Rank Country Land Networth Special
1 20202020202020202020202001 (#81) 33,138 $54,565,988 H
2 The Great Bambino (#5) 42,675 $53,090,031 CG
3 Turdnado (#10) 21,398 $34,366,325 HG
4 THANOS (#86) 29,606 $29,372,569 DG
5 Some things never change (#56) 13,156 $28,751,872 HG
6 MXZ 850 X (#19) 18,583 $26,863,602 DG
7 76 (#76) 22,329 $25,739,407 HG
8 a stuffed animal (#7) 18,542 $21,813,877 HG
9 Where The Shadows Lie (#4) 12,810 $19,532,134 HG
10 EZ4U2C (#12) 16,754 $18,946,561 RG

This may be my first win with a casher in express. Feels extra special! :)

Congrats on the amazing CI for 2nd! I think it might be like the 2nd-3rd best indy finish ever!

Oh was that you!? nice work indeed :)

Congrats on the win. Not too bad for 2nd, think I made a few mistakes probably, but not too bad for recent return :)

Ty. Your indy would have won most sets for sure. Ty for the race to the finish line and the ingame convo!

The market, especially concerning oil, could have worked out better for me for sure. Also the timing on my grabbing spree was not great this set. But my tech start, and the tech market worked wonders for me. All in all great conditions for my casher.

Assuming someone flooded the market with cheap oil and there was no huge commie(guess who lol) doing his grabbing spree a couple hours before me I still do not think I could have cracked 60m. Not without also having cheap food and cheap military(in which case I should have been a rep like st0ny). I guess the stars will have to align just perfectly, because I had quite good conditions that dont happen just any set for a casher.

Not to take anything away from you, seems to be a lot less dumbass grabbing recently. I tried for past couple years with TC but *every* reset without fail I would get stupidly farmed.

Maybe its just my Ugoli face :)

Regardless is a damn good finish for TC - best have in express to date is about 42... way off!

Still the win eludes me... I just can't seem to find the motivation to do what I know needs to be done, and keep playing half assed techer to 20m

Maybe next set eh

My mistake 36m best casher, even wayer offer :/

Tech was cheaper to start, yea. I also saw at one point like 5 mil or so oil drop on market at like $50 a barrel? is that a dumb bot or?

The dumbassery level is certainly low. It could be partially due to the changes, I see blatant topfeeds this set that should have taken 3k acres but they took "only" 1k. It must kill the motivation of those kind of people quite a bit.

That said. The way I play minimizes the risk pretty effectively. For most of the time once Im fat Im also very well defended. Not that people can't break me if they burn their stock on jets, but maybe those players can't, or they can find someone nearly as fat with far less defence instead, maybe?

Someone dumped 4m oil at 25 probably as a way to transfer oil but I think it failed because everyone had orders at 100-150 for oil including me and I didn't get any of it. There was some transfers earlier in the set too(at 72 I saw).

Bots dont make oil at all. they dont buy it either. its most likely an attempt at cheating that mostly failed. Its actually cheating both if its multies and if its friends trying to transfer to each others.

It could also be a mistake(tho the repeat occurences this set shows it isn't).
Its also possible someone who gave up and just went 'yolo', but I would very much advice against doing this as it can scew the competition based on 0 skill. My advice to people who have no reason to keep playing for the reset is to just self-delete.

admins should investigate!

Ooh I missed the oil trick too sadly, not that it woucl have made that much difference I was always looking at 20-30

What pleases me most about that is that it doesn't appear to be reliable enough that people can use it to good effect. Seems to be "database order" which as any programmer knows is whatever tf the database wants :)

Bots should make/buy oil. I made oiler bots, and I made my techer bots stock it too! There was no oil destock at time, but they were ready. I understand there is now I just haven't had to time code the changes.

Anyway it seemed fairly balanced (bots were finishing with a few bil, but also a good chunk of oil)

Upshot, I think oiler bots would smooth that bit of (what is presently a very lumpy) market.

Much like LaF "bots" do in 1a ;p (thank you)

ok, well I saw like 5 mil actually hit the market and be there at like $50, I didn't expect, but bought 500k at the time. I should have done more, but it was gobbled up quickly.

I'm not sure how cheap bots sell units; are standing orders taking advantage of cheap units? And should bots buy some jets even if they don't retal to balance market?

Do cashing bots place standing orders at end of turns, and then buy when they pick up again if still have $ on hand?

Sweet NWs congrats fellas

Ideally bots could be used to balance the oil market to within some normal price range. Kind of like they do with tech, that they tech the highest priced techs at a much much higher degree than the low priced ones. They cant just produce or just sell tho, it needs to be both ways.

Something like a sliding scale for the rainbow bots to have between 0-30% rigs from $100-300 oil:
If Oil_Price > 100 AND oil_price< 300 x=(Oil_Price-100)*.15
elseif Oil_Price > 300 x=.3
elseif Oil_Price < 100 x=0
end

x being fraction of buildings the rainbow bot strives for to be rigs.

and then the techer bots spend 0-10% of their cash each day on oil:
If Oil_Price < 250 y=0.1-Oil_Price*4/10000
else y=0

y being the fraction of their cash they spend on oil. Do this as long as their defence criteria is already met.

and make oilers who are in extasy when oil price is 500-600 or over not that happy?

Oil being 500-600 is a bug and it certainly needs a fix.

500-600 oil? How is that a bug?

Well considering some people complain on the tech prices in express and $500 oil is FAR FAR worse than any tech prices that we have ever seen in express considering you get $1500/acre/turn for grabbing, building, exploring, spying without needing any tech to get that. Its 2x what a casher makes while cashing with absolutely maxed out techs and 100% specialization lol.

If a fascist rig makes as much as a rep casher at maxed techs its a bit overtuned, but if its twice as much the game is just completely broken.

You know you can buy oil on PM right?

You wouldnt even buy that stuff in 99% of the situations; unless, a player changed their default settings.

Oh- and of course if they bought out their entire PM of oil lmao; but, who is going to do that?

umm only in express you can buy oil in private market. I bought out my private oil last set and Ive done that several times before. Im not complaining about the price to buy at tho, that is an issue in itself when it comes to war and such. The main issue is when the only strategy that does not require tech or to spend their turns teching to get their full income is the one with the highest income the whole game is upside down.

That comes about only in imperfect volatile low-confidence markets and it is killing the fundamental workings of this game. If we cant get reliable oil from the market we have to produce it on our own. Cashers, farmers, techers and indies alike. At $500 oil most strats will benefit from producing their own oil. Oil dont reach 500 on express because of the private oil but it happened on alliance server a couple times in the last few years, but the oil market is certainly dysfunctional being dried out completely for serveral hours a day also in express.
The same thing happens to tech on team and tournament, the same happens to food in primary right now and most sets. As the confidence in the markets dissappear we will all turn into rainbows who run tech starts to produce all our tech for the reset.
We are seeing more and more of this sadly.

Well oiler is currently the worse strat you could play on EXPRESS.

I can see your argument on other servers though.

wartime and oil jumps to 900ish makes war a very big moneysink.

Yeah it ends up that even when killing non-wallers you destroy more of your own resources than the enemy loses when you kill someone.

In a perfect market with rational actors the situation would never occur on 1a as no one who is a rational actor should do an oil destock when oil is above 400. Sometimes the only rational actors in the game are at war and so you end up with the remaining netters buying oil at 900 for their oil destock, oblivious to the fact that there are other ways to destock with much better potential at those prices. The bots would solve this by putting a range in which the oil price can move and my solution also would help mitigate(not solve) the techer bots cash hoarding.