I’ve been locked in an eternal Cold War with Superfly for years.

Shh. You know the rules. We don't talk about Speedkill.

If you have a way for Discord to provide alerts with audio queues to signal you are being hit then that’s awesome. When I am warring I run several IRC clients with highlights

Can’t use Discord because news is troublesome on that platform. For walling I use IRC highlights.

Sounds good

Any updates regarding this?

I can tell you that most people would simply select when they are sleeping. I have no qualms in walling any FS, I have survived chem rushes from 60+ countries hitting me which would normally result in a 10 second death. What I don't like is not being able to sleep.

I have started posting some material up on the Leadership Resource forum for the purposes of assisting Alliance leaders. I recommend Alliance leaders visit and check it out. I will continue posting more material which you might find useful.

If you have any questions feel free to post in those relevant threads and I'll address them when I can.

The removal of restart bonuses will basically make wars less competitive. Any restart will take significantly longer to be able to effectively re-enter a fight and war activity will die off far quicker.

Wars between small tags have far different dynamics than wars between 50-100 member tags.

For warring Dict Destroyer.

Build and stockpile as a Dict Techer and then destroy acres before war.

I will never let you delete those private messages to me and I will forever use them against you.

Most wars I have been involved in usually vary their chat times between the 3 main zones. I think the timezone most disadvantaged would actually be Euros. But even if you cannot be killed for 8 hours, there is still a huge 16 hour window to kill said country. It would mean tags have to adjust their tactics but overall I think it is fairer gameplay.

In terms of the FS, most FSes these days comprise of at least 2 warchats. If you can't get a target at one you would have to get them at the other. In terms of participation you might not be able to make 1 chat, but you can make the other one.

I'll address your final points first due to time constraints.



You can investigate a matter without needing specific access to the tools. For example, you would see discussions on moderator channels and forums, you would interview other moderators and even consult with the community. The person responsible for this would post their findings but other commissioners would also have their own beliefs. But it would go to a vote.




It comes down to scale. The playerbase is so critically low that you need to slowly start growing it and you can do so without a budget. If players return then Admins may feel a budget would be warranted to try and attract more players in the future. There are so many Earth2025/EE related social media groups and contact lists available you don't need a budget to get going.

As an example, last time I brought SoF back from the dead a couple of years ago I personally recruited 60 people back to the game in a couple of weeks with just a couple of posts on social media and a mass email. This lead to other tags also recruiting and the game enjoyed a nice boost.

Right now there is less than 150 active players on Alliance if I am not mistaken. With a bit of effort from a handful of people this could easily become 300 within 1 set.




In a Corporate structure the Board of Directors do not personally implement the changes. Basically they would just discuss and decide what changes should be implemented and then liaise with appropriate parties to ascertain how.




Basically the issue is this game goes for long periods of time with no management or leadership. You are here now, but for how long? It would be no issue if there were multiple active and engaged admins. I am giving you a suggestion that the game can be managed and run going forward so that it can grow and not be neglected for large periods of time.

I posted this on AT as part of larger group of suggestions but I think the concept itself is worthy of it's own thread for discussion.


One of the biggest aspects of warring is walling, but the problem is not everyone can be online 24/7 to wall. I have been known as one of the harder to kill players in the game, but it is very draining in my older age to go without sleep. In fact it is one of the things I dread about the game.

I believe it would be a positive for the game if a player has an option to select an 8 hour period of the day where their country cannot attack or be attacked. That means any player willing to wall have an 8 hour respite and also any player who does not wake to wall has a fair opportunity to level the playing field against the guys who will wall 24/7. There will always be those players who do not take up the 8 hours.

If that player is attacked during this 8 hour period the attacker would be greeted with a message along the lines of "Your Generals refuse to attack due to bad weather. They advise that the weather will improve in ** hours."

You can change your 8 hour period but any changes will take 24 hours to become active.


A further note, I don't think you should be closed off to landgrabs during this 8 hour period because that would have broader repercussions in terms of retals and landgrabbing etc. But I am certainly open to input from others.

