I haven't played on the alliance server in over ten years, so my information is a bit outdated. I'll go ahead and share my understanding of what the alliance server is and which parts are fun or not fun.

I view the alliance server as a place where stronger clans take advantage of weaker clans.

Positive netgaining experiences:
* Competing with your friends to get the highest individual NW
* Competing with the entire server to get the highest individual NW
* Working together to win average networth or triple crown
* Outrunning retals against a smaller clan
* Making a big retal as a small clan

Negative netgaining experiences:
* Not being able to successfully netgain due to war, suiciders, or other issues
* Losing an individual competition to a country that was heavily aided by their clan


Positive warring experiences:
* Stonewalling successfully
* Leading and participating in and leading war chats
* Planning and pulling off a successful FS
* Winning a war, especially when the odds were against you

Negative warring experiences:
* Getting woken up in the middle of the night to stonewall
* Your warring country that you worked hard to build gets killed in ten seconds
* Spending most of the reset not actually warring
* Not having anything to do after winning a war
* Getting FSed by a larger clan with no hope of victory


Positive political experiences:
* Dominating a weaker clan

Negative political experiences:
* Too many to list

For netgaining, it seems that the real problem is that many players view the alliance server as the premier netgaining server but the server isn't designed to provide that kind of experience. Clan GDI is one method to try to solve some of the problems with netgaining on this server, but it causes other problems and fundamentally changes the nature of the server. Personally, I would like to understand what parts of netgaining are fun and to design a server that provides the ideal experience. With that said, this post doesn't mean that Clan GDI is forever dead as a concept. I am making this post to get feedback from players after all.

For warring clans, I think that the issues are easy to understand.

For players who enjoy the political aspect of this server, I don't see any way to meaningfully improve the situation without getting more players into the game.

What are your own thoughts? If you're currently playing, what parts of the alliance server don't you like? If you aren't playing on alliance, what do you think would need to change to get you to start playing again?

NOTE: We cannot remove outside tools for the alliance server because players would scrape the data from inside the game.

When I have played to netgain, I actually preferred Teams because the bots in alliance seemed to turn it into a land grabbing competition. I am 100% a novice so there might be other strategies to fight against this.

In terms of war, I think killing a country should be slowed down a bit. Or, as we’re talking specifically about Alliance, more that your alliance could do to help defend you. It would be a major change, but something like the ability to pool defences so an alliance could build some absolute monster war countries to help defend their net gaining countries.

Some in game alliance relation tools would also be cool

I think you nailed the big topics. To me, the game gets repetitive sometimes, did you guys ever think about adding small perks that change set to set? Im thinking like if there is a strat/gov that really isnt popular, making a change to benefit it for one set then switching to something else another set? I dont know if alliance is a good place for it but maybe another server can benefit from it.

Also, have you thought about trying any mass emailing to try and bring back old players? Figure you have a list of emails already, maybe send some out a couple times a year...a newsletter or something? I would love to see more players in the game.

Slagpit - I'll say this, and I imagine everyone will disagree with me.


I think one of the biggest issues with any team/alliance servers is the utilization of outside tools. It creates barriers to entry that limit new players from coming to the game and competing/enjoying it. If there is any goal whatsoever, to grow this game with new players, rather than to limit the bleeding of old, I think it's something that needs to be considered.


In particular, bot assisted kill runs that take 10-20 seconds, and stonewalling by getting alerts via IRC pinged to your phone, are hugely problematic. They so overwhelmingly favor only the most hardcore of players, and the game becomes not a test of skill, but a test of who is most available, most frequently, and which side has more turns with more frequently available people.


I would love to see those outside tools removed from the game, so that information had to be figured out on the fly, making kill runs more challenging. I also think it'd be amazing if there was a cap to how many attacks could be done in a period of time, making it so that kill runs had to be done over half a day or more, giving people a chance to respond. Additionally, the penalty for dying is very high. I think being able to get back into the fight quicker would limit the downsides of being killed, while also increasing enjoyment in the game, by being able to play/compete again more quickly.



All of that said - I do not expect many, if any, to agree with these opinions. So feel free to ignore them :P

I like this idea. Maybe even have a server that drastically changes each set, giving people a reason to try again, do something new, experiment. Maybe some sets things are incredibly broken, but it makes it fun an interesting.

