I find the I-Cashers and I-Farmer a refreshing strategy. They give up 20%/15% respectively but they should grow faster with fewer build costs and military upkeep.

And at this point (50kAcres) Landtrading amongst eachother would be profitable probably. My guess is that one trade would yield 4000 acres to both parties with about 5500 acres needing to be built due to the destruction. With turrets this cheap there will never be a better time.

I'll explain why it isn't worth it to landtrade Andrew. Consider these 2 scenarios:


Scenario A: Bottomfeed for 2k land with your 54 turns.

You perform about 3 PSes on 3 targets using about 1/3 of your turns, build the 2k land with your next 1/3, and you can explore or cash the last 1/3 and use the cash generated here to buy tech and defenses for your newly gained land. Your tech% is maintained, your CS count is maintained.



Scenario B: You lose 4k land, but gain 7k land due to a landtrade (if the exchange is 4000(7000) for both sides), for a net gain of 3k acres. You need to build about 6k acres despite gaining only 3k. [Your estimate of building only 5500A gaining 4000A is way off, you will be building a lot closer to 8000A.]

You spend all your jets doing a single huge PS, and build almost 6k acres with all your remainder turns. In fact, you would need 120 BPT (as a Dictator, you would need to even build about 670 CS to get that high) 6k acres in a single day's 50 turns after deducting 2 turns for the PS, and a few more for spy ops. It's more likely you need 1.5 days of turns to build all the land (and that you have also lost about 5 BPT in the exchange).



In both scenarios, when you are building a full BPT of buildings, the cost needed is pretty close to your per-turn income. So while building land, the income earned that turn goes towards building acres.

So for scenario A, the player spends 1/3 of his daily income and turns building the 2k acres, and the remaining 2/3 is money that can buy turrets and tech for the new land.

In scenario B, the player spends ALL his daily income building every single turn, and has no money for tech or turrets, not only that, the building spills over to the next day, taking maybe 1.5 days in total for 3k acres of gain, taking into account replacing some of the CSes lost in the exchange (or your next trade takes even more turns to build), so about the same rate of gaining land as Scenario A (2k per day).

But this gets worse the more you trade, and you won't have money to maintain your tech base and you will fall behind your non-trading competitors.

Also in scenario A, you don't lose turrets since you don't get retalled. In scenario B, you lose turrets since you get retalled. That is another cost to factor in. (I assume in both cases, jets used is roughly about the same: 1 big PS vs 3 smaller PSes.)

And the reason why landtrading works in Alliance server is because Scenario A doesn't exist on that server.

You won't see landtrading happen on Express/Primary/Tournament (the solo servers) because landtrading is a worse scenario than just plain bottomfeeding.

You can inspect the last year of resets and note that nobody in the top 10 land trades.

[Your estimate of building only 5500A gaining 4000A is way off, you will be building a lot closer to 8000A.]

It is not way off.

Scenario B:
2012-12-31 00:47:30 PS 14 (#168) PANLV 1 (#155) PANLV 5159A (9246A)
2012-12-31 00:44:08 PS 1 (#155) PANLV 14 (#168) PANLV 4962A (9069A)
http://www.eestats.com/ffa/oldcountry/405/155

First attacker gains 9069 acres and build 4962 Acres.
2nd attacker gains 9246A acres and builds 5159 Acres.

1st Attacker nets 3910 Acres and had to build 4962.
2nd Attacker nets 4284 acres and had to build 5159.

Dictators with the similar NW land trading have to build about 125% of the net acres gained. You lose about 1.5% of your Construction Sites, but you do not need to rebuild at this point because your BPT is already past optimal for the future acres built.

In summary it would cost you 1 attack with likely 4 spy ops so 6 turns and a gain of 4000 acres would take 50 turns to build. It would destroy 1M turrets (on the high side). Costing you $125M (also on the high side since some indys are selling turrets for $95). The $125M is going to take 5 turns of cashing to recover depending on your tech levels. the extra 1k acres built will cost you another $166M or so, so probably 6 turns cashing.

Landtrading gain of 4000 acres nets to 71 turns to build and recoup investment.

Scenario A: Bottomfeeding with 100BPT for 4k land will take 6 attacks (5 turns/attack on average - this is generous, I fail a ton of ops these days). 30+40 turns, so you gain 4k land in 70 turns

The hidden benefit of Scenario A is that you may not be building 4k land if you grab targets of the same strategy.

The hidden benefit of Scenario B is that you are doing your cashing and building at 4k acres more already. So your cash/turn may be increased - depending on tech% decrease.

So in all I am not sure I would be landtrading if I were you, but I wasn't a fool to think about it. And you weren't doing the idea justice in your analysis.

"But this gets worse the more you trade, and you won't have money to maintain your tech base and you will fall behind your non-trading competitors."

No. It improves the more you trade because you gain land faster. The more acres you have the more superior landtrading is to bottomfeeding.

