$55,017,072 NW - afaik 2nd best ever!

Insane finish. Well done my padawan, I've created a monster. :)

I tried your oil destock and it is useless; 0/1 victories. :P

Im with syko on this. It would be so great to just play techstart MBR and go to like 1k acres and FA all turns, then the guy you are FAing can give you like half his tpt worth or something for those turns. Would make playing that server less tedious for sure.

Then it's on you too!

When I play I make the mistake of assuming my competition is going to act rationally and optimally in their favour. This is a silly mistake. I suck.

Thx a lot! The stars aligned for me that reset! You should join in the fun and express yourself! :)

It would be fun to compete with you.

Vic trumps Trump.

You get player-player interaction in the market, relations, alliances, FA as well.

If All-xp is the way to go I go all-xp, if grabbing humans is the way to go, I do that, if grabbing bots is the way I do that... The game is fun because in doing that I compete with other players who also try to optimize the same or other strategies and growth schemes. I honestly think I'd have fun in the ai server with a DNH on all player countries.

But yes, bot land is sometimes too easy. Making it harder would do 3 good things in one strike:
1. Dropping the tech prices.
2. Raising the military prices.
3. Making grabbing, in order to beat an all-xp, take some degree of skill again.

I see no problem with hitting bots. I do feel that they are too undefended though, thereby making hitting players completely useless. There should be an upside to hitting a badly defended player. Risk-reward. Right now I sometimes even skip retalling because it is so much better to just hit more bots.

Hey. I hadn't played Earth Empires at all and not earth 2025 for over 10 years when I came back on like February 20th. 2 years away from a server is absolutely nothing.

Well, I've played with the current rules and won 3 in a row, soooo...

Griefing is punished by all major online games and I don't see a discussion to allow it, rather a discussion on how to find such behaviour more quickly. So you are wrong in not thinking it is a problem, unless Riot games, Blizzard and such businesses have independently made the same wrong choice and are actually in need of your expertise.

Ohh plz try it you scrub. :P

Well the game has been around for about 20 years and there ought to be a guide out there somewhere to show a scrub how to stockpile. When he blows his stock on jets he will break, that is the way the game has been set up. What you are saying is that good players shouldn't be allowed to stockpile. To make it fair or what?

You can only stockpile once you have turrets, tanks, SDI and troops so no one can break you in any way otherwise you deserve to get hit based on umm jealousy? Because it is sure as hell not in their self-interest.

In the same way you should not get out of your house if you are not wearing an armor suit that will render you immune from bullets and suicide bombers. Otherwise you are just asking for it.

So right now there are tanks for 341 on the public market, if you know you will miss destocking on Sunday you might just as well buy them. Thats 11.73 m NW/$2B cash which is around maxed mil tech full TMBR-territory!

Only problem is that if you take 1700 turns with them they will cost you quite a lot. :(

Well it is very strong nowadays. Only thing I think with so many turns given a day they could let us sell more per time. But it is not really an issue this late as long as the crap gets sold.

Commie Indy used to be the least tryhard strategy but with the small game and volatile market it is pretty intense.

Third time in a week now. Afaik only happens on first turn of the attack.

Turns: Near max Money: $114,941,982.33333 Food: 146,269 Bushels Networth: $The most
Advisor!
A brigade is out!
Our generals inform us that we launched at least one planned strike recently. Remember if we launch five planned stirkes at once we will not be able to do any additional attacks until at least one of them returns.
Your forces invaded Some poor lands(#X)!
They broke through the defender's defences!

They took:
A lot of Acres(Very many Gained)
The best Buildings(The worst Destroyed)
Some Bushels
A few $ too little
Almost no Technology Points

Your military lost:
No Jets, because I'm awesome

Your enemy lost:
Some Troops
All Turrets
A few Tanks
Tax Revenue:
Expenses:
Net Change: $691,399
$1,415,009
$-723,610 Food Produced:
Food Consumed:
Net Change: 849 bushels
15,155 bushels
-14,306 bushels
Your people demand a tax rebate, lowering tax revenues this turn!
Population gain: 1042 people.
You Produced: T Turrets and B Oil Barrels.

