I think if you have no sense of why a market needs to be reasonable stable and reliable to have a purpose I cant explain it to you in a post, you will be needing a book or a library.

If you go to the supermarket and theres no food there one day you'd be a bit bummed out, you go to the next one theres no food there either and so on. You go to 2-3 supermarkets a day and eventually you find food before you are starving, but its not the food you want; you wanted beef but all they had was pasta and milk, so now you buy what the market has instead of what you want. Next day you do find beef but it costs $170/lb. You will eventually start making your own food and so will everyone else, the trust you felt that the supermarket would have what you needed is no longer there and that is not good for the producers either because when they eventually get a product there is no one to buy it and it rots in the stores. Is that good for your life quality? Is that good for anyones life quality?

This is very much the situation on team server most resets. You go to the market in anticipation of finding nothing. Buying a tech, be it an income tech or a war tech will not be a strategic choice and neither will how much you buy. People rely on long inefficient tech phases to get all the need they want and every reset is the same over and over and over again because they can't afford to believe in a market that only delivers every other reset. Its a selfpromoting spiral in which THE key feature of this game is taken out of play. The market is as central to this game as buildings or the war room but only the market made this game more or less unique at one point.

Any decent country is impossible to make worth killing at this point due to the oil prices pretty much. We can each break bigger countries but the attacker loses 2-5 times more resources than the defender even if the kill is successful. Thats not because of this war thats just because of the oil price.

A techer spending all his turns teching makes $2500/turn/acre if teching residential tech, but $300-400/turn/acre when teching something else.
An oiler with no tech makes ~$3000/turn/acre by attacking, spying, sending missiles, building CS or exploring.
A casher with full tech makes $750/turn/acre cashing all his turns.
A Farmer with full tech makes $600/turn/acre from a brief stint where they made $800-900/turn/acr
An indy makes $600/turn/acre.

Normally techer makes more than the others and cashers are second but farmers and possibly oilers make more than casher in part of the endgame because everyone is stocking their product. This is how it should be because the investment you make in your country is far higher per acre if you are a casher or farmer than if you are an oiler. And a techer has to spend all his turns teching to get his income, which means less turns for everything else. There is a balance that has been in this game where those strats compete with each others over which is the best on a given reset, based on market conditions. This has been put out of play. Your choices don't matter when there is only one choice.

Another problem that can solved with a simple solution.

More players.

People like different things in this game. And just as 20 players came to LaF to fight this war a lot of players quit when forced to war. LaF could fill a war tag and a netting tag both with 25-35 members but we all know that the netting tag would be the one doing all the fighting...

You, sir, are a cunning linguist.

Maybe, maybe not. You should try it

Maybe you could trick em LAFNET and LAFWAR but secretly do the opposite ;)

Yes but if everyone is dealing with the same market I don't see what interest we have with a stable market vs an unstable one. Sure oil got out of control but it didn't determine the course of the war.

Fixed your post to fall in line.

Some notes:

I like war for the sake of coming together with my buddies for a couple weeks every set and tryna rek ppl. Not typically trying to run a gauntlet of chats for 50 days straight.

I appreciate a solid market condition to achieve that.

It's not that i necessarily appreciate laf for the market conditions or something tho.... haha

I'll vouch for anything that isn't this war...

1. You would have been able to keep challenge originals for longer, perhaps throughout the reset, if oil prices were normal.
I may be unique in hosting the opinion that a war is not over when one side has been tag-killed and I would have considered you as winners if you went on to outbreak us, outgrow us and generally outrank us by the end of the reset, regardless of if you got the tagkill at all.

2. More kills would have been worthwhile to other things than just stats. In combination with 1. it wouldn't have made the war less stale thats for sure.

SMH I don't know why people waste their time with you, even after comprehensive explanations you still don't get it...

Thanks for your reply, i hadnt really considered the oil market a big factor in us losing, would have said the big jump was after the war was lost.

Im not sure it had that much effect but you could have kept killing originals for well longer with 150-250 dollar oil.

LaF's hand in the market has never really been invisible =)

I'll start by saying that I have no problem with LaF doing what they do to stabilize the market and to help their players. LaF has found what works to maximize their performance, and they should absolutely do that.

As far as this round's oil and tech prices go, I have a somewhat different take than other. What the market actually needs is equilibrium. And LaF's control of the market is just one of many ways to achieve that equilibrium. Unlike some other servers, Alliance has enough humans and enough bots to self-regulate and get to more-or-less equilibrium. If there is a big war again next reset, I guarantee that there will be more FFOs and that more will think about running unbalanced farms/rigs to respond to market conditions. I have no idea why there were so many cashers and so few (large) FFOs this round, but that won't happen again next round. So we will move toward equilibrium and a more "normal" market even if LaF wars.

Specifically for this reset, I saw FFO and techer as the only viable strategies this round given the specter of a near-server war. I chose techer (mostly so I didn't have to grab so much), got fat fast (thanks to being theocracy), stocked very early at low prices, and unsurprisingly cashed in on the food market and to some degree the oil market. And we in PS were enough of a force in the market that we guided it to work for us, e.g. my take is that we were the primary reason food didn't go over $60 as it was mutually beneficial for us to keep it in the $50s. This was not your normal market, and we were adept at anticipating it, reacting to it, and moving it when we could.

This reset was the most interesting netting reset I've played. While there was still a very large dose of math as there always is, there was a much bigger emotional element in the markets than normal. For example, once you're stocking and planning an oil de-stock, what do you do when oil hits $500? Keep going or do some type of public destock? The public market absolutely cannot support multiple people de-stocking. So if oil goes even higher, will more people consider a public de-stock (and screw you if that's what you choose) or will more people buy more quickly to get it before it rises even more? Just like in real life, the human element in the markets was huge this round, and that made it a lot more fun.

Well the oil destock is overpowered but that has very little to do with normal markets. Any oil that sells for a longer period above $300 is simply wrong, I don't know why some people don't understand that.

And the reason the market acts this way is that there are a limited amount of rational actors on the market. It makes it very easy to save/make billions upon billions on others players and bots irrationality.

I disagree with the emotion arguement when it comes to the oil destock, if the prices were like 350-400 and it was unclear where they were going for some reason I would be inclined to agree with you, but very simple math would give you the answer this reset.

I think I need to clarify again. LaF doesn't 'control' the market, that would be very costly and only benefit a few. We balance it. We ride the wave without creating it, and in doing so we keep the market volumes up and the prices reasonable by educating our members how to build and what to buy/sell. And I am not sure that there are enough rational actors to achieve that with <20 active netters that don't communicate amongst each others.