You can value both (and I'm not arguing against being able to defend yourself, just against using lethal force to do so), but prevention should always have the priority as crime not happening in the first place is the best outcome.

If you live in a where crime prevention is viewed as less important than dealing with crimes in progress, I feel sorry for you.

The question you're answering and the question I asked appear to be a little different.

You're saying that in the face of an attacker prepared to use lethal force, lethal force is an appropriate response. I'm saying that there should be no attacker.

I get that this is an aspirational statement that isn't going to be practical in all situations, but the better outcome here is to not put people in situations where they need to use force, lethal or otherwise, to defend themselves.

It is it really a step too far to say that using lethal force has no place in society today outside of war?

KoH: Changing how the bots operate isn't the only way to address the individual needs of the server. Slagpit's suggestion would be quicker, easier, and more effective given the current state of things. If you want to wait for bots tailored to the server, fine, but you might be waiting awhile.

Yeah, that's the kind of bike I saw going up Groat Road that I was telling you about, qz. Crazy how they can handle snow.

I'm not sure retalling with special attacks is appropriate for all servers, and Slagpit's suggested change solves that effectively enough for express. If you hit a bot 5 times, you lose GDI and are open to getting wrecked by others.

Defense is the bigger issue. They're not going to be able to effectively retal most hits on them regardless of how they're coded, only those hits from people running low defense which is less of an issue on express than it is on say, alliance.

Regardless, it'll come eventually.

I'm pretty sure the aim with the bots was for them to be alternative targets that were as appealing as other players, rather than a sole source of land. They'll get defense before long, and hopefully they'll start retalling after awhile as well.

I already suggested elsewhere that the bot count be reduced to 10% of the server population, but based on what I've seen (I watch the news) that seems pretty reasonable.

That's a real convincing argument, right there.

I'm 99% sure that's not Souly; they don't exactly hide which country they own :P

Gotta keep in mind that, aside from the salary cap issue, baseball has 162 games in the regular reason and lots of local TV money. They don't do so hot nationally, but they clean up on the local level and at the gate compared to other sports.

Yeah, but you're still shorting yourself. 52 hours is ideal imo, max PM size possible for a final resale.

If you do that on alliance you lose lucrative reselling opportunities :P

Well, you'd have to be signed out for 3334 turns, but yes. And, the turn after, it'd decay like 75k troops immediately, vs. a gain of only another 1500 for a loss of 73.5k.

It doesn't cap as such. That 0.985 is a decay function, so the cap is where ever the balance is between the decay and whatever you generate per turn, and that only kicks in if your PM wasn't empty on logout. If you log out with an empty PM, it'll fill indefinitely, until you log in.

Hi and stuff.

That's accurate.

That's Land*6.5 NW per acre per turn, at a cost of $172/NW for a TMBR.

I doubt it's there for strats other than techer due to income per acre questions.

Don't need the oil to do it, just ~5 hours or so at the end. Right now, due to the bot land, I expect it'd be trivially easy for a techer to rush to 10k A, stock, switch to TMBR, and get over $30m NW. If you can manage 250 A per hit, which doesn't seem entirely unreasonable, you're looking at only about 300 turns spent getting BPT, land, and buildings.

Edit:
Yeah, the rebuild is only in the area of $300m for a country that size. Assuming 1400 turns of teching at 3k TPT and an average price of $1500 and a NW cost of $172/NW you're looking at a ~$35m NW jump.

I did the math on it back when I was playing; TMBR was actually my ideal destock option as a low-land (~10k A), all-x early stocking techer. Strat didn't work out as intended 'cause I didn't fit it to the server environment well enough, but the math is there to support TMBR if you're low enough on land and have a big enough stock.

Tech percentages when fighting I'd guess.

I was pretty certain the only way this would happen is if qz typoed. I went and checked, he didn't :P

If you're looking to summon me, 3 times is enough :P

WHAT DO WE WANT
CAR CONTROL
WHEN DO WE WANT IT
NAO!

If they're theo farmer, qz really needs to recheck the government selection coding :P

Well, uh, that got personal really quickly.

Mental health issues are real, shouldn't be stigmatized, and need to be treated, but I'm doubtful you could find statistics or studies that would correlate murder and mental illness, and suggesting they're linked does more to stigmatize mental health issues.

You should ask qz that.

http://www.earthempires.com/...iccyh-thread-34515#624535

Minor forum issue. Please don't make any attempt to repeat it :P

I wouldn't have guessed that the market stuff is third party given that it's advertised in the news channels.

I've got timestamps on, but my preferences for IRC in general are different than what I'd want for that one specific channel; I don't want GMT down to the second for anything aside from the news.

I just figured I'd toss it out, anyway.

The market bot has a time stamp, but the news one does not. That'd be nice.

I had a conversation with qz about this literally yesterday. If you're asking what the original intent was, no, I can't answer that and wouldn't pretend to be able to, but that isn't the question as I understood it.

Pardon me for trying to be helpful.

Ah I see, you don't care about the answer, you just care that *I* answered.

NukEvil: I posted between when Tellarion replied and when the thread was locked, then deleted my post as soon as I realized the thread was locked. Rather hilariously, this is the same thing Jayr was complaining about; he posted between my reply and my locking, so I deleted his post; I'm just applying the same standard to myself.

mrford: I had reason to discuss this general topic with qz when asking about modding practices. Ask him if you want.

I thought it was implied. Directly, then: no, it's deliberately done.