In a corporate structure, a Board of Directors is appointed by the Shareholders to run and operate the entity on behalf of Shareholders.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Board_of_directors

Admins are stretched for resources and time. Being a moderator for the game or forums does not mean you are running the game. You want people who are willing to put their time in to make decisions for the game to help further the game.

I recommend creating a "Game Commision" to act almost like a Board of Directors to help run the game. Naturally admins will not only have a spot on the commission but also veto power over it. The duties of said commission would be:-

- Discussing and voting on appointment of game and forum moderators
- Responsible for promoting the game
- Propose and vote on game changes
- Decide on game rules and implementation of them

Members would not have access to code or mod tools.

I have been logging in here quite a lot in recent times and have thought a lot about whether I should return to the game. Along with that I have thought hard about how I would revive the game and more than that, try and give it a future. For me I think about rebuilding SoF but then I look at the server and it becomes a question of the value of the time investment.

Here are some brief ideas I am happy to put forth for you all to ponder on and possibly consider. Keep in mind that these ideas are with a longterm goal of growth in mind...


- Introduce "Bad Weather"
One of the biggest aspects of warring is walling, but the problem is not everyone can be online 24/7 to wall. I have been known as one of the harder to kill players in the game, but it is very draining in my older age to go without sleep. In fact it is one of the things I dread about the game.

I believe it would be a positive for the game if a player has an option to select an 8 hour period of the day where their country cannot attack or be attacked. That means any player willing to wall have an 8 hour respite and also any player who does not wake to wall has a fair opportunity to level the playing field against the guys who will wall 24/7. There will always be those players who do not take up the 8 hours.

If that player is attacked during this 8 hour period the attacker would be greeted with a message along the lines of "Your Generals refuse to attack due to bad weather. They advise that the weather will improve in ** hours."

You can change your 8 hour period but any changes will take 24 hours to become active.


- Introduce clan incentives based on number of members
You want to encourage clan/alliance leaders to recruit more people and you want to reward them for making their clan bigger. They should not be overpowering bonuses, but ones that are enough to encourage clans to grow. For example you could boost restart bonuses for clans with more than 15 members by 5%. If the clan has 20 members then that could become 7.5%. If the clan has 25 members then that becomes 10%. etc etc. I have other ideas but not the time to go into them. But I will note that history has shown warring tags have always been the ones more inclined to recruit heavily for obvious reasons.


- Forget new UIs and out of reach projects like AI overhauls. Keep it simple.
Do small UI improvements and other slight changes but forget the blue sky projects that go nowhere, utilize the resources you have better.


- Advanced vs Normal Servers
Make it easier for new players to come into the game with simple server choices. Such as:-

Easy Primary Server - Basically how Primary Server is right now but with bots. You need to make the server feel more populated for newer players.
Advanced Primary Server - Think of the old 1B server back on Swirve. Basically same rules as Alliance but no clans. Let people coordinate ingame and learn how to relate with other players. Maybe no bots, but this would need to be considered. It is a step to Alliance but also introduced the social aspect back to Primary which is something that really drives people to be active in the game.
Easy Alliance Server - A server designed more for netting rather than warring. Basically make it so a country cannot be killed, for example special attacks are nerfed and a country can never drop below 100 civilians.
Advanced Alliance Server - Basically the server as it is now.
Easy FFA Server - Can only run a max of 5 countries, for those who do not have time to run 16. An easy stepping stone into FFA as 16 countries is quite daunting for those who are used to only running 1.
Advanced FFA Server - Basically FFA as it is right now.


- Create a standard EE staff forum handle
If someone is posting in an official capacity regarding an admin or mod action as EE staff it should be as EE officially and not as an individual. Remove the personal side from the forum mods and admins.


- Promote the game immediately
Use the large database to begin emailing all past and present players to invite them back to the game. Encourage current players to invite people back to the game. Promote the game through all avenues to the Earth2025 community. There is a big opportunity to really kick this game back into gear in 2025 but you want people to come back to something in a healthy state. I know if I came back I could get SoF back to 40 members in 2 sets if I put in the effort by myself.


