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!

thanks pang!

Weeeee thank you Pang and happy holidays!

poor suiciders who get killed, yay for netters since war restarts will be buying more stuff.

*puts on earth 2025 glasses*

if the goal is to make it to make suiciders weaker but you still want some sort of restart bonus,

why not tie it to the clan GDI war thinger?

then untaggeds get 0 and if ur warring and u dec properly u still get it.

this isnt my personal person, i think they should go altogether, just saying i know some people support it

Buying more stuff? LOL with what cash, with what money? This is the final step needed to push warring into a deadly boring activity.
The new attack formula's will force wars to be GS wars only from now on. (BRs are no long worth it due to building loss constraints and ABs are even worse). And the loss of restart bonuses will lopside wars within days as a strong FS will end a war directly. There's no way for a player to make a comeback after being chem rushed in the FS for instance. As he loses all his stock and time invested in building his or her country. You do get that nice 100 acres restart with no CS and 100 troops! Good luck getting back o hitting and making a difference in war.

Not to mention that I foresee people not restarting anymore because there's no point in restarting.


Enjoy your server netters!

After this set I doubt anyone will run a late war again. Things will revert back to early wars without a restart bonus.

I think disabling the restart bonus completely will lead to less players on the server, which would exacerbate an already existing problem. If the goal is make restarts less powerful (obviously) then maybe tinkering with the restart forumla is the way to go.

Personally, I came back after an extended 2.5 year break a few sets ago. I was just to be for a set or two, but I'm still here for a 3rd set. Mainly because the wars that were arranged were fun, with the restart bonus meaning that after a welcome day off you could be back in the war hitting hard if you managed your country properly. Starting from scratch would dis-encourage restarts because the mentality would be "What is the fluffing point?" and not reward well built countries that died in 10 seconds during a FS. Let players keep some of what they built.

And as Sov said, this will lead to more early wars that will likely end earlier, leaving the lots of players involved in the war not interested in playing the 2nd month of the set.

Well said maki and sov

Again you CANNOT fix the attitudes of those who choose to suicide without negatively impacting the actual player base.

You can’t code out attitude fixes.

My suggestion is the same:

No restart bonus for untagged players + have people verify or claim their country.

Claimed countries receive restart bonus as they are safelisted.

Unclaimed countries don’t receive restart bonus.

the restart bonus made wars lame too.

Shouldn't this help warring alliances though? Doesn't this make stonewalling significantly more powerful?

I dont have solutions to the problem but i agree with Xyle and Makinso.
The restart bonus needs to exist just not in its current form.

I never liked the restart bonus. I still think there should be DR on types of war attacks to push for a mix of BR and GS. Additionally all specialty attacks should kill civilians at a lesser rate.

Yeah, tanks, nukes and EM should kill some civis...

I’m on board with a change not eliminating it. There needs to be some bonus but not so much that wars grind on until the very end...

I’m not sure who posted it but I still love the idea of die x times then you start over. To me that would add a new level of strategy deciding who to kill. And giving ppl a second chance.

What that magic number is or the reduction restart bonus is I don’t know.

I always liked the idea of one and done. I think gerdy suggested that originally but I've been on that.

That said, I'd rather not have it at all than have what we had. Prefer one and done tho. Pretty easily that's my favorite suggestion. 1 restart bonus per player per set.

Well we could spend the 2nd month suiciding netters XD

Allow me to quote a smart mans set of suggestions

Stonewalling was already significantly powerful.
This will push all of it over the edge.

one of the reasons stonewalling got too powerful was that once you defended 835 hits you didnt lose anything when you died

so the closer to that number you got the less killing you was worth

at least now if you mess up and take 1k hits to kill someone you can keep going if you want to

the previous gave you more stuff back the less you were blindsided too

I have mentioned this before but the hit-scaling portion of the restart bonus is what creates most of the issues and add nothing. Walling would be powerful without it. If restart bonus was 20%/50% but with no on-hit scaling you'd have more balance between walling and non-walling, you would have more balance between FS and counterstrike and you would have already made suiciders restarts slightly less powerful (not enough but noticeably).

These recent changes have made walling even more overpowered than it was before:
-The attack formula changes made BRs and ABs less powerful meaning GS will be the attack type in 95% of all hits in wars, and GS have always been easier to wall than BRs, since the 5 civ minimum.
-The removal of the restart bonus premiers wallers even more than before as you are pretty much out of the war after dying.

Restart bonus was toxic. It made suiciding stronger, it made wars long and BORING . Sorry but who enjoys two month long wars, really? Especially when those wars are decided in the first week and the last month and a bit are one side abusing the restart bonus to kill small countries and otherwise not do much else. This is boring for both sides of a war. Yes, it helped terrible war clans compete for longer but the results of wars rarely changed.