I'm going to go with Xin's analysis on this one. Continuous landtrading will wreck your country, I have seen it time and again when people decide to make every retal and end up unable to and their country falls off the radar, plus you won't see many top countries doing this and call it a smart idea hence why you don't see it done on solo servers and have it pay off.

Go ask NGC 224 (#27) how his effective land trading went this set? I dare say he'll be the 1st to tell you never again even though he came out ahead in land on a majority of those hits. It's never always just about land you know. You can landtrade yourself to the bottom of the pack to where you just become bottomfed on.

Since my analysis basically broke even, I can guarantee that landtrading at anything below 50K acres would not be smart. You also must do it with another Dictator of the same strategy.

That is why I began this thread because I don't recall a previous set where you could find Dictators of the same size and strategy above 50k acres.

Also someone playing a dictator (which isn't a very pansy govt) might not take kindly to being topfed and you end up with a risk that you don't factor in, war.

I suppose I totally forgot about not having to tear down buildings you grab if you land trade with the same strategy type.

However, even so, land trading is a destructive process and is still inferior to pure bottomfeeding on solo servers.

Particularly for cashers, they can be cashing the turns for 20% extra cash instead of building building building.

As you grow bigger, while it is true land trading gains you the land faster, it isn't actually faster or better once you factor in the tech costs (you will struggle if you try to build this up from 130% to 178% at 80k acres and it takes days), building costs (which are polynomially higher) and turret costs (which are linearly higher).

When you go from 50k fully built down to 45k then to 55k, you end up building 15k buildings for a 5k land gain.

:)

I'm not trying to be argumentative here, but this is very wrong. I showed an example of a land trade from 52k acres above.

Again, I am not trying to be a pain. But you missed the fact that if it takes 6 attacks to gain 4k acres bottomfeeding you will likely have the same amount of turns to cash.

The key in the analysis is the number of turns it takes to grab for the same amount of land. The variance in build costs will grow (because it is polynomial vs a linear cash/turn growth), but not signifcantly enough to cost you many more turns.. But the number of turns cashing to replace turrets will not change.

Xinhuan just got xinhuaned!

I get you Andrew. Let me think about it.

It was horrible! But Andrew's example is quite different.
I think it has merit. I think landtrading as a dict at 50k acres could get you to a higher landgoal pretty fast. If you can stockpile with more acres than the others it might just pay off.

Guys, you all have it wrong. The best way to gain land as a dict is to grab big repubs, get all defensive bonus, and then buy up a ton of turrets so you don't get retaled (or at least make it very hard to be retalled) - 35% difference with just government difference, add in D bonus and weapons and man repubs get gyped. =)

Once you get fat like this hope that larger countries grab you, and then you retal for even more land.

that seems like a horrible strategy...IMO

crown of the valley and March 17 2012 landtraded in the May 2012 set. I think that was aqua and blid if I remember correctly. Blid hit aqua knowing he would get retalled but thought it worth it, for both of them.

So is trying to enforce a 72 hour retal window =P

Now that's just plain cold LATC. A bit too soon for that now, lol.

haha sorry Bobby.. I was wondering if it was too soon to joke about that.

Would land trading be a viable strategy since it requires some coordination between countries?

Would this be considered "cheating" by the moderators?

In Alliance/FFA, you have teams/tags, and you are allowed to "work" with other people. Primary is meant to be a "solo" server. Regardless, I think you should still be able to "trade" with others since it's just considered an attack with a subsequent retal.

Although you should wait for a mod to comment on land trading first.

It also makes more sense from a Dict perspective just to attack and trade hits with fat reps who are around the same size/nw. Yes, it's mutually beneficial to two dict cashers "trading", but when they hit a rep, it'll be more beneficial to the dict. If the rep does the 1:1 retal, you'll gain more than them (due to ghost acre bonus). And if they retal more than once, it opens them up to war :) So to all those reps out there, be careful of dicts!

I can't quote you for some reason LATC, but I lol'd=)

ingle, I believe you are correct in everything you just said.

an added risk to landtrading is that the other guy may have more mill strat than you.

hah that was a lameass move I made. I was playing a Rep that set for the second set in a row with the specific goal of setting the Republic record. aqua was outpacing me in land and I grabbed not to improve my own score but specifically to slow him down as I viewed him as my top competitor. He got hit by other people as well, stopped grabbing early, and I did beat him and set the record... heh. glad aqua was able to turn around and win one of the sets after that, makes me feel less guilty

lol yep reps, fear my giant dict!

It's already started, before this thread was even created...

The hit
2013-02-04 23:05:20 PS Maxwells Demon (#75) Vengeful Spirit (#186) 4853A (8691A)
The retal
2013-02-05 15:31:40 PS Vengeful Spirit (#186) Maxwells Demon (#75) 4109A (5874A)


4582 acre gain for the dictator 1021 acre gain for the republic.

