I'm super guilty of helping push the era of rules lawyering and pacting and such, but that being said Requiem's point about getting a group together and implementing your own will is pretty on point. We fought a LOT of wars over our policies back on those days and my former alliance still wears a target on their back for it :D

Also just want to touch on "an untagged player who is likely new to the game and quickly gets disgusted by being continuously farmed."

We actually put in some mechanics to help direct new players to solo servers (Express and Tourney) so they can learn the game before joining the shark tank that is Alliance. My expectation of Alliance is that you should be part of a tag or at least know what you're getting into. I think we can do better at this (and will) but the notion that people are joining Alliance and getting farmed as an untagged country and quitting is not something I've really seen evidence of in years. Even back in E2025, a lot of the untagged fodder was multies and such.

Anyway, if you like the game but got tired of what you're doing, try changing up your focus!
When I joined the game, I played in war tags for a few years...
When I got bored of warring, I joined netting tags and learned to netgain...
When I got bored of netgaining, I moved into leadership...
When I got bored of leading, I built tools (which eventually became Boxcar)...
When I got bored of Boxcar, I rebuilt the game (that one was sorta forced on us :p)
The key thing I was focused on changed half a dozen times over the years. I'd recommend anyone else who feels like they're in a rutt try the look at another aspect of the game you haven't focused on before (or for a long time) and see how that changes your perspective!

But I'd expect that most people that are still playing have followed similar ebbs and flows and changes of focus. That's part of what has made this game enjoyable -- the ability to do so many different and complex things within a fairly simple underlying game.

Some things are bad, like a smaller community,. But other things are good, like fixing several major bugs, integrated clan sites and stability.

The biggest thing I want to do to grow the community is make it so some of the things archaic mentioned as driving players off are resolved and the look and feel are modernized for mobile play. It's getting closer but that has to be in a good spot before I spend money marketing it.

Either way, take care Cerberus!! See you when. You're back!

Wait til the bots hit back! I have the API done for it now, just need to update the bots!

great!!!

haven't heard that name in years

All the broken countries should be fixed now. Thanks for your patience!

I pushed a change that should fix the negative unbuilt acres bug -- please let me know if you encounter it after this post. Especially if it breaks your ability to grab!

I will fix the dozen-ish countries that were impacted by it shortly.

There's icons in the new UI!!!

Perfect lol

Merry Christmas!

Hope Santa is good to all of you!!

Happy Holidays from everyone at Earth Empires!!

Thanks to everyone who's played this year, and been part of this community. An especially big thanks to all of our mods and developers who have helped keep the game running and make it a better place for us all to play!

We've made some good progress this year on new UI work and tweaking some game mechanics. It wasn't as much as we'd hoped to get done, but it's a solid start and I'm excited about the team we've got now ready to help push things forward in 2020.

I hope Santa visits all your countries ;-)

Cheers,
EE Staff

ya, that seems reasonable -- maybe a Premium perk or something for the naming?

carrying over clans from round-to-round is also something very much on my mind

I'm working on that too -- I have a system in place for it, just need to roll it out. It's all dependent on the new UI, though, so you would need to do all the admin through the new UI but the benefits would be back-ported into the existing game core.

I don't recall what dragon told me, but just because every idea doesn't get implemented doesn't mean it's not something we're interested in.

If you have the logs, please share them!

Yes, I'm looking into Amazon's email services which have a pricepoint that means I can turn everything back on.

I was busier than expected after I went back to work and struggled to keep the progress up as I'd hoped, so everything is delayed at least a few months.

Moving some things forward over the break to hopefully accelerate dev a bit more, we'll see how that goes :thumbsup:

I made a post soliciting feedback on this a while ago:

https://www.earthempires.com/...ut-war-47401?t=1564436864

I don't think I got a good coalescing of answers other than that players like the teamwork aspect of war and dislike needing to be available 24/7 + having their country killed in seconds.

I'm very open to ideas about how to make war not kill countries so quickly.

I added code to throttle attack speed by making it take more readiness to attack quicker and many people revolted until it was disabled. Some by suiciding.

Sure it's fun to kill stuff quick, but I would love to find a more fun way to handle the war mechanic that isn't to time dependent.

FYI, I forgot to do it at the start of the round but decided to do it now before wars start.

It'll be staying off now and if re-enabled, it'll be done with a new changeset.

Thanks!

Since we're only a few days in I decided to re-enable the restart bonus. Restart bonus is now disabled for Alliance/Express and all other servers will get the full change suite on rollover (someone remind me if I forget again please).

Sorry for all the wishy-washy change timelines -- things have been crazy IRL with the holidays and visitors and stuff.

I forgot to toggle off the restart bonus so it'll be on again for this round of Alliance.

Also, I forgot to turn this on for FFA/Tourny/Team restarts so right now it's just taking effect on Express and Alliance.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

from my post on Announcements:

- Land returns for grabbing/nuking will be capped at 10% attacker’s total built buildings OR 100% of the existing calculation whichever is less)

lol

The parameters of the game have changed so you'll need to adjust your strategy/expectations to adapt to it.

I'd rather do more to shake things up than continue to let everyone optimize the status quo.

Even with the Pats absolute garbage play in the first half, it still took ridiculously incompetent reffing that wasted our challenges then missed two blatant officiating errors (some of which we couldn't challenge -- costing us a TD twice and at least a FG) to then eek out a 1-score victory.

I wouldn't be gloating too hard about that, but congrats on winning what most Chiefs fans would consider their SuperBowl! :)

https://i.redd.it/gsr1hpswfg241.jpg

Oooo that's a good point. I forgot we built in functionality to do just that -- I pinged the server now. Thanks for the feedback!

oh I did find a bug that may have caused this -- I put a patch in but ping me your country info and I'll fix it up (already been chatting with dragnars via PM)

thanks!

