This post builds on what I talked about here: https://www.earthempires.com/...oadmap-49938?t=1617095819

Please note that anything in this new post is subject to change at any time. It represents my current best prediction for the future direction of the game. To put it simply, I want all six of the main servers to each offer a fun and unique playing experience.


1) TOURNAMENT

The Tournament server will be redesigned into two tracks. The first track is for more experienced players and offers an elimination style tournament with a different gameplay experience for each game and only one champion per season. Each round of tournament will last 19 days and a season of tournament will cover three rounds. There will be three game levels for the first track: A, B, and C.

For round 1 of a season, all players will start in game C. Game C will have NPC countries that do not attack other players. The top 50% of players at the end of the round will advance to game B. The other players will remain in game C. Game B will consist only of NPC countries that can attack each other. Game A will consist of NPC countries running in "elite" mode. These countries will be tuned to play as well as most humans and will be able to attack any country, including those run by players.

For round 2 of a season, there will be human players in both games B and C. At the end of the round, the top 50% of players in game B will advance to game A and the top 5% of players in game C will advance to game A. All other players will be eliminated from competition.

Round 3 is the final round for the season. Only players who made it to game A will be able to compete in the final round. The champion of the season is the player who finishes in first place in Game A. If an NPC country finishes in first place then there is no champion. At the end of the round, all players who wish to play in the next season will start over in game C.

Here is a diagram to show how players can move between different games for the first track: https://imgur.com/a/AxIQiWY


The second track is only available for new accounts or recently created accounts. The aim is to offer a training experience where they can learn the game by competing against NPC countries that play at different competency levels. Each round of tournament will last 19 days but the seasons will not reset players as they do for the first track. There will be four game levels for the second track: W, X, Y, and Z.

Game Z is only available for new player accounts. NPC countries will be present in Z but will play in a deliberately weakened state. They will not attack players. All players automatically advance from game Z to game Y at the end of the round.

Game Y is the starting point for players who already have a game account but who haven't played for long. Game Y will have a mix of players and NPC countries. The NPC countries will play at a slightly higher competency than game Z but will still not attack players. All players will advance from game Y to game X after playing 2 rounds in game Y.

Game X will have a mix of players and NPC countries. The NPC countries will play at a slightly higher competency than game Y but will retal player attacks. All players will advance from game X to game W after playing two rounds in game X.

Game W will have a mix of players and NPC countries. The NPC countries will play at a slightly higher competency than game X but will retal player attacks. All players will graduate from game W after playing two rounds there. Players who wish to continue to play tournament can only sign up for the first track. Players may also opt out of Game W and immediately proceed to the first track.

To summarize, new players will spend between 4-7 rounds in the lower levels of Tournament to give them a chance to learn the game in a less competitive environment.

For both tracks, tournament will not allow ingame allies and will not allow country name changing during a season, even for players with Premium. The turn rate will be increased to getting one turn every 15 minutes. Express GDI will be required in all levels.



2) BLITZ

The Express server will be renamed to Blitz. This server offers fast-paced gameplay for players looking for something more intense than Tournament non-game A and less intense than Classic. NPC countries will be able to retal players who attack them and will attack each other, but will not pre-emptively attack players. Further gameplay improvements are planned for Blitz to improve the public market and to make the first day of the round more exciting. There are plans to bring the seasonal model to Blitz as well to allow players to compete on the leaderboards on equal footing.



3) CLASSIC

The Primary server will be renamed to Classic, but that will be the only change. This server offers solo play for the most dedicated players. At this time, there are no plans to add NPCs to the game. However, that may change depending on country count and the overall health of the server. If it is necessary to do so, NPCs running in "elite mode" as described for Tournament Game A may also be added to the Classic server.



4) SQUAD

The Squad server will replace Team. It will offer a clan-based environment for players looking for a more casual experience. Tag admins will be able to define their tag as a netgaining or warring tag during tag creation. Players will not be able to play as untagged. The server will have untagged NPC countries which are able to grab each other and to retal player attacks on them.

Netting tags will be limited in size to 8 players and will not be able to attack each other or players in other tags. Ingame allies work differently than usual for countries in netting tags. You are automatically allied to all countries in your tag, but will get a smaller percentage benefit from each country than usual. This means that tags that have 8 players will have some level of advantage over smaller tags. Players may also work together as a squad to maximize the advantage gained from having 7 ingame allies. FA packages are not allowed.

