Cyref- do as you've been told above and take your rightful place in weedylar!

But where did I say I want to play a solo server with solo dynamics?
I was simply pointing out Mehul's intended dynamics where your final NW measured success and war was one of several components that could be used to achieve that goal.

Grudge wars that repeat set after set with multiple tags ganging up against alliances that prefer to use diplomacy and commerce (also components of the game) to compete for the NW title are by their very nature harmful to the player base. It used to be, there was a reason for a war in any given set. That's why the NLS v NM 'bored war' was unique in it's time, and why Imaginary Numbers were different because they DGAF about NW when they went to war.

I too miss the good old days where you had to measure every landgrab against a live opponent; where you calculated to win the exchange even after the retal. But that worked best when there were thousands of countries on the server not dozens.

The neverending grudge wars were not the only cause but they certainly contributed to the loss of players in this game. They certainly contributed to the loss of members in my tag at the end of the Jolt era, when a couple tags with much bigger numbers decided to FS and/or RoR the mostly netting tag I was in with no reason for war and with no concern for their own ending NW.

The introduction of bots was an attempt by the current developers to counter that and I wish the bots would be capable of retal be it with spies or BRs or ABs or missiles or anything except just roll over and explore for more land. And the bots are also dumb at commerce and detrimental to the public market play that was the original genius of Mehul's creation.

Why is it some tags _never_ attempt a netgaining set?

Is it because most of their members have no interest in netting? Is it because to them the entire game consists of building a battlewagon and then logging in at the chat time and mashing the attack button when they are told? Yeah well that can be fun once in a while if ya got the time but set after set after set?
Effing b o r I n g !

tbh i see ClanGDI in it's current form as an attempt to provide netters with an alternative to getting run out of the game but ultimately it's an overreaction to what the warmongers have already done to this game.

Derrick has some really good ideas about how ClanGDI could be implemented and I hope they will be explored.

So RM, telling me to F OFF and go play on a solo server is just your way of avoiding the real discussion of what has happened to this game. Yours is not a serious attempt to discuss potential fixes.

Heya braden howzitgoin'?

But RM didn't say that. He said i should go play on a solo server. In his world my opinion disqualifies me from any form of Team play.

Excuses is all I'm hearing. Don't miss the super team lol.

I think my opinions about ClanGDI are as old as the discussion. As I recall, they've always been well received, and as far as I understand it, the biggest hurdle to climb was just programming hours. I think there's a reason pang never implemented the changeset he was building, and it isn't just that more netters were agreeing with my ideas than this buildout. It's because without politics and such built in, it kills half of the game. Even if he went with his own opinion over that of the community, he could see the impending mass exodus we're seeing now.

That said, people have wanted the expenses formula fixed to provide parity between strats for...the whole time there has been bots. I think it's a little disingenuous to say all 1a wardogs don't ever net. Or, at least, it's a generalization. I held a netting record on one server for a time, and really enjoy that aspect of the game.

I find the netting meta of 1a completely intolerable. From bots controlling the market to land fat FFO being the only strat able to compete for 1st (don't get me wrong...the fact that many have been close but no one has crossed 800m as demo reseller has entered my mind because I'm good at that strat. But finishing in 17th place to break that record has made me never do it. Perhaps it's in some part my motivation and not necessarily the meta. But I like winning, and i know DTR or MBR cant do it).

I think the game just needs to be open sourced at this point, and for players to vote on changes. Anything short of that seems to be people who havent played in a decade plugging in super out of touch changes in response to the handful of people they're close to crying.

It's been like 8 years since an FFO at 350k+ didn't win 1a. And the idea that 5,000 bot hits takes less time than a handful of warchats is actually a lie and completely asinine and disingenuous.

I view it as "players who like playing with the community" vs "players who like playing alone" rather than "treehuggers" and "wolves." Granted, the wardogs have occasionally done wars against netters but there's generally half a decade in between the barage of friendly wars we do against each other.

The goal shouldn't be to stop a war meta from proliferation. It should be to balance a bad netting meta so people like me who are cool with both find netting interesting again. The game is dying. Don't try to kill metas. Try to grow them.

I would dead ass seriously go full netter if 5k bot hits and oil destocking wasn't the only way to win. I think that's important to consider.

Netters always say "I don't have time to show up to a 20 minute warchat" right before they spend 2 hours making bot hits. It's actually a bullfluff narrative, and the time constraint to win this server vs winning a war is much, much more for a general member and we all know it. Every time I've ever won a server, I spent more than double as much time as I ever did in a war.

You do have the time, cyref. You just choose not to spend it with me. And I view that as my misfortune that you prefer not to interact because you're one of my very most favorite people in the game. I'd argue your want not to interact is actually the problem.

