Hi!

I'm trying to figure out the changes I'll put in for the next rounds of Alliance and FFA (Feb 9 and 6, respectively).

Not sure what I can get in in time, but I'm going to try and hammer out the following:
- Update building returns cap for attacks to be based on % of total built land, not % of type (for all attack types)
- Re-enable restart bonus but curb how much you get back + nerf benefits of walling (making it more of a mechanic that helps you if you get killed while unavailable). TBD on this.
- Update foreign aid so that countries can send up to 20% of their goods to countries that are restarts (still 10% to non-restarts).


Let me know what you think!
Cheers,
Pang

1 & 3 sounds fine.

Not really sure what you mean by "nerf benefits of walling".

Also,. if you renable restart bonuses, then why up FA to 20%?

Why not keep restart bonus off, allow 25% FA to restarts and give player 120 turns. (but exclude players who self-delete, otherwise that mechanic will be exploited).

Actually the 120 turns may not work either. Perhaps carry over their turns from when they died is better. Since giving them 120 is exploitable.

"- Update foreign aid so that countries can send up to 20% of their goods to countries that are restarts (still 10% to non-restarts)."

Definitely do not do this on FFA. This is a BAD and poorly thought out change. It does not even require explanation, tbf.

And bringing back restart bonus and nerfing walling are both subpar changes as well.

Nerfing the walling aspects of the restart bonus -- right now, you got more back the more you walled

Ttt

Likes to wall. Likes stuff killers r us baby

1.Building returns based on specific building types on SS/PS are a great addition, but like I told you before you have added them in the wrong place or something so they are actually too stringent currently. For more info on this see our previous conversation about it. The specific building limitation for ABs/BRs should be based on total buildings instead but I dont think 10% is at all as stringent as it needs to be. Im not a fan of the flat 10% either way especially for BR/AB since ABs will be hurt more by this than will BRs as their base % is higher.

Consider shifting AB/BR to a Constant%*Modifiers*Min(Target_buildings,Attacker_Total_buildings) so that the attack type, MStrat and government bonus still apply.

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2. The war portion of the game is more interested with a restart bonus imo. I think walling needs to be less powerful in general but what you are suggesting is my least favourite way to nerf it. If its all we are getting its better than nothing tho.

I prefer;
+attack specific DR, that goes away upon taking an ingame action and has a 1hr reset time(no halflife mechanic), that makes a straight GS or BR kill on a non-waller cost 20-100 more hits than today. This will still be viable for many targets but alternatives will be better by comparison, could be that we see more combined GS/BR, BR/CM or GS/CM kills as well as more maiming and offline kill runs(as they get impacted less).

+SDI loss 0.5% on a DH missile, Base SDI increased to 10-20%. This will get rid of CM rushes and they will instead be used to complement GS/BR runs.

+Bioterror is changed to kill no population, but 0 pop growth. This will be an option against turn-wallers.

+Restart bonus changed from 20%+0.06%*defends and 50%+0.06%*defends for market goods to
20%+0.05%*defends and 50%+0.03%*defends for market goods. (I think that people should be ecouraged to wall but it should be harder.)

+Spy changes:
Effective spal for calculations of spy op success becomes
SPAL=Spies*Acres^(-1/2)
AND
Cause Dissention
3% of troops instead of 4%

This was widely agreed on in the thread that discussed it in the UI forum: https://www.earthempires.com/...ussion-47479?t=1566674084

Result: Walling will be harder, and allow more counterplay as well as be slightly less powerful in general. Offline kills, hybrid kills and maiming will be comparatively stronger because fast kills are nerfed slightly. Fast kills are still viable, and in many situations they are the best option, but they are more costly and take slightly longer which hopefully allows for more complexion in warfare than the endless strings of GS we normally see.

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3. Not sure this is necessary if the restart bonus is re-enabled in some shape or form. But I see no reason not to.

I support reduced SDI losses. 1% is too expensive for a big country and it is really annoying to be buying SDI all set.

Not to mention chem rushes at the start are kind of a lame way to take out the best countries easily.....

No warrer wants restart bonus, just turns. Have you ever once considered sending out a poll to all players IN GAME to see what they want?

