I don't really get a lot of these changes. You're messing with formulas with regard to the building costs and PCI rates that could have serious consequences, the purpose of which I don't really know. It's probably an attempt to micromanage some elements of Alliance play or something. Meanwhile you also implement some simple fixes with regards to removing members from alliances. But unrelenting requests from solo players for simple fixes to remove offensive alliances and tech alliances seem to have gone unheeded, not to mention requests for more serious changes like Express DR.

And then tinkering with fascists and dicts I don't get either. Dicts were not overpowered. I assume all ghost acre changes are alliance-motivated. I won't bother trying to figure out the fascist change since it isn't going to do much, but I will mention Primary runs short on oil supply almost every round (oil is at $589 as of today) - dedicated "oiler" still isn't going to be a strategy likely to succeed.

Do you ONLY play on solo servers or do you just not understand the game? These changes maker perfect sense to anyone who has played alliance or even FFA. Dictator was definitely too strong there recently.

i play much more solo than i do clan play and i would sorely miss offensive allies on solo servers. and remove tech alliances, not gonna happen.

if by solo, u mean u want there to be no player interaction, then go play solitaire. but this is a multiplayer game and there needs to be some interaction such as diplomacy

express dr is a problem that we are currently mitigating through the server moderator, if its the same problem i'm thinking of

Hopefully the call to remove OAs and RAs from solo servers isn't yours to make.

it's the range (say 12 in alliance) times that

so like

min(12,1.05+12*(turns/31.7)^2)

	12	8	2
30	11.80	8.00	2.00
29	11.09	7.75	2.00
28	10.41	7.29	2.00
27	9.76	6.85	2.00
26	9.12	6.43	2.00
25	8.51	6.03	2.00
24	7.93	5.64	2.00
23	7.37	5.26	2.00
22	6.83	4.90	2.00
21	6.32	4.56	1.93
20	5.83	4.23	1.85
19	5.36	3.92	1.77
18	4.92	3.63	1.69
17	4.50	3.35	1.63
16	4.11	3.09	1.56
15	3.74	2.84	1.50
14	3.39	2.61	1.44
13	3.07	2.40	1.39
12	2.77	2.20	1.34
11	2.49	2.01	1.29
10	2.24	1.85	1.25
9	2.02	1.69	1.21
8	1.81	1.56	1.18
7	1.64	1.44	1.15
6	1.48	1.34	1.12
5	1.35	1.25	1.10
4	1.24	1.18	1.08
3	1.16	1.12	1.07
2	1.10	1.08	1.06
1	1.06	1.06	1.05
0	1.05	1.05	1.05

I'll get to those; they're more complicated; the solo servers already reset anyway =/

Also we probably won't just eliminate them; though we'll probably modify a little....

It was intended for it to be cheaper to start; partially because it departs quickly; so over 20kA it's similar cost. I didn't think about war restarts, but that's a nifty thing too.

Yes, I've got the impression that's how you feel. Well, tech alliances don't need to be eliminated, they can be reworked to prevent leeching. But I don't really see any feasible way to rework offensive allies in such a way that a player won't benefit tremendously by having an ally with jets that never attacks. And we've seen that be a problem time and time again.

i dont play alliance/ffa/team. i understand the game, though. http://www.earthempires.com/profile/9952/

Cashers won rounds 14, 15, 16, 17, and 18 of Primary, and are going to win round 20 too in my opinion. So if that PCI change does buff cashers 2% that's bad for Primary. And the building cost increase sounds like it may make it so we never see the scores we're getting now again, which also isn't fun.

Right now, Primary and Tourney are good enough how they are as far as balance and ghost acres and all that. The games run smoothly and don't have all these issues that Alliance seems to have. There's not really any change necessary, except for the leeching thing. Basically every change on that list, from the perspective of Primary/Tournament/Express, is kind of like OK I guess... why? Not something we needed but maybe it won't hurt, except of course the PCI boost and the building cost increase. I am kind of surprised country:country DR survived.

