Oh wow, I totally didn’t expect that nor feel deserving, I made so many mistakes (including a fat fingered accidental hit on JOSH #91 instead of a bot #61, drawing in other players too due to my mistaken hit), and learned many things of what NOT to do. I only got there though because of some unfortunate suiciding on quite a few players this set.

Congrats to all who made it through the set, this was a brutal one, and congrats to all top 10.

Looking for one Intel ally if anyone still needs one this late in the set

Very nice win Tmac! Looks like you’ve got the winning formula figured out for express.

Congrats to all other top 10 as well!

I plan to pump out a ton of it later today!

Could be at least a 3 way head-to-head matchup for farmer this set! Would be rather interesting!

I was planning Techer too. Won’t we need a Commie?

I haven’t seen anyone recently try casher in Express.

That’s so hard to do, knowing the prices you COULD be getting! I know the one time in recent weeks that I tried it with not enough time to play I definitely overflowed quickly. I feel like you need to be ready to sell very frequently as Commie. Even more so than techer?

Well I was one of the ones buying a ton of your military at $160+ as I had already emptied out my PM!

Tmac, doing well with Commie! Clearly I need to finally learn how to play that.

Gerdler, did you start late?

Assuming you are looking for the value of “x”, you will need to set this equation equal to some other value first before we can determine the value of “x”.

Something like “3x + 1 = 13”, in which case x = 4

I played more turns but screwed up hard in a few areas and wasted a ton of cash and turns, looks like lots of folks didn’t finish the set though.

Very impressive finish Tmac!

Bonus

While you will want to certainly consider the time/turn investment needed to both make late hits and build the acres afterwards, the bigger consideration is "is it worth the cash". Cash translates to potential finishing networth.

You have to consider the cost of buying/producing/losing units and the per-turn expenses for holding them, the oil you need to buy/produce, the turns spent spying/attacking (vs being used for cashing or something else), then the price-per-acre to build the acres back (can sometimes be omitted if you are farming) plus the turns spent building, and finally the tech percentages that you have will go down with more land, etc.

Once you get the total cost of all of that, compare it with how much money you could have made if you instead spent all of those turns and cash on buying units for networth. Lots of the veteran players here can eyeball that and determine when they have done enough attacking to meet their finish goals. For me, I still throw it all into an excel sheet I made to determine when to stop attacking and to start destocking/netting.

If anyone still needs one more tech ally, PM me, as I do too!

Bonus

Truly awesome seeing you guys at the top stretch the lead so much like that. Definitely something for us all to learn from! I know I’ve learned much since I got back, thanks to you all!

I’ve certainly re-read all of it a few times, catching tiny details I’ve missed here and there. I fully appreciate the wealth of experience and skill all of these players have and am thus engaging in this discussion of potential changes. Looking forward to see if adjustments can be made to make a few improvements!

Best of luck on that rib, those are no fun to break, they stick with you and remind you they are there at all hours!

I think in some cases we are saying the same thing, but possibly talking past each other, I’ll break up the reply.



I did notice you mentioned those are included in the function f(Target_Land) but I don’t know what the function looks like specifically so I can’t speak to that. If my response indicated ignorance, my apologies. Once I understand the inner workings of that function I could propose a better final solution.



I agree, NW factor cannot be the only factor to change the limit. In my proposed change, I broke out MilStrat and Gov bonuses to increase the cap. What would that equation look like with your previous suggestion? Going back to the intent of the changes, neither encouraging nor eliminating the feasibility of top feeds is the intent. No strategy should be auto win (or never win/auto lose), because that creates a stale and restrictive environment for winning. If topfeeds used to be auto win, then a change was needed to make that less so, more in line in viability with mid feeds and bottom feeds. However, the intent by these current changes is to adjust the limit or cap from gains, which currently hurts more types of attacking than just topfeeds. You could be the exact same NW as someone else and as long as they have about 10% more land than you, with all other things being equal, you will lose in a 1:1 trade.



That certainly is an oddity that seems to be an artifact of the previous change. A better adjustment to the limit equation might help address scenarios like these, while also still being in line with the intent of the previous change to limits to reduce top feeds to less than auto wins. Including MilStrat and Gov bonus into the limit part of the formula could serve to lessen those nerfs on those two aspects, which again is collateral damage, unintended consequences of the previous, heavy-handed change.