Not everyone posts on the forums

I have seen several warrers saying they will quit rather than restarting with this. And the only war we have had with no restart bonus has had horrendous restart rate despite being between tags that are historically very good at restarting.

I think fast kills and no restart bonus is a bad design no matter what. You can't lose 2 months of work in 10-15 seconds thats not proportional. If kills took some hours or perhaps days, that would be something different.

From today:

Nerf CD: No.
Nerf bio: No.
Nerf restart bonus: No.
Nerf SDI: No.

Why punish active players? That's dumb. Effective walling is literally the most difficult action of the game. Players are walling with units more than anything, not with turns., and you're suggesting to make CDs do LESS dmg, which would make unit walling even easier. It's like all your suggestions are geared towards netters. There's like maybe 4-5 people who can actually effectively wall with turns.

Missiles seem to only matter on FS. I stare at DHs all set long. You make missiles do less damage, then they'll become irrelevant. 20 players using the most powerful attacking unit should be able to kill 1-2 players in beginning. Especially if they all have like 20-30 each. It just makes sense to me.

The no restart bonus needs to stay off. The only part that perhaps should change are the number of turns you begin with.

If people are more keen to get full turns + stored turned over a restart bonus that's easy enough to code in.

I've gotten a lot of mixed feedback on the restart bonus from ppl fighting this round. Folks here seem to want it off for the most part, but other folks who have messaged me privately want it restored as-is.

I like allowing other clan members to help their restarts get back into the fight quickly by providing a higher % of FA so if that alone feels like a good change I'll look at doing that!

That couldn't be further removed from the truth. It has everything to do with availability and preferably being on a computer.

I am one of the better wallers in this game not because of skill lol. I seek to level the playing field so that others can better compete with me, and you want to keep your advantage. Seems like you are the one trying to gear the game to benefit yourself.

I mostly think that a text based game shouldn't require of players 24/7 15 second availability to be effective. It's not sensible considering the demographic now playing this game.

My bio suggestion is not a nerf to bioterror, it makes it more powerful in conjunction with other attacks.

I actually buffed restart bonus, but who is counting? :P

I actually buffed SDI greatly, but again who is counting?

I do see your point about missiles. If SDI is made stronger to counter chem kills it makes sense that the weak NMs and cruise missiles that everyone keeps throwing on bots to make room for more CMs should be buffed to compensate. I would give a flat buff EMs and give nukes a new purpose that makes them more useful in an extended war.

Hard earned missiles should not be wasted.

And when it comes to CDs it was actually widely agreed between warrers mostly that they are too strong if you read the thread I linked. Most posters were from SOL and Elders even tho netters from LaF, Monsters and PS all agreed with it. CDs are super powerful and you are using them every day because of it, because you think its more powerful even than attacking. It makes sense imo to nerf the aspects of the game that are considered the strongest so that it challenges players to find new optimal ways to play. And since most netters and most warrers (very much including you) think that CDs are very strong, they can afford to be slightly weakened.

Either way, don't make FFA restart FA be 20% unless you want people to eat their cake and have it too.

I think a modification to reduce the restart bonus and
/or add a one and done as discussed before would be welcomed by many. Dropping the restart bonus altogether no matter how many turns you start with will make people quit.

@Gerdler:

"That couldn't be further removed from the truth. It has everything to do with availability and preferably being on a computer."

What action in EE is harder than walling at < 150 population against 20 people?

Your bio suggestions would make logging in to wall with turns pointless.

Also tfm0m0 does have a point. As much as I don't like restart bonuses people will probably quit because they feel so far behind and war leaders fail to effectively FA restarts.

10 countries FA'ing any dead country should put you back into the fight. The problem is 1. people are too selfish to send their resources or 2. no direction given to members to FA killed countries.

Effective restart FA used to win wars...

When there were how many players?

