As usual, any changes will occur as servers reset.


The coming sets will have the following changes:

First there are two Free For All specific changes:

1) The number of countries will be increased to 16;

This is to facilitate full def & tech rings.


2) The $2B limit will be removed and replaced with 0.1% corruption on money over $2B
(the 2B limit for food will also be removed). The new cap will be 2^64.

This change is already implemented in express, but due to the sheer sizes of countries & stockpiles in FFA, it only makes sense to switch.




Next some general changes:

1) Readiness loss multiplier for Standard and Planned Strikes, based on gains relative to the attacker's land, so hitting a far larger opponent for a significant portion of your own land will increase readiness loss.

This is to discourage being extremely land thin and making multiple hits on larger opponents.

2) You may not drop below the amount of land you grabbed in the last 72 hours.

This is to discourage dropping of land that was just gained, but allow the dropping of land having recently grabbed.

For example, if a 20kA country grabs 4kA in the last 72 hours, bringing them to 24kA, they will be able to drop 20kA of that to leave them at 4kA.


3) You will be able to self-delete in preferences. This allows self-deletion rather than dropping of land.

4) You must stay out of vacation for 24 hours after leaving it.

This is to prevent leaving vacation, only to play some turns, and then re-enter vacation.



These changes are some general balance tweaks we've been discussing for quite some time ;)

As usual, post your thoughts and comments, and we will take note and modify things appropriately if people note any major flaws in our logic :)


-qzjul, Pangaea, and Slagpit

I definitely think 3 and 4 are great improvements. I think 2 is a very solid but imperfect solution. 1 I think I disagree with. I certainly disagree with it in principle since the preparedness required for an invasion should likely be independent of (or really even inversely related to size). I do think that making several attacks on countries larger than you can be a valid strategy and that this is a measure to protect stockpiling countries from 'suiciders'. With the implementation of change 2 though I find this to be redundant.

So #1 encourages bottomfeeding?
[edit]
#1 certainly seems to be implemented due to recent server activity instead of thought out much..eh

Mmmm I'd not say it's to encourage bottomfeeding; it does discourage making many hits on significantly larger opponents; a couple single big PS's is still definitely quite feasible, having tested that part yesterday and today. Most times you aren't going to hit people more than 2 or 3 times bigger than you in land anyway, and in those cases you don't notice much.

Actually of some of the changes we looked at, I thought #1 was one of the more elegant ones :) As it doesn't penalize anybody who wants to make one or two big hits on bit countries. Nor does it affect a land kill.

My opinion might be persuaded if you saved me the hassle of figuring out numerically how the formula has changed. ;)

Ya, these changes come after a lot of thought and 6 months of discussion.

They are not taken lightly :p

#1 is the only one that worries me - Is this on SS/PS only, or does it also modify GS/BR/AB readiness loss as well? If it's all of the above, I would think it will also make smaller countries breaking larger ones in war much more difficult (major implications to a FS, for example).

To be honest we probably could have done #1 without announcing it and 99% of the community wouldn't notice.

The sky is not falling.

This will be my last post on this thread about this lest i get called out for flaming, but whether you all notice it or want to believe it, this game is being more and more skewed towards a 'Netter Friendly' type of game.
This game is supposed to be about war/diplomacy and the such,not about being able to sit on 100k acres with minimal defense knowing you probably can't be attacked.
May as well rename it 'Wall Street' and give it a new directive.

All the changes are done with the aim of balancing the game, snawdog, I'm sorry you don't seem to see it that way. War and diplomacy are two important pieces of the game, but they are not the ONLY two pieces.

Every change we make is done to better balance the game and enhance it's playability for the community, not to skew it in one direction or another. Like we've said numerous times, we have a vested interest in ensuring the game is balanced for netters and fighters alike, and this is another step to move in that direction.

1,2, and 4 facilitate killing. How does that make the game more "netter friendly"?

boo. seriously boo. Where are the anti-suiciding measures that were promised? #1 is a weak attempt at suicide prevention, it only affects small untagged suiciders and not rogue alliance members. Ah well you can't make everyone happy but I'm not happy with these changes...

wrt change #3... Am I missing something or does this change very little? Don't get me wrong, its a good change (at least a step in the right direction), but it still lets everyone accomplish the same thing.

My recommendation is to make it impossible to kill yourself while having a 24 hour (or maybe base it on accrued turns) holding period before the country is taken out of the game. Not really sure how to properly fully implement this, but thats why they don't pay me the big bucks.