Neither country has been deleted .... yet
*looks at Galleri*

If I get grabbed, I'm blaming you Andrew!

I thought about it like I said I would, and I think the key equalizer is really that the landtrader needs to build more CS than the bottomfeeder initially at the outset. Even building just 100 more CS (for 17 more BPT) is an extra 2 days that could have been used for bottomfeeding instead.

So even if landtrading is slightly better than bottomfeeding in terms of land gain speed, it isn't as powerful as it seems if you have to sacrifice extra days to build early CSes.

I do think its more than "71 turns to gain 4000a" though. Since you didn't account for cashing another 10+ turns or so to get the cash to buy the tech to maintain tech% (probably 30 tech per acre spread over res/bus/strat/weap), and another 5 turns for the jet/oil and turrets (this would already be part of the bottomfeeder's routine of 2k/day) and it's probably closer to 85 turns to gain 4000a.

Factor in the "have to build more CS" early, I think trading is maybe equal at best, and you'll need to have a good Strategy tech too.

I think another point to note is defensive allies.

Dicts that agree to trade with each other (or otherwise) will be hurting their D allies slightly for every trade and their allies might not appreciate you wasting their turrets and drop you in favour of someone else that isn't trading.

If you have no D allies, you're vulnerable to being topfed.

Sometimes I feel too stoopid to play with you guys

Its ok, Cannon, i am stupid and play with these characters haha

Duh...

PM me when you dicts have dropped your def allies.

I only have 1 DA but he's not active.

And this isn't a PM

This is a valid point. You can't drop D allies for sure, and they would be somewhat upset.

I don't see how it is any different from bottom feeding. To get the techs up. The 70 turns bottom feeding didn't account for buying the tech or jets.

The difference here is that since all the acres are gained at once you are gaining the tech every other day as opposed to every day. But your cash/turn is higher because the land gained produces more than the loss of tech %. I.E. If you start with 50000 acres at 170% tech and you gain 4000 acres. 54000 acres at 168% tech cashes more than 52000 acres at 169% tech.

Reminder:
In the original analysis you are actually done building at 56 turns (6 turns spent spying and attacking). The remainder of the turns are the cashing that equalizes the non-equivalent costs of the two scenarios. You have to buy the same amount of tech in both scenarios.

And it looks like I don't know how to add. 4 turns spying, 2 attacking, 50 building, 5 cashing for turrets, 6 cashing to make up for the additional build costs = 67

This is a valid point, but I don't think it is that significant.

You lose on average 1.5% of your BPT per defend.

If you start land trading at 50,000 acres you will need 6 trades to get you to 79,000 acres (assuming 8% gains). During these 6 trades your BPT will drop from 100 to 91.

For simplicity if that is a weighted average of 95BPT over the 29,000 acres it will take 15 more turns to build while land trading than while bottom feeding at 100BPT.

I think if you tested it you would find that if done correctly between two equal dictators Land Trading would be better than bottom feeding at 55000 acres and much better than bottom feeding at 62,000 acres and above.

If the same two dictators traded too many hits their def allies would get frustrated and I personally would probably report it for coordination. 6 trades? That's abusive. If one dict reading this thread likes your analysis and forces land trades on *different* big countries with the same building type, then they could get away with that, but two countries trading 6 times seems like abuse to me.

Yeah, personally I think it's a bit of a touch and go, and a lot of conditions must be "just right" for trading to work.

2 countries wouldn't want to trade more than 3 times. And to me it is abusive if they coordinate. If I were a mod I would look at whether or not they spied before they attacked.

If they spy then I would give them the benefit of the doubt that they are not coordinating and both doing what is in their best interest.

When Land Trading the 2nd attacker gets more land than the first. But the first gets to build at a higher BPT.

If you were the first to hit, would you want to build before being retaled?

And I guess it's obvious you wouldn't hit the same country more than three times. But I don't know, having a land trading partner, even if it's in both countries' interests, seems like coordination to me. Otherwise, hitting someone a second time you'd face possible missiles and war.

Speaking from experience, this is a bad thing to face=)

Yay!, you got the point :p

I appreciate this question, and it has been brought to my attention. I am waiting a reply from qzjul or martian.

A certain croatian keeps PMing me to landtrade with him.. ahem.. he's trying to coordinate outside of the game!

Dear folks,
The Gods have spoken...ok the head czar game mod has given me an answer.
Landtrading is consider coordination.
So it is a no go.

more details please! :P

because this could be explained as not being allowed to grab someone with the same nw and land even if there's no deliberate coordination? it's too vague.

But thanks for asking the czar, I know we can be a hard to please crowd :P

aha! I agree with the ruling :P

Mags, I assume you can grab anyone you feel like once, but if the two of you engage in repeated land swaps it's coordination

Yes, I'll assume that too I guess.