1) buildings, thats fine but i do like gerdlers idea of just letting you actually get 10% of each type of building you have

2) restart bonus being inverted is what i wanted for years
the reward of stonewalling is wasting attackers turns and the opportunity to use your stockpile to do so, you should get a reward for choosing not to use stockpile and getting more of it back later, if you really needed to you could unlink various types of resources since the only things that really need to be use it or lose it are food and cash, with oil a bit less so, and tech kind of situational

3) foreign aid change might be a good idea, increases flexibility so you can just send 20% of cash if you want rather than 10% of everything then people have to sell it for cash

i like the idea of some or all of normal restart bonus instead turning into an FA pool which gets used up instead of your own stuff when you send FA to restarts, could be combined with the 20% so if you sent over 10% it used the pool if available, or so it just took half of what you sent out of the pool

the people complaining are probably worried about self killing a country early in FFA then top down FA it all set so you equalise closer to 4 days of income on hand rather than 9

i think the idea here is to make a smaller restart bonus and easier FA combined to take some of the dead time out of wars

even next to 0% bonus on restarts would probably bring back the 20 turn protection, and the on death unused turns carry over, which would swing things a long way, id kind of like to see some on death turns lost, or the cap be a lot lower like 120 instead of 120(120) or those turns be instantly usable and spent only in protection on growth

but other options that can be used are lessening humanitarian restrictions for restarts (perhaps also for formal wars in general!) and putting some or all of the restart bonus in a FA pool that would go to the tag the restart died in and only be available to sending to restarts in that tag

create an extra good that boosts nw dramatically but has low upkeep, and low sell value, could be an extra mil/tech/good but i think the simplest option would be a building that had very high nw that you could only build as a restart, and maybe only in protection, or that you got more of later in the restart, another option would be a sort of reverse gdi that instead of reducing your humanitarians range it increased it, that might actually be the least problematic change to breaking other things and could be shown instead of G and GDI Member

thats has the extra effect of increasing decision making and interactivity while not providing any advantage to solo suiciders

my suggestions would be

1) actual 10% buildings cap
2) shortened protection and some turns on death
3) 20% restart foreign aid - combined with an FA pool
4) relaxed humanitarians - or virtual nw boost to restarts
5) implement your show prior country on country search idea

i dont really want to see restart bonus come back but if it did
6) inverted much lower restart bonus

and then to address the other changes people brought up

1) sdi losses capped at 1% losses at 99% of max sdi
maxloss = 0.01 * techpointsfor99%ofmaxtech
that sort of thing

so if you want to way overbuy SDI you arnt punished for it and it still costs the same amount to stop missiles as if you were logged in buying it, otherwise if you buy 200% or 300% of what you need you end up losing huge amounts of stock equivalent on a DH

2) bioterrorism changes
currently at low pops it reduces regain by half, changing it to be zero isnt a huge deal, and would make medical tech more valuable which isnt a bad thing
the big effect would be potentially reducing stonewalling turn effectiveness a lot when on super low pop which isnt a bad thing

3) cd nerf
has been long needed
especially with restarts having no bonus currently, and if it does come back presumably it being lower, there has been a big loss in effectiveness of BR kills

in the current SoF vs Elders war Elders ran a lot of BR's early because SoF had very low turrets, but that caused Elders to spend a lot of stock increasing jets instead of troops and so they were also very easy, and cheaper for SoF to kill in return

and sof did no br kills, when they could have easily done some with the stock and breaker and income advantage

4) attack specific DR
mixed feeling on this idea, its not bad but id try other things first, (particularly a CD nerf) and start it off small to slightly incentivise it rather than going heavy from the start

Well I know more people who can do that than I know who can see what price to sell tech at and where the market is heading.

I know fewer people who can grab at a level that is needed to win 1a.

I know fewer people who have won 2 sets of any server back to back.

I know fewer people who can get 900m NW in Alliance when LaF nets (Its much harder when laf nets since the market is decently in check most of the set and the bots are farmed harder).

Its harder to win expess with a casher than it is to wall well.

Walling well, if you are at a computer, is about as hard as finding the right BPT in terms of skill. I know some people wall well on mobile, I dont think that is much skill either, just tedious and demands a bit more experience and more time to learn how much time everything takes and so on. Because I have a PC I generally just try to manipulate my enemy to hit me when I'm on it, which may take some skill, but that is beside the point. The actual walling is just clicking the same button and hitting back + repeat in decently the right tempo but the real difference comes from just being there, you dont have to even be efficient at walling its a huge cost for the enemy if you just logged in.

