When people are talking about somebody top-feeding .. to what are they referring?

Attacking a country that you know can easily attack you back.
Typically a poor choice of attack.

Just what whiners say when they feel upset that someone smaller than them land grabbed them for large gains. Lol

+1

solo servers = no topfeed

alliance/team = topfeed exists (no universal definition)

ffa = yes and no topfeed

+2

3

More specifically when someone makes a grab where it is certain that the country grabbed has no chance to get its land back.

People seem to think every grab should be a land trade where both countries benefit. If someone with 5k acres grabs someone with 20K, the poor fat fluff with 20k acres has no chance of getting his land back without wasting considerable resources and breaking GDI making it not worth even trying.

This was curbed a bit by making NW factor into gains, but it is still commonplace and netters hate it. Some alliance server pacts even have topfeed definitions written into them allowing L:L retals for grabs on countries with more than 120% of your land pre grab.

You should read some of the terms in these pacts lol

Which is why alliance server suckssss now.

they r talkin aboot your mom #rekt

Aboot... Lol. Where'd that even come from? Did the Canadian South Park guys just randomly make that up to see if Americans would buy it? Ha maybe a Newfie thing???

r ye avin a giggle m8

try and say GOOD EYE MIGHT without sounding australian serp

Thanks for the input!

History lesson incoming.

15 years ago....

When you SS or PS a country in 0 DR (i.e has been hit 0 times in the last 24 hours), if your NW matches the target country, you get a certain % of his land. It used to be something like this (numbers are not exact):

Target NW is 80-120% of your NW: A PS will get 9% of his land
Target NW is 50-80% of your NW: A PS will get 7% of his land
Target NW is 30-50%% of your NW: A PS will get 5% of his land
Target NW is < 30% of your NW: A PS will get 3% of his land

etc, basically the larger the NW, the more % of his land you get. So if the target was way higher than you in NW, you got A LOT of land. When target searching for suitable targets that are 1/12 to 1/3 your size, good players would always search for a country just below the 30% NW threshold where you magically got nearly 66% more land for a PS than one just above the threshold.

So a topfeed (at that time) was defined as attacking someone of larger NW than you.
A bottomfeed is defined as attacking someone of lower NW than you.

-----------------------------------------
Fast forward 10 years. Earth:2025 died, Earth Empires was born. The rules were changed so that the NW brackets for grabbing was no longer a step function. There aren't anymore thresholds, the % you got was calculated off the ratio between your NW and the target NW. Furthermore, the benefits for topfeeding was removed by making it such that attacking a country about 95-100% of your size in NW yields the most acres. If you attacked someone far larger in NW, you got penalized the same way for attacking someone of smaller NW, the peak centered at your own size. If you think you know what "symmetric bell curve" means, or "Gaussian curve", then you got it.

Nowadays, the definition is a bit hazy, but a lot of people classify attacks based on intent:

Topfeed: You attack someone, with no intention of avoiding the retal, with the hope that the exchange of land would benefit you more than it would benefit him.
Midfeed: You attack someone, with intention of jumping out of range of the retal after the attack (by buying a lot of turrets)
Bottomfeed: You attack someone that you know is incapable of retalling.


Based on the "intent", it is generally the case that bottomfeeding is strongly correlated with attacking someone less than 1/3 your size, midfeeding correlates to attacking about 1/3-2/3 and topfeeding for attacks larger than 2/3 your size.