note: this has nothing to do with my alliance or any other alliance, this is my personal opinion on the state of this server

i came back recently from a 6 year hiatus seeing if this game changed and was it better because i was told the game admins were actually old earth vets who cared about this game

but i can see one very big problem that i don't know why anyone would think this game is fun knowing this...

as we all know we have full understanding of the game now (as the admins are literally part of the community). with that knowledge we know every single nook and cranny of this game now which reduces almost all of the suspense or mystery in what's already a pretty deterministic game (based on math and formulas)

we need more randomness in this game. the lack thereof is really killing it.

think of all the things you can automate as information:

1) which alliance is allied to what other alliances
2) what alliance is going to war what alliance
3) who did harmful spy ops on who
4) who is tech allied to who
5) who FAed who
6) who suicided on who (in regards to two-stepping/coordinated/etc)
7) who is cheating
8) who is doing buyouts

i'm happy that all this information and non-randomness has helped the admins solved problem #6, but at what cost?

anyone can create a website or a script to parse out all the information now given to us via ee apis and sites like boxcar and remove every suspense from this game.

why are all of these possible? because of the deterministic factor of the actions of people on this server (all not cheaters, all relatively veterans of this game, all have the same basic beliefs)

we are a community all trained not to run multies, that we try to retal with SS/PS whenever possible until things get messy, that we don't grab our allies, not to run rainbow countries but specific governments and strats for war and net.

for example let's take each example and i'll demonstrate why nothing is "secret" anymore. this is also made much easier than before because of the lack of alliances in the game period, make the error for mistake of guessing using these algorithms much less than before.

Q: which alliance is allied to what other alliances
A: write a script that parses all the hits done this reset, any alliance who hits each other (can take out the 1-2 hit outlier as mistakes by members) aren't uNAPed/LDPed/FDPed to each other and are capable of warring each other in the reset.

Q: what alliance is going to war what alliance
A: gather all the possible pairings of wars between alliances above. if one has lots of theos/repubs, they aren't looking for a war. if one switch their theos/repubs to monarchy and/or then to tyr/dict they are war prepping. list all the combos of possible nonpacted alliances they have as war possibilities.

Q: who did harmful spy ops on who
A: look at the times and networth changes of all countries and match them up. this gives you all the information you need from the game. in this case we are looking for networth loss from one country pair and networth change based on their usual turn taking patterns. this also going to include real attacks like AB/SS/GS/PS/missiles/etc. but those you can easily deduce those from the news. the stuff that doesn't "show up in the news" that is hurting one country at the same time someone is "playing their turns" based on the networths is going to be a harmful spy op.

Q: who is tech allied to who
A: variation of the earlier one, someone gains their acres plugged into the tpt formulas worht of tech in nw, some other country gains 1/10th of that amount.

Q: who FAed who
A: same thing as above, but the nw gain and lossed between the two matches the FA package size + 3x the average nw change of the FA sender's nw.

Q: who suicided on who (in regards to two-stepping/coordinated/etc)
A: same thing as above, match playtimes. if thye consistently match, you smell something fishy.

Q: who is cheating
A: the admins got this, i don't need to go detail this (standard ip matching, cookies, etc. etc.)

Q: who is doing buyouts
A: same thing, anything market related information is public, you match the nw you get by selling your jets, you can match who bought ur jets that time from the networth changes and market news. from this you can figure and match who bought what from who easily, and from all of this it's not too hard to see buyouts as well as a wealth of other information.

there's so much more you can do from just observing the game formulas in related to networths/land/etc./etc. that i can take forever to list them all.

you give me one week, and i can host a website that will list all this information nonstop to any person in this community who wants to see it. or we can pretend to have suspense and drama in this game ;)

given all this, like i said why are we even so worked up about what's going on all the time on AT?

we can all know the exact answer to everything.

what we need is more randomness imo. otherwise we are losing so much dynamics in the server game. in primary and other servers there is less widespread collusion because of the lack of alliances so things like this aren't as much of a factor.

and P.S.

if i ran these algorithms on the market news/news/networth changes data on this reset, everything that happened this reset would be so obvious to everyone that we'd probably realize we'd been all flaming each other and guessing for no particular reason other than maybe naive ignorance and/or a pretense of entertainment

i also forgot to add we can smarten such a program by including the retal policies of the various alliances posted publically to get better automated deducing of specific events that happen (for instance, someone from SOL would 1:1 so them hitting twice on another alliance as a retal consistently means they are finding a war while if SoF/Omega/LaF/LCN/etc. retal based on land formulas it's probably not instigating war but just normal retals, and while if we see any other alliance send NMs it probably means war but for PDM it doesn't mean much, etc. etc.)