I know also a lot of people who can wall but choose not to. I'm confident that several of them are just as "skilled" at walling as I am because there really isnt much skill in it. Theres some "skill" learned by experience for example how fast you need to be, how many turns you need to take at once or how many units you need to buy, I guess it took me about 4-5 attempts at walling til I walled 2k hits my first time, and I have not learned much since except not to use hexchat.

If you look at my list of suggestions only the bioterror change is a marginal nerf to walling. The others are actually a buff to walling, in that they make kills take slightly longer (more hits and/or changing attack types take more time, which leaves more time to login). It is a nerf to fast, cheap gs kills and fast cm rushes, hopefully forcing a wider array of combinations of attack types that will help slower wallers get online fast enough.

Bro, link me a country you've walled with that you call good.

The # of defends is not an indicator if you're a good waller. It's a player who maximizes gained population vs loss population from a hit.

If you link me you walling at 7+ civs, that's not efficient walling.

Many of the netting accomplishments you listed requires a cohesive effort. You can guide your clan to do certain actions & you have access to certain tools which identify the best bots to hit that not all players have. I'm not going to sit here and say you're not a good netter. You're obviously one of the best ones, but let's keep it real, everyone has the same ability to wall and log into IRC with no extra tools needed & monitor their population and time when to gain population. It's an action that requires a great deal of skill and is not impacted as much as netting achievements.

Walling from phone is moot, I even had the warbot text me and I logged in within 3 seconds, as soon as I went to next screen I was dead, 5/5 fails at walling.

Yeah' don't use the warbot, its too slow, it can be a good auxillary tho. Depending on where you are and your provider it can take 5-20 seconds before you get the text. Use highlights. If I didn't tell you that its my fault, but I'm sure I did. :)

Problem with that is that you need to be in the room in order to see the screen flash :-/

The fastest reply is going to be from IRC. In fact, before any API gets the attack data, IRC gets it first.

KoH what kind of phone do you have?

Also,. for the readers in room,. Gerd and I chat a lot on IRC. We say what's on our minds and don't take it personal.

Braaaap

Droid, haven't been on the chat with my new phone though, I have the latest Motorola.

KoH I use irccloud.com

It's free, however if you want persistent connection you have to pay $5 a month. I've never had an issue with them.

Thanks for all the feedback!!

I've done a little work getting ready for these changes and am putting the following suff out for more discussion as this is what I have coded:

- Building returns from all attacks are based on 10% of attacker's total built acres, not 10% of each  specific building. This should mean that any country that has built the majority of its land will get regular returns for buildings.
- Restart bonus is re-enabled with the following changes:
  - Number of defends before dying no longer has any impact on the restart aid calculation
  - All restarts will receive 25% of their original country's resources at the time of death as the base calculation for resources to restore on the restart, rather than up to 95%
  - All restart will receive 50% of their original country's resources on the market at the time of death, rather than up to 95%
  - Turns, bonus points, etc will be counted the same way as before
- When looking up a restart country in-game through the country search, the original country # will be available on the search results page
- Still weighing how to handle the increased aid % for restarts

Anyway, let me know your thoughts!

I think thats a good start to at least try out, we can adjust from there if needed!

Thanks :)

+1 for suiciders eh?

I'm not sure i'll have time to add it, but I was also thinking about adding a mechanic to GDI that reduces the amount of food, tech and cash captured substantially if the defender is in GDI.

I don't know if I'll have time to code it tonight, though.

10% of built acres definitely gives advantage to first attacker. Can Tyranny surpass that 10%? Does Military Strategy offer the ability to surpass that value?

10% of attacker's built acres, not defenders. Does that change your comment? :D

Changes sound good, thanks for considering the feedback

"- Building returns from all attacks are based on 10% of attacker's total built acres, not 10% of each specific building. This should mean that any country that has built the majority of its land will get regular returns for buildings."

For BRs and ABs that is great and absolutely needed. But when it comes to landgrabs the specific building limitations created problems for me as a netter that I had to solve by making several decisions that would affect my outlook for the rest of the set. It was challenging in a new way, and all players have yet to land on the "optimal" way to solve it.