It's not about ending player interaction, it's because the people at the top trying to win don't want to be competing against abusers getting free jets or free tech from a friend or lackey or whatever. And this isn't just me in particular griping, I know Rob, oldman, Xinhuan, crest, Bobby, and probably almost every other player that gets a lot of top tens wants to see this corrected. So I see these odd things getting changed and not things we've been clamoring for for like 18 months in the solo community.

The server moderator thing can work to delete people that are obviously abusing, but DR still remains an issue. What if someone in 30 DR decides to grab me for 2000 acres? I can't hit back. Even if the person got deleted for making that hit (they probably wouldn't be) I still would be out 2000 acres. The main thing needed is to allow players to retal even if the guy hitting them is in DR. The server moderator is a decent patchwork holdover because it can keep people from seriously abusing it but things like the bit described previously still happen almost every round.

Yeah, the only thing I'll add is that the "leaderboards" will now mostly consist of unreachable statistics (the NW ones and Best 3) once the rolling changes goes into effect.

No blid, you don't understand the game until you actually play a reset or two in clan servers, the grabbing environment is completely different, and a very different set of skills is required (market watching/studying via various external tools, DR camping/calculation, news watching for suiciders, reselling goods in a much more larger and thus stable market, are just a few). Another key difference is in warring strategies and warring builds and how to manage and coordinate that together as a clan.

The land situation is so different and that makes Commie Indies the weakest strategy on clan servers (apart from oilers), and techers the strongest - until landtrading became rampant. In fact, the game originally was popular because of the clan servers, and the clan servers were the default game.

I'll even go as far as to say that a top 10 player on clan servers is likely to be a top 10 player on solo servers. But not the other way around. An example is oldman, he finishes top 5 on solo servers consistently, but has never made top 10 on alliance - land is that hard to get without requiring a large timesink (I'm sure someone will argue that spending more time on a game doesn't mean the player is more skilled, it just means he has more time, but most games reward the player that does put in more time (such as the old market camping before SOs were introduced - you can still market camp for goods above SO prices)). Another example is Express, a player that logs in every 2 hours to PS is more likely to finish better than a player that logs in every 6 hours only. I'm ok with rewarding players who spent more time on the game, that is why all-explorers tend not to be able to compete, and that's how it should be.

I'm not saying I understand ALLIANCE, although it would be easy enough to learn, I'm saying I understand the solo servers. These changes aren't needed for solo servers and the things that are needed aren't happening. The changes are all Alliance-geared. It will be sad to see scores go down forever because of a building cost increase Primary doesn't need. It will be unfortunate to see the dominant strategy (casher) get a boost. Basically Alliance has problems because there's no land and Alliance is bad. That's not gonna change even with these updates but these updates are gonna drag down the more functional servers. :(

Clan servers were never the "default" game though they were popular. Primary has always been called "Primary." I played in 1998. And never played Alliance :P

edit: well I guess Alliance was game A and primary game B fwiw.

I do think that perhaps qzjul and Zarcon isn't understanding the solo servers issues/problems because they do not play on the solo servers. It took Slagpit a couple of rounds of playing on them to figure out how bad the suiciding problem was before implementing the GDI anti-suicide restrictions.

I always knew how bad the suiciding problem was. It took me a couple of rounds of playing on them to find a solution that actually worked.

maybe qzjul needs to play on those servers too?

Yeah... let's force him to play on every server. Although that would mean that he never has any time to make any code changes... "Great idea", Forgotten. :p

For what it's worth, I like the changes. They are very Alliance-centric but I don't think that's a problem.

I *am* confused by the need for a PCI buff though - I didn't see this as necessary at all.

Qz has said (on IRC) that this was to encourage more Cashers, as Farmers were the prevalent strategy on Alliance. However, I believe this was only due to the massive interest in landtrading; farmer trader was the easiest to run (not the best, just the easiest), so everyone went farmer trader and there simply weren't sufficient casher traders to make casher viable.