Duct tape can do a great job to temporarily fix certain issues, but that doesn’t make it the best solution. The previous change may have successfully solved some long standing issues like top feeding or ruining a set but had second order effects on other attacks because it only accounted for one way to fix the primary issue, a hard limit without exceptions. It didn’t attempt to both solve the primary issue and avoid impacting fair, valid attack strategies with a more customized approach. While folks have gotten used to this change, fine tuning this limit equation may well serve to create more successful attack strategies that won’t negatively impact the health of the gameplay.

I look at this as someone who played this game a good amount many many years ago and loved this game. I’m now coming back after a long break and seeing things in a new light, with significant experiences from other games and such, and can now see a few areas that might benefit from some improvement. Is the game great now? I think so. Could it be better? I think so.

Yeah I got a ton of tech stuck a couple sets back when I was doing a demo techer, but you had more land and much more stock!

Per the formula Gerdler posted above, I didn’t think there were any terms/factors that were related to NW, so what would make the grab results different for grabbing a lower ranked, higher land country compared to a higher ranked, higher land country?

I think we are still combining two separate topics. There’s the “top feeding vs bottom feeding” discussion and there’s the “land gained per attack cap/limit” discussion. While they could be related, I’m looking to address the latter of the two.

If there needs to be something in the “gains per attack” to reduce the benefit of top feeding, then that would require a separate discussion but would likely include a NW ratio factor, as Gerdler mentioned before.

For the caps on land gained for attacks, this would be totally agnostic of the networth difference in the two countries. You might have a techer who is at a high networth but low land (say under 10k) and maybe let’s use a Rep Rainbow with low networth but tons of land from all the exploring (let’s say 15k). Even though the larger country is lower ranked, he would win out on 1:1 trades with the smaller country purely because he has more land and because the land gain equation has a cap. That doesn’t seem to make sense though.

The 10% of own land cap seems to be *intended* to mitigate the top feeding issue that was being discussed but the collateral damage to the way it is implemented is impacting land gains in many other circumstances, not just top feeding.

Again, this all comes back to “what is the intended outcome of the change”. The change to 10% own land cap could arguably be replaced with a better factor in the formula (NW ratio?) to address the intended issue and not impact attack scenarios outside of the scope of that change.

Tmac, how do you think you would have finished if you’d been able to use those turns and dump your stock?

Very impressive push for the end, Cordy! Is that the first oiler winner in a while?

So this formula could be something like below

Land Grabbed = min(f(Target_Land), 0.1 * Attacker_Total_Buildings * MilStrat * Gov)

I didn’t see where the ghost acres are accounted for in this equation, and I don’t think I have that formula, so I can’t yet comment on how to potentially change that to be in line with my above suggestion (and it’s possible the additions I made above would be better placed in the ghost acres formula, than here, but will have to wait to see that one)

I agree with your last statement, being able to hit someone without recourse is always more advantageous. In your examples above with attacks and retals though, we can see how painful it is for the smaller country being capped by max gains of 10% of their own land, all those mil strat and gov bonuses are mostly wasted.

That’s why I was proposing that the “10% of own land max gain” be at least changed to “10% of own land max stolen from larger country, and also get more bonus ghost acres than current up to another cap depending on mil strat and gov bonuses”. The 10% stolen could then be evaluated separately to determine if that’s the most ideal percentage or if there’s another that works better.

I may have misspoke, I intended to say the max gain from an attack (if a smaller land country than the target) should not be a total of 10% of your own land, but 10% (or another percentage) of your own land could be the max you steal but the cap for mil strat and gov bonus could make that higher, so the “1k, 1.1k, 1.2k, 1.3k, etc” would be directly stolen from the larger country but then the mil strat the plus gov bonus could be a much higher cap than 10% for the total gain.

I agree that there should be SOME limit, because doubling land like that doesn’t quite sound right, but 10% feels quite low, especially when the gain percentages of SS or PS could get you more than that alone, not even counting mil strat or government bonus. Maybe the way it should work is you only steal 10% (or another percentage) of the enemy land, but can get bonus/ghost acres up to another percentage cap.

In my mind, it’s less of an issue of top feeding vs bottom feeding, etc, although normally a higher land target would be at a significantly higher networth. This also comes up in retals.

Sometimes you’ll find someone with huge land but not a huge networth, trying to save on expenses and not buy defenses to protect it. That could be a mid feed but the larger country would win in exchanges.

Maybe a better way for me to approach thinking about this would be to have use cases then define the desired outcomes.

1) Larger land country hits smaller land country once, then smaller land country retals once. Who should benefit most from the exchange?

