Immediate Changes & Rolling Changes
-----------------------------------

Hi All;

Firstly we'd like to apologize for the slow pace of development over the past year and a bit; We've been more than a little busy IRL.

That said, there's been some things we've been talking about balancing and changing over the last while; here are some of those changes, one of which will IMMEDIATELY APPLY TO ALL SERVERS, and the rest of which will roll out as the resets happen.

This is an IMMEDIATE CHANGE FOR ALL SERVERS:

1) Special Attacks will be capped to 5x their previous levels (thier unmodified losses), to prevent excessive losses; this should help the CS problem; it may stretch KR's in special circumstances, but not normal circumstances.


THE FOLLOWING CHANGES WILL BE PRESENT IN ALLIANCE, AND ROLL INTO THE OTHER SERVERS AS THEY RESET:

2) Dictatorship Ghost Acre adjustment
Dictatorship will now have a 30% bonus on ghost acres, rather than a 60% bonus on ghost acres. When this was implemented there were few dictatorships playing, so the bonus was kept high to encourage use; now that play has adjusted, it's being moved into the normal range of bonuses.

3) Fascism Oil Bonus Adjustment
Fascism with be rolled back to 1.5x oil, rather than 1.75x oil.

4) Ghost Acres Reduction
Ghost acres will be reduced from 48% to 43%.

5) Base Exploration Change
The Base Explore Rate will be increased from 40 to 45 Acres/turn.

6) PCI denominator adjustment
The networth/land divisor in max PCI will decrease to 18000.

7) Building Cost Increase
The building cost has been adjusted to 3*(max(1,land-1500)^1.05)+1500 instead of 3*land+1500; destruction costs remain a function of building cost.

8) Humantarians at end of Reset
During the last 30 turns of a reset, the humanitarians range will tighten with ((turnsleft/31.7)^2+1.05) with a minimum of the range; (ie GDI, team)

9) Dropping members at end of Reset
Clan leaders cannot drop members from their tag during the last 300 turns

10) Leaving tag at end of Reset
Clan members may not drop from their tag during the last 30 turns


Thank you, and as always please leave your comments and thoughts below. As always this is a work in progress and we're always open to tweaking it.

-qzjul & The EE Dev Team

confirmed! pretty extensive list of tweaks, but should all be for the better.

Facist oilers will be complaining as you just took away income for those who play them to allow US to play the game without going rainbow.

Is your goal to make this an all explorer game? More building costs, less land, less oil, stop ruining the game.

I know it is free, but the more you screw with a system, the worse it will turn out.

LEAVE IT BE!

Hrm.. wasn't the previous Dict GA bonus 2/3 and not 60%?

32% bonus was 2/3 of 48% normal?

So is the new bonus 30% or 1/3? ie, 43% + 13% or 14%

I like new Meta changes :) Thanks for tweaking the strength and weaknesses of certain strats. Makes the game more enjoyable learning different variants to the game as the set goes on.

Are explore dropoffs the same cutoffs? Can't experiment in express or anything :(

sounds like most of the changes are for netters and fear of suiciders and dropping ppl for ANW

where are the changes for warers? what about in a war like SoF vs MD this set where i had a hard time hitting MD already, and now you wanna screw humanitarians even more?


nice netting game you are building here.

Yes i know it's confusing; it *was* 80% compared to 48% (5/3 * 48% = 80%)

now it's 4/3.... so 43%*4/3 = 57.333%

Most of the changes makes sense to me. I do not understand the facsist change though. Since when is oiler overpowered?

no

but the ingame help will still give you dropoff hints


Incidentally, this is the explore rate from E2025 in like... 2005?

Thanks for the changes QZ.

I have warring changes in mind, but they're so much more complicated =(

I think giving less Oil COULD theoretically help oilers by giving less supply... but it all depends on how supply and demand end up going I guess...

So the alliance with the least portion of land traders gets a all explore buff.

Good to see nothing is changed. EVO BUFF!

None the less, it's great to spice up all explore a little.

Would have liked more advance notice considering the reset starts in a few hours, but it's nice to see changes regardless.

