I played for real last set because I feel that's one of the best ways to understand what goes on in a server and to find ways to improve the player experience. Apologies for winning. I didn't think that a casher would be able to do it. Running a country was quite educational and made me aware of many different things. I think that express has the most potential out of all of the servers in terms of providing a fun experience. Here are some future changes under consideration right now:

1) Bots should be able to retal, should buy less tech, and shouldn't all destock at the same time. The destocking is exploited by players, including myself last set, to get networths that otherwise aren't attainable. There are other minor improvements planned to bots covered in the other thread.

2) Changes to GDI - the other thread covers this. It would be good to close some of the holes and to make it harder for players to end up in a bad state, like forgetting to join GDI. I will say that the server feels much more calm then it used to be.

3) Bonus turns should be eliminated. I haven't dug into the code to know for sure, but I think the intent was to give 3 turns for logging out for 3 hours and 6 turns for logging out for at least 6 hours. In practice I received bonus turns all the time, even while logged in. Sometime feels off here. I don't think there's any reason to encourage players to login at least once a day on a server like express. Reducing pressure on players to try to login perfectly will probably be a good thing on express. Logging in is its own reward in that you get better access to landgrabbing targets and the public market.
bonus turns

4) The 2 hour PS time feels overpowered. Countries get 30 turns every 2 hours and it takes most governments 10 turns to do 5 PSes. There seems to be little reason to not do a PS as long as you can find time to play more than once per day. Even as a casher I got nearly all of my land from PS. Changing this to 4 hours feels less overpowered.

5) I noticed that the public market was empty of food quite a bit. It's fairly annoying as a player to want to play turns but for there to be no food, especially if you only play once a day. The most straightforward solution would be to lower the food private market base purchase price to something like $70 for this server only and to make sure that the replenishment rate allows a typical country to play a good chunk of turns in an emergency. Thoughts on this?

6) I'd like to add defensive and intel allies back in a game as a way to grow the community spirit a bit and to encourage players to form positive relationships with other players. A server where most players don't interact other than farming bots feels a bit cold. We would disable FA and not allow the bots to get ingame allies to give players an advantage over them.

7) Bots should be visible ingame and in the feed during a set, if only so that players don't waste time sending ingame messages to NPC characters. Also if we don't allow ingame alliances with bots then a player could figure out who all of the bots are that way. Some players already know how to identify all of the bot countries, so marking them removes that advantage.

8) The $1000 public market price floor should be more visible to players. Maybe players who try to sell tech cheaper than that automatically have the prices raised to 1k. That might not be enough though because selling tech at $1001, which I saw during the set, is an incredibly bad move. To be fair, I don't know how many of these sales were done by bots instead of humans.

9) This is more of an FYI, but we might use express as a proving ground for improving the bots. Sets are only one week long and there's a lot of grabbing so I think it could work well.

10) Some of these changes will likely lower the maximum NW that's possible for players to attain. In some sense, this isn't fair from a leaderboards perspective. Some players will have a "best 3" number that will no longer be possible to achieve. I do think that leaderboards have their issues on a server like express where we've had over 500 rounds. It's simply impossible for some players to catch up. Adding a seasonal model for leaderboards could be a good change for express. Maybe something like each season consists of 12 weeks and the seasonal leaderboards reset every season. The leaderboard metrics would be "best 3 NW", wins, and top 10 finishes. A player could still do well even if they only play for one round a month. This would also provide a good way to crown a champion for each season which would be the player who is performing the best under the new rules, as opposed to a great finish they had years ago. I don't know how much players care about the leaderboards, but hopefully this would provide a bit of prestige and fun competition for players.

11) There should be more frequent changes to the game play rules to balance strategies and to keep things interesting. As much as possible, I would want game play rules to be synchronized with other servers to keep it easiest for players. I do think that express will always need its own subset of rules though, like buying oil on the private market for example.

If you have any comments at all about what's written here or other changes you'd like to see on express, please post them here. I promise to read everything, but I may not respond to all comments. Thank you and I look forward to playing with you in future sets!

I like the ideas, it's definitely a move in the right direction, make express great again, if bots retal then people who play all x won't be easily smashed by the bot farmers, also, will bots do AB or send missiles if GDI is broken? Would coding that would be extremely difficult?