Make restart bonus take nothing from the market and no military. Clans will FA eachother to get people back in the game, suiciders will be useless as it should be, and wars won't be so long and boring.

Depends where you get your strength from.

LaF is one of the best tags at war despite being by far worse at everything related to walling. We get all our power from managing our countries better and that includes restarting better than anyone else. It also includes building for war better than anyone else. We win wars despite our abysmal walling.

So this is a huge buff to elders style of war, which is building bad countries, then walling 24/7.

I think that an activity that you do for 1.5 months should matter in the grand scheme of things. Enough that seconds shouldnt render it meaningless at least. I think that the activity requirements of war is whats toxic about it honestly and what forces a lot of people to quit who dont want to play for netting. Not many big games have this forced activity at any time that you can't choose. I mean you got tournaments and special events in many games but not this "well if you dont log in in the next few seconds you can play again next month, so cya".

I go back to SOF and we FS netters every set until the netters quit and we go back to having fun

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.

My idea is to add attack specific DR that is so strong that you can GS (or BR or CM) someone to death but its almost not worth it if you can do only one attack type on them.

If you can get to the point that you can GS and BR someone tho, it takes about as many hits as today if you start with GS and finish with BRs. This switch of attack types will take time, which would allow slower people to get online and have fun walling.

I would also suggest that this DR is removed instantly when the country takes a turn or buys goods. So basically bad walling is worse than no walling, thereby increasing the skillcap of stonewalling.

It would be possible then to build a country that is so strong that it cant be killed efficiently, and the tag or tags that wanted it dead would have to choose either to whittle it down over days, take extra many turns to kill it, just maim it with ABs/nukes or just leave it alone and focus on other targets. It forces more decisions than "which country do we GS kill next?". :)

Yeah we just wouldn’t bother playing anymore

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 gave up some time ago contributing to any discussion regarding war because it seems to be dominated by people who don't primarily war and then you get flamed by halfwits for whatever you post.

I don't agree with sov often. But I do with this. Suggestions have been made. Then u get flamed. Or if u make suggestions they don't get listened to. I don't remember all the suggestions that dragon told u pang that 1 night alone on irc but they was good and I'm sure most would agree he is someone worth listening to when he suggests something

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!

I'll have to look. But if I don't I'm sure he does

if things were structured anti blindside it could make things better, for example the restart bonus should have started off high and dropped the more hits you took

so the absolute highest restart bonus would go to people who come out of protection on 100 cs early set then get land killed in 5 hits

the other problem with how wars are going is its becoming less and less new player and casual player friendly

as alliances get smaller you need a higher proportion to show up to get a kill, and as wars drag on with kills that gets even harder and will become more of an issue without restart bonus if not managed correctly, this is why 1v1 wars now are less desirable and its better to have server wars

changing walling formulas is the easiest way to fix this to allow imag v rage style wars at 5v5 or so to be ok

if instead of 40 civ min gain (ex bio) and 5 civ/hit for gs and 10/hit for br at very low pop levels so

40 5 8
40 10 4
20 5 4
20 10 2

multipliers of hits/turns, which goes up by 2.333 to 18.666 at the highest when measured in turns/turns

1 country can optimally wall 18 countries

and at full and high pops you get more killed in 1 hit than you gain in 1 turn

so doing something like

increasing pop gain at high pop
changing the curve so initial hits kill less then mid/late ones more
reducing pop gain when under max pop for too long
or when gaining max pop for too long
or when gaining the floor max pop for too long

would promote staying at 100% more, make walling less effective, allow inactive who cant show up to warchats to contribute/participate more especially since offline AB just took a nerf and cause spam tags running offline kills throughout the day to become more competitive lowering barrier to entry

Starting out high then lowering is problematic as it just punishes good players for walling. This is the problem, there are no fundamentally good ways to do a restart bonus which is why the ideas are so different and there is no consensus on what a good restart bonus would be like; but I understand there is a big push to punish walling because... why? Seriously, there should be a push to make walling easier if anything, not make it less effective.

Offline kills throughout the day would make this game infinitely unattractive to about 100 people that are regularly around to war and if there is no counter to them, it would just mean that larger clans rule the day every. single. time. Everything should have a counter, even numbers. Walling is the ultimate counter to being outnumbered as we have seen in many recent sets, the best wallers usually win, not the clan with 40 useful idiots. Considering walling is harder than showing up, that is a fair tradeoff.






"From here, you may send a portion of your assets to another country."