Yes, but farmer and indy bots and especially casher bots dont buy much tech until they are fully built and because of their CS heavy start this happens quite late. So right out of the bat the techer bots are producing but the other bots are not buying, then you get a short equilibrium and then the buying side takes over. So in express this means cheap techs late wednesday and all thursday, slightly higher on friday and then higher still on saturday morning, then starts the decline because every human techer is teching all their turns and flooding the market with more than the casher/farmer/indy bots can buy unless there are very few human techers.

Yes, bots buy most of the turrets and humans buy most of the jets. I don't see a problem there, a player who plays CI will most likely produce mostly jets and if the jet prices are above the turret prices the bot C/Is will too. When bots are in the equation there is also the supply-demand glut in the AI-community. Bots produce more food and military units than they buy and waaaay less tech. This can be fixed quite easily I'm sure.

First off, what you think or what this makes you think of en4 has no relevance. A game that is shrinking just lost one of its oldest players who has been through it all hundreds of times. Most of the people I knew from when I played 10+ years ago has quit for this very reason, and I did too. I probably wont keep playing very long though or at least not in alliance.

Griefing is punished in CS, LoL, WoW etc which have automated or player/mod/tribunal systems that deal with these things and try to set the game up to make it harder. These games are (arguably) more successful than EE or E:2025 so why do you assume EE/E:2025 did this better than them?
LoL is probably the most successful online game ever created, do you honestly think they are wrong? If so you should be able to consult for them and argue for removing the barriers meant to keep toxic behaviour out. They will likely ignore you, possibly laugh at you but probably feel sorry for you when you bring up this obscure dying text based math game as a proof that no such measure is needed.

I get the impression this is the reason most players quit, and as such it is a problem that if dealt with will bring players back or at least reduce the shrinkage. The game at ~600-800 players is not as good as 6000-8000 players so cure the shrinking, and as far as I can grasp this is how.

This has nothing to do with alliance btw. Greifing is and always has been a huge problem in all game servers except maybe tournament game A. This is why I always loved tournament, because scrubs were kept out by their own lack of skill. Now tourney game A is really easy to get to and therefore scrubs can join, sadly.

It has nothing to do with low price sellers. The market works perfectly. If you sell to high your goods get stuck. The problem is that the production boost of +25% for commie has become +35% and that tech has gone from 140% to 160%. If prices for jets/turrets were 160-180 like they used to the C/I would make far more than any non-techer.

Don't get me wrong; these are good changes, it just tips the balance point of military prices so TTR and TMBR don't function unless also the private market prices were changed to balance it.

My suggestion for fixing this:
1. You could generate a demand for troops and tanks by creating incentives for players to send them on SS/PS attacks, such as an attack boost if the jet is matched by a tank and a troop for example. This would increase demand for troops and tanks and raise prices for military units in general which helps the indies.
2. Drop the commie bonus back down to 25%. This reduces the C/I power sligthly. But it would also raise military unit prices.
3. Make IC base troop/jet/turret/tank production 2/1.86/1.86/0.5 instead of todays 1.86/1.86/1.86/0.4. This would be a boost to indy's especially in combination with 1.

The dynamic would be that TTRs would create a soft price ceiling and a price floor for each of the military unit markets and while in normal price ranges C/I still makes more by producing mostly turrets/jets they would at times be producing tanks/troops for more profit and also for their own use.

Pros:
Tech per turn is doubled
Market commissions replaced with a 5% VAT that works in the same way.

