Xin: You make a valid point for solo servers but my point is that it could increase abuse in 1A.

If the allies did a tech start and got bus/res to 170% they could effectively keep exploring and building labs indefinitely. If they run short on cash, tech a turn. I am sure there are plenty of people in plenty of alliances that don't really care about their resets and would be willing to the explore / build labs thing. So while your techer stops at 20k acres and starts to stockpile your allies keep going to 30k acres increasing the TPT you get.

blid: Why would it matter if he allied real techers? He only benefits from their labs, not from their teching. A normal techer will stop growing and stockpile early (usually) while one of these explorers could just keep growing to help benefit the techer.

A simpler solution that would solve your problem without adding any way to take advantage of it:

Currently the tech you get is the amount of tech your allies tech * 10%

Change that to the amount of tech your allies tech * 10% * % of your land that is labs

That would eliminate non-techers from leeching tech (since they don't have labs) but still forces your tech allies to tech in order to benefit you.

BigBen, it would be far more efficient to just have those strawman techers FA the main country if the idea is just to provide labs to leech from, or for the main country to just directly farm the strawman techers for land.

While it is still abusable, it is far less abusable than the way teching currently works.




Your proposed change is pretty good too, and its certainly a lot easier to implement. I like it.

Ttt

This sounds pretty greedy to me. I expect that from time to time I will help an alliance mate by teching and allowing them to leach tech. I don't see anything wrong with this system.

Tech leeching (and Offensive Leeching) is a very big problem on solo servers, Cerberus. The advantages are enormous to the leeching country - you might as well have your friend run land farms.

mhmm; i wonder if we should have similar alliances for non-techers if we do something like this though; or make research alliances do that for techers, and do something else for farmers/cashers/commies/oilers ?

Like a Production alliance? Where the alliance shares a portion (say 10%) of your production of any type.

So like, if I am teching 1000 per turn and also make 10 spies per turn, then my production allies would gain 100 tech and 1 spy? Or flip this to work like how Xinhuan wants the tech alliance to work. Where only when countries produce something, do they gain something from a production alliance.

I don't think it's necessary - tech alliances are used almost strictly by techers right now as is. If you do think it's necessary, I think an easier solution would be to just eliminate the research alliance entirely from solo servers, like you're going to do with offensive allies.

Yeah, might as well cut it out of solo servers and save yourself the trouble of having to re-code it. If it is only a problem in Solo servers. As a techer myself, I can tell you I would prefer it removed as blid suggested.

As it is there are far fewer techers necessary then other strategies on solo servers. Lowering the supply by 30% will allow more people to choose techer as a strategy.