There were still plenty of all-x farmers and cashers though.

:: shrugs ::

We'll see how it pans out.

I just hope that people don't decide to suicide end of reset, within the tag window, and Admin's have no recourse to remove the players.

One question:

Why give cashers a PCI boost but do nothing for farmers? Didn't cashers already make more money/acre?

Yea; Maybe i'll make a subsection for leaderboards under different "Change Sets"

I would love to play them too. My issue is time; find me an equivalent paying job with half the time and maybe....

This is a valid concern that I thought about. My main thinking was that by the time the clan reacts, the set would probably be over. If it does become an issue we could make some sort of detag option if they've made over X hits in the previous X time

It's only like a 2% boost; I had planned more, and decided to scale it back a bit, to see if it changed much/anything over a reset or two. It affects more than just cashers though. Part of my original plan was to boost the viability of carrying larger networths.

Yes, i'm aware of that; I'm assuming there would still be some momentum in the farmer strat numbers, and that even a *tiny* boost to casher, once publicized, would cause some immediate momentum change, regardless of the inconsequential amount.

New concern: The new construction costs formula may make MBR destocking nonviable in most situations, and pretty much make the MB building type almost useless.

I think changes should be implemented based on individual servers. Different servers have different playing styles and applying the same changes to different servers could affect them adversely.

I agree with h20 on this - there is no way to balance all strats across all servers.

Primary is the best server this game has. Yet these changes are all based on alliance server needs and problems. Just my opinion.

Good changes for alliances. I don't see why they need to be implemented on my favorite server, primary, either though.

Primary is my favourite server too heh.

Remove all changes on other servers now! Just keep them on alliance server, its a excellent change for alliance. Good job.

Technically, no other server has the changes yet. Only just Alliance.

express

Primary is fantastic the way it is now.

The land gaining on Alliance server is going to suck no matter what you change. Player made policy limit you're freedom to grow your country unless you land trade, or camp the score list for those couple untagged countries less than a tenth your size. The only fun thing about alliance is the people you interact with in your clans, and working together in wars.

If land trading is an issue on alliance, just delete ghost acres on that server like mehul did. If it's not an issue then just leave it all alone.

the last ten posts: yeaaa that's right!

Last set, we had few cashers, less than 5 plays all x casher in evo.. 5/40 members.. How is that MOST of evo members play this strat?

Its not like the PCI bonus wont affect farmers in a positive way

It's not a population bonus. Only effect would be a slight trickle down if the PCI bonus lets cashers get bigger.

If you look back in the history of EE, generally EVO plays All Explore Cashers more, while LaF plays All Explore Farmers more.

Also, I'm spamming.

lol

Don't apologize, it was better that way.

yeah, right. doesn't have anything to do with buggy advertisements. i didn't click on Announcement forums to get here.

you clicked link.

So the way this played out for me in Express kinda sucked. I had saved a ton of turns to play near the end. With 1 hour left in the set I was sitting on 250 turns.

I was ~2.5M nw and I couldn't LG an ~850k NW country due to humanitarians.

Blah.

Not that I care much about express anyway... but maybe just limit special attacks instead of all attacks?

you might reconsider if low nw all-jetter grabs you near end of set.

bump for FFA

ffa is bad. :P

I am so happy that all of you Alliance server types approve of changes 2-7, but their application in Free For All have changed things, considerably.

qzjul, If you're punishing landtrading, you've succeeded beyond your wildest dreams this set in FFA. Last set my total land around Day 30 was 863k acres. It is now Day 37 and I only have 453k acres... Unless you've doubled the production capacity each building gives this does not help me in my attempts to get a high networth. At all.

@Stryke I would argue that all players on your server were affected by this change, so the playing field is still even. May the best country (player) that adapts the best to the changes win.

Sure, but it blew up the way FFA previously worked and people liked how FFA previously worked.