Cons
Humanitarians stop every attack (ofc)
Oil rigs produce nothing. (let it stay in the ground)
Burning oil for private market units is impossible (Carbon cap)
Exploring gains -50% (nature shouldn't be exploited)
-40% food production (Organic, non-GMO)
Food cannot be bought from the market (all others produce GMO and non-organic)
Military units cannot be bought from the market. (ofc)
Workers strikes are x20 more frequent. (greens are basically marxists with a fancy costume)
Teching is restricted to non-warfare techs, Spy, SDI, Weapons, Warfare, Military and MStrat cannot be teched or bought (self-exlainatory)
Teching is random, among the non-restricted techs, you cannot chose what to research.(While the greens like supporting research, it is generally not the research that results in increased productivity that they support)
1% change of switching republic, dict or fascist every turn taken, with switching losses. (we don't know yet :P)

Yes, this is what is killing the game. Always has been.

I remember En4 from the echelon/swirve days but never had any dealings with him so far as I can remember.

Either way this is a problem that can be fixed and has been ignored, which is resulting in a steady decline of the game even though EE is much better now than E:2025 ever was with all these new features like standing orders, market history, constant tweaks to govts/techs/bots to keep things somewhat balanced and at least cheating is less rampant now. Everything is better except this. And so a good game dies.

Bye En4. Hope you change your mind. But even more I hope it will be brought on by a change in the game mods/admins minds.

I told you not to jump too late. This is waaaay too late. If you had logged in with 10 minutes left I would have probably gotten 1m more NW. So it is all your fault.

This one is on you! 100%!

I'm a good player but other people ruin my reset all the time!

*runs away and slams door*

I might add that when I was destocking with my demo I was actually planning to do it mostly from the private market, but the public market kept giving me cheaper stuff when I jumped so early.

I get the feeling you like to run Theo Techer! :)

What has changed in the game for theo is the pop bonus which helps a lot especially for the early game before build full techer. You want to minimize the turns spent inefficiently building ICs or farms to finance your labs. The pop bonus lets you do just that. I often used to build like 300-500 ICs in tournament before finishing my CSites so I could get the income I needed to be full techer at like 2k acres. Now I build way less, which saves turns.

Also reselling is kinda useless nowadays much because of the Commie buff to +35% indy production. This is a bit sad because it was one of those things that could make or break a TTR player because it could go very wrong if the goods got stuck.

the only thing I bought on the public on the last 7 hours was like 500k NW of troops. Rest was private market, I had calculated so I would be able to spend all my cash with like 1 hour to spare and then to do some reselling. But my country had daylight savings time so I thought the set would end the same time my time but it was one hour later lol.

Also I suck at reselling, otherwise blid would no longer be number 1. :/

Even if I was only not unlucky with my last batch of military tech comming to the market 5 minutes after game time that would have pushed me above blid. 150k tech that never reached. 141m cash which I would get like 300k NW for after accounting for the tech NW.

On my NW record I jumped off public market for like 80% of my stock, and last reset I jump of private, because; big fat theo.

I think it is just bad tbh. :)

At least if you need to buy the oil. The express oil market is very small and even if you manage to buy that oil without creating a rising price you are not getting a very powerful jump from it.

The oil is not spent on NW so while you think you are spending your stock to get 11m NW/2b you are actually getting quite a lot less than a regular theo jump would. The advantage is only that you get to spend all your turns in a productive manner up until the jump which is not a very significant advantage when the tech market has crashed. It took me about 3.5 hours to fumble my way through my destock. Yours would have taken longer since you stocked quite a lot earlier, maybe 6 hours, which is fine, those last hours are not all that productive either way when we are selling tech at 1000-1300.

Every other set or so there is a Fascist going full oiler and if no one is stocking oil he will either crash the oil market or be forced to sell like 50-80% of his oil on the private market for 60ish :P

If you would have stocked for a longer time or if you were not forced to go through the market it could be very good.

When techs drop below like 1400-1500 the other strategies, with high techs usually end up making more per acre than the techers, and they should have more acres as well since the techer is stunted in his growth for his stocking phase while the cashers, farmers and indies can stock quite effectively while still growing.

