Please understand that the majority of player suggestions cannot be implemented for a variety of reasons. However, all suggestions will be considered as long as they are presented in a constructive, respectful way.

How about limits on how many PS/SS you can do to bots?

It's been a problem with bots being in deep DR, specially when couple players decide to do it on purpose as a form of griefing.

Everything else seems ok, would be kool if bots retal but that's still a long way away, no?

Totally agree on some kind of attack limit. not for warring countries, but a limited amount of grabs per set or day or something. shake things up a bit.

How about something like hit same bot more than 3 times in 24 hours attack gain drops to 5 acres, make it not worth doing.

My suggestions:

1. Increase number of bots by 4x
2. Program current bots to hit back.
3. Allow players to create bots.
4. Increase the consumption of oil on server. ( I don't even think bots buy oil ).
5. Increase the consumption of food on server. 30% more.
6. Remove the 0s in input fields.
7. Change GDI to be same as other servers
8. Decrease spy DR from 24hrs to 6hrs.
9. Decrease the consumption of bus/res tech by bots (spread it out more to other techs)
10. Change turn wait time from 4mins to 2mins.
11. Mask the bots. (stop showing which are bots are not) (use a better method of selecting names so players cant identify which is real or not)
12. Give 10% bonus for declaring war (re-add this feature)
13. Allow players to def ally with bots (after changing gdi rules)

Hi, my few cents on having played a few days and building on what Celphi posted:

1. Increase number of bots by 4x - Seems like a minimum, would go even higher
2. Program current bots to hit back -Not really needed, but can
3. Allow players to create bots. - Would not go there
4. Increase the consumption of oil on server. ( I don't even think bots buy oil ). - Yes
5. I would change DR time to only an hour or so
6. Decrease the consumption of bus/res tech by bots (spread it out more to other techs)
7. Change turn wait time from 4mins to 2mins. - > I would go to 1 min and allow higher number of turns stored.
8. Mask the bots. (stop showing which are bots are not) (use a better method of selecting names so players cant identify which is real or not) - > this is a big YES!

I would drastically increase the pace of this and make it really express.

I misspoke on # 3.

It meant to say allow a player to make a bot (not bots). So instead of creating a country they could make a single bot country instead. The idea behind this is to expedite bot improvement.

More bots would inflate the final scores and won't stop griefers IMO.



Not bad idea.

Unless you keep them relatively low on land and almost not worth farming

Of you go that route the market takes a hit, less supplies 😞

My 2 cents worth drop the zeros in all fields yes! And drop the recovery time on PS, back to two hours.
and when GDI stops all hostilities, the bots should stop growing to in the standings.
And this hitting the same bot more than 4 times in 24 hours attack gain drops to 5 acres, makes it not worth doing, I agree.
Change turn wait time from 4 mins to 2 mins. and allow higher number of turns to be stored. This would speed things up a bit. And masking the bots, will cut double tapping down, because of no way to tell a bot from a live player, it will create more wars, and this is a war game. It would slow players down, from grabbing so much land, by hitting, bots 5 or 6 times, if they can't find them. Back when I first started playing the only way to find a bot was spy, and look for how many turns they had. Bots usually had zero turns, and no NPC markings in search, made it hard to find them, and this would all so force players to build defenses.

Why should the bots stop growing? That would fk up the market, you shouldn't be making any grabs on Sunday, Ratski stop making rainbows bro 🧡

SF and Cat: I deleted posts that were unnecessary towards Slagpit's question.
Nothing against either of you. But, yeah.
Hard no in the book of galleri and probably Slagpit.

I would agree on somehow minimizing the bot farming or the DR aspect.

Maybe heavy DR land reductions don’t apply if you haven’t grabbed the bot in 24hrs?

Probably super controversial; but what about trying for one set no PvP? Only allowed to farm bots and can’t touch other players?