The readiness thing is likely to affect only me, so I hate it.

why discourage land thin countries from expanding through war gaining?

often countries carry large amounts of cash and tech with little or no defense
at swirve a good attacker could move up quickly by attacking these lurkers, dropping the land and attacking again

so now that wargaining strategy is banned

so the idea of carrying cash with no defense is encouraged
why encourage that practice?

to say this site is netter friendly is an understatement

if all you have is netters the game can not grow

why discourage land thin countries from expanding through war gaining?
-> this doesn't do that, as after one or two hits you should be average sized again probably; it only really affects people who continually drop their land

and even if you're "war gaining", dropping your land is not any way to "gain" anything...

And yes I'm aware this will slightly affect players like myself that sometimes play a tyr-parkinglot start, but even then it won't be of huge effect.

Rouge alliance members can be handled between the involved alliances. Nearly all alliances have clauses in their pacts for that exact situation.

I understand where Bobby is coming from... and I don't think we should be basing our game mechanics decisions on politics. We should make decisions based on the game mechanics alone and not on how we expect a specific server to handle it, because while one server has clauses in place to handle that, the other 5 don't.

What happens in Primary when one player wants to suicide 10 of the toprankers, and they plan for it all set? A stock stealer is still able to quite effectively hit them, since you can't really run pre-emptive KR's on suiciders in primary, due to the nature of the server, and that will ruin the playing experience for the players who are hit and allow the suicider to come out almost unscathed. Again, this is generally something that hurts the top-level, elite players and I think that's a demographic that has been driven out of the game for the last 5 years, due to borderline abuse of the games mechanics. At that point, it's not even suiciding, since you don't expect to be killed... it's just stock stealing as a strategy. That is what allows the attacker to grow so much, and perhaps something we should consider discussing in the context of ALL servers. I don't like how we're only focusing on Alliance, as I think the implications are as or more important for the solo servers, as that's where we're going to have new players coming in.

I still stand behind my initial idea I had a year ago to make SS's kill "stock" like GS's do, but have PS's continue to capture, which mitigates this effect but does not remove it.... but I'm also interested in seeing how these changes work before we go mucking around with more stuff in the mechanics, but the stock stealing and growing is a major unbalancing factor across all servers, not just alliance.

i guess im weird, i like the changes

I have to take issue with most of what you said. Stocking stealing doesn't happen on a large scale in primary, express, and tourney. The environment and server specific rules make it very difficult to pull off. There also isn't any kind of motive.

In team and FFA alliances can sign pacts if they wish.

looks good guys :)

i'm definitely in favor of all the changes

good work guys :)

I think it's still highly possible to pull it off in Primary... a little harder in tourney and team, which are shorter and have less stocking.

If we're going to talk about the political implications of rogue suiciders deciding to screw over their alliance, I think it's still generally negative...
When it's an act of war, perpetrated by the alliance in a methodical manner, that's one thing, but when it's just a rogue member who does it for his/her own reasons with no warning, it's his clanmates who suffer. As we've seen this set, and many sets in the past, a single player can greatly damage the playing experience for roughly 50 players, both in the host alliance and in the target, and become a very large and tough to kill country, requiring an alliance-wide effort and a disproportiate amount of effort to kill it compared to the effort the player put in. That continues to not be balanced even with this changeset, IMO.

With politics, many players need to pay for the actions of one through their pacts, and I don't think that's fair to the innocent members of the alliance who were just minding their own business and it's also not fair, politically, to those who were hit to be told to just deal with being given nothing. It creates a bad playing experience for everyone involved, except for the single suicider, whose rationale is often "i don't care about the game or my alliance anymore...".

Why are we still catering so much to them at the expense of so many serious, ongoing players?

The game's best netgainers no longer play anymore because of this. It's been a a major loss for the game over the last few years.

how many players are there on EE?

1200 or so atm?

unique players? roughly 1200 active accounts last time I checked, which is probably about 10% higher than what e2025 ended with on EC/1A.

Most of that is coming from FFA players who came back, and I assume we've lost quite a few primary and tourney players who we weren't able to target as effectively, which is a major regret I have about the transition :p

Yea, I wish we could have gotten all the primary people over; the tourney people too, i think Slagpit jsut about has his tourney project working.

