I didn't see anything that stood out in the turn 'report'. I did look but I did not focus on it for very long. But let's say I'm 80% sure that the turn 'report' was all integers.

Maybe it has something to do with the tax rebate happening during an attack or perhaps the first turn of an attack, as it was for me? If it can only occur 2/3rd of the first turns of attacks it is pretty rare since the tax rebate is quite rare in itself.

Govt: F

I just got this:

Turns: 79 Money: $205,385,735.66667 Food: 284,033 Bushels Networth: $X

First time I have seen it. It seems harmless. I attacked and in one of the turns I got my people demand tax rebate. When I moved on to another menu it was rounded up to *736.

It is still a bug tho I guess.

I have only played this game for a month with the current bonus system and I only played the endgame for a techer once in express in which I got no bonuses after my jump so the issue has never come up for me.

Hmm that can be beneficial in some cases, yes. Or increased PM replenishment. Either way it rarely makes or breaks the reset if you do/don't. :)

This is why all good techers tech 100% indy tech in the first 3-5 days of teching. The boost is soo powerful. Just look at my techer in Express last set, this is half the reason, maybe!

But indy tech improves the ICs you have for spy production so you need fewer and therefore get a higher TPT, plus it sells higher right now!

beerdrinker is likely drunk or hungry or both, this why he speak of food related stuff.

There is also a bug that once you have sold 452714 indy tech points on the market during a reset your BPT increases by 20% which is a huge boost to techers. tbh this means you should tech indy tech even if it sells lower.

Maybe the name was a curseword in Tabasco Zoque?

As a somewhat decent techer I have noticed a flaw in your game and I'm here to adress that.

When you choose which area to focus on there are several things to consider:
1. What is the market price of the different techs?
2. Which techs benefit me.

These are easy. You can figure it out yourself.

3. What is the added value of teching an area that benefits me over an area that sells high?

So this is a bit harder but I have done the math and the answer might surpise you:

Tech indy tech. The smart techer techs indy tech now. Don't be a stupid techer. Be a smart techer and research indy tech.

Edit: So I rechecked the math and it is solid.

Thank you that's all!

I hope you made a typo. Do not use the cashing button even once as a techer. Sell tech to get cash. Tech all your turns not spent growing in various ways.

"I am a troll. Everything I say must be assumed to be said solely to provoke an exaggerated reaction to the current topic. I fully intend to bring absolutely no substance to any discussion, ongoing or otherwise. Conversing with me is pointless."

Your post makes sence now. :P

Nah, macdaddy did very well considering. He stocked early and jumped early. WP!

Kinda screwed my jump a little actually as he jumped before/during my jump and raised the prices. :/

Teching is a very good strategy, DO NOT DIVERSIFY! In this game specialization is key as serveral of the building types are more productive the more you focus on them. This is especially true for research labs. The first research lab you make is damaging you, the last you make is the most productive building you can ever build, as long as you are using turns researching that is.

To answer your question, yes, as people max their techs they stop buying techs, and sometimes they even get time to sell their techs. The tech market will crash hard in the last few days and you will have to undercut to get your techs sold. But by that time you should be using your stockpile of cash/food/techs and convert them to military units by buying either on the private or public market in order to achieve a higher NW. This will lead to your expences rising above your earnings and taking turns should no longer be profitable. As a techer you should end up with a few turns untaken after finishing your jump. I wish I could point you to a guide at this point but none are around any more.

It is not hard to figure out, the hard part is figuring out when it is worth it compared to another way to jump, and that requires foresight into the future of the market and insight into what other peoples plans are in cases where is not an obvious choice. Really long games it is obvious, so no need to put up any excel spreadsheets there, but for shorter games like tournament, express and even primary and team it is not so obvious I imagine.

The oil destock allows one to take all ones turns before jumping and therefore get more income, while sacrificing a few mil NW and a hundred mil dollars in the switch. The jump itself is either very efficient or very inefficient depending on the prices. If you buy food at $45 and oil at $260 you end up with ~$5m NW per $2b cash while if the prices are $36/$100 you get $8m per $2b which is pretty good. The strength however comes from using all your turns and decoupling yourself from the whims of the market.

For comparison:
Either way a max mil tech non-mbr non-theo gets like $7m /$2b and an non-mbr theo gets ~$8.5m with market commissions for dumped stock. A demo non-mbr gets around ~7.8m.
But you will start dumping stock early and lose a lot of production this way. Like I did this reset, I was making too much negative cash on the last 100 turns so I couldn't take them as my net income would have been non-positive.