Hopefully this puts landtrading somewhere between grabbing and exploring, although it's a bit disappointing to see bottom feeding nerfed even more.

Locket is correct, this is the logic here.

How was bottomfeeding nerfed in any way by this? If anything +explore == better bottomfeeding targets

you forgot how you screwed over c:c dr with bottom feeding, so if you are in tier 3 with that country, you essentially get no GA.

9 and 10 won't change anything, members to be detagged (or who will detag) will be done earlier.

Potentially, something I didn't consider originally.

Sure, yes, but that promotes planning :)

Surely you can put it in terms us simpletons can understand?

err i meant more complicated from a coding POV; ie requiring more time

^ lol. yea. warring changes, for the most part, require a lot more actual code changes, thus also increasing the potential to fubar other essential mechanisms of the game.

That said, since this game started, there have been many good changes to war.

Good to see you guys back in action :)

Nothing like allowing the warring people see what you are planning....especially on such a time consuming endeavor. That way if the changes are loathed you'll know before you spend all that time on coding!

http://forums.earthempires.com/Forum.php?threadid=7063

This is currently my favourite warring related change.

Just wanted to clarify. 2 - 10 will not apply in Team and FFA yet?

PapaSmurf: that's correct, 2-10 are only in alliance until the resets of each other server

I really hate to see a change aimed at reducing CS damage without increasing the normal AB damage. For a non-killing attack ABs were already weaker than they used to be, further weakening them may make it almost worthless.

Scorba, 5x cap isnt all that 'further weakening' it basically just stops some of the rediculously large returns from special attacks when the defender has 0 def.

I still miss the missile market and conditioning tech...

Someone with 0 defense deserves to lose a lot, so that change wouldn't be needed.

The only damage I would like to see reduced is the defending damage from landgrabs both for the defender and defense allies.

i'd argue than 5x the normal max is 'a lot'. what was happening before was rediculous, where as a country could lose all its cs and most of its buildings in maybe 6 attacks. sure, the owner was pretty stupid for having absolutely no defense... but isn't that a bit steep?

And by changed, do you propose it goes higher or lower? i have thought for a while that allies do lose too much. depending on tech, sometimes lose more than the country actually being attacked.

I'd like to see the amount lowered, especially as DR kicks in. The damage was greatly increased going to EE which lead to countries being farmed down in ways that couldn't happen before.

THANKS QZ! :D

I'll go my thoughts on each change.

1. Special attacks capped at 5x. I'm ok with this change, though I think it should be capped at maybe 4x or 3x instead of 5x. Some testing still required on ABing a 0 tank country with maybe 300 CSes and see how many ABs it takes to bring it below 20 CS.


2. Dict GA nerf. This is something I proposed directly in the other thread on Alliance. Good change.

3. Fascism Oil Bonus Adjustment. This is a good change, less supply = higher prices, so relative power of the oiler strategy is stronger as everyone else has to pay more. That said, I think that oil demand should still be adjusted upwards (eg. 1 oil should supply only 15 units instead of 25).

4. GA reduction. Same thing as (2). Good change.

5. Base Exploration change. Buffs to all-explore is always good, because it is the weakest strategy. The amount of exploring land is increased by about 12.5% (40 to 45), this counteracts the GA nerf (where GA is reduced from 48 to 43, about 10.4% nerf) somewhat for bottomfeeding. However, still not as strong as removing C:C DR which hurts bottomfeeding more than landtrading.

6. PCI Adjustment means all countries will make more money (and maybe slightly offset the increase in building costs). But cashers will now cash maybe 1-2% more money. Did cashers need a buff? Cashers are extremely strong on solo servers, and are moderately strong on clan servers, depending on market forces. Smaller countries (in NW/Land) might only see a 0.5% buff to their income, it is not significant.

7. Building cost increase. This has 2 direct effects.
A) It is much more costly to build a large country (about 50-70% more)
B) It makes the -construction costs bonus more powerful.
C) It slows country growths significantly maybe by 10-20% (estimate), because players would have to perform less grabs (use less jets to divert money into construction). On a typical day, maybe 1/3 of the money goes into construction, 1/3 into jets and 1/3 into buying techs and new defenses.