Create a universal retal policy that will promote land grabbing or land trading, that should solve the problem.

randomness (things like earthquakes) artificially closes the gap between skilled and unskilled players, which i consider a bad thing

how about hiding the governments of all countries? maybe viewable by spy op, or maybe only viewable by the owner

the stuff based on networth could be obfuscated by increasing the time between nw updates, rounding of networths, or having networths fluctuate randomly within some range of the actual networth

the major problem with landgrabbing is the lack of countries on the server, both legit and non-legit (multis, bot countries). if i were grabbing in the early 2000s, there were a dozen small to mid sized alliances for me to midfeed and pump defense to prevent a retal. there were thousands of untagged/no-name tagged countries to bottomfeed without worrying too much about DRs. it was an art to get as much land as possible from grabs without losing it to retals/suiciders

now? pacted to all or close to all tags, which means midfeeding is going to piss off whatever tag(s) im hitting because i have to hit them over and over. there are only a handful of untaggeds/no-name tagged countries to bottomfeed and they are perpetually in DR. all-explore isnt miles behind grabbing now, which is completely boring and removes a large portion of skill from the game

how does this game recruit? i played e:2025 for years but wouldntve even known ee existed if not for the arizona shootings. is there a facebook page? twitter feed? podcasts (something like what eclisod used to do)? we have seen how much people will spam for a measly few points in game...how about points for recruiting new players?

just some ideas off of the top of my head...may come back and comment/edit later

i'm not saying randomness in the way that earthquakes and stuff occur to annoy poeople.

i do see the luck bonus being a good step in the right direction, but not everyone chooses that bonus.

i was thinking more of the lines that we should change this game fundamentally so i can't guess what you are doing by looking at your government. we are all so collectively skilled at this game now that in the past i couldn't 100% tell you were a techer or you are warring just from seeing stuff on the surface, while now its a telltale sign. by just looking at your government i can already deduce if you want to net/war and what strat you are playing

if we make all governments have methods to be viable in both war and net (let's throw out something like say a dict casher actually doesn't have as much of a bpt loss, or maybe they can get bonuses from the point system to counteract the bpt loss maybe at a slight decrease of military power as you go along (but not completely) to counter balance it, then it will be a viable netting strategy (for people who want to use that capture extra buildings as a viable netting bost), while maybe a theo can have a tech boost as the point bonus at the slight cost of its building cost (again not completely), so it can be a part of a war alliance's arsenal (because the market is too expensive on a FS, some theo techers that aren't just nuke dumps can serve to be breakers), etc. etc.

then you can't tell what an alliance is doing just from looking at it.

and then you would also create new strategies that people would have to learn and master again.

and that's just for governments.

i can think of many ideas for the networth changes etc. etc. i'm just saying just doing this step by step might revitalize the "fun" back into the alliance game.

It seems a lot of the things you mentioned could be adjusted by local scores (ie your scores page) updating in real-time/five minutes and public scores updating every 20-60 minutes. No way we go back to a gamerstown upload system that way and it gives plenty of room for multiple things to happen.