2) Smaller land country hits larger land country once, then larger land country retals once. Who should benefit most from the exchange?

They should have the advantage of networth and production from that land to buy/acquire enough defenses to protect it right?

Maybe I haven’t thought about this long enough, but at face value, the formula as is would reward a much bigger country when exchanging grabs one for one, which is counter intuitive. In a war of attrition, the bigger country should win out over time simply due to having more resources (because of the land) to engage in such attrition. The smaller country likely had to have blown their stockpile to even be able to grab the much bigger country in the first place, so they could get only a few grabs while the bigger country could strike back with impunity.

This starts to equalize the closer the land values are between the two countries.

I am sure I’m missing an important aspect here though, so please don’t hesitate to set me straight!

Should that formula be changed to make top feeding somewhat viable given you put up the effort to make that sort of hit?

At profit-making prices for you though too, I would hope! :)

Good insights, thank you Gerdler and Tmac. Hopefully I wasn’t the only one with that question and you both gave thorough responses to clarify the rules.

Okay, that checks out with what my interpretation was so far. In this instance, it seems coordination was attempted via in-game messaging.

What if player A was having it out with player B, using various special attacks, and player C noticed this in the news feed and figured this was a good opportunity to join in on the fun so they also started launching special attacks of their own without any coordination between player A and player C (maybe player B had broken GDI against player C and player C wanted revenge). How is this handled?

So was it the cross-server nature that broke the rule?

Or was it sharing the break?

As a returning player and not being quite so keen on exactly what the nuances of all the rules are yet, is there an “explain like I’m 5” for what led to that player’s deletion? (Forgive the ignorant question, just trying to make sure it’s crystal clear on the rule(s))

Yes those oil prices were rough. I had to stock turns to wait out the market for both oil and Bus/Res tech prices, almost overflowed on turns a few times.

Impressive finish you all. I thought Tmac was unable to play and make the jump then saw the photo finish. I guess I need to look into how oil burning works for PM finishes. That’s a new mechanic since I last played that I haven’t even investigated yet

You get one turn out of storage for every turn you gain normally

I think the intended meaning was "double the bonus". i.e. one single ally can actually provide the full 50% bonus rather than 25%

Yeah, with bots, it seems rather easy and not a particularly unreachable record.

Have we managed to post at least one winner using all of the possible strategies?

I definitely held off because I knew you would be the one with a shot to win and I wouldn't be gaining much other than satisfying my curiosity and figured I could bring it up later and have that answered (which is exactly what happened, thank you both for the answers!). So no worries there, wasn't planning on ruining a set for curiosity. What is the land record in Express, anyways?

I definitely messed up the timing on my stocking, spent too much time attacking and not enough time teching when prices were high. Need to find the right balance.

Gerdler, I will say I spied you at 5h to go and saw your stockpile of turns with the land and knew you were going to win! You had so much tech and even had positive cash flow in the millions, probably due to all that pop. Impressive! I actually was contemplating a PS to see how many acres I could snag, and had the units to do it, but didn't realize GDI locks you out of attacks in the last 6 hours if you haven't been attacked before!

On that note though, would attacking bots make the environment more balanced? As it is, we are all hunting for the lowest DR on bots and trying to go for massive land without much worry of getting it stolen. Attacking bots would change that a bit.

Unless Slagpit knows, this could probably be set up for a test in FFA pretty quickly

Ahhh I didn't realize one ally could fully double you. THAT was lost on me. I knew you couldn't get more than double total though. Thank you both for the details.

Would the formula be (100*0.25)+(100*0.25) = 50? So that one ally with a massive amount of defenses relative to you cannot contribute the full 50% bonus?

I had about 1.5B, but ended up getting most of it stuck in tech. I was not used to the market timing!

I saw this firsthand, and no amount of trying to buy up the cheap stuff and resell as a Demo helped adjust those prices!

I did that about 99% of the time, other than the occasional farming of Agricultural tech early and some Industrial tech to help with spy production, all of the bonus tech I picked up at about the minimum from what others were selling. I just bought it up to resell at higher prices later.

As for selling the tech, I did try to sell a couple of times the day before, but always priced just a bit too high, as prices were coming down fast. I got a bit greedy with my pricing and ended up getting stuck with it.

Yeah I think I also had a shot at top 10 (though probably no shot at winning) with 2.4B in cash/bushels and tons of spare tech, but I was unable to really play in the last 5 hours of the set...painful...might try something besides tech this time.