Bots have no concept of silly human constructs like 1:1, land:land, or no missile retals.

sounds good

1)
id like to see retals chance based escalating based on hate/aggresion/threat
destocking would be nice to have multiple strategies, public/private/oil being the main ones, and maybe an indy strat

3)
bonus turns were inverted years ago, originally it was server load in ee2025 days, but that doesnt promote activity, not sure if express was different but i agree forced playtimes more often than 24h or so isnt good

4)
ps at 5 and 2h with 30 turns in 2h compared to the 'slowest' server of primary which is 5/20h/30m for 40 turns in 20h is still 133% the rate of ps's to turns that primary has, slightly lower when bonus turns are taken into account though
and much faster than that compared to every other server

5)
maybe on private food but 70 is way too low imo since it takes out all the risk and opportunity of a high food set but also impacts end of set decisions slightly, the first option should be to raise on market time from 8h, since obviously a market where potenitally only 1/3 of player base has access to it will be hugely erratic compared to other servers where its 2 days

the only downside to longer market time is recall costs but recalling could be free on express once its been on the market for a certain amount of time, say 2 hours, that also has some potential destocking impact but its not huge unless you never stock anything else during that time

6)
any allies on express makes the server way too meta gamey
personally i like the idea of only having defence not offence as it shifts the topfeeding PS balance towards landfat countries but i dont think its worth it
with only a 5 day reset to get allies in game youd have to first identify likely countries then message and wait for them to accept, so im sure everyone would just use the same out of game allies each set

7)
seems fine, i hate the idea of pretending to be bots being a strat
theres a bunch in alliance this set who used bot names for example

8)
treat it like buying on the public market, if you try to sell for a price that will get you less than 1000-commission then it just sell for 1000-commision instead, unfortunately commission is going in the opposite direction of buying so it doesnt give then nice buffer and arbitrage opportunity for lower commission govs though

as to the balance between clearing tech at 1k then hopefully selling for more to the public, that seems hard to enforce, just like with food sales on private, if you were going to try something then it would be logical to try and stop people selling food on pub for less than they would get on nprivate as well

9)
thats basically what i tell new/returning players to do, shouldnt be any different for bots :)

10)
definately wouldnt hurt, either seasonal or recent would be fine
one potential option is to break it up into changeset eras as well
assuming the game ever goes more mobile having it push your tanks to your friends/clanmates makes sense as well, and should be done in the current ui as well
hopefully persistant tags come in as well then you could start to have stats for tags performances in war and netting for alltime/recent/season/changeset

11)
consistency is good but some variance is needed
hopefully the details page clan clarify more of the changes though
like i know FFA doesnt apply a lot of things that are in alliance like the min jets send, but it would be nice to see them on the details page, and i have no real clue whether alphaFFA follows FFA which makes it hard to use it to test for non FFA servers when its the best environment to grab yourself and so on and also alpha tends to have potential changes on it sometimes, or do you have an extra dev server set up?


not sure on potential changes at this point, i havnt played for ages

As I player who plays almost always I approve of your ambitious plans to make express great again!

70 dollar food on private is nice then tmbrs can start selling food for profit at just about $40 :)

I dont think that will happen.

What would be a better price for purchasing food on the private market? $66 on public for most governments is a better buy than $70 on private with no mil tech.



What do you mean by "meta gamey"? You can find allies any way you want to. You have the two days of downtime between rounds and it's not like you need allies on the first day of turns, so that gives you 72 hours right there. We could even have a bot create a "find allies for round X" thread every set on this forum. If players have to talk to each other on the forums to find allies I think that's a good thing. It's better than people just doing useless "bonus" posts once a week.



What would it take to make you play on express? Would you start playing every so often if most or all of these changes were implemented?

PM food replenishment rate would be low so if people did do this I don't think it would be a big deal. But I'm open to convincing that it would be an issue.

I dont think it will be an issue. food replenish about as 2 bushels per turn and acre iirc... its slow enough that you cant really make much bank from it.

Make it $57 dollars and I will make issues for you :)

70 food private demo means 57.169 so 57 min food price on na demo
ill assume you will leave food at 29 min or untether it when dropping food max

food:

which gives a food range from 36 to 57, with demos being able to clear or oversupply at those prices so only 37 to 56 guaranteed price range

which feels really low and is a potential 51.35% rise and 32.72% fall

interestingly 32.7 is less than 39% switch loss, though if demo>mono>theo that would be a little closer because selling at 35 max not 36

i doubt express ever hits 56 as an average or even consistently but it obviously must at times for this to even matter, particularly end of set i remember being unable to buy food to stock when i played in the last hour, that was back when there was more turns stored and on hand though i think

tbh ive never looked at volume on private food, and gerdlers argument about tmbr is much bigger, but it also means theo can stock private food at some volume at about 50 which is better for them than buying food at 47 on pub which is also interesting, and like the tech price argument you might want to do it when food was 45 or 46 to disadvantage your competition a little

if its 2 per acre that sounds like it at least exceeds consumption usually

allies:

i mean outside of the reset, we already have primary as a solo server like that, and tourney unfortunately is pretty much the same because of the fewer number of games compared to the old 26, so it would be nice to have all 3 solo servers function in different ways