There are a ton of other things I would also do but perhaps I might post about those another time. The fact is the admins need to stop thinking about this game as their side hobby and consider it as a business and run it like one.

This drama is not dramatic enough.

Lies. I bet you are inactive already.

You assume there are active admins.

This may be true but I still fit in to my speedos.

The turtle pr0n keeps the game going

Buy more SDI!

Hey Subby, we miss you and your 1.5 minute walling!

Yeah we weren’t too impressed when you started hitting us while we were at war with Mercs last set, subsequently killing 2 of our countries and crippling a couple of others. So we know how you feel.

I don’t know how you thought we wouldn’t respond...

Ok well put it this way.... Mercs got an opportunistic kill on Ninong last set which was great. Ninong at the time had more stock than any top Mercs country (well over 600m bushels worth of stock). Ninong's DD had 30m troops, down from 40m because he was being CDed a lot. Now with this change it doesn't matter whether Ninong has 30m or 50m because the amount he is CDed will remain the same, so now he is going to carry 50m troops. But now you cannot CD him as much either, so you can't get the break down.... End result would likely be that Ninong wouldn't have died.

https://www.earthempires.com/...stones-50212?t=1622768700

We had a war dec, albeit a brief one ;)

I can't envisage BRs being widely adapted as a result of this. The main reason why GS is the main kill for most killruns in late wars is because you are already carrying so many troops. In many cases, BR may be the lower break but conducting those killruns entails the attacking side spending significant resources to carry a large amount of jets which serve no defensive purpose.

The problem is that countries are already too hard to kill, well played countries that is, especially when taking walling in to account. Just look at the last SoF vs Mercs war which basically ended in a stalemate because both sides had unkillable countries. This would magnify that problem and also disadvantage any alliance which is slightly weaker. It doesn't make wars more competitive and will reduce kills even more.

The fun in war is killing. Killing is more enjoyable as a whole than surviving. Sure an individual waller may feel strong personal achievement in surviving the war, but for the most part everyone goes in to a war expecting to die. This is effectively reducing killing which will also fundamentally reduce the enjoyment. It will make wars less competitive.

In terms of stock depletion, I don't think that will be a huge factor. On the contrary, countries which may have previously been opportunistic kills (lots of stock, lots of resources but by chance not online) now are under less threat because they are so much harder to kill, therefore are far more likely to survive because any kills on them would require more planning. Last set after breaking in every warchat, being CDed daily and FAing SoFers daily I still finished with I think something like 400m bushels. If anything, under this change I will finish with more stock because I won't be losing as much to CDs.

CDs may seem overpowered but they are a great equalizer by giving weaker countries the *opportunity* to kill otherwise unkillable ones.

As I have said before, SoF will benefit from these changes just due to how we set ourselves up for war. Dictatorships with high spy counts and very large stock levels. Other tags will be disadvantaged by this and will likely have to revise their strategies. But all in all war will be less competitive and there will be less kills, thus there will be less enjoyment.

Are you sure about that? Because when a spied out target spies us we generally can CD/demo them again and have been doing as such for some time. Also if it didn’t then those guys wouldn’t be able to do what they are talking about above.

This is the 2nd time in a row you have agreed with me. I fear that a 3rd time may mean the coming forth of an internet apocalypse.

If this was a real scenario the smart move for the country first CDed would be to not respond with ops thus keeping himself in spy DR.

Haha he needs to wall the chem rush first 😉

Also with regard to the CD change, the only reason SoF Dict Destroyers (our Dict Techers that drop/destroy land to boost SPAL) don’t sit on more than 40m troops is because CDs wreck us and make it too costly to replenish more. With this change we would likely sit on 50m or 60m or possibly even more troops comfortably making us even harder to kill.

For SoF this change greatly favors us. But overall it will diminish warring.