Slagpit the primary environment has actually been very healthy over the past two years as you noted. This is a tribute to mature players not a balanced game.

Hm, I'm not sure how to explain this to you. There's really nothing to "pull off".

-There's no motive.
-Countries have far more military, more spies, and less stock.
-It's harder to find the "top ten countries".
-You only get 80 turns to work with.
-The countries you hit will hit you back the next day.
-The market is a lot thinner.

It's simply not a problem. If you want to solve political problems on one or two servers then say so, but it's not honest to say that the same problem exists on all six servers equally.

Well I lied,i will post again, that is exactly what i think these new mechanics are meant to do, address POLITICAL issues.

The issue of many good players being driven away by a small handful of players is not a political one.

yes it is.

Wow...

1) is way out there.

I have seen some strange things, but discouraging hitting larger opponents is pretty weird guys.

You may as well scrap dictatorship.

The entire point of the game is to be smaller, and hitting up. People don't do it because it's tougher. I agree, that suiciders may be a problem, but removing one of the core dynamics of the game is harsh.

Maybe I am misunderstanding this, but I can see a whole mess of all jetters being made. This will just encourage people to go offense heavy and make more stupid little attacks rather than less, far more strategic ones.

Bottom feeders will thank you. I won't.

I very much doubt that your particular style of play will be affected by the first change, though it's nice to see that you're passionate about how you play. I suggest waiting until you actually play with the changes before making your mind up.

Will do.. of course. It just seemed to be a bit harsh from this side of things.

I just thought giving a larger country a huge advantage for feeding is a bit imbalanced. (and yes, I do approach things from a balance/gameplay standpoint, as I have designed a number of games)

Mostly for me, it's a bully concern, creating a situation where a larger country could initiate a farming run, and be protected by the dynamic. It also creates a disparity for me in that it would seem that the less nwpa you have, the more you would lose when attacked.

But yeah, can't really say for certain until I see it running right? Just thought I would voice how it sounded from this side of the fence. XD

Man, if you left it would be official. Every great netter would have left the game...

lol Bobby..I'm not a great netter... just.. alright.

I was concerned because my favorite strategy for landgaining is a dictatorship mid feeder... who.. hits up. XD

I consider it a challange to see how far I can get without bottom feeding at all.

The only reason it won't affect me much is that I'm running out of targets anyway.

I play a demo that grabs at specific times depending on the market and getting all my land in a couple grab spurts usually being much smaller in land, while I focus on the cash to support the jets and oil. So I'm usually grabbing up and also utilising my readiness so I can hit as much as possible within that day.

i guess this thread explains the lack of "fizz" in country performance, lol :)

err what?

none of this was active anywhere until the FFA reset a few days ago...

Sorry to be late to this forum, but how exactly do these changes 'facilitate killing'? It looks to me like all it will do is keep us from farming the piss out of the other sides breakers before we launch a FS.

It also looks like it will make it more burdensome to retal a big country that is bottom feeding you. If I am getting farmed and buy up a ton of jets to do my retals, I am going to have to run a lot more expensive turns in order to perform all of my retals.

All in all, I think you guys are doing a great job, but 'the game's best netgainers' were always a very small fraction of the players.

Your interpretation is not correct. It will not prevent the strategy that you submitted.

If you wish to look at it in a simple way, the ease of killing a country is related to how much land a country has. Countries with very small amounts of land are vulnerable to landkills. The first numbered change makes it more difficult to stonewall landkills. The second numbered change removes a defensive option for some countries. If a country has a lot of population, it can drop its land to increase tech and spal levels while still retaining its former population. The fourth numbered change prevents countries from putting 2B worth of stock on the market, going into vacation, logging in, spending the money, putting 2B more worth of stock on the market, going into vacation, and so on.

I kind of like #1 from a realist's point of view..

You've captured more land, it takes a larger toll on readiness just out of sheer organisation in the taking of that land. This may not have been an intended representation, but it still makes sense

Killing up does seem harder....

It wasn't changed.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XP8v-PDiQms

never mind

as i have said before i do not understand the admins hatred of hitting up

it is a perfectly valid strategy to stockpile weapons and military strategy and then hit people who stockpiled quick growth items

but they are the ones working so hard to improve the game if they want to ban hitting up so be it
but to me it seems to be based on a faulty premise that the quick growing country is somehow a better country or that its player is somehow better than the player who has adopted a fast finish strat