I like the deterministic nature of the game - the problem is largely the availability of data (which in some ways is a good thing)

what's wrong with the alliance server is that the demographic of earth empires players is the group which plays on that server

Also, and PDM is a large outlier, I think you can not tell what we are doing if we have "war govs". I encourage people to play with tyranny and dictator if they want to grab at all. Sure, if we're all reps we're probably being boring as all get out - but I think it is up to alliances to be unpredictable on some level. Pacting is very clear - PDM pacts about 1/3-1/2 the alliances and everyone else all pacts together. I remember when pacting changed from personal preference to lining up sides and pacting out. It fundamentally altered the way politics on this server worked, and largely for the worst (sure it was fun for a while but things never reverted back to a more free flowing system)

how about the government changes?

if i put my points into bpt gain (which can only effect to dictators but let's say a monarchy can stock it with no effect so you aren't forced to roll with a low bpt but switch when you are ready) and max it out over the course of a few days, i would be at a normal bpt and say half of the military might bonus (or maybe i would lose all of it since the spy+building bonus is still beneficial to netters).

then you would see monarchy->dictator->demo netters (the last part which in itself is a problem, all netters will always end up going theo/demo in the end so apply similar logic to what i just did for dictators to the demo/theo phase).

but at least the mon->dictator phase won't create any certainty that the guy is netting or warring.


the likewise tech cap loss at the expense of bpt gain for theo would cause theo techer to be a viable war strategy. you would say reduce the tech cap con after half a month of working bonus points into it and your bpt slows back down to normal, but you end up having a lean mean breaking machine that gets cheap military to fund your breaking prowess without worrying about being a nuke dump (which is why theo is never a viable war strat). then someone wanting to war could run 10 theos and we can't tell if they are going to net or war

i know pdm and imagnum in particular are outliers. but every other alliance is pretty damned structured... too structured in fact ;P

Sure, I think some customizability within governments could be good and interesting.

Yeah - I am honestly surprised at how few members we have... I guess people are just value loyalty to their alliances over fun in the game because I can't imagine any other alliances are having as much fun as we are.

the recent food change helped the demo/theo netting problem a lot but not quite enough

What makes iMag less structured than the rest of you?

He might mean structured as working within the existing political structures of "socially acceptable".

Lots of good points. I like your point system idea Noto....like some sort of reward system for having your name put into the referral section when a new player signs up. But I think it would be really hard to recruit.

Now I'll be assuming quite a bit of things here, but I think people will agree. As hanlong stated most of the membership is from earth2025, and most of us were teenagers in high school when we started. So, many of us are starting to have less time with school, work, or family. What we need is an increase in new teenage players. But the problem with that are things like XBox live, which wasn't around back in the day. I don't know how this game would pull them away from the more visual games.

I do feel like we can try a complete different bracket to recruit from besides teenaged boys. One interesting thing I noticed on facebook. I feel like there are tons of middle aged women playing facebook games. But I don't know if this game would or could appeal to that bracket. Many people have talked about moving the game to facebook; I don't think it would really work. I did some asking around to my facebook gaming friends, and I asked what keeps them playing certain games and why do they stop others. The top responses I got:

- New Missions
- Monthly game updates (new content)
- Holiday items, missions

Now I don't know if that could be applied to this game. I would rather keep earth how it is now, than to see it flop on facebook. The thing that makes this game great, is the community everyone knows that. That could be lost if it was put on facebook. And back to my idea of recruiting middle aged women, I don't think they would fit into the community. But I definitely think we could try, or think of ways to improve the game to appeal to more people.

There is a former PDMer (middle aged woman actually) who said she will play again if this becomes a facebook game....

News feeds, ranks updates, and market feeds were not our creations. Players were already getting that information many years before Earth Empires was created.

All eight of the things that you listed can be hidden by players, in some cases with only a trivial amount of effort.

The government change could make the game a lot more interesting. If government were not made visable, but I would go a step further and not even let a spy op see the government. I would say that would make the game more challenging.

Another idea, how about making switch governments a little different. You would pick a certain cap, let's just say 300 turns. If you take 300 turns you can switch governments without penalty, and then after another 300 turns you can switch without penalty, etc. But if you change before the 300 turns, you take penalty.

"There is a former PDMer (middle aged woman actually) who said she will play again if this becomes a facebook game.... "

Quoting doesn't work on my work computer. Detmer ask her why. Does she want the game changed, or she simply wants the game in it's exact fashion, but on facebook.