A parallel here is games like Path of Exile that have 'leagues' or 'seasons'. The game gets a refresh every 3 months to keep people wanting to come back and try again.

Restart bonus is lame, eliminate that so suiciders cannot continue to do damage to people minding their own business netting.

I've been an advocate for this for a while (see suggestion from 2021: https://www.earthempires.com/...sions-49716?t=1612785028)

Rotating buffs/nerfs would change the meta each set and spice the game up a bit, definitely making the strats and play style more interesting.

This reminds me of the time when Theo and oil were added to the game back in 2000ish. It took a few resets of tweaking to get balance, and that made for a very fun and interesting time as there was a lot of novel experimentation occurring. A similar thing occurred a couple years later when they adjusted food production/consumption and prices and took a couple rounds to get that balance right (though that time wasn't as interesting as the theo introduction). But a big part of this was the lack of transparency. Players were told these changes were being made but the specifics of how they would work were not made available, and adjustments from reset to reset finding balance were vaguely explained. Part of the problem in my mind is that the players know too much about exactly every formula the game functions on now, and it has turned the game into a min max problem.

Honestly I (and I feel like I've championed for this in the past) would like to see more random variability added to the game, beyond the simple earthquakes and PCI boosts countries get now. Add in a randomness factor that attacks will fail even when all the numbers say it should succeed (maybe with increasing probabilities of failure at smaller margins of mathematical attack superiority), you could also do the opposite and make attacks succeed even when they shouldn't at varying probabilities. Make the bots actually interact with players beyond sending/accepting pacts (e.g., make them have a probability of retaliating that can vary based on factors like how many times they've been attacked, attacked by you specifically, your tag specifically etc.) Give them a chance of suicide you if you attack them with similar style varying probabilities, etc.

I quit playing about 10 years ago as well, but I've been active in the community again for the last couple months (and have poked my head in once every couple years to check things out over the last decade) and one thing I've noticed about the game is that is has become far too predictable. It seems to me the biggest (but not necessarily the only) contributor to this is the addition of the bots. The bots exhibit very predictable, consistent behaviour. People have completely mapped that behaviour out right down to the turn. Very precise strategies have been crafted around the bot behaviour. They know the strategy the bot is playing based on it's country number. They know that at A turns issued/played you hit bots with country #'s ending with B with X amount of offensive power at Y NW differential between you and the bot to maximize returns etc. etc. etc.

Playing a good netting country has just completely become a matter of following a script. Boring AF.

You have a pretty good list there.

For netting: Most people never want to be grabbed while they are netting. With how the game is designed, a retal is always possible because even if all things are equal, you have 3 offensive ally slots, which does tilt the advantage to the attacker in all scenarios, provided they have 3 friends to ally. This makes a retal nothing more than a tax imposed randomly by people who attack. If someone is targeted more than others, it creates an unfair netting environment. Then you have the whole top-feeding issue and what is right or wrong to get your land back?

War: Missiles are OP. Spy ops are OP. Walling all night sucks. Dying in 10 seconds sucks. The restart bonus kind of sucks when you have to kill someone more than 2 times– I think after the second death, you should go all the way to zero. Need I say more :p

I've been of the opinion we need two Alliance servers:
1. PvP server
2. PvE server

PvP is your classic Alliance server we have known for 20+ years (with the addition of bots). The PvE server would be a server in which you just cannot attack real players and can only attack Bots.

This gives me a place to play both ways, and I think I would lead to the best outcomes. I think many people would play both servers, but that is just a guess.

I believe the biggest issue is that there is virtually no way to retain the chances of finishing in rank 1 after winning a war. Just by participating in a war whether you wanted to or not is an instant game over.

Another issue is the lack of strategy balance. Players suggesting rotating buffs/nerfs is a symptom to this kind of issue. For the past 12 rounds, or two years, the only thing that finishes in rank 1 was a Fascist before converting over to Theocracy. One exception being a Tyranny which looks like a techer. https://eestats.lafamiglia-ee.eu/alliance/oldranks For the past 12 rounds, check rank #1 country's history.

There is no compelling reason for most countries to buy anything other than jets while playing with almost no army.

The expenses are too high to justify the cost for defense. It's sad to buy defense only to still get rekt anyway. I'm not saying that 0 defense is good, but right now, a serious attempt at defense is not a good use of money if one is serious about finishing in rank 1.