Very well played anyway. 2nd and not even trying lol. :)

To clarify a bit: Before the techer bot change I used to find the techer bots and 50 jet PS them all reset because the code prevented them from teching enough turns to get income for military purchases. This is no longer possible, which is an improvement. Every bot now eventually gets military. The last ones usually get military on late thursday, and it is yet unclear to me if it is rainbow, farmer, casher or techer bots that take the longest nowadays.

My goal with suggesting that change had a bit to do with the market prices as well but my main reason was to make grabbing a bit more challenging(perhaps mostly for myself as I seem to have been one of the few who noticed/exploited this weakness).

To illustrate what the change has done:
http://www.earthempires.com/express/379/ranks
Look at the status of the lowest 3 bots(all techer bots), they have spent all their money on buildings and only managed to buy like 100k units in 1800 turns. They are not even fully built and they teched very few turns all reset.

After this the change was implemented:
http://www.earthempires.com/express/380/ranks
The lowest ranked techer bots are
Zona (#67)
Hordes out of Lurd (#62)

So they now have a stronger economy than the rainbow bots, because they tech more, and because they do, they get the resources to build their acres and to buy some military, which seems reasonable.

Ty. It was a good set for techer.

The recent tweaks improved[Edit: maybe not improved, but made techer bots produce tech, unlike previous sets] the early game tech market but mid and late-game is still overbought by the aggregate of the AI, I think this fools a lot of players into thinking this is not a good reset for techer(they may also be fooled by forum posts saying so :) as when they are about to choose strategy they see the low tech prices and pick casher/farmer/indy.

It would be difficult to make a script change that works for all servers in this regard I think. Perhaps if the tech buying bots started reselling tech and also buying the cheapest tech with a portion of thier spare cash. I know only very basic programming and I have never worked with this kind of code (just structured text, matlab, r and VB.net) but if I get time to try and understand how to run the script and make modifications to it I would love to head over to the AI server and test a few things out to try and normalize it a bit. In the meantime I will just deal with it and try to thrive in the environment I am in.

I don't know if anyone caught it yet but I kinda failed:

Always (#6) - 7th
http://www.earthempires.com/express/379/ranks

Numba (#2) -1st
http://www.earthempires.com/express/380/ranks

And now:
One (#1)

My plan was to win 3 sets and write "Always Numba One" with my country names. Also I wanted to have #1 each set so it was "Always #1", "Numba #1" and "One #1".

A guy actually commented ingame last reset and called me Mr Numba 2, suggesting that I do the number 2 on the rest of the game, but that was not my intention LOL.

But many of them were on different rules or no bots right?

Yes, I saw that the average is just over 52 but I figured it might be one very high and two around 45-50.

Thx man. We still have to see what I can get. This round has been absurdly good to me. What is the NW record? :P

Why are you talking about potatoes? What game relevance does it have? Especially small potatoes. Big fat potatoes maybe, but not small...

I produce 2 oil barrels per turn, which means I can grab bots.

But I mean a 100k acre TTR to MBR doesnt spend 40B on buildings even if he switches at 100k acres.

The destruction cost is up to a few % of the total stock so if it is doubled or trippled it is not going to make the switch pointless, it is only going to make the ending NW a few % lower and increase the amount of stock needed for it to be worth it. There is a balance there and I have not done the math on it as it depends on several factors including bpt, govt, acreage, NW and oil/bushel prices. I'm just suggesting to nudge the balance point ever so sligthly.

It is not exactly like last reset tho. Some important factors are different. :)

There is one other factor that I think is about as important; the casher, farmer and indy bots are just now starting to get fully built and get some tech up. The techer bots can outproduce casher bots that are not fully built and got techs at like 100-110% but once the casher bots get fully built they can spend more on tech and it is exponential growth for a while there with a significant portion of their income going into techs. Meanwhile the techer bots are smaller and spend a portion of their turns being completely unproductive.
I would love to play with the AI in the AI-server to try and balance these things a bit but I have never coded with php which is what is stopping me now.

I predict a casher, MBR, Techer or indy to win if not a farmer or farmer/oiler wins. :P

Absolut! Så var det! TY. Haha, skön snubbe.

Why?

The problem I see with alliance stems from game mechanics and bot function. It is what creates the narrow minded approach to strategy that dictates the markets and skews the game so much in favour of bascally 2-3 strategy/govt-combinations.

The solution would be to do something about the bots to add more of the main income techs to the market.
4 things come to mind:
1. All bots(or the non-techer bots only) can have a priority added to buy the cheapest tech on the market with a portion of their cash.
2. Make a stronger function for techer bots to favour the highest priced/highest volume techs and/or to completely ignore teching the techs selling at a price lower than x% of the average tech price on the market. X could be as high as 80%.
3. The tech buying bots start reselling tech(perhaps also based on the tech prices), after a certain tech level threshhold, in order to create liqiudity and stability in the tech markets of the major techs while also draining their cash through commissions/underuts preventing them from drying out the major income techs.
4. Increase the ratio of techer bots. Maybe this won't be necessary with the other changes.