The format of running through facebook is what she wants. The games she plays are centralized there.

the generalized rules which i can use to make an algorithm to guess the actions of what people aren't doing won't apply to imagnum

i'm not saying you guys aren't structured in the sense of having leadership and members who listen to you. i'm just saying you aren't' as easily predictable with the generic algorithms i can use to guesstimate what say NM or Evo or SoF is doing.

it's nothing against imagnum, merely an observation

and slagpit, i'm not suggesting it was the current dev's creation. most of the ideas in earth empires is actually mehul's creation and a lot of the tools are the old tool/site creator's creations (like gamerstown creators).

i have learned one important thing about game design working in the game industry for many years and that is the principle of a successful game needing to be "easy to learn, hard to master". this game (when i mean this game, i meant the alliance server iteration of it, which is what i'm addressing throughout this post) feels more like "easy to master, hard to learn"

to get yourself on even playing field you NEED to learn all the boxcar/(insert hosting site here) tools. you also have to learn all these policies and regulations of what's acceptable, what's a "topfeed", what's 1:1 retal, etc. etc. This is the "hard to learn" part. Once you get all those down, you can join an alliance like evo who will give you a canned all explore netting strategy or an alliance like sof who will give you a canned war strategy and you'd master the game. This is the "easy to learn" part.

A big reason why hard to master, easy to learn is bad is that it takes a lot of skill (aka fun) away from the game.

there's only ONE thing i can think in this game which i can think of which fits the "easy to learn hard to master" category and that is stonewalling (and that's the only time i had fun so far after coming back, when SOL was killing my country and i was walling).

walling is easy to learn (just get your SMS, log in on time and the mere presence of you buying stuff and taking turns means you are walling), but to do it right requires very quick decisions (since you are time limited while they are rushing the hell out of you), and flexible options (if you wall too much with troops and ur turrets gets weaked they might switch to BR on you) etc. etc. but other than stonewalling, nothing else captures the easy to learn hard to master mantra i was taught to foster a truly fun game.

if we are going the route of changing the governments, then i would prefer a system in which each government has:

(netgaining bonus)
(warring bonus)
(general penalty)

as opposed to a system that dulls the effects of the government through any method

Hard to differentiate warring and netgaining bonuses without adding our politics in. Theoretically greater military strength should allow you to gain land more easily and higher income will allow you to buy more military and warfare tech.

yea i don't think game design should take politics into its factor.

just pure min-max changing of the govt bonuses using the daily bonus points would be enough flexibility to give lots of creative options.

the different alliances/politics of the server will utilize them in various ways

now wait a minute

we cant argue that there needs to be a government change because you can predict what a player/alliance will do based on his government and at the same time say its difficult to differentiate between a warring and netgaining country

what things obviously separate the two? immediately coming to mind are war techs for warring and land/stocking for netgaining. could we not then have bonuses that increase missle storage/missle generation/missle damage? that would be a strictly war bonus. the dict spy bonus is another example of one with a very minimal gain to netgaining.

likewise, netgaining bonuses could include something like an additional 1% production for every 5k buildings you have of a certain type (there may be a better way of doing this to involve cashers equally), goods sold on the market receive a bonus in the amount of money returned for every million in the batch, etc

the numbers would need to be played with so that each type of bonus had minimal effects if the player chooses to play the other type of strategy

I think steps could be taken to make this game easier to learn, that would be easy. But I don't know how you can take away easy to master. You have one problem, we are playing alliance server. If it was only primary, I would say it's much harder to master. But with alliance server, a player joins the alliance, and then all they have to do is take simple orders from their strat advisor. Do you see a way of getting around that without taking away alliances?

Noto, I said that in the way PDM plays, and hanlong acknowledged that PDM and iMag do not fit the mold, government is not indicative of behavior. I do not think this is a problem and that no changes are necessary. I would be simply be amenable to the ability to min max some for further customization.

Dict casher who commits espionage gets income and tech - seems like good netgaining to me.

that's not good netgaining in the current politics of this server, because they will get pissed that you did that and retal you with SS/PS

like i said stonewalling is hard to master. i think the real time element of it makes it this way (compared to everything else which you can take 5 minutes making every single move so you can follow a canned strat verbatim).

maybe you get diminished returns in what you are doing if you are being too repetitive or something to that effect? makes you actually change up your actions and react based on what's going on insetad of just "explore 40 turns, build acres, log off"

unless that's the goal of this game (which maybe it is). for old retired vets to spend 2 minutes a day just to reminensce. if that's the only purpose of this server, then we all know it's going to die sooner or later since we are promoting it as a dying server

I disagree with you; I wouldn't say stonewalling is hard to master. The concept of it is simple. Take turns with low pop to maximize the amount of hits needed to kill you, and buy military to cause failed attacks. Now I do agree stonewalling is one of the most fun things for me too. But it's not really something to master, it more just having good timing. You can't do anything if you can't get on, or you got online to slow.