Building a country takes effort; griefing virtually effortless. There is no good way to recover from griefing, you're basically out of the race if someone kicks down your proverbial sand castle. It'd be nice to be able to rebuild faster and cheaper. As of now, construction is expensive and consumes too many turns.

1. I agree that external tools have contributed to the negative experience.
2. Killing within seconds is something that can be done even without a bot. Tools didn't enable this.
3. I agree that killing should take longer. Defense in this game is somewhat a joke.
4. I like the idea of rotating buffs/nerfs, but I believe the market condition should influence this more. As of now, we're lacking balance. Farmers can store with less penalties compared to other strategies which makes farming very powerful. It's difficult for Industrial communists to finish better than other strategies.
5. I like the idea of adding more random elements to the game.

A friend of mine said it best: In general, people don't like the idea of spending weeks building up something only to have it gone in a flash.

Others have given a lot of good feedback. As a small correction to your original assumptions, one big change from 10 years ago is that given the low numbers of actual players and high amounts of bots, people pretty much never grab other players unless they're already in a war of some sort. So some of the really fun aspects of diplomacy and teaching other alliances they can't grab yours is sort of gone. It's hard to think of how that could return though without hundreds of players, because the core veteran group is mostly pacted out, or if not, it leads to frustration where a number of players are unlikely to return. This occurred some even 10 years ago, but with dwindling numbers, it's just exacerbated.

Primary is probably the best example of a server that looks at least a little like the old days, and honestly, I think it's because the way GDI is implemented prevents griefing / suiciding but still allows a choice of aggressive grabbing - and so that's the culture that exists. It's just only for individuals (who sometimes retain their name from set to set as a form of "tag" protection).

Getting to Req's and Auk's point, I think the people who are vying for #1 likely appreciate the PvE experience. That min-maxing that HW called out is actually enjoyable for a number of us geeks (and the numbers are still complicated enough, especially with market dynamics, that there's a lot of 'playing by feel' even if there is a valuable guideline from the numbers).

The PvP experience is good, when it's on your own terms. I think a few years ago, it was sort of in an interesting balance where the war groups mostly took turns warring each other, with occasional sets netting or having players join netting tags as desired (or you could war on Teams and net on 1a, etc). There's a somewhat reasonable expectation that diplomacy would require netting alliances to earn those pacts by having a war set every now and then (which is more or less what happened 10 years ago), but if even a few players aren't interested these days, that's most of the alliance, and given most people are older and in different places in their lives - not everyone can even play that style of immediacy to stonewall or scheduled timings to gather a group for kill runs. Changing that to occur over time to prevent such quick deaths and reduce the need for having groups of players online at the same time would be tricky - most people don't like losing all that work so quickly, so restarts were given more capabilities - there's more balance to be done there I think. And while getting the timing to join a kill run can be challenging for people who have busy lives, having that community experience on IRC or discord is probably a pretty big draw of the game to many (especially after so many years).

The future state of ClanGDI was meant to possibly help with some of that - pacts would still be necessary if war clans could ransom you for resources if you didn't agree to war, but pacts would be binding for those who could navigate into the PvE for that top spot. There certainly could be other ways to meet those needs - and with some of the other ideas, there are certainly plenty of ways to spice things up with and without it.

-Go back to the original concept of Earth2025 ( the more changes that were made, the more folks left)
-No bots
-This is the Alliance Server and not a solo server
-Make a minimum player number to recognize a "Clan". First 5 days of set to achieve or leave
-Remove all outside tools
-Slow down Kill Runs
-Two options to consider....restart @ 50% of all losses OR restart at zero and let your alliance FA you back into the game as was done the original Earth 2025

"That min-maxing that HW called out is actually enjoyable for a number of us geeks"

I'd consider that survivor bias though, and there aren't a whole lot of survivors since the bots were introduced. If they hope for a 2025 reunion to cause any sort of sustained bump, then need to think about what caused what was a relatively stable couple thousand players for many years to leave in the first place.

The goal isn't to be a griever, but to get and understand different perspectives.

The biggest challenge I see is that we have is that we have a numbers issue. We need more players and when we get many of the old players come back, we need to make sure that they have fun. When we get new players, we need to try to be more welcoming and nurturing to them. Thats tough because integrating different people requires work, time and compromise.

