I agree that express is casual in the sense that you just need to play seriously 3-4 days at most to compete, while in primary if you miss a day here and there at the wrong time you are toast.

Yes that, and also if you screw up or get suicided 1.5 months in, it feels like a lot of effort went down the drain.

Unless you own the suicider and still finish top 10 and laugh at the little loser.

All the bots are in DR:

2021-05-02 12:59:47 PS im a 100 jet SS (#40) Sangre Rosa Ravenbeard (#50) 1231A (2005A)

My comment is not divisive when I have won express multiple rounds by farming the piss out of bots and only hitting players and by playing all-x

Let’s not forget that there isn’t a single player left in this entire game that has played this server more than me.....

So I can actually say that the competition is more intense and fierce when we don’t have a pile of bots to farm...

Achieving $100m NW by spending your entire weekend timing LGs only shows dedication to LGing bots. Not being hit by a top feeder or a human only shows luck.

Actually beating the 40 humans that are left playing express on the even playing field of no bots is skill. That is why I am excited for your changes slagpit of some sets having no bots.

In the past there have been all-x challenges organized on this board were some of us did not make any grabs. Those things were fun and changed up the monotony of “he who spends the most time farming bots in the weekend”.

Further more I am not trying to take away from some peoples extreme dedication to set timers and blow up their day or whatever to login every 2, 4 hours or whatever.

If your life permits you to have that much dedication to the game than by all means you deserve the win.

I guess it’s not different than real life. He works hard and focuses everything in life to win express is #1

Enjoy the rest of the round boys and congrats to Tmac. Commie Power Represent!

May l finish a distance second to you bro!

And thanks in the CS amount tip. I’ll try that next set

Damn Little Baboon (#75) was so close for 10th!

But Major saved us!!! lol, good set guys! xXx

or I guess I didn't lol... damn it man!!! good set to all.

Superfly, I played in the old days too. I'm the villain who coded Express GDI after all. I will agree with you that modern Express is soft compared to the old days. I disagree with your characterization that winning is solely about effort. Skill is needed to win. It's just a different type of skill set compared to the old days.

NPC countries are a trade off. If anything, removing them might make "camping" more important. The first countries who notice the low defense countries exploring from 4k to 8k acres might be able to make a huge advantage out of that.

As I've said before, I think that allowing the NPC countries to fight back will remove a lot of the current abuses. It's also possible that we'll see some seasons without NPC countries, but that isn't guaranteed to happen. I'd like to make the NPC countries good enough to where there are no longer complaints about them.

Text me when bots start retaling 👍

Hopefully that's not sarcastic. It is planned to happen. I've been working on the code to make the NPC countries better. 17 M NW is the best ever finish on Express for one of them.

Player base; Can we have one bot added to a server wide DNH? Let’s see what these bad boys can do without being crippled

Yeah I bet they’re good netters already if they don’t have to be door mats!

That would be cheating! Generally speaking players HATE it when the NPC countries in any game cheat. I try hard to make the NPC countries not cheat in any way.

There's an AI test server that has the same number of turns as Team. The top country there gets around 55-60 M NW.

Here's a fun challenge idea, turning on a stopwatch for any time spent running your country or looking up targets. You have 1 hour for the whole week, how high can you go

(In response to the talk that the top scorers are the top time investors)

The EE speed run

Yep that is a good one Molotov. Just announce it before and make people apply in good time before.

Ignore KoH this evening. He tested his ghost reaper moonshine he made.

Haha yea that would be awesome! Speed chess type game lol

I think you also want to add some number of minutes per day. Otherwise people could run out of time before they destock which wouldn't be any fun.

Tested it on a friend too lol

And no it wasn't sarcasm, I want to see those bad boys in action :-)

Koh hows the ghost pepper shine?

Delicious and HOT but pleasant heat, you can smell and taste the reaper ghost pepper, I really liked it and my buddy that is not fond of spicy foods liked it too, he expected pain and all he got was heat, I was surprised too that there wasn't pain , that's a good thing I guess 👍

How do we count online time?

I don't think we can check for that.

What we could do is limit time of grabbing by summing up the time from the first grab to the last grab of every PS window.

One hour is a very long time then which wont limit us at all. Considering we can plan ahead which targets we hit the time needs to be way shorter if thats how we do it; like 10-15 minutes for the entire reset.

Or we could limit to only PS, or X grabs in the reset.

I remember we did 4 duels back in 2018 or when it was.

