Congrats to all on amazing finishes! It was awesome to watch.

And special congrats to Cordy on his first ever Primary set and still finished top 5!

I will most likely stay techer as well, though I will try Demo this time

The best way to avoid having to buy troops/tanks/SDI is to be very good at jumping out of NW range after multi tapping someone. If you stay in range, you are going to have a hard time defending against someone who is determined to retal.

But then you have no strategic deterrent left for future attackers. Send a few to send a message and keep the rest in store for the next guy, assuming you have the spies to defend them from being defused.

I got quite lucky! Need more practice with CI. Congrats to all of the top 10. Hard week to finish well with Super Bowl distractions

Darn superbowl, almost missed logging in here too! I logged in with 13 (THIRTEEN!!!) seconds left in the round, all I had time to do was run 50 turns and quickly buy Troops on PM…whew…

The thing is, unless if you are a Fascist on top of the food chain, you are essentially supplying the means to your own demise! Definitely can't add any rigs to my set up now, but hoping to see more oil soon.

I havent priced out when it makes sense to buy oil at high prices vs foregoing attacking vs building my own rigs, but I am sure some folks have!

So what about the oil though...ya'll got any more of that??

Should have sold my stock for higher so you could keep the recycling going!

Quite funny, considering literally almost any bot at that point in the set would have given a larger acreage payout than hitting you (twice, at that) without any risk of retaliation.

Got some early purple action already!

I'm in!

Man, I was so sad when I saw those $199 turrets got sold, my tanks at $575 were a much better deal for $/NW for the buyer, and had 1.8M of them on the market. Had those sold, i think I could have gotten another 2-2.5M NW and sniped rank 5. Maybe. Would have been close

We'll all see who everyone is in a bit over 2 days anyways!

1 tech point = 1 tank = 2 NW

There would be a bit of math involved, but big considerations would be (especially at the end of the set with low prices) that one point of tech is equal in NW to one tank, with the major added benefits of no food consumption or expenses, while also providing benefit to your country. Others like Gerdler or Tmac may know the price points or math for when late tech buys are still worth it given the price

Yes, $500.

Rocky, you may have me too high on that list! It heavily depends on my PM replenishment rate at this point. I think I will finish outside of top 5, but should stay top 10. Need more practice on long-set stocking/destocking.

Those are not the situations that warranted discussion of sanctions. We aren’t talking about players who are legitimately playing the game, attacking other players, and trying to win, we are talking about players who are intentionally griefing and suiciding other players without any attempt of finishing. They’re only there for the set to ruin as many other player’s sets as possible until their country is killed. Then they restart, and do it again.

To be fair it was more expecting a possible retal and watching the networth growing, though seeing this certainly kept the possibility on the radar longer than might have otherwise been

Unless, of course, if there’s an exemption

Nah, you don’t need to do that one, it’s been too long now ;)

I think the others have been run off, one one big one left from the looks of it.

Must have agreed to a land farm arrangement where they wouldn’t retal

Going full oiler may end up meaning you get stuck with too much oil. Having played a big Fascist farmer with only making around 5k-8k oil rigs I was able to supply most of the server. Too many oilers can be painful for prices. Military also normally stays low on Express (sub-$120 turrets) until Saturday, but when there is high demand, all the cheap stuff can get temporarily bought out before then.

Something that definitely could have happened is that some of the players were on at the same time (Express gets turns so frequently that people can and do stay on for a good bit longer than one or few logins per day like on other servers). They could have been saving up turns or prepping to hit and monitoring what the target country was doing on eestats. They could have then seen someone else attacking just like they were planning to do. But if someone else could kill them, why waste your own turns to do so right? So perhaps they watch and see when they other player is running out of turns and jump in to do their own attacking only once the other player has used up all of their turns. Makes sense to me.

Someone else did that to me in fact a few sets back when I was making my own kill run on Hungry. I was down to 5-10 turns and they came in and finished him off within minutes of my last attack while I was building readiness. No prior communication was ever done.

Tech is normally still expensive until late Friday at the earliest, but sometimes doesn’t start to come down until mid day Saturday. Lately with fewer techers and more market manipulation, prices have been a bit more sporadic

The attacker always loses 8% of the units they sent, correct?

The ones that maintain and repair his jets, turrets, and tanks, obviously

To be clear, the whole reason I started that last post was due to Hungry's actions and his alone.

I am also already all-x, trying to beat my last attempt

Have any sanctions been applied?

Definitely agree that allowing the retals by those affected doesn’t make up for the damage caused, but it’s at least a step in the right direction!

Now that you mention it and thinking on it further, I think it might be abusable if implemented as just free land for all. Maybe it would be better if limited to something along the lines of the following rule-set:

- Only countries who have been attacked by a purple-ed country can attack it (and only as many times as they were attacked, minimizes any exploitation and allows those countries that were adversely affected by cheating to get a chance at redemption)
- No special attacks are allowed against a purple-ed country (so that you can't rush to get your land back then sabotage anyone else from getting their land back)

Since these countries will be removed before the end of the set, preventing an easy way to look up who they were, are there other methods of determining the perpetrators? Or rather, the purple-trators?

It's too bad that purple-ing the country takes them out of play. It would seem more fair to make those country owners unable to log in to those countries and folks could then retal their land back.

Whoa, looks like #52 and #6 got purple'd. I guess no chances for retals on those countries now!

@Superfly I think the premise or perhaps intent of your words at least are fair, that attacking other players should be a part of the game, and players should plan to carry reasonable defense or can expect to receive attacks as appropriate. However, the method that this sort of action has been carried out in practice, I cannot agree with. And since I have not personally had any experiences with you, I will only speak to other instances where I have experienced this sort of thing from Hungry.

Again, keeping players honest by ensuring they keep defenses and by leaving the availability of attacks in the game is fair. But what is not fair is spending the whole set outperforming the average and then getting targeted by a focused effort to grief a set. And players have been doing this without consequence for months now. What is the recourse for the players trying to actually play the game properly? Kill off that griefing country? Okay, easy, because those countries are actually trash countries that are purpose built to ruin other's sets, they would have no chance of being competitive in the set. Then what? Oh, they just restart, and target you again, forcing you to kill them again. Every. Single. Reset. Without pause. There is no consequence to the repeated griefing.

We have talked about this before. Grabbing humans is fine given you actually use the land and try to win. Spamming strikes without any intention of competing, but only for the purpose of ruining others' sets is not within the spirit of the game, and this behavior should get the consequence it deserves.

That definitely varies from set to set. Once you have built all of your CS, that roughly sets the acreage goal that you should be shooting for. Once you hit that land goal, and possibly even before, you should also have all of the tech that you need for your respective strategy and can begin stocking. You would probably aim for AT LEAST 25 tech per acre of your primary stock.

As for when to start destocking, you would need to determine how much of your stock you can unload on your private market (based on the total dollar value of your stock converted back to cash and the turns you have left versus the private market replenishment rate) versus the public market. You will want to do a bit of math there to see how far out from the end of the set you can reasonably afford to wait before destocking without paying too high on prices and without having any stock left over.