The networking and communication that you have with your friends allies and adversaries has always been the driver of the game. There's a political aspect of it in many ways, we are all part of the same community and we all have relationships all over the place.


Farming bots is boring and I agree with the outside tools where people are hitting without even doing spy ops. I don't know how several hundred thousand acre country runs with zero spies.. For a lot of people, It is difficult to have fun when there's suiciders; but that is something that has always been in the game. You just got to run defense and make it difficult for someone to hit you if you can. Clans have run kill teams to isolate and kill the threats for as long as a game has been going. Last round I spent 80 million net worth in the last 4 hours of the round because a suicider hit my clan. We needed to kill him, it's principle. I don't care so much about my finish, but I'm glad we were able to kill him. That was fun.

War has been pretty non-existent on the server in comparison to in the past. That is where we have
been hemorrhaging the most amount of people. There are hardcore players out, and it's a pain in the butt when the IRC highlight enables them to get online within seconds of being hit. That just means we have to target them at a different time and try again. The really well organized groups can do a kill in less than 10 seconds. First of all kudos to them for being that disciplined. We all have lives, families and jobs; constantly warring is a pain in the butt. It's also a choice to wall and commit yourself to that. For many people there's a huge thrill to wall, even if they die.

Not sure why outside tools are getting a lot of flack, they've been part of the game for over 20 years including SMS bots and highlights, they're not new and most of them haven't been developed in years.

Bots need to bite back, being defenseless landfarms has nulled a lot of what made the server fun, earning the respect to net and allying with other clans for defense. ClanGDI was the final nail in that coffin.

I agree with Steeps. Not sure the problem people are having with outside tools?

Also, echoing off Leto. The player base is not friendly to new people. Everyone gets pretty "suspect" of a new player, because who is going to come and play an old text-based war game? So the regulars seem to think they are a multi of some sort.

Slow down KR's. I now fall into the category of the "I have 0 time to war" group, but I do miss KR's that took a bit longer and someone could possibly wall. That would also require more players to finish up that type of KR.

If we are going to continue the bots, we probably need more if the player base is not going to grow?

We have needed the bots to retal for years now. This server used to be about netgaining through war, politics and strategy between the clans and solo players. Playing your turns in some what of fear in the back of your mind if you have enough defense to defend itself after a day full of grabbing.

Warring does take too much time as well. Sitting and waiting for enough players to do KRs, or waiting around to be hit in IRC just doesnt fit with many lifestyles of players.

This server or Earth empires really should not be a "no hit" solo no interaction dead 100% number crunching no consequences server.

https://www.earthempires.com/...-beta--future-plans-47555

When is the stuff going to be updated and implemented? There was a solid plan in place but the execution wasn't there.

Easy to blind grab bots without tools, I'm pretty sloppy and I am at 97% success rate!

Spy carry cost and turn cost to spy (esp. as techer!) are too damn high ;)

Hi Slagpit.

Thanks for thinking about how the server can be improved for the enjoyment of everyone.

I am a big advocate of creating a separate netgaining server for alliances and believe this would go a long way towards addressing the tension we've seen in the past.

In terms for the positive/negatives, I think you've captured most of it. I've added a few more thoughts that came to mind.

Positive netgaining experiences:
* Competing with your friends to get the highest individual NW
* Competing with the entire server to get the highest individual NW
* Working together to win average networth or triple crown
* Outrunning retals against a smaller clan
* Making a big retal as a small clan
* Competing against yourself to beat your PB NW
* Competing to break NW records for a selected strategy
* Netting is a time efficient way to stay connected to this community for many of us who are time poor

Negative netgaining experiences:
* Not being able to successfully netgain due to war, suiciders, or other issues
* Losing an individual competition to a country that was heavily aided by their clan
* Strategies aren't well balanced meaning farmers are OP

Positive warring experiences:
* Stonewalling successfully
* Leading and participating in and leading war chats
* Planning and pulling off a successful FS
* Winning a war, especially when the odds were against you
* Catching up with old friends while idling in war rooms