These steps will improve the casher strategy more than anything but also farmers and indies.

Then some small nerf to the game mechanic regarding the oil destock which will keep it viable but less dominant. Maybe keep the cost of building destruction constant after dropping acres, and put a price on dropping land? Or make changes to switching costs perhaps? Maybe also a small nerf to the tyranny govt like 15% higher military losses will make theo techer viable for netting and tyranny less dominant for warfare.

This may make for a more interesting game without the need for a new server.

Indy prices are crashing quite similar to last set, I expect them to go down a bit further today and then vary between 110-140 for the rest. Tech prices are epic tho... Res/bus is lower than last reset (2300-2800 in the last hour)and a casher can be a monster right as they take their turns after protection.

Sweet!

Wow, that's your comeback after 5 days?

I award you no points and may God have mercy on your soul.

Cerb in a way I understand and respect your reasoning, at the same time you are so fragile when you're netting; I just did some mistakes early in my reset this time; a food shortage+ I miscalculated my building expences so I ended up running like 10 turns rather ineffectively, and another small mistake and I reckon these mistakes cost me like 1m final NW. A nuke midgame will cost much more. And being forced to have 500k troops and 300k tanks and 70% SDI, when the ones you compete with have none of that will cost your win, unless the rest of the players are garbage(which they rarely are).

So in essence, as long as you are not ready to let the loser ruin 2 good players resets, you can only be a moral support to a friend.

Getting deleted also ruins your finish I think. :P

What strategy will you run tho? The resets usually go in cycles a bit with tech high one set than "low" one set. It is just that the "low" in express is a bit high. Last reset was high tech prices despite the bot change, this is why top 20 was 65% techers. This won't be the case this set.

I'm a good player but I am not really trying this reset, need one def ally still so if you message me your number I can send. I am casher, but like I said, trolling...

In this case no matter what I'd do could be considered illegal considering I talked to SuperFly in-game which means if I farmed him it could be considered as him helping me and if I farmed the fry guy I would be considered as helping him.

But there were several people fighting Wars that I had no friend in. So i could have had nice farm in there perhaps?

Well as I said before that depends, unless that game mechanic has changed drastically..

Är det någon som kommer ihåg vad den där svensken i LaF, som gjorde sig känd för att stocka turns/cash och sen grabba typ 10K acres på en dag, kallade sig för och vet om han spelar än? Det måste varit typ 12-14 år sedan.

Det var något på T... Typ Telefon eller nåt sånt?

DR on fry is gone when he hits fly, I think.

I have a question around the rules here though. If I decided this Fry guy, or SuperFly for that matter was in a war and couldn't hurt me in any significant way and I decided to penta tap one of them, or both for that matter, and get some SDI, tanks and troops, what would happen then? Would the mods say if I farmed only one of them i would be taking sides?

I mean I'm not technically taking any sides if my intent is to improve upon my own finish, the one I hit could be dictated by who is not in DR. And if I hit only one of them I would have a significant personal stake in the war considering that persons wrath could hurt me.

There is very little the community can do tbh. The mods can do something. But they won't. If I jumped into the fight I would have not only risked my win but the mods have also made it clear that ganging up on people can lead to deletion. So maybe superfly would be better off but I would risk deletion or at the very least my reset. So the kid would take down two good players instead of one.

Ty, i bet if you were more lucky with the topfeeders you could have given me a good match. Theo casher is pretty awesome, just it is costly and a balance act to defend yourself against the topfeeders. You need more acres than a techer, but not as many as an indy. And your private market is a blessing when it is time to dump your stock. TBH I like Theo casher more than rep casher for express.

When you do try that Indy, I'd love to give you some small tips that I think most players don't know or don't know the strengths of. :)

Ty,

But didn't you finish with a bit of stock left?

I thought you would buy most of my 20m jets at $216, and I was ready to buy out my private market after that. :P

If they sold I would have made another ~3m NW. :)

I learned so much about the game playing indy. Several things have changed drastically since I played, game mechanics and otherwise. I can really recommend everyone to do a tryhard indy set in express, not only is it strong but it also affords you to spy the bots and learn how they work. When playing techer and casher turns are too valuable and spies are very costly to lose.

Optimal_BPT=Sqrt(Land_goal) is not only basic, it is very wrong.

And the true formula for "turn optimal" BPT has been public knowledge for well over 15 years.

Back when I played we had lofty discussions on these things in the public forum. Also comparing stats at different times and how we got there.

Ni kanske känner mig ändå. :)

Jag snacka med några TKSare under min tid på jorden! :)