It also makes suiciders stronger again if that mechanic is removed, at the same time as the restart bonus is re-added which also makes them stronger.

the building change is fine, but does reduce strategic complexity a bit which is a shame

i was expecting restart bonus to drop as defends increased, but this is still a fairly big change

instead of an average restart bonus of about
35% home and 65% on market
its now
25% home and 50% on market

and a larger nerf to those 500+ defend countries obviously
and there was still an 'exploit' where you could do a lot of attacks on your own countries pre war or to the designated jumper in ffa to protect it up to 95%

turns is fine - i think we all expected the turns to stay the same when restart bonus was taken away, might have been a different response to the changes if thats what had happened, so dont completely write off reducing bonus a lot more but leaving turns the same

country number history on restarts is good, will it apply with self deletions? which previously was the way to deliberately skip restart bonus's when testing on alpha server

restart foreign aid isnt critical, (and a lot less so with some restart bonus back but would have been nice to have it instead of restart bonus), but i think it would have been a nice change, another option is to unlink normal fa and restart fa with a seperate timer, that way you could fa a waller 10% and a restart 10% but you couldnt fa the same restart 20%

gdi changes to reduce losses are a nice idea, would it apply to spyops too? and would it apply offesnsively, thats not as big a deal if it doesnt include land/ghosts though, since it wouldnt make grabbing impossible like clangdi

and yeah just generally on suiciders if the suiciders who build up a bit of stock and keep dying and instantly resuiciding become a thing again i hope you change something, since they always have first mover advantage currently

I think lowering the amount of restart bonus from things on the market would increase people walling.

I know I have had the chance to wall but I did not want to pull my market stash because I would end up losing more stuff than i would gain.

@Pang:

What I was referring to is this:

Country A: 5000 bldgs
Country B: 5000 bldgs
Country C: 5000 bldgs
Country D: 5000 bldgs

Country Z: 5000 bldgs

Country Z fs all 4 countries at 500 bldgs max per atk.
Countries A-D with plenty of $ to buy tanks, now have fewer buildings. So their counterattack would barely do anything. So they'd have to use their turns first to rebuild before counter-attacking.

I just wanted to point out this scenario. The biggest gripes I hear about are the restart bonuses. So that should be handled first. Everything else is sorta extra. Sure, it would be nice if AB and BR did something but it's not as important as the restart bonus part.

In my opinion your restart bonus changes would be fine. But also carry over their turns.

country z doesnt kill 10% of the other countries buildings

it kills up to 10% of its own buildings but is still capped at killing about 3.5% or whatever of the defenders buildings

that means assuming two equal countries for it to even matter you have to kill more than 2/3 of the other persons buildings

to get an advantage with that much investment doesnt feel unreasonable

Enshula: "country z doesnt kill 10% of the other countries buildings"

Right, and Z has 5000 bldgs. So as I said, up to 500 bldgs max per atk; but, you're missing my point. Say after Z has finished attacking A,B,C,D

Let's assume it looks like this after Z FS A,B,C & D:
Country A: 2500 bldgs
Country B: 2500 bldgs
Country C: 2500 bldgs
Country D: 2500 bldgs

Country Z: 5000 bldgs

A,B,C,D can now only do a max of 250 buildings otherwise they'd need to rebuild first to do more.

i just tested on a 10k country, and you only do 158 per ab and 92 per br

that means you need to do 73 hits to knock them down to 16% built before it even comes into effect

even max mil tech and tyranny is still 25 attacks until it begins to have an effect

and your talking about doing somewhere between 25 and 73 hits on 4 separate countries?

thats 233 to 681 turns

and it assumes you are really close to matching nw for all attacks

Im curious. Why would you want a restart bonus to be shorter the more a person walls? Walling costs money so wallers will already start with less stock the more they wall. Thus having a flat rate will actually cause people who wall more to start with less by nature. Why would you want to penalize someone for walling tho? I think it was way too powerful before, but i don't think a players restart bonus should be penalized for walling to a point that not walling is a better solution.