Whats wrong? Tools that assist clans to DR small neutrals into the ground so that they leave the server... The land pool decreases and more pressure is put on neutrals and increased conflict and land trading occurs. Eventually smaller clans will get hammered and farmed more and more until they collapse as they are unable to effectively war with larger clans farming them.

Its been a problem for years and years. The current situation was predictable from 2004.

i think that timing aspect is the mastery part.

if you stonewall too early/fast you end up getting another guy in your alliance killed instead.

you have to reel them in at the right rate and fail and gain pop at the best times.

it's an art form almost and like all art forms, it is hard to master =)

If we are to change governments, why not just make them totally customizable. Nowadays, you can make your character look any way you please, if we take attributes, you have points, then you can choose to form it to your liking, making it completely unique. Have multiple different options with a scaling system of using the points(like Mass Effect) so people don't go overboard on one. Use the current bonus system(except some timing changes to allow for more days worth of points) to allow them to increase some productivity inherent in their government.

Just an idea anyways since its being talked about.

remove the governments, REMOVE them all.

instead, further develop the bonus section with all sorts of country bonuses. by default, you start with X amount of points, that would be about the same as the current different country bonuses. I'm talking about having 20 or 30 different bonuses you can invest in, or maybe even have some that has a positive attribute but comes WITH a negative attribute, like +15 explore rate but -20% military strength, but then you can either use some points to increase military strength from another bonus, with no negatives, but cost more.

creates total chaos/random/UNIQUE country attributes ( of course, most netters would be able to figure out what they want the most, but there will be lots of testing and tuning) *If I'm farmer, do I want 10% food bonus or 10% better explore rate? Do I put some in military cost? What about spy strength? hmm*

would also create DIFFERENT war strategies, different styles.

give a spy bonus to give FALSE data to spy ops, tell them you have 500k less defense and watch the opposition DH!


And more importantly, spy ops cannot tell (other then defensive strength), only advisor update can load to your selected hosting website.



another thing I would suggest is to limit the amount of attacks in 24 hours to 50. lowers effectiveness of FS, increases more interesting scenerios for wars.

raise that 1/12 networth border to 1/8, or even 1/6.

give the little guys a chance, better chance, or maybe country under 2mil networth have that border to 1/2 even.

I think Forgotton is onto something:)

http://forums.earthempires.com/...did=7962&p=1299179836

posted in suggestion board, should get more attention there.

I think it's a valid idea, and could help us get more players, or atleast get older players to come back and try it.

I'd like to see a market Ticker thing, to show current costs of tech, food, oil, and military

I'm too tired to write a long reply to this, and even read all of it through, but I disagree. We're mostly veterans here. Very few are enjoying any form of "exploration" of the game. To me it makes no sense saying that removing "helpers" which do cumbersome work for you. Removing it would mean the information is still there, but you'd have to repeat the same process of getting it over and over again.

Most people thus have good grasp of the game dynamics, and in most situations, more randomness would either just make people increase their marigin, or it'd lead to a less competitive environment. Neither is good.


As for Forgottens ideas, at a first glance I like it. However, it'd mean it'd be really hard to keep track of all other countries. This would make the game more consuming, which would be nice for those with the extra time to but into it, but prolly really bad for those wo don't.

I didn't read the whole thread, but I want to toss out that the new bonuses add some randomness. With normal spy ops there is no way for me to account if you've sunk all your points into defense, so if I calculate to oversend 10%, I may end up not even close.

you can see the defense bonus % in a normal spy op

this is still all true fyi ;P

and since everyone ignored me back then, yes i wrote a tool for everything i said and more since then

This game still needs more PDM. Even though there is more PDM than a year ago, there is not enough yet.

well i'm just reminding everyone that still

there is zero secrets in this game if you know what you are doing.

and i agree with you detmer. PDM has been one of the few completely no BS alliance. I fully admit LaF (and that being mostly myself so i'm guilty as charged!) does dabble in the political game also (which requires BS), but at the end of the day we know that facts and tools is what we depend on.