And in regards to Bomb Buildings. The thing that does need to be nerfed is not the amount of buildings destroyed but rather the amount of CS destroyed. Right now this is a broken mechanic and the amounts of CSes taken out is extremely high. Bombing Runs do not kill barely any CSes until all other buildings are virtually destroyed, yet with a handful of ops you can take out a large portion of someone's CS.

I think the amount of buildings killed is fine right now as is. Just nerf the CS component almost entirely.

If a country has 40m troops (common for strongest countries in late set wars on Alliance) and is a Dict with 145% weapons then the raw break is 72500000. Effectively right now using ops we could easily reduce that break to 22000000 raw which means you can break it using a Dict with 12m approx troops and only 40m troops on hand.

If with your proposed change you could CD 4m troops per 10 ops then 20 CDs (standard amount of CDs conducted on a killrun) reduces the troop count by 8m troops. This bring the raw break down to 58000000. With demos that is reduced to 40600000. Assuming the breaker is a Dict with the same weapons, it means that the breaker will need to have 22,400,000 troops to break, and for optimal readiness loss will need more than 3x that in troops on hand. Effectively 70m troops which is very costly for any country to buy.

Then the other massive change no one is considered here is the massive increase in oil consumption which is a further burden on the attacker. It would also drive up oil prices significantly over the course of the war because raw breaks would be far higher.

Essentially this all means that any early lead achieved in a war will almost be insurmountable as the sheer economic requirements towards killing large countries will become unfeasible once you start to struggle for breakers.

All in all I can see there will be less killing and wars will become a lot harder to conduct.

EDIT: Also it should be noted that I am basing the above on SoF's Dict breakers which we usually run far more of than any other warring tag. These numbers are far worse for Tyrannies and Commie countries commonly used by other tags. In fact breaking with anything other than a Dict with these numbers would not be viable and thus warring with those governments would be probably obsolete.

The only problem with this change is that with spy DR, you are limited in how many troops you can effectively CD. CDs are a great equalizer in allowing medium countries to reduce a raw break enough to be able to efficiently attack. Strong countries will overcome this no problem, but essentially it makes stronger countries unkillable.

For me personally it works fine because I am pretty hard to kill as is and with this change I will be near impossible... (good luck ever killing me again Derrick!!) But it will make wars less competitive and decided far earlier.

Activity on the General Talk board is very low and hence the basis of my argument that no one frequents there to participate in those discussions and therefore we should just keep them here.

You are living proof that in 2021 emo is still a thing.

If you have any evidence of me cheating other than what was discussed on the announcement thread then please post it so I can embarrass you with it. But if me looking up a bot country after I attacked it is all you have then I'll play a little violin for you. Regardless, I'll keep going and continue playing the role of archaic's tear extractor for years to come.

If you want to take a simplistic approach suitable for a simple mind, I’m sure it is.

Don’t be too mean to him, he has a tendency to cry victim and emo out the boards.

How old were you when you were defrocked of your manhood?

I would like to recommend to the mods that off topic discussion on AT should not be moved to GT. AT has always been the most active board on the game and off topic discussions thrived on it. Right now any thread not game related is being moved to GT and those threads are dying and AT activity is low.

If you want to generate more activity then you need to allow and encourage more activity on here. There is only so much discussion that can take place on AT with so few Alliances and stagnant game politics.

There are a few in Mercs. Good group, check them out!

Just a little payback owing from killing 2 of ours last set <3

I apologize for the drama this has caused everyone. I’d like to make it clear that in this instance, what I did was use the mod tools to confirm a bot country was indeed a bot. This is out of line and I am prepared to accept full responsibility for it.

There was no malicious intent on my part in my use of these tools but nevertheless my actions were not in line with the conduct expected of a mod.

If anyone has any questions you are welcome to contact me about it.

Don't top old threads.

Yes, refer back to the not smart enough part.

What is more hilarious is that you are not smart enough to work out that Rage and SoF are the same Alliance and have been for the better part of two years.