Well, I've already suggested most of FFA be playable from the control panel, except for grabbing. But in order to make even grabbing less time consuming, I suggest making self-farming more rewarding in FFA in order to help people that do not have time to find dozens of targets to hit.

I would also suggest buffing the explore feature on FFA, perhaps even to the point where there is NO decay on it or maybe explore rate should even grow slowly as you get larger Ie. You will always get 45 acres regardless of your land.
Or in the second case, maybe every 10000 acres will give you a 5 acre increase on the explore rate.

Why? Farming bots is beneficial not because there is a decay on exploring but because even at 1k acres, you get more land and buildings in a turn from bots than you would from exploring. However, this will make all-x countries more competitive.

Obviously, this would have implications for bots. The bot code could be changed to make them grow at the same rate they currently do in terms of land, ie. Making them cash more turns when over a certain acreage.

Both of these changes and further suggestions would make FFA be an option for the casual player as most cite time as the reason they refuse to play.

Also, if people have other ideas, post them here and I'll add them to the this post. It sucks to hear so many old FFA players say they'd play here if only they had the time or they promised their significant other they wouldn't play the server because of time etc

That is not on our todo list for the BETA release of the new UI, but it is one thing I would like to take on after BETA release (1-3 weeks)

I see a lot of topics everywhere about things to add/change and it gets over whelming and polluted with nonsense. I will talk to Pang about adding a board or cleaning this one up so we don't miss things.

I would like to see a feature where I could explore all or do the same thing for multiple countries from the control panel like you were saying. I would love to explore 125 turns for 16 countries in a few clicks and then put everything on the market.

Man, that would be, I am trying to think of another word for fantastic, ummm almost as good as sex. lol

Sweet!

Yeah there definitely needs to be a dedicated B&S forum mod to clean up all this crap. Lots of them are duplicate suggestions, although I think this one is brand new (at least the explore rate idea). I will try to update it when I have some time with some math that would make sense for the ideas.

I can say offhand in the last 2 weeks ago I've heard over ten people say they would play FFA if they had the time or they can't play because they don't have the time.

Why not open FFA up to run bot scripts that you upload? that way the devs get access to your code and can use whatever improvements you have made in your own code to improve the server-run bots?

That would make more players play FFA and scripts would be passed around and improved upon while still not nearly matching an average player who takes time to grab bots manually. It would ofc speed up the development of the AI as well.

Why dont we do that on alliance while we are at it?

because its one country perhaps? But yeah I would like to just have the AI take over for some people for a week when they go on vaca. I quit when I miss a day worth of turn, any server, its just not worth the effort after that. I think a lot of people feel the same way.

We're never going to co-mingle user-written bots and player servers. We definitely would love to have a bot-only server where bots play against bots for a new dimension of the game.

Also, one of the goals of the whole AI project is what is being discussed re: bots playing for you while you're not available/taking over abandoned countries from new players who didn't stick around.

Essentially, playing the overflow turns automatically.

For this effort we're welcoming community contributions (about a dozen people have bot keys at the moment to build stuff) but any bots that come out of that work will be subject to the same NPC scope that our current bots do. The source for those bots is on Github that anyone can see/play with!

Well, this idea, especially making explore useful again, has the goal of making it more competitive for those with less time as well as less time consuming. Even if a bot took over all of your turns, most still wouldn't play or would play only to suicide because they'd be so far behind the manual players it'd be pointless.

Sorry pang we have that.

The AI server runs, still runs and will always keep running most likely. some of us used it as a way of testing the bots to build the current ones up, and others just used it as a way to control a bunch of countries. the API was never fully developed so people stopped noticing its existence.

+1

How about when I go to spy. Spy is all ready set at spy so I don't have to hit the drop down menu, unless I want to do something else ? It's like this whats the first thing anyone wants to do when we go it to spy ? How about spy ?

A bump for viable explore rates

No to user bots.

Yeah hawk, that has already been squashed by Pang, so its not happening.