It was:
0cs
All-xp
Tyr casher
and something else I forget what.

I only participated in 0cs and tyr casher.

I suggest we figure out the rules of this together before we plan it because it needs to be well thought out.

One hour to play 1800 turns sounds a bit boring to me because there's no way to check for it, plus what is considered 'playing'? I could sit hours and plan my turns plus waiting for the perfect market conditions to log in and play 5 minutes.


I suggest one of the following:
*A sum of up to 10 minutes between the first and last grab of all your grabbing sprees put together.
*Do all your grabs of the reset within 1 hour of your choosing, no grabbing outside this window.
*A limit of X grabs for the reset, where X is something like 5-20(to be determined later).

Planning ahead for targets would count as time spent, ideally. Same if you are in IRC looking at the market. It would all have to be honor system really, unless it was implemented for a season of the Fiesta Server actually. Turn off the external data (like Tourney does) so people can only grab from inside the game. Timer starts when you log in and then there's an "Exit game" button on the home page that you have to click to stop the timer.


Not crazy about the latter two options here because that's limiting the amount of grabs, whereas the impetus for this is sort of to show you can do a lot of attacks and get big without actually spending a lot of time "camping" or hunting through targets actually.

The first one is good because it mostly reflects time spent, not attacks made, but 10 minutes for a whole set is quite low, and also it would have to be honor system of course since we can't know someone hasn't spent 15 minutes picking out the targets ahead of time and then does the attacks in 2 minutes.

My advice is to pick a challenge that's fun to do. Limiting time won't really prove anything. The narrative of "the top players only win because they spend so much time on the game" has been around for at least 18 years. It will never go away.

Lol that doesnt work for me at all... I literally used "Blocksite" browser extention to stop myself from logging in when I needed to and it blocked me 20+ times in a day. When Im browsing EE I usually log into all my countries.

Also honor system is too weak. In the other duels we all were encouraged to spy each others and stuff so that no one built CS in the 0cs duel for instance or played tyr farmer/techer in the tyr casher duel.

Its really hard to track your own time expenditure, and impossible for others



My point was that the original suggestion was all grab searching and so on had to be done in 1 hour and there is no way to control that. Limiting it to the actual grabbing means we CAN control it and by lowering the time to 10 minutes there will be a soft limit on how much time you can actually spend looking for targets as well.

I mean if you look for targets for an hour to do 2 minutes of grabbing you will see a lot of those targets lost to other hitters during that time. So it will only be meaningful to search for targets about 1 hour total at most to do 10 minutes of grabbing.




I also feel we have a different entry into this when you say this. My thinking is that I would do this duel with a country that is essentially all-xp but enhance it with a very limited number of good grabs at the right time that clearly indicate that I have not spent a great deal of time "camping"(which doesn't exist), looking for targets and grabbing.

If I have only 5 grabs over the reset, no one can claim I spent too long looking for targets when some make 100+ grabs in a set---> QED
If I have made all my grabs in a stretch of say 30 minutes no one can claim I spent a lot of time looking for targets---> QED
If I have made all my grabbing sprees in a total timeframe of 10 minutes I cant have spent all that long looking for targets etc---> QED

-------------------------
This is camping:
Looking for targets that exit DR minutes or hours later and setting alarms for when to hit those targets. THIS PRACTICE NO LONGER WORKS AND NONE OF THE TOP NETTERS SPEND THIER TIME THIS WAY SINCE THE WAY DR WORKS CHANGED IN 2014.
-------------------------

In case it helps, I'm willing to occasionally audit the countries participating in any challenge. So it wouldn't have to be entirely on the honor system, depending on the challenge details. I don't have a good way to audit "only spend X minutes during the round" though.

Clearly skill and effort contribute. An inefficient player can play all day, but still lose to bots. Top players have shown they can easily hit 45m nw without much effort which can actually win. When skill is equal, effort may very well decide the winner.

I don't know why people still talk about camping. I have no idea how that works now. Whenever my jets are available, I go on eestats and find some bots in low dr to hit. Once you start having an idea of how certain bots play, as well as which ones most humans hit, your searches become easier.

I'm not a fan of speed play. My fingers hit wrong buttons all the time(sometimes it clicks all bushels on my pm when I'm buying something else!), and I don't play quickly in general. That's why I don't war on clan servers because I'll die in 10 seconds and I hit slow, lol.

I'm up for a challenge - I think the cleanest challenge has to the the all-x challenge or some version of who can run fasc casher and commie techer to top 5. lol