For a change in landgrab results, we would want it to apply to bots and non-bots equally. Ideally, it would be a change that we could keep even after improving the NPC logic, which is my third highest development priority.

One possible change would be to change the maximum DR penalty for landgrabs from 10% to 1%. Would that go far enough?

No.

Your proposal would only reward the people placing the bots into DR with more land.

You ask us what we want.. we list them and then you suggest changing something nobody even suggested. What's the point of even asking?

For me the easiest updates that would improve Express drastically are

1) making it really express. A turn a minute or even every 30 seconds + increasing turns that can be held and stored.

2a) Remove being able to see what is bot and not
2b) 1 SS or PS max per bot country per 12 hours.

Or have an SuperExpress server.

A turn every second and a round time of 4 hours. Event to be held once a week or so.

I am reading every suggestion here. Some suggestions are straightforward and don't require any follow up or questions. The issue of attacking bots is a complex problem to deal with. For example, some players suggested an attacking limit. What happens if another country attacks a country that has already reached the attack limit? What if that country gets dragged into a war? Would some players feel pressured into doing only PS attacks in order to make the most of their limited attacks? Is this the kind of change that makes sense long term after the bots are able to attack players?

The compromise solution that I proposed is significantly reducing landgrab returns on bots that are in heavy DR. I would want to make the gains from such attacks less than what players can get from exploring. I am open to other ideas, but so far I'm not seeing anything that I can implement.

Bots need to be clearly identified ingame because players fundamentally interact with them in a different way than they would other players. For example, an npc country cannot reply to an ingame message. Some players would also pretend to be npc countries in an attempt to start pointless wars.

Identify them in Alliance.

Honestly I thought they already were. By identify do you mean marking them in ingame search and ingame scores?

Yeah! That would be super helpful if they were. AFAIK only express does this.

What about 1% C:C DR, but less general DR; so it limits the gains from a single player but allows others to get some (it seems like the issue is that individual players put all the bots in heavy DR to ruin it for everyone, but I don't play Express)?

That would be nice and could work. Go into extreme DR after one grab on a bot, but does not affect other players hitting it. Bots would still be heavily farmed though, but solves the nuisance part.

The whole point of making bots were to emulate human players.

They've turned these bots into large explore buttons. What's the point of the explore button? LIke really? We have zero retal, yellow highlighted, countries with max gains per hit.

Just up the explore button to 250A a turn and then nobody can complain about DR. No really. This is literally the direction it's going. Instead of addressing the underlying problem of making the bots play more human like and less distinguishable from real players we do the opposite. You stated the bots don't reply., then make it so they do?? If you guys don't want to take up the task of making these smart type of bots then allow us the ability to help by allowing the creation of them. 1 per player. This is the EXPRESS server. It's meant to be an experiment server. If it doesnt work out change direction the next set.

If you want to remove the yellow highlighted bot country indicator, he will have to change the name generation and not allow it to be open source. At this time, all it does is put an artificial barrier on people who do not code. If I know how the name generation works, I can make a tool to find bots anyway. I doubt he will work to improve bots, so I say mark them all. It's not that I disagree with your post; I don't have confidence in any meaningful change. (I want this same functionality for Alliance as well)

That's how I look at it, at least. Given the current state of the name generation, among other indicators of a bot, it's pointless not to mark them and only puts a barrier to entry for non-coding folks in the community.

The names could easily be pulled from past sets. There’s years of data of real players. Just use those.

Send all military option

It sucks changing the time on market when lots of tech

are being sold*

Delete all option for personal inbox

Coins for 1-3 place finishers

A one time change your username option,” I was intoxicated!”

Agreed 💯

Allow me to elaborate on an earlier comment. Making npc countries perform attacks and spy ops is included under the umbrella of improving them.

That will solve a lot of farming issues of the bots for sure, no timelines yet?

It's my third highest development priority but no timelines yet. We're still straightening out some source code issues before I can start developing the game again.