primary - multi set ally diplomacy
tournament - can only ally people in your game so ideally would find people during the game
express - no need for multi set positive relations increases opportunity for aggressive grabbing, which ties in with no defence allies, although given my druthers id possibly just ban ps on express to change that as opposed to bringing back d allies, but i definitely like the idea of d allies and no o allies, theres probably also a risk of mini clique like tags that work together, but the most likely scenario is the server goes more non interactive since the pvp players will now be facing 50% more defence on average


playing express:

sure more changes in general are also good even if they arnt huge improvements they keep it fresh, a lot of its just wanting to play many times a day though, and liking to put most effort into alliance, though this set netting was over rather quickly, i played ffa somewhat seriously more recently than express though and obviously thats a huge timesink comparatively

ironically the 2>4 hour ps change might make thinks more complicated if you had to spend more time grabbing than currently, since 16h a day with 45 ps's sounds like way more than most people do in express

checking out your country last set which might be one of the heavier grabbers its 110 ps's or 22 cycles/logins maybe 4 or 5 a day for potentially 8 hours playing a day, but if its changed to 4 then for the same efficiency youd take 16h a day which is a lot

I agree with all the proposed changes! Great work and this definitely injects new life into Earth again!



This is probably the most controversial point. Gerdler and enshula have already voiced concerns I have. That said, the fact that we have some of the best strategy minds here with different ideas for how to exploit a change, is practically the definition of a good change.

If we have consistent gameplay changes (maybe every season? or hot-fix type change after 1 set if severely broken), then balance wouldn't be a huge issue as people normally take a few sets to figure it out and as soon as it gets figured out it's gonna be a new changeset again.



This is an interesting point indeed. Seems like 2 sides to this coin. We probably all agree that the goal here would be to make it more accessible to be competitive, i.e. login less often.

We've only ever had 2 sets with average food price above $56 and 11 sets with average food price above $50 according to: https://www.eestats.com/express/serverstats

I'm trying to make it less painful for players when the public market is empty, especially early on in the game. Having an empty market at times doesn't mean that you'll see high average food prices necessarily.

Are there really that many demos who get max mil tech at a point where they have high food consumption needs?

$70 base isn't exploitable I think. $57 is.

At $57:
I would go demo, stock up some decent stock with say a demo techer. Maybe 100m bushels, Then I would stock turns to 360, drop land to 1 acre, sell my food stock on PM at $36, build a military base, buy back my stock at $35, destroy the mil base, repeat 360ish times which means I would get $396 per bushel, which is pretty decent.

I would sit on 1 acre a long time warranting high def and I would spend turns at high expenses but that wont eat more than about 25-30% of that income over those turns on average.

If you thought the earthquake complaints were numerous, just wait until Fuzzy Wardrobe and Captain Jack Silverblade start not only retaliating, but also tossing nukes for retals on PS :-D

I support.

LOL 😂

In all seriousness, retalling bots will get me playing again.

We'll code them to do extra retals against your country since you're so excited!

I think bots should act different towards players who hit them 10 times than players who hit them once. A sense of escalation.

Earthquakes are fine because they happen to everyone and its probably very rare that earthquakes decide a fight over rank where a lesser skilled player or one who spends less effort trying to play well beats a superior player because of them.
Adding another completely random decider(bots that retal completely at random) that may have a greater effect than earthquakes is a wasted opportunity imo that would make the game less complex rather than more complex as I believe most of us want the latter.

Bots should at the very least be more likely to retal those who hit them more, preferably increasing the probability of unlocking more harmful options. This would force the player to make decisions on not only which bot gives most land but also which bot gives him least risks. This would not differ all that much from what its like to grab a player. Players rarely retal with complete randomness. :)

That sounds sexy and definitely turns me on, but I think Gerdler's idea is better, escalation reaction FTW!

No really, that escalation he suggested is great if you can code it.

I have 2-6 and 8 coded on a dev branch. Hoping to make them live for the next round of express.

Can't wait to try this, thank you Slagpit 👍

Getting bots to retal opens up a whole new world. Love it! :D

Double post :P

@Slagpit -

I’d suggest trying to get in touch with @ UgolinoII. He and I made competing edits to bots 12-18 months ago to make them behave more human-like and rationally. Things like an oiler bot, stocking and destocking food and oil, not overbuying tech, etc. We cleaned up on the AI server with our edits. I’d work with him though - he’s the real coder, and I guarantee you don’t want my hack job :)

I moved on to other things (Rocket League addiction), but here is the repo I was working on...

https://github.com/sgbett/ee_npc/tree/strategy

Ugo!!!!!!!

Hello :D

Come back buddy, we miss you!