I'm sad I rejoined this game only to watch the final death throes of cliques ripping each other apart and everyone fighting about all the changes and changes happening just to make them. It's been a fun 5 months and I'll be here to the end, but damn... It makes me yearn for a time that I was unable to experience.

Once upon a time there was a game that many played and became apparent that recruiting others was not so hard.
It was a great game and in an attempt to make it better, it failed. Continued tries at making it better only made folks quit at a higher rate.
I remember recruiting a friend (HDRules) who like it so much he ended up in leadership. I recruit now and after one set, they leave.
One quitter even told me, after reading that netters opinions on strategy, that a game of chess was more exciting and required actual strategy.
Again, I state that I am not in SOF but, when SOF returned and started their wars, AT lit up. It lit up with new recruits and greatly increased community conversations. The number of "old time" players returning surprised me and numbers started not only going up but retention.
If all pure netters were to rage quit, would AT even notice?
Try doing the planned changes this set then, next set remove the bots for two sets and lets see where the numbers fall.

Pang, you should spend time with SOV and Dragon and actually listen to their ideas as you have done with the netters.
They both can be pretty neutral since they have shown a passion for the overall game and not just the interest of their alliance(s). If you are not willing to do that then, find Mehul .... he new how to build a game :P

it doesnt punish you for walling because you had probably days to choose to spend the stock if you wanted to

unlike the chem rushes that usually happen at the start of wars

it doesnt even have to be purely tied to hits, you could decrease restart bonus based on time/turns spent below full pop

use distance from full pop as well to prevent 1 SR making someone get less restart bonus

Dying in war is and always will be the fundamental part of war. The sense of achievement in every warchat is killing. If you attend several warchats in a row and achieve no kills watch how morale and interest decline.

Most players in warring tags just want to be able to log in, attend a warchat, get a kill and log off. Their sense of achievement in the game comes from getting the kills and winning the war. It takes weeks to win a war so most of the time the fun in the game is in successful warchats.

Walling takes perseverance, determination and skill. You can slip up for 10 mins when you can't be available and die. If you are determined enough, you won't be unavailable for that 10 minutes and you will wall. Not everyone is able to wall 24/7 and quite frankly, the game should not be made easier for those people. If someone has the commitment to making themselves able to wall around the clock then so be it. If you can't... too bad. Dying is and always has been the most common factor in war.

So many suggestions from people who do not primarily war and do not understand the activity dynamics in terms of keeping players interested and active in war. All the changes seem to be based around making dying harder. Ever since the game was created countries have died with the same level of ease. You can die in 15 seconds yes, but if you have sufficient defenses to actually be killed in 15 seconds then it requires a lot of coordination and skill from the attacking Alliance based on current game population.

It is not like back in Earth2025 the ratio of countries walling and dying was any different to what it is now. The hits per kill over the last 10 years has actually been fairly comparable. So what is the problem? You die in war, you restart and and then you can get nice restart bonuses to make restarting less painful. Why do we need to harm the warchat experience just because people don't like dying?

What makes a war more fun? Walling or killing? Make it too painful and hard to kill countries then you kill the enjoyment. Warring is about teamwork and the satisfaction is earned from getting the kills. If you change the game to make it harder to kill and thus more about walling then you reduce the enjoyment people derive from attending warchats. In war people love warchats. They don't war just to be able to sit back and stonewall.

If you make killing harder you may not have as many people crying on AT about it like those being suicided or those who die fast and complain about the speed... but you will grind people down and their enjoyment will be reduced and then they won't bother playing anymore.

The restart bonus was designed for one reason... to make dying less painful. People always cry when their countries die, it is the nature of war. The market bonus was introduced so that (1) netters would be more likely to have stock on the market and thus would have a greater chance to rebound from the FS and get back in to the fight and (2) to introduce a skill element behind stockpile management in war.

The problem with the restart bonus is that individuals learned to use it to their advantage in terms of suiciding. Then simply, the restart bonus should be adapted so that those individuals cannot benefit from it.

Merry Xmas everybody

And happy fluffin new year

There half baked changes are bullfluff

You know pang for someone who works as a programmer/developer I gotta say I'm pretty disappointed with the total lack of vision most of these reactionary based changes have been pushed out

Considering in my opinion you have done nothing to really cripple suicides but you have managed to potentially cripple wars moving forward though. Congrats you made this war game finally not a war game. Wish complete.

well no restart bonuses didn't stop wars in earth2025 nor in ee before rbs was added.

People didn’t cry about their countries dying as much in Earth2025.

But wars were also generally earlier and countries not as large.

When I died in war in E2025 I restarted got some FA and became a finisher. *shrugs*

The issue now we don't have that many players anymore.
In the past most clans are above 50 countries (or near/above 100?) and restart can get 3 to 4 FAs easily to get them back into networth range to help kill as finishers.

