It's short notice but that makes it more exciting. Highlights for Express:

* Ghost acre returns are now based on the total number of buildings owned by the attacker and the defender instead of doing a building to building comparison. This means that there should no longer be a reason for countries to build off-strategy buildings to increase their grabbing returns. The "10% rule" is still in effect.

* The update to AB and BR returns as part of change set #19 had the unintended consequence that countries could lose more buildings if they had many different building types. The formula has been changed so returns are approximately the same regardless of the building distribution of the defender. Note that a defender with many different building types may still see slight differences in returns due to rounding.

* The Premium spy chance estimation chance now accounts for spy DR.

* A new server setting was introduced to give countries an initial amount of bonus turns. Restarts will not get any bonus turns. This is intended for use on Express in the future but may also be added to other servers as well. Currently, no servers take advantage of this functionality.

* Military sanctions will be applied to a small number of player accounts. Reference: https://www.earthempires.com/...e-tool-49995?t=1618074323

* Harmless spy op (spy, market spy, ally spy, and military spy) eligibility is not impacted by the shrinking humanitarian range during the final 30 turns of a round.

* Countries in GDI can perform harmless spy ops even during the final six hours of the round.


Full details here: https://www.earthempires.com/...set-21-50109?t=1620149788

Ooh

Now that change set 21 is done I plan to do another round of NPC improvements. After that I will likely either implement seasonal leaderboards or will add NPC retals. I'm still not 100% sure on the order yet.

I don't understand the military sanctions... Link took me to country menu for login in.

Which part don't you understand?

Can you elaborate on bonus turns? The past few sets I have gotten 6 bonus turns the first time I login, then no more. What's different now?

Glad I can get good land off any strat now!

Check the announcements forum and you'll see it. It's a way to for mods to ban certain known, repeat offender griefers from griefing without banning them from the game.

Yeah I found it LOL

Disregard, I found the explanation 👍

Nothing changed for this round, but Express will change in the future before the next change set. Here's the current expected future state:

1) The first country for each player will get an additional 180 turns upon creation. Restarts will not get any additional turns.
2) NPC countries will play their initial turns right away (depending on the strategy), so we should see food, tech, and military on the public market much earlier than usual.
3) Countries will be awarded bonus turns at most every 24 hours upon logging in (this comes later, I didn't code it yet)

The current situation (6 turns at start) is actually unintended, but I figure it's not worth fixing.

Small correction: only admins can do it.

Makes sense. Will be nice to have goods on the market earlier.

Question for clarification on sanctions:

If someone double taps me and I kill him, will I be sanctioned?

How about if I AB him the rest of the set (sometimes I like playing with my food) ?


Thank you.

You will not be placed under military sanctions for either of those. "Running an offensively-oriented country and harshly responding to any country that attacks you." is explicitly listed as an acceptable behavior.

Good, those are my two favorite things to do here 👍👍

I had wanted to add a warning message for players about to break GDI on another country, but it ended up being too tricky to do as part of change set 21.

Good, don't do it :P

I think targeting countries that never hit you with the intent to ruin their experience is what the sanctions are for koh. If your intent is revenge for current set issues or for personal gain, you should be fine.

Yes but I wanted to make sure of that :-)