Warring tags will be unlimited in size and will be able to attack NPCs and players in other warring tags. The max turns on hand will be lower for warring countries compared to netting countries. Ingame allies and FA will work as usual. Countries in warring tags are not ranked in the end and warring tags are not ranked in the end for average networth or total networth.

Other details about the new server: a shorter than 60 day reset, 200(200) max turns for netting tag countries, 30% max sell size, 2-3 hour market time, and no building expenses bonus.

Squad would use a seasonal approach with different turn rates per season to keep things interesting.


5) ALLIANCE

Alliance will offer a clan-based environment for players looking for an experience where tag protection matters and clan level politics can be important. There may be some restrictions on how tags can interact, but for the most part, it is an expected part of the game that bigger alliances may take advantage of smaller alliances. NPC countries will have the ability to retal players who attack them.



6) FFA

FFA will offer a clan-based environment for the most dedicated players. There will be little to no restrictions on how tags can interact. At this time, NPC countries will not attack players. However, they will attack each other as they see fit to do so. NPCs attacking each other will make the game more dynamic and will hopefully improve the public market a bit.


I hope that the newly defined experiences here are able to better accommodate players who are looking for more casual or more hardcore gameplay than what is currently offered. Now is the time to offer any feedback you have on the newly defined servers.

Hmm.

I will give it a honest go but it looks like team will be dead for me and my boys

I like the overall direction in using very smart NPCs to make up for the lack of players on each server.

For new solo players:
The new player track on tourney is a nice addition, though it's less clear to me if it's the best introduction to the game that would make someone 'stick'. For e.g., while the proposed changes has a 3ish months ramp that's gradual, I wonder if it might be too passive an environment if that's the only thing they did. Ideally, they'd join something like Blitz (a lot of countries grabbing), prob get owned, but it was exciting enough they'd wanna get good, and we route them to the tourney new player track as a training ground.

For new clan players:
No worries. Clans take care of new player as is.

Tourney down time:
It seems like there is a 19 day period where, if you get eliminated, you won't be participating in tourney until the next cycle. I wonder if it's worth filling this void, or just redirecting everyone to play a couple sets of Blitz before starting up the tourney 3 round cycle again.

Squad:
Seems interesting - will prob give it a shot. The ratio of NPCs to players seem key here if netting players can't grab each other (which previously, is a strategy to win too).

Blitz:
Already love the ongoing improvements here!

Team has 44 countries out of protection and 0 DR in the news right now according to eestats. It doesn't look like much happens on that server anymore?

Too early, it'll turn bloody, always has wars breaking out.

Sounds to me like you wanna make alliance really hard-core and basically force war from everyone, and instead make squad a server you can netgain on. I think this is totally viable and I would play both.

You make alliance into harcore war server forcing alliances into coalitions and high level participation which is basically a war heaven.

I'm intrigued about the new tournament server as well.

Last set it looks like there was a 2 tag vs 1 tag war. That was all?

Some sets there's more battle than others, it really fluctuates, hard to tell early on though...

Ya there’s always something to kill

interesting

squad and ffa bots can grab eachother but not alliance?

no building expenses on squad will keep nw's and land sizes way down and cause drastically different market

but if people just give up on netgaining on alliance because "if you wanted to net you should have played squad" it will lead to a weird market there

a lot of market stuff can be fixed by more bots of course, but if player activity ever has too low an impact on market patterns thats not ideal

theres a chance warring becomes so much more fun on squad thann alliance too that maybe people wont even want to war on alliance, im assuming double turns gained combined with half turns max stored

200 turns is 33.33 hours you need to play assuming no need to login more often for 12/18h bonus turns

if its cut to half that on hand for war countries then its 16.65 which obviously requires multiple logins a day to use all turns, or an extended play period of ~4 hours

but the biggest factor is twice as many kills per country per day so wars would be over really fast, but could also be good if the important bits of say a 10 day war is done in the 2-3 days of a weekend with a bit of time for it to conclude, then perhaps a break before the end

If you intend to make a netting server why limit the people in your tag?

Yeah hmm.

I kind of have a lot more faith suddenly.