With the current status whereby most war clans having 20+ countries max and around 4 ot 5 of them are not so active, restarts will have a hard time to get enough FAs to get back into networth range to hit.
Restarts that can't get enough FAs to get into networth range to hit will bored out and quit as not many players have the patience to join a warchat but end up unable to hit due to networth restrictions issue.

So, Makinso is right.
The biggest issue now is this game is lack of players seriously.
No matter what changes you try to enforce or implement also wouldn't solve any problems as we don't have enough players to make things work.

Exactly.



Less people are dying. Less need FA. There is no problem of scale here.

I'm probably the biggest advocate of no restart bonus at all. I'm not advocating for it gone for netting, I only war on 1a. I make the point about how it benefits netters to have it gone because I want to get as much support as possible. Unlike the people who try to get things implemented for war that play the LaF is evil and every change is for netters blame game, I would like to see wide support in order to see changes happen. Truth be told, it's just a valid fact that suiciders benefit from restart bonus, but I couldn't care much less about whether they do or not. The restart bonus is bad for reasons entirely to do with war. No one likes 2 month long wars. No one. The people crying about it being gone are the kind of people that go inactive in 2 month long wars. Do I blame them? No, those wars are boring.

The LaF elders vs sol sof war was literally over in a week. There was zero chance one side was going to win, they were only sticking around because restart bonus in conjunction with some other bad game mechanics made it impossible to kill them fast enough. How is that fun? No one had fun in that war. Half of the losing side spent the entire set talking about how they were going to quit the game. Sadly, that's the most entertaining war in the last year. How bad is that?

This isn't change for changes sake. The restart bonus has drained the life out of wars. There is no reason to build well, no reason to FA a restart, no reason to wall past a certain point, no reason to even kill originals, no reason to try. It's bad, man. It's beyond stale. Wars should have clear winners and losers and it they should not be curved down to the lowest common denominator just because a few people are worried they can't compete without the restart bonus

The restart bonus is being removed is obviously bad for LaFs warring, and obviously good for LaFs netting.

If its good or bad for war, as I have been relegated to a person "who do not primarily war and do not understand the activity dynamics in terms of keeping players interested and active in war" despite warring the majority of my sets in 1a, team and primary I will say that I think that the restart bonus unfairly gets the whole blame for wars not ending, despite there being several other mechanics that share the blame for that:
1.The NW modifyer for special attacks makes low NW countries take more turns to kill, despite having less pop. I have always found that weird.
2.Spies being cheaper to maintain the smaller you are and yet its more effective to do spy ops, certain ones being more to blame than others, from smaller to larger countries than the other way around.
3. Missiles are cheaper to aquire and defend against for a small country firing them on a larger one than the other way around.

Doing away with or balancing these 3 mechanics while keeping the restart bonus would probably have an as pronounced effect on creating a natural end to wars as just removing the restart bonus would do.

In another thread I put actual numbers to these imbalances between smaller and bigger countries(which can be a restart vs an original or a badly managed original vs a well managed original).

When A has twice the resources as B does:
Special attacks and landgrabs are 33-40% as powerful when A attacks B as when B attacks A.
Spies are generally (with a few ops as exceptions) exactly 50% as effective from A->B as B->A, despite A paying >200% as much for spies, meaning <25% value for money.
Missiles are all 66.7%(2/3) as effective from A->B as B->A, despite A paying 200% as much for warfare and SDI to produce and defend at equal effectivenesses, meaning 33.3%(1/3) value for money.

Having twice the resources might mean you can pay twice the expenses and spend twice as much on tech viably, but not for half the effectiveness. Out of these factors the way spies and spy ops work is the greatest culprit in making wars last til set end.

I agree with a lot of that, although, I do think restart bonus even with those balance changes you're suggesting is bad for warring. I'd be ok with those changes and something along the lines of Derrick's suggestion of one and done

I would also put more traction into your suggestions if the prerequisite for having an opinion here is warring regularly as I'm quite certain you've warred more in the last few years than most people in this thread. Actually, I'm not sure who is being referred to by that as everyone who has posted here aside from marshal wars frequently enough to have some skin in the game?

That could be a solution worth testing to have a restart bonus for first death and then no restart bonus for later deaths. I dont think its either my or derricks suggestion originally I have always just liked the idea for numerous reasons so I have discussed it favorably at many occasions.

I do concede that I'm in a somewhat different position when it comes to war because I've had only one arranged war in my 17 sets I've completed in EE 1a and the rest are when we got blindsided or grudge wars. I remember that one arranged war very fondly, and I would like to do more