I suspect that you'll find the number two priority way more exciting than npc attacks.

Hmmmmmmmm

/wave dd

Sure, that would indeed be a change.

Hello Slag! Welcome back!

What're your priorities now?
(I feel like no one asked, or I might've missed the msg.)

I give Slag a hard time but to be fair he’s actually going through the SUGs and BUGs & addressing them. Not to derail your intent of your thread man., I do appreciate the work you’ve done for EE.

On the portal page, the play your country box turns red if your being attacked

Have countries lit up that your in War with.

I think Bony has the right idea but instead would recommend adding a live population field that exists on all pages where a player could see their population in real time. This hands down would be an awesome feature.

I played this on game called all out war and if you were logged in to the game you would hear missles being dropped on your countries, nobody got sleep,lol

PS Mar 20, 00:47 area 51 (#6) Acele Acholate (#45) 51 A
SS Mar 20, 00:47 area 51 (#6) Acele Acholate (#45) 42 A
SS Mar 20, 00:47 area 51 (#6) Acele Acholate (#45) 41 A
PS Mar 20, 00:48 area 51 (#6) Greste Cryptmaw (#60) 58 A
SS Mar 20, 00:48 area 51 (#6) Greste Cryptmaw (#60) 45 A
SS Mar 20, 00:48 area 51 (#6) Greste Cryptmaw (#60) 46 A
SS Mar 20, 00:48 area 51 (#6) John Klek Gully (#70) 49 A
SS Mar 20, 00:48 area 51 (#6) John Klek Gully (#70) 51 A
SS Mar 20, 00:48 area 51 (#6) John Klek Gully (#70) 55 A
PS Mar 20, 00:49 area 51 (#6) Mysterious Tiger (#77) 59 A
SS Mar 20, 00:49 area 51 (#6) Mysterious Tiger (#77) 59 A
SS Mar 20, 00:49 area 51 (#6) Mysterious Tiger (#77) 60 A
PS Mar 20, 00:51 area 51 (#6) Zestia Van dirge (#33) 28 A
SS Mar 20, 00:51 area 51 (#6) Zestia Van dirge (#33) 17 A
SS Mar 20, 00:52 area 51 (#6) Capt Sofia De Belleville (#85) 64 A
SS Mar 20, 00:52 area 51 (#6) Capt Sofia De Belleville (#85) 50 A
SS Mar 20, 00:52 area 51 (#6) Capt Sofia De Belleville (#85) 41 A
SS Mar 20, 00:54 area 51 (#6) Looladin Gefirr (#20) 44 A
SS Mar 20, 00:54 area 51 (#6) Looladin Gefirr (#20) 37 A
SS Mar 20, 00:54 area 51 (#6) Looladin Gefirr (#20) 32 A
SS Mar 20, 01:18 area 51 (#6) Enoka Haston (#54) 77 A
SS Mar 20, 01:18 area 51 (#6) Enoka Haston (#54) 62 A
SS Mar 20, 01:18 area 51 (#6) Enoka Haston (#54) 50 A
SS Mar 20, 01:19 area 51 (#6) Luna (#37) 71 A
SS Mar 20, 01:19 area 51 (#6) Luna (#37) 58 A
SS Mar 20, 01:19 area 51 (#6) Luna (#37) 47 A
SS Mar 20, 01:20 area 51 (#6) Enoka Boldel (#65) 57 A
SS Mar 20, 01:20 area 51 (#6) Enoka Boldel (#65) 48 A
SS Mar 20, 01:20 area 51 (#6) Enoka Boldel (#65) 42 A

This is why it wouldnt matter if you lowered returns.
#6 current land is 2.2k land. He's spending 2 turns for 17-51acres (when the explore button would give same/better results from 1 turn). Makes 0 sense; but, proves my point that lowering returns will NOT deter a player from LG'ing bots.

Yeah that's irritating and why I hardly ever play express anymore.