It is.

Also, -28 acres total or -28 unbuilt acres?

-28 total acres would mean you are dead and should cap at 0

did you grab and/or were you grabbed recently?

something in this vein is very much on my mind

Ya, that's reasonable -- I'll re-enable it for the remainder of the round. Everything else is still in. Will actually be interested in seeing how the returns impact war!

Hi everyone!

Here’s the update for Changeset #18 related to changing grabbing returns. This is a stepping stone toward future changes — we’ll see how it goes!

- All attacks (all types) will have returns capped at 10% of what the attacker has OR 100% of the existing returns (whichever is less) for the following items:
    - Buildings
    - Tech
    - Money
    - Food
    - Oil
- Each Building/Tech type will be treated separately so if you have 0 of a specific building type built, you won’t gain any built buildings of that building type. 
- Land returns for grabbing/nuking will be capped at 10% attacker’s total built buildings OR 100% of the existing calculation whichever is less)
- The restart bonus has been disabled until we can workshop how to implement it better

These changes will be enabled as each round resets, other than Alliance for which we have enabled the changes immediately.

Thanks to everyone for the feedback and passion they brought to this discussion!

Cheers!

The obvious counter-point to open profiles is that if you want to do something nefarious, just make a new profile and the paper trail isn't tied back to yours

That was always the reasoning behind not opening it up.

Also doesn't stop people like Requiem who suicide on the way out and no longer care about their reputation.

qz is the other one who reviews it -- only him and I are active in that project. Zarc has access but has been largely MIA unless we reach out to him.

Other stuff, like the UI project, is in a different repository

But as for feedback on the solution -> there's a thread on Announcements where I outlined what we're doing with some discussion I actioned. The code that does is just reflecting what I posted there.

It used to be harder to get 20k acres when we had less turns and no ghost acres!

I guess Z hasn't seen the proposal on announcements because I think he was one of the proponents of the idea we're going with

Either way, take care -- we'll be here when you're back :)

I like the idea of making land gained based on built acres, not all land. Made that change as part of this changeset -- I'll write something up more fully before releasing it. Just trying to get qz to review it before I put it in production.

*shrugs*

I literally have code up for review that resolves some of the issues folks raised

It's like leaving a new years eve party at 11:55!!

I nuked Requiem's access.

It's too bad but overall he really didn't contribute so it's not much of a blow to the project. Still fluffty, though.

FYI: https://www.earthempires.com/...to-grabbing-returns-48061

Hi!

We're making a few changes to grabbing returns based on feedback we've been receiving.

We're going to roll this out in a few phases, here's the general breakdown:

1) Grabbing returns for land, buildings, cash, bushels, tech and oil will now be computed to be the minimum the following:
- 10% of the amount the attacker has
- existing returns
For tech, it will be based on the individual techs the attacker has -- so if someone with no SDI attacks someone with high SDI, they will receive no SDI with their returns. This applies to all attack types.

2) After we see how this change works, we'll consider moving to a model where returns are captured based on the forces sent by the attacker. I.e, Troops can capture up to 1 bushel with them, tanks can capture up to one barrel of oil with them, etc. We need to figure out the math on this so it's something we'll look into (but was qz's preferred option).

3) Look into bundling some of these changes into a Clan GDI/clan war declaration mechanic if these changes are negatively impacting war.

I'll be making these changes shortly and should have them in a changeset for the start of the next rounds of each server. I'll make them available on the Alliance server as soon as they hit production.

Thanks for the feedback from folks on other ideas -- they are still very much in flight but this change has the lowest cost to implement in the short term.

Thanks!
Pang

The challenges of any "untagged can't do x" solution is that you just make a 1 man tag and you're no longer untagged.

Or if it's tags of x size, now I need to find a friend or make a multi.

I'd prefer more scalable solutions

I'd be curious how much SDI those countries that got nuked have. I'd guess like 10% from looking at the news.

There has to be some level of responsibility on the country owner to protect themselves. Many folks who yell at me about this want a magical boolean flag that will let them attack but not be attacked. That's not realistic.

The key to stopping capture of goods (stock) is so it doesn't allow countries to fund their continued efforts on the backs of those they hit.

Hi!

Thanks for all the feedback on the first discussion I posted. Since then, I reflected on a couple of aspects and came up with something new that I'll run up the flag pole for feedback.

This is looking for a less complicated implementation to start with which we can build on (both technically for implementation and conceptually for players to grasp), has some benefits which don't require meeting a Minimum Military Requirement (MMR), some additional great benefits which DO require the MMR, and a mechanism for it to be overridden through declaring war.

Clan GDI Rules:
- All countries, regardless of MMRs:
    - When attacking or defending, no returns are captured, only destroyed (except land/buildings)
    - No SS attacks can be made by members of clan GDI
    - Only non-harmful spyops (both ways)
- For countries that meet the MMRs:
    - Cannot be SS’ed
    - +25% SDI (maybe 25% is high, but somewhere around there)

Declaring war:
- When Clan A declares war on Clan B:
    - Clan B is alerted about the declaration of war immediately
    - After 48hrs, all Clan GDI protections will be removed (SS, spy op, SDI, returns captured)
    - If Clan B accepts the declaration of war prior to the 48 hrs, all protections are removed immediately

So two quick points on that:
- Declaring war in some form will likely be a follow on piece that happens after the initial clan GDI implementation
- The spyop piece is a simple on/off because of technical limitations in how we do spyops. It needs to be looked at more thoroughly to make a better solution.

Anyway, as always, if you have feedback please bring it forward in a civil way. Framing the feedback in the context of "you're killing the game!" doesn't really resonate.
Thanks!