Before that the techers make a killing. :)

Amen!

Would be easy to test for bushels in say the ai server or FFA or some other crap server. The tech that sells to the server never reaches the market, it gets taken off the order up to like a minute from the time it would reach the market.

But it works every other time than during attacks. I just got another one. I made sure to check the turn report this time. It was integer everywhere. This also happened on the first turn of the attack, as it did last time.

You motivation is that tech prices are too high, not even realized that you are raising the tech prices doing what you do. You are inneffective to the point of being counterproductive, congratulations.

But we both know that is not your purpose. We both know why you do it. Keep on knocking them sand castles over kid. You are not saving the game though.

I was true to my name, third win in a row.

Congrats all in the top 10.

I think that got me to 2nd in the top 3 average NW finishes. Which means; sorry MountainYeti! :/

I missed blids 1st by like 60k NW(in this game). :(

So I will just have to try again some time later. I don't think I want to try hard next set tbh. Wanna do something a bit crazy perhaps. I have a crazy idea I wanna try in express. :)

Welcome back then. I am also a returning player. I only played for like 5-6 weeks on Earth Empires but I used to play Earth 2025 back in 99-05 or 06 or something like that. The game is much better now. Much better, in so many ways, and there seems to be at least some kind of process removing cheaters and making small changes and fixing bugs. In every way the game is much better, except the players. 80% of all players are great, like they always have been. 20% of the players are still toxic and since knocking over sand castles is significantly easier than building them, your success depends only on not attracting them.

So you knocked over the wrong sand castle. You fail even at such a simple task.

Why don't you try and build one for once?

Congrats man! Theo casher is lovely sometimes. Great start, better income early, better BPT. If no fancy destock it is significantly better at destocking with too.

56 is also casher I think.

Everyone can break everyone. No one can defend against anyone. And yet they say; too little defences if someone can break you. Does not compute...

I am trying to fix the imbalance. I am working on the code and once I can test it on my own I hope to have something workable so that AI-collective is not a giant black hole eating through all the tech. Tbh the problem is not that they buy tech at a high price, the problem is that they buy more tech than they produce. I have said this and people have heard me. It's an engineering problem which needs an engineering solution, not a topfeed. It is a process though. Too big changes may screw everything.

You enjoy knocking over sand castles, don't pretend you are doing anyone a favor.

And since we are talking about imbalances, how about we fix the PS so scrubs can't break top players? I am a top player, you are a scrub, deal with it.

I fluff them too but in my own way. :)

I fluffed up this set. My country just had daylight saving time switch and I thought the game is ending 50 min from now. But then I saw "reset ends in 160 minutes" when it should have been 100 minutes. So I mistimed my jump quite hard.

What is fluff? :P

Just come back next set and play something less appetizing to fluff with.

WTF WFT WTF WTF... daylight savings time! I miscalculated the end of the reset by an hour.

Well it was the right direction at least! :)

Also, the stronger techer is, the more people will play techer. Which should bring down prices. So if you want to make techers weaker, go play a techer and saturate the market.

This set the prices were nice for casher early and late, just horrible in the middle. So a smart casher can do well with that, until someone who gets hard from destroying other peoples sand castles comes along.

PS RL situation or realized you couldn't touch it? :P

You realize it is topfeeding that makes me play techer right? No other strat can afford protection against it.

You inspired me. I will drop some land just for that.

I have no units on the market I swear! I think. Wait lemme check.

Military prices have been high all set and they won't get cheaper when the bots get suspended and stop putting cheap units on the market. I suspect dry public market very soon and then you'll have to buy my turrets at $359 in the last minute again! :P

Jumping early was very successful last reset for me. This reset I failed completely but also I didn't really try. So if you make a good jump the number 1 spot might be yours! Take advantage of those units that offer good NW/$ still!

Tyvm! Do you play express too?

^^This