Obviously, it is a move to nerf landtrading, since traders in particular spend more than half of their money on construction (and almost none on defenses), and landtrading will probably see slower country growth by about half in combination with the GA nerf. An initial estimate might see landtraders only reach about 50k-60k acres instead of 90k acres.

8. Humanitarians change. Stops last minutes suicides, nice. But don't really get the formula ((turnsleft/31.7)^2+1.05). At 30 turns left, that gives 1.94562... At 15 turns left, that gives 1.2739. At 1 turn left, that gives 1.050995. What does this number mean? Does that mean, at 30 turns left, you can only attack someone that is within x1.94 to /1.94 of your NW? That is smaller than the GDI range, but you said there is a minimum range of GDI still in effect, so it doesn't work?

9. Last 300 turns no dropping of members by admins. That's 4.166 days on Alliance. I think it is too short. Maybe try 500 turns (6.944 days).

10. Last 30 turns no dropping tag. 30 turns is only 10 hours on Alliance. Too short?


Overall a good set of changes, nothing I really disagree with apart from maybe the PCI buff that seems pretty random.

You think lowering the fascist oil bonus makes oiler stronger? Seems like it's making a bad fascist government even worse.

Supply and demand blid. If there is less oil out there prices will be higher. I believe this could increase it more than enough to offset less production.

Thanks for all your work guys

9 and 10 should be longer.
5 days worth for Admins and 1 day worth for dropping tag

I thought about it a bit more, it seems like this change is broken for countries below 1500 acres. The building cost will be a constant $1503 for all buildings constructed under 1500a if I'm reading this right. (Edit: I verified this on Alpha FFA test server.)

Then it increases from there. Is this intended? All startups are a lot faster now with a reduction of $300-$4000 per building, averaging about $2000 less per building below 2k acres.

At 100 acres: Old $1800, New $1503
At 500 acres: Old $3000, New $1503
At 1000 acres: Old $4500, New $1503
At 1500 acres: Old $6000, New $1503
At 1600 acres: Old $6300, New $1877
At 1700 acres: Old $6600, New $2282
At 1800 acres: Old $6900, New $2697
At 1900 acres: Old $7200, New $3119

At 4541 acres, the old and new costs become the same (at $15123), and from then 4541 acres onwards, the new construction costs overtakes and increases exponentially compared to the old costs.

This change makes startups a lot faster since it costs maybe about 1/3 the original costs of building your first 1900 acres (particularly, it buffs tech starts because switching the 1700 labs into your strategy has an extremely low cost now).


It might be an intended change for war restarts which start with a lot of acres and high CS count, but I'm not sure if this was really intended.

Haven't you guys already nerfed the ghost acres a Dict can already receive with the last change you guys made with implementing Country:Country Ghost Acre DR?

I considered this, however the impact this causes is dampened by the ghost acre reductions which also hurt bottom-feeders.

Thus the gap between exploring and grabbing has been reduced further.

the oil change is largely irrelevant

it just makes being a non fascist slightly less bad than it is now which could hurt dedicated oilers but it shouldnt matter

oil price usually stabilises to a reasonable $/acre income more than anything else so it should be a bit higher, also increasing the benefit of being rainbowish

the rest are all fine, a few changes which might accumulate to nerf landtrading enough, perhaps not

a few politically motivated changes but whatever, id rather just stop the averages from moving as much so people can still be booted if they suicide or whatever though

the one which confuses me is the explore change, which combined with the build cost change could combine to make it even less desirable to kill some countries than it is now

but unless the whole curve and the minimums are changed doesnt really affect the allx/bottomfeed/midfeed/landtrade imbalance we have at the moment much

it doesnt have to be targeted at that but i assumed an explore change would be about tuning allx rather than startup stuff

These changes benefit All Explore Cashers the most.

guess which alliance plays that the most?

EVO.

some help landmongers (traders and grabbers) too since there is more land to grab.

With the huge increase in costs is there a chance the change is slightly too much and now techer will have too many advantages due to not needing lots of land to compete?

techer not needing alot land to compete?

Nope. An all explore techer might be able to break 200m now.