Negative warring experiences:
* Getting woken up in the middle of the night to stonewall
* Your warring country that you worked hard to build gets killed in ten seconds
* Spending most of the reset not actually warring
* Not having anything to do after winning a war
* Getting FSed by a larger clan with no hope of victory
* Smaller play base often means there can only be one warchat which always seems to be at an ungodly hour
* Smaller clans often won't have enough turns to complete KR which means kills get dragged out and honestly feels pointless
* Warring is such a time investment and many of us are no long teenagers with unlimited time

Used to do 30 second killruns without bot assistance, just calling breaks by hand. (That said, we had a lot more players to work with back in the day)
IRC pings aren't particularly hardcore, and walling used to be an art form, knowing just how many turns you could run, to ensure that you stay alive but don't immediately give away that you're online, or knowing just how much military to buy that it could be a chat runner's mistake, rather than being obvious you're online.
of course, the immediate stop of a run was simply to buy up big, then send a love message to someone trying to kill you lol

Just to piggyback:
BH, a bot assisted warchat can go wrong if the person calc'ing the break ...calcs wrong (throwing myself under the bus).
I can't lead a warchat or set up a bot to save my life. Thus, everyone in ee/earth2025 knows this.
I can't recall a time when there was no warchat bot. I can remember a few chats where there wasn't one used....because either the bot broke or the clan was too new and didn't beg to borrow anyone's.

Just hold enter.

100% Spot On. Burn every cheating outside tool except eestats.

Thank you all for your feedback. My own perspective is that I want all servers to be fun to play on and to each have a clear identity that sets them apart from the other servers. This is not a promise of future development or a roadmap, but the following changes could in theory be done to improve the state of the alliance server:

* Tags can agree to UNAPs in game. These could even be published on the forums, perhaps on a time delay.
* Tag admins can assign roles to their members to limit how they can landgrab players in other tags.
* Players cannot play untagged or detag.
* Special attacks cannot be done unless a tag declares war on another tag and a certain amount of time passes before war starts.
* The restart bonus only applies once per country.
* A player can define a six hour time period each day where they cannot log in but they also cannot be attacked.
* NPC countries can retal

This would make it much safer for tags to accept new countries, would limit the power of an FS, would limit stonewalling alerts in the middle of the night, and would give tags more options to deal with suiciders. But is that enough to make the game fun and to give a clear identity for the server? It seems that there's a group of players who does not care at all about their ending NW and there's a group of players who only cares about their ending NW. I do not know how to reconcile the two groups.

If you could make it 7.5hrs that would be ideal so that I can get a good night sleep :)

Just eliminate all the outside tools then let the game work. Why go to all the trouble of everything you just described above? It will eventually turn in a game where you can only attack someone on your grandmother’s birth day on a new moon during a leap year while Haley’s Comet is passing by.

The game is fine. Leave it alone. Just remove all the exterior tools.

Imagine. You’re a new player. Game looks pretty cool so you give it a go. You’re suicided by your friendly neighbor psychofly while you’re trying to get a handle on the game, but you’re like… ok, I can fight back. So you fight back. Then 30 seconds later your country is destroyed because all the basement nerds got pings on their phones.

How long do you think that guys is going to stick around for? And why? To be destroyed constantly.

If this game had 100 clans and 3,000 there might be an argument for the outside tools but at the moment, other than maybe a clan website or a place to make communication a little easier, ban the outside tools.

Leave the rest of the game alone.

I agree with the Blackest Of Holes 100%.

“I view the alliance server as a place where stronger clans take advantage of weaker clans.”
At it’s core this was designed to be a wargame where the stronger country takes advantage of the weaker ones. The alliance server added the team aspect to this concept allowing weaker players to band together with stronger ones, it changed the dynamic from solo play to who could build the strongest alliance. This was a fluid dynamic when we had thousands of players on the server, now that we’re down to a few hundred no so much.

Netgaining vs. Warring was a debate as far back as the early 2000’s that set many at odds with each other within individual alliances. Many alliances had separate divisions set up for netting and warring (or at least defending the netters). Again, this dynamic has drastically changed with the loss in player base. The challenge of warring and netting back then became a matter of political skill and negotiations among the legitimate clans, while the danger of being attacked existed for all from the multis and suiciders. The building of an alliance, management, development of members and infrastructure as well as political negotiations were all aspects that many found enjoyable, often superseding the actual gameplay itself.