A combination of realism and modding philosophy. If the alt breaks a rule, or makes a show of evading, then they'll get banned again. Otherwise, we don't care so long as the rules aren't being broken.

It isn't like it's time consuming or difficult to do it this way.

If we're talking about strats that haven't won, I'll just point out that I doubt oiler has ever won anything anywhere and that the most recent oil changes are unlikely to change that.

Well, more that food should be weakened, but yes that obviously affects farmers.

I'm just going to point out two things, briefly:

The quality of the play on the server and my strategy being appropriate are not interdependent.

The "mob mentality", as mrford describes it, isn't a feature of all forums in all places but rather the result of a few people here, who have little to do with express specifically (the people making the most noise are people who I'd already been arguing with about unrelated things well before ever becoming a mod), making the forums worse for everyone.

Now, I'll ask this real clearly:
What's the outcome that you'd all like from this?

If there's something you'd like me to reply to, I'd be more than happy to. If this is just going to be a continual torrent of abuse, I'm going to lock it.

Those aren't the "n" word, they look similar but there's no relation.

If farming needs strengthening, it shouldn't be done via the private market but rather by increasing demand. Similarly, if you use the private market to put a floor in for oil, it might make the strategy viable but will take it out of balance; the mechanism that was put in is far superior to straight private market sale.

So Vic, what's the purpose of your post? As far as I can tell, there's nothing in there that I can usefully reply to; it is all just tearing me down and telling me about how I deserve to be fluff on.

What kind of reply do you want from that kind of a post? Why should I even pretend to give you the time of day, like I am now?

EE is a game where the public market tends to automatically provide a balance between one strategy and another: if one gets relatively strong, more people will play it, driving down prices for whatever good they produce, and driving up demand for whatever they buy, making them weaker and other strategies relatively stronger. Farmer is mostly exempt from this, as the high floor on food prices provides a guaranteed cashout price and increased demand for the whole reset as bushels are the safest item to stockpile. No matter how many people play farmer, there's always a very high floor for the strategy.

This indirectly affects one other strategy, primarily: oiler, as oil is the other easily stockpiled item in the game. With no floor on oil, it likely wouldn't have mattered if the private market price for food was lowered, as oil had no effective floor. Now, with the recent changes to oil, it does. Even better, the floor for oil is effectively market based, as the price of oil will now be directly related to the price of military. However, while it still remains to be seen how this will work out exactly for oil demand, I suspect that it will have little effect on the viability of farmer as a strategy, as bushels will still be preferred for stockpiling and the floor for oil is highly likely lower than the floor for food; there's little reason to play oiler over farmer.

Still, of the two floors, the method used for creating a floor the one used for oil makes more sense as it is a more market based solution. Oiler will never get too strong as more people will play it if it is, lowering prices and boosting other strategies. So, why not make oil the main stockpiled good instead of food?

If the maximum private market purchase price (demo with full tech) were $15 instead of $35, a fascist farmer with 215% agri tech would produce about $196 in value per farm. That'd be about the equivalent of an $71 dollar barrel for a fascist oiler. At that point, the minimum price for oil is highly likely to be higher than the private market sale price for food, and oil would likely be the preferred choice for stockpiling.

More demand for oil would make oiler a much, much stronger strategy, that would be competitive with the rest. Farmer would still be a viable strategy, but destocks would have to be played very differently than they are currently. There'd be other changes in relative balances between strategies compared to now, but in the end none would be any stronger than the others as supply and demand on the market would solve most issues.

Hey, so long as you acknowledge it was awful I, for one, will never say anything about it so I can't answer that :P

I'm not entirely sure what you're saying in that second to last paragraph, but I'll give it a shot anyway:
I absolutely pick fights on the forums occasionally, but this wasn't one of those occasions. I don't even know if I got one here, 'cause I didn't really engage except to defend my point. Maybe I'd have been better off not posting it or phrasing it different if I didn't want to deal with that kind of feedback, but I did, and I'll live with that; I earned it.

If someone wants to give me fluff about things I've posted, that's fine. I left that thread open for ages and took my lumps for what I said 'cause I earned it; I didn't even think of locking it. I only locked it (and didn't delete a single thing) when it turned into a meta-discussion about how much of a prick I apparently am in all things, and how I'd apparently been kissing ass to get named a mod.

The whole aim of that meta-discussion was to turn it into a spectacle; people were already breaking out the popcorn waiting to see what would happen. There was no actual criticism in any of it, just over-the-top insults and assertions. I'm a mod, not a toy, and I don't have to play along with that, so I didn't.

I'm also going to point out here, since you're implying that my "insulting" posts at the beginning of the thread are somehow similar to what was being said towards the end of the thread, that there is a huge difference between someone stating an opinion about the quality of play on a server and someone specifically insulting someone else. Really, if you find someone stating an opinion about a server insulting, then perhaps you're taking the game a little too seriously and perhaps you personally identify with a server a little too much.

I'll leave this one open since criticism is something I'm fine with; there's actual questions here I can answer. If it turns into another there where it's insults and accusations, though, I'll be locking it.

Right now, farmer is overly strong 'cause the bottom of the market is set artificially high. Oiler is weak in part because farmer is strong; there's no demand for oil 'cause it is safer to stockpile food.

There's now a real mechanic that relates to the market to provide a floor for oil, but it is still not going to be enough to make oiler viable since the floor is low enough that there's not enough reason to stockpile oil over food, as the floor for food is too high for there to be a balance between oil and food.

So, weaken farmer and let the public market balance the rest. It doesn't matter how in balance the rest are, generally, as long as the public market balances them out.