seem to be really neutral on food

the buildings need to grab ghost acres is really harsh, perhaps more so in primary where people will be in very low DR usually and therefore building gains would normally be full

right now we as players basically consider it as you get 4.3% of the buildings you have max, although that isnt actually how it works

but if it was going to come in to servers where it wasnt already in id much prefer it to come in as a flat 10%

so if i had 1k farms i could grab 100 farms, nice and simple for everyone

the total building part is much more useful for preventing griefing, the matching buildings always felt really weird and over promotes rainbow play

although in primary techer is dominant right? so it would be a huge nerf to the dominant strat which is kind of good, but people wouldnt like it

to address the original question for cuban

this set is the first set youll be able to not only look up what country did the ops on you after the set, but also see who the user was who did it

and although i dislike both cross set reps and suiciding very few tags seem to want to take responsibility for things that happen last set

theres a few big untagged and solo tag this set, but the odds of them being the perpetrators is low

Actually doubling team turns per day compared to alliance is a good solution if your going to allow kills. Because it makes it a lot easier to get kills with only 5 people in a system that restricts killing outside formal wars.

My preference for team has always been just disallow kills to stop the barrier from entry being as high and reduce reward for collusion between teams. And its nice to have different servers where something isnt possible.

Some solo servers are still good options for a server where killing isnt allowed though that would be more to save moderation effort.

But this is a good alternative

Keep in mind they lose the same amount regardless of how many you get though. So although it feels like stealing buildings its more like creating them.

Tech on the other hand they lose how much you take.

Sure.

Interesting that its a 9 and 9.333 multiplier, i would have never guessed that bit differed. Not that the long DR would usually apply much in express. The biggest application of it is in matching grabs for landtrading which isnt the current meta.

Possible additions to the information on server details:

DR half life decay timers could be a new row. To prevent providing unwanted or too much detail it could be phrased in a vague way yet still indicate the difference between servers. Example:

Diminished Returns
This server has standard protection from excessive landgrabs.

Diminished Returns
This server has reduced protection from excessive landgrabs and is slightly less than half of normal.


And for the FFA specific changes they could be all together in their own box and only show up on the server they are used on. Or be listed on every server if you prefer.

Grabbing Restrictions
This server has reduced limitations on land grabs. Country:Country diminished returns, Minimum jets sent and buildings possessed for ghost buildings do not apply.

the gdi expense change surprised me, but it makes sense for servers where you start of in gdi by default

so that the expenses dont kick in as hard as early


and having more info on the server details page is always good

it would be nice to have the DR halflife times for express listed if they are different, but id also like to see it on alpha and alphaffa if they are different, which hopefully they are to make testing way quicker

most of the hidden changes are usually ffa which tends to have different rules for c:c dr, min jets send, ghost acres and maybe one other ive forgotten, but im never certain whether alphaffa follows ffa changes or not

is it legal to drink or be drunk while being armed?

thats the point, we wouldnt kill if it stays 1v1

speaking as someone in laf if you keep it to the person who hit you were usually fine to let you both have fun 1v1

troops 1 1
jets 2 0
turrets 0 2
tanks 4 4

thtats attack and defend valuess, jets only attack and turrets only defend, the others do both

Its funny looking at ffa on eestats because it doesnt work for over 2b nw. Which ironically would be more of an issue in a longer destock phase.

But its not like t10 nw's are hidden in game its just that score page is a bit redundant compared to other tools.

if you wanted to make earthquakes more interesting there should be a discount to rebuild with the same building type, even if it was only small like 20% the same as destroying land

does luck already reduce quakes? its pretty hard to check since its hard to even identify the quake chance, but its nice to know its 4% max

and since im pretty sure weve seen a lot of single digit quakes id assume its pure random 0-4% quakes, maybe with a minimum of 1

even lucks effect on the good and bad booms is pretty hard to get a handle on, and because explore isnt really a meta right now except maybe team and tourney it doesnt get a lot of play

can you do reports on points spent on the different bonus options per server? would be interesting in balancing them

its probably the code variable for how many minutes it takes to get a turn

if you look on these pages:

https://www.earthempires.com/primary/serverdetails

Turn Rate
Turns are given every 30 minutes.

the 4th row says how many minutes per turn, or you can just check in countries, so it faries from 4 express to 30 primary

interestingly it means oil destock will be weakest on primary and strongest on express from the turns, but express has arguably the weakest oil destock already so i dont think that really matters

i might have been running a greasemonkey script that let you do that

i think it triggers off the portal as well as things like old scores or clan t25's, not sure about profile pages, you dont even have to be in a country for bonus points

i dont think it triggers purely from forum stuff though

its also an issue when you dont want to get the points yet because your waiting until 00:00 utc for a server to start

it hurts self contained farmer oilers by limiting their destock compared to pure farmer or casher

the games gotten a bit too rainbowey recently with the grabbing changes, so i guess thats nice in a way but oiler is also the only strat which cant grab its own buildings

obviously this forum is more active so i understand but these threads seem more appropriate for strategy or Q&A forum

would be good to ask multiple questions in the same thread too


best time for alliance is usually last turn of the set on private

i made a slightly different proposal recently:




basically i meant allow the crazy login schedule to still happen but instead off rewarding it with 2 extra turns a day and .8181 extra bonus points a day just make it so if you did bonus turns perfect 3 days in a row you could skip the 4th one but still get double bonus turns when you logged in on the 5th day

of course that could lead to a dumb game of optimising extra bonus turns for FS's but in general it would be casual friendly

and its sort of the opposite of the login once a day idea here

sounds like this one would use the login once a day during a 24h calendar day similar to mobile games or whatever, which for most people is much more flexible, i guess you could set individual timezone to do it at 00:00 based on where people play from or let people choose but i dont think its critical



if your banking all points and turns then its fine to make everyone start of with first bonus at same time, either start or end of first day

if bonuses were auto for premium (which i like the idea of, perhaps limited by staying above x% of recent daily logins) then i guess you could prorate missed bonuses from being on cooldown when reset starts, can even do that without auto bonus's, i dont like it as much but i think its definately worth encouraging people who want to play offset servers


presumably the things to balance are:
1) equality and hassle
2) server load
3) activity