Enshula brings up a somewhat valid point in that the markets in squad and alliance might be a little wonky if one is primarily a resource grab/war server and one is primarily a resource build server. I wouldnt necessarily hate to see a tournament style merged market for the two servers. Especially if the bots continue to not interact with the oil market, I think larger wars on the alliance server would lack an oil market almost entirely. The netting server being oversupplied doesnt bother me as much tho because it will just balance FFO a bit with other strats. I think if you're planning to have bots hit each other tho, it sounds like they would be interacting with oil. Might I suggest oiler bots for the alliance server?

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Also agree with gains entirely about limiting clan sizes on squad. I would have a larger squad rolling with me in team right now if there were not a limitation on recruiting. Once I got my 5 guys, there's actually 0 reason to spend any time asking anyone to play with me. And people also kind of know if they go to play the server solo they will lose. I think part of the reason team is so empty now is because of this recruiting limitation, and the necessity to have not more or less than 5 to compete for a win.

Having a limit of 8 with a unique bonus based on the number of members encourages some level of recruiting, allows for solo play, and will allow for competition between tags.

It has been difficult to assign tags some kind of meaning when there isn't the typical concept of tag protection. Let's say there was no limit to the number of members in a tag. Why wouldn't every netting country simply join the tag that has access to the best tools? There also wouldn't be much of a reason to recruit more members to a tag.

This eliminates Teams in Team server who like to impose a 1:kill retal policy while netting. It's the sol purpose of why players play in Villains, kills off the culture of why its fun to play in Team, and kills off the reason of why they play Team. So I'm not sure if Villains would continue with these changes.

Is an environment where players kill off new players over a single landgrab a good thing that's worth preserving?

Its a bit odd that you make Squad a server with a distingt netting/war choice and make alliance a dedicated war server. A dedicated war server will have market issues is my guess, unless the bots start making oil based on the oil price at least.

It sounds like Squad is going to be 1a except with a netting/warring choice. And alliance is going to just be totally changed.
It would be more intuitive to make current 1a have a netting/war choice and the squad server become an evolved team server with 8 man squads, 10 min turn rate, too few bots that annihilate you when you look at them the wrong way and basically encuraged conflicts with coalitions that farm and kill weaker non-aligned squads?

Derrick points to this issue of having more or less a war-only server and suggests a shared market which would be a solution, but the problem is that then we can only play one of those servers or we will be able to do market transfers to ourselves. I'd prefer, and I believe it would be for the better for everyone if we could play both.

Yeah I hadn't even thought of it but I'd totally think to abuse it haha. GP gerd. The first thing that came to mind was that both servers would have crap markets without having the bots over-influence the market (think like 2000 FFA bots buying 3 million bus/res/aggy tech per hour). I kind of like playing with some sets having 400 oil and some having 250 and some having 150. If you make bots fix the problems, the value of strats will be pretty predictable, so you want as much human interaction as possible to determine prices. If everything is the exact same price every set I'd probably get bored of the game reaaaaal quick. My idea for a remedy to that was terrible but that's sort of my thinking.

The game is already boring!

No you solved the problem but introduced a new one. It was a good solution with side effects. :)

There aren't any new players in Team :P. But seriously, the best way to avoid this is to allow teams / clans to put there retaliation policy in clan manager so that when a country goes to hit a player in a team / clan the confirmation war page also shows the clan's retal policy as a warning message. If they chose to hit, then they chose there fate.

Then quit playing bro. It's better than being a cancer. Some of us disagree and you definitely aren't helping anything.

Agree totally with this statement. New players should absolutely know I go ham over single LGs, especially when I'm warleading. People like us won't quit playing this way until you make us, so it's just best to let people know up front that is the case.

Based off the plans, it seems the Squad server is where I will be migrating to in future. It wouldn't be surprised if a number of netting alliances migrate over. I do wonder whether 10 minute turns over 30 days is the right cadence. Bot grabbing is already time consuming as it is, the thought of logging in with 144 turns everyday seems like a real grind. I would suggest this server has all the same settings as Alliance i.e. set lengths, turn count, max turns, time to market etc. In addition to making the turns more manageable, the added benefit is it will further provide a clear indication that Squad is for netting and Alliance is for warring.

I also like Gerds suggestion of allowing clans in Alliance with a netting/warring choice, as I do prefer the cadence of the Alliance server.

It's a game and you can't tell me how to play it :)

ttt

how is it going with this?

It's not

ttt

lol.

The last thing the game needs is more bots

I hope tournament and primary never get bots

Short answer is no, team server the way it is now is terrible

Although this discussion is from a year ago and it doesn't seem like any of these changes have happened

ttt