I think what became wrong with the game is the fact nobody is willing to just attack another alliance. By all means this is no shot at MD. If you wanted to hit LaF, NAP them, then hit. Prep your allies for potential assistance if it furthers a 1v1. There is to much BS concealed around 1v1 wars. There are no real enemies anymore. Arranged wars, grab pacts, its just not what I would consider competitive.

While I somewhat agree with the lack of randomness, I disagree that the availability of newsfeeds and scripts and APIs (causing "less randomness" because you can write scripts to determine/deduce a lot of things) as the main reason that is wrong about the alliance server.

Consider this:
I suggested this
http://forums.earthempires.com/...ame-mechanics-every-reset
To change the game mechanics slightly every reset, so that every reset, there is something slightly different, or outrageously different, so that there is something new to try out - that makes the game random, you don't know for sure what is the best way to play your country given changing game mechanics.

But it got shot down as being time consuming to test whether each change would unbalance the game. Part of the problem has been that the game admins are resistant to big changes.

What Forgotten suggested has some potential to be realized, but it essentially amounts to similar ideas - add/change game mechanics in some manner to spice up the game and add more variables so that it is "more random". Bonus points was such an addition that spiced up the game. It was great, it changed the game significantly. I think more of such changes is good.

On the other hand, the Express server is getting some loving. The Express server is soon getting new DR and new GDI mechanics. That introduces new strategies, new ways to play, and makes the game even more unpredictable, more random. So while I did say earlier above that the game admins are resistant to changes, they do listen and change the game. And I like this upcoming change a lot.


Hanlong, you are describing things that apply to every server with clan tags, not just this server. Fundamentally, the problem is not really with the game mechanics. The problem is really that there are only something like 15 alliances, everyone knows everyone else pretty much. The number of alliances is too small, and hence "randomness" is reduced.

Consider the Team Server, originally created with the concept of "5 person teams", and see which team is the best. Great idea, but didn't turn out the way it was imagined to be. But what if you could enforcce 5-man teams? There would be something like 50-100 teams, there is no way each team is going to pact with every other team out there - That is what will create randomness. Our current Alliance clans are simply too little, too few, and as a consequence, everything becomes predictable. If there are 50 alliances, then grabbing would become so much more random and unpredictable simply because you don't know which unpacted clan would attack you. This is essentially what drives the solo servers. Every man is his own alliance, that is total chaos/randomness.

If we could not enforce smaller alliances, the other obvious method would be to increase the playerbase by 10 fold or 100 fold. That would obviously cause more alliances to form. And that's not happening soon.

I have for several years, going back to the Jolt takeover been advocating a set by set randomization of the government bonus's. Each set the algorithms spin the wheel and the intrinsic gov bonus's would get +/- a marginal ammount, not enough to characterize the government, but enough to add an element of uncertainty to each strat.

I would also add more of a 'mehul' factor on attacking, sort of like rolling a 1 on a saving throw - such that any attack could occasionally fail.

(meaking the assumption that everyone here knows what a saving throw is is probably not much of a reach, lol)

Another area where there is a lot of room for randomizing the outcome is spy-ops. I have a lot of ideas about making them more interesting. In the real world, most battles are fought by intelligence services - troops are a last option.

Add missiles and spies to the market and ditch the missile/acre restrictions. That would add a lot of randomness to the game and add a whole new dimension to the game.

LaF

Exactly what is wrong with the alliance server.

A group of individuals can gather for a serious conversation about the problems of the server. And some guy will come in and stirs it up just to make it fit his own agenda.



--------------------------------------------------------


Sheltering data from exposure should make it more interesting.
Ideas like

- Blind Land and Networth. Only can be seen through spy op. Info be released 24-48 hours from end of set for netgaining competition.

What if unaps and DPs style pacts allows hits to be exchanged, in a reasonabel fashion , wouldt that slide under your radar then ;)