In general, seeing as the community is breaking up atm. If you haven't met cyref, do yourself a favor and say hello. Few people who have ever played this game come close to him as a person. I can only hope you can make him interact with delightful conversations, because currently it seems he is against wardogs and says they hit netters at random despite the fact that we all love and respect him and no one has hit MONSTERS in over a decade.

Good politics are good politics. Bad politics get netters killed.

No clan I've ever been a part of has ever touched you netting, cyref, and I've been warring for 10 years straight. If we just hit netters when we are bored, don't you find it weird we have never hit you once? Feels like maybe, just maybe, we will never hit you because you're a nice fluffin guy. And that can't be said about every netter here.

You do, however, get suicided and griefed. I understand when you're netting, it's hard to separate the two, but the idea of politics/war and netting being mutually exclusive is a farce. Mitigating wardogs because of a bad netting meta is silly.

Derrick luv ya bro but knock it off with the gooey stuff!
i'm a grumpy old bass turd and even moreso as the big 7-0 approaches.

It's true i have withdrawn from interactions in this game but i have other priorities, and I'm more of a numbers guy anyway.

Seeing grown men on the forums call each other cowards over disputes in an anonomous online text based strategy game never amused me but now it just makes me want to puke. I don't find stupidity even a little bit amusing any more and is why i rarely visit AT.

I've been playing all-x for a couple years now quietly setting all-x NW records and even just missing a T10 with one (11th) a few sets back. About 4 yrs ago I had a couple wins with repub cashers and many T10s but yeah no doubt FFO is overpowered and when not interfered by war is the consistant winner.

But botgrabbing is not nearly as time-intensive as you describe. I literally LOLd at your "5000 bot hits" comment but you knew that was an extreme exaggeration. And - important to me - i play my turns when i want to, not at some preset warchat time that most often ends up starting late and eating up over an hour of my time. The days of planning my time around warchats are long gone.

You are right, I'm not that commited to this game any more and could easily walk away but i do want to continue to support this game even if just a little by buying EE coin since the owners did save it from an early grave years ago (2010?)
And I enjoy occasional banter with my tagmates.

So yeah as AT became more rancid and more stoooooopid I became more of an isolationist. Does that really make me part of the problem? And the clans that gang up on a netting-preferred clan set after set after set are not?
*shrugs*

Weedylar is one. But yea my response didn't jive. I got excited to see you :(

Set is ending soon.

Are there any plans to implement costs/expenses for joining Clan GDI?

Or qzjul planning to let all the netters going defenseless again with no costs/expenses at all?

A cost has no utility. forcing us to buy (but not keep) troops turrets tanks would be ideal.

Assuming you don't just want to cost us out of GDI so you can hit us.

How would forcing to buy military units work? What would it look it?

My suggestion was that attacking, just as costing oil would consume troops, tanks or turrets on the basis that GDI is a protective alliance and require military to generate that defense. Thereby it adds to market demand of those units without actually all going into military expenses, which a minimum military requirement would do.

So how it would display is something like this:

"You have enough oil for 75,000,000 military units and defensive units enough to for 13,000,000 military units"
and the mechanism would be that for every lets say 250 units you send you would lose an extra 1 tank, 4 troops or 4 turrets (plus 10 oil).

Depending on how much and what you grabbed and how effectively you grabbed it will cost different amounts. Generally it will add 5-20% to the cost of each grab(depending on prices).
If you were all explore you would pay nothing, which is fair and good for the game.
The cost structure will hurt FFO more than anything else and that will work to balance it compared to all the other strategies which the game could use(it wont make FFO bad or anything like that, so curb your expectations). But mostly it will drive up demand for units which have had low demand even long before clanGDI was implemented.

I was worried that cGDI would mess up the market, but it actually didn't. I think such a mechanism as I proposed would fix a long standing problem with unit demand even if it was not created by the implementation of cGDI.

...or just remove CLAN GDI and sack up

If not enough defensive units, when you send the attack it will show a message similar to when you don't have enough oil for the number of jets wanting to be sent..

That could be interesting/fun

There isn't actually much point to it (there is no need to ballance) because with the normalization of organized griefing, any one netting but not in clan gdi will be subject to far more damage than any cost. The greater the cost - the greater the incentive to make sure anyone not paying it is removed from the running. Because of this the only thing adding a cost does is remove from people the decision as to whether they wish to be limited by clan gdi or not.

So should regular GDI be free then too?

This is probably intuitive to most, but fyi Clan GDI prevents you from attacking your own clan members.

Glad it didn't work this time

He would've deserved it.

I'm sitting here reading the posts on how clanGDI can be improved and I started laughing, this is equal to mechanics sitting on a table and brainstorming how they can improve a Delorean....you can't, it was a terribly engineered car......you can try to improve it......you may think it'll work.......but at the end of the day you still have a piece of fluff that looks kool......

The Delorean will still be around at the end of time. But only if Doc Brown is real.

But the stainless steel construction makes the flux dispersal...

88 is the magic number!