“When I have played to netgain, I actually preferred Teams because the bots in alliance seemed to turn it into a land grabbing competition.”
I totally agree with this comment, the addition of the bots to solely gain land is one of the most significant changes to the game. Along with the current etiquette of not hitting even untagged players for land grabs has turned every set into a race for land without any fear of retaliation. In my opinion this is contrary to the initial concept of the game enabling gameplay with minimal or no defenses without fear of getting hit. 25 years ago, if you had 50k acres with 5k troops, turrets and tanks you would be guaranteed to be hit by non pacted aliances.

“In terms of war, I think killing a country should be slowed down a bit. Or, as we’re talking specifically about Alliance, more that your alliance could do to help defend you.”
I have mixed feelings on this, the ability to kill an enemy country quickly is a reflection on the activity and organization of the alliance. However, with the limited player base it the ability for any alliance to significantly grow to meet competition is greatly diminished. Perhaps having all tagged countries to automatically be defensive allied to each other could bring some balance instead of limiting smaller alliance countries to only 3.

“I think one of the biggest issues with any team/alliance servers is the utilization of outside tools.”
I can’t believe I’m actually going to kind of agree here. Although access to these tools can be accomplished by anyone with the knowledge to do so, not everyone has the ability or contacts to do so. In addition these resources have greatly diminished over the years, the near loss of eestats for example would have had a big impact on individual players and smaller alliances that didn’t have access to other resources. I think eliminating third party sites and making tools such as clan hosting, war and news bots available directly by earth empires could level the playing field.

” Make the bots actually interact with players beyond sending/accepting pacts (e.g., make them have a probability of retaliating that can vary based on factors like how many times they've been attacked, attacked by you specifically, your tag specifically etc.)”
I really, really like this idea. I imagine the bot’s were originally introduced to compensate for the loss of actual players. Enabling to bot’s to act offensively adds a great element back to the game, no longer being able to attack without risk of retaliation.

Right - if the outside tools are imperative to the gameplay, then the tools should be available within the game.


If alerts are important, setup an alert system in game with text messages.

If bots are important, setup a bot to autocalculate hits.

If saved spy reports accessible by the whole clan are important, program that feature into the game.



AND - if you really want, charge a premium for it.





Look - I think the one thing that absolutely everyone can agree on is that the one thing this game needs is more players. More players fixes a lot of problems, and makes the game more fun.


EE has a unique opportunity, a literally once in a lifetime opportunity, to revive a nearly dead game. Over the next 9-18 months, a lot of people are going to potentially poke their head in here.


IF the game has active development, that will tell people the game isn't dead. If there was a server with ever changing rules every month, it'll encourage people to try again, to come back 30 days later. If they stick around for enough rounds, they might just form some relationships and actually become active players.


I think all changes being that are being considered should ask one question 'will this encourage players to come back, or new players to stick around?'


If yes, try it. If no, what's the point? Regardless of what changes are made, if this game got back to 1000 active players, everyone would enjoy that more.

Crusading against the tools is silly, mostly because it is completely futile. There is nothing they can do about it besides removing the APIs, because they don't administrate third party sites. Removing the APIs would make administrating tools less convenient, but it is "newer player" naivety to think it would get rid of them. The APIs have only been around for 13 years or so, but tools have existed since shortly after the game launched. People would just rebuild them to function the way the old tools worked before the APIs existed. It is also a slippery slope proposal. Are we going to demand that nobody is allowed to use discord either? That is a third party tool that allows for coordination and info sharing that creates unfair advantage compared to newer players that aren't part of a clan after all.

You'd be better off (and likely more successful) trying to argue that tools shouldn't be gated behind logins, and to have the earth wiki updated with links to tool sites etc. than you would be lobbying to have all third party tools banned, which quite frankly would be a nightmare for them to attempt to enforce.

Even if they did try to get overly militant with enforcement against third party sites, then people would just switch to sharing spreadsheets like they do now with destocking models. How are they possibly going to stop people from sharing destock and grabing calc spreadsheets? It seems poorly thought through to me.

Just build the tools that are actually useful into the game.

If we are talking about effort being put into the game, that's what should be done.


If we are talking about nobody putting effort into anything.... well then there is no point in arguing in this thread about what should be done, cause it doesn't really matter.

Either it's a dying game, or it's a game trying to revive itself.

Which is it?

Just to clarify, there are great tools out there that enhance the gameplay and make the game more enjoyable. EEStats, GHQ, Market Central, all contribute to the playability to the game. The IRC bots are great if you have access to them. While it's true the game can be played without these tools, it takes some work to do so. I shouldn't have suggested eliminating third party sites, but having these tools installed as part of the game easily accessible to all players would be a plus in addition to guaranteeing the stability of these tools. The short disappearance of eestats is a great example, and LI did a great job filling that gap while eestats was down.

Expanding into clan hosting with these tools available on the clan site could drive additional traffic. But back to BH's point, will there be enough return on the investment and attract enough players back to the game.

On a side note, BH can you stop making so many good points- you're gonna ruin your rep

Warfare is in many ways broken because of the now much smaller clans.

The only goal for war is to kill the enemy countries. That was great when we had big clans - easy to get plenty of turns and all the fun with stonewalling and speed runs etc...

But with smaller clans killing is very hard.

What if we changed the goal of war? Or created a new category of war? A way for smaller clans to compete with each other, demonstrate cooperation and attack skills without having to put a couple of hundred turns online at the same time.

Could there be a way track LANDGRAB wars? Where declared war clans can attack each other for a set period of time and the land gained/lost is tracked and there are leaderboards with appropriate stats. No country outside of the declared war clans could attack (physical or spy op) during the war duration. Leaderboards would be needed to give incentive to be good at this.

This would give war clans a way to get into fights without the large numbers of players required and the baggage associated with the current wars. Since the land gained/lost can be normalized by number of members there can be some difference in the number of countries in the warring clans. And since these wars would have to be arranged it stops the large clans from just destroying small clan for fun. Except in traditional war, which would still be allowed.

This also encourages activity, training in clans again, and diplomacy as clans would have to negotiate the war.

Its and idea. You asked for ideas.

TTT

I don't like the idea of Clan GDI. Clans are supposed to already provide protection. A good clan will. A bad clan won't and learning to adapt and overcome is how a clan should survive. Also if people feel their clan is too small they should recruit new players from OUTSIDE the game. I've been working on it and have seen a few new accounts created over the years.

What if we changed the identity of the server so that the best clans are the ones that are good at both war and netgaining? I haven't figured out the details at all, but something like the following:

* Tag admins can classify member countries each round as belonging to a netting or warring role. A tag must have a certain minimum number of members in both roles.
* Countries in netting roles automatically join GDI and can only perform landgrabs against NPC countries. Only NPC countries can hit them back. Other players cannot attack them.
* Netting countries automatically pay money and acres into a "clan bank" throughout the round.
* Warring countries can landgrab anyone, including bots or warring countries in other tags.
* Warring countries can only perform special attacks against other countries if their clan is at war with the other clan.
* If a clan wins a war then it loots a percentage of money and acres from the opponent's "clan bank". The resources are immediately distributed to the netting countries of the winning tag.
* Near the end of the round, the remaining resources in each clan's bank are automatically distributed to the netting members.
* TNW and ANW are calculated using only a tag's netting countries. We'd also add a clan ranking for resources stolen from other clans.

Under a system like this, clans would start wars either in response to too many landgrabs or to steal resources from other clans. Winning a war wouldn't necessarily mean killing the entire enemy clan. Netting countries in the best war clans would have an advantage over netting countries in clans that aren't good at warring. However, netters in clans that lose wars wouldn't lose their entire country. They would just receive fewer resources at the end of the round.

Thoughts?

I'm of the opinion that the most disappointing thing to happen in the game (besides the player count plummeting) is the culture shift many years ago that implies the two have to be separate. I feel clan servers are already mostly designed to accomplish the goal being suggested by simply allowing large group cooperation - players changed the meta themselves. At some point attacking, stealing resources from, and/or destroying an opponent became taboo and those that joined or rejoined this community after that shift simply accepted it as truth.

Sorry for the slow response. Thank you for working on the game. I would be careful making too many big changes all at once. The great thing about this game is that small nuances matter.

With that said, aiming to equate various strategies would go a long way. FFO is the only way to win right now. Simply capping the building cost bonus may be able to solve this without impacting other servers.

Encouraging wargaining would be great as well. To be effective, the expected gains would have to exceed what the bots typically provide. Because the cost and risk will be much higher. Implementing a country to country GDI, like in primary may be a first step towards enabling more player to player land grabbing. More than one grab would unlock special attack from the entire clan, but one grab is fine.

I think that systemizing clan to clan relationships would also be helpful.

Well said!!!

I'm not sure what you're advocating for here. The players who want to netgain should band together and repeatedly kill every other country on the server? And if they don't go through that effort every round then it's their own fault as to what happens to them?

I agree with primeval here. Large group cooperation is a successful meta. We band together to kill the griefers (like Josey Wales). Clans working together is what makes the game fun.

A more elegant and perhaps simple solution is to code the pacts into the game (and possibly prevent untagged yadda yadda– close other loopholes) so they cannot be broken. That way, an alliance could still pact out and have a peaceful netting set, maybe one set, someone doesn't do the pact, etc. This would still have a certain level of uncertainty but without taking away _all_ of the other aspects of the game.

This would still require some level of cooperation between players. My concern with your netting server idea is that its too much change. You are proposing going from Earth Empires v2.0.0 to v5.0.0 in one leap. Small incremental change is the smart and safe way to go about this.

All that is just my opinion on the matter. Take it, leave it, or disregard it at your own convenience.

This is just my opinion but
Please don't code the pacts into the game. All's fair in love and war. People should Build a strong clan capable of enforcing any pacts made by former clan members years ago that don't play anymore if those pacts are important to them.

How do you negotiate with a group of players who doesn't care about TNW and thinks that it's fun to kill you?

Let's suppose that all clans cared about their TNW. In that case, we could consider war to be the last resort when diplomacy fails because both involved clans will ultimately lose NW from their war. War could be a tool for smaller clans to stop larger clans from bullying them: "if you landgrab us too much then we'll make sure that both of us lose".

Let's again suppose that all clans cared about TNW. We could also consider war to be a risky strategy that some clans use in an attempt to gain TNW. Consider a larger clan doing a landgrab FS of sorts against a small clan. Perhaps the smaller clan could ruin a few of the attacking countries, but maybe the larger clan gains overall. In this case, we would say that the smaller clan needs to recruit more members or they need to form defensive alliances with other clans.

Now let's suppose that all clans do not care about TNW. What is the purpose of war? Well, there is no purpose. War is fought for the sake of fighting war. Isn't the problem with this environment obvious?

I think you're arguing for a different game not Earth:2025's continuation.

It's fine, though. You don't have to convince me. I posted my thoughts. Do what you will, not really a debate to be had here.

What's different between this page between ee and Earth:2025? https://www.earthempires.com/...nce/85/clans?ranktype=tnw

I don't have any emotional attachment to the alliance server and I honestly don't mind that much if it slowly dies, but I'm still making an attempt to try to figure out how the player count could start growing instead of always decreasing. That's what this thread is about.

And that is what my post was about as well. You want to convince me of your opinion vs. just taking in more information—my opinion.

Don't ask for an opinion so you can use it to debate.

People have posted a lot in this thread and I've read every single word of it. But it's still not enough for me to figure out what changes, if any, to make to the alliance server. You are correct in that I'm willing to challenge some of the comments that players are making here in an attempt to get to a solution.

The most popular suggestions in this thread just don't seem to be enough to turn things around.

Slagpit - I think in terms of figuring out how to increase the player count (which by the way, this is the first time I've actually heard an game developer use those words... SUPER EXCITING), both you and Req are arguing two different sides of the same coin.


I actually think your ideas are really interesting. And yes, like Req said it's like going from EE2.0 to EE5.0, but maybe that's a good thing? Change, progress, just being different, might be enough to keep people interested.

However, in doing so, I think it's important to be careful that you don't ostracize the people you have here now. So maybe the idea shouldn't be to change 1A server, a server that a lot of people really like. But rather to do your idea on a different/new server?



Also - just a thought, but I think a lot of people care about the record books. So changes like this might be like moving from a 16 game season in the NFL to an 18 game season. It messes up all the records and history of the game.


So rather than changing 1A which has a history, and records... you start something new. Something that can have it's own history and records.

My bad if I misunderstood your intent there.

My concern is that getting too far away from the traditional game too quickly would be much harder to manage and I am not sure I would enjoy a game that doesn't feel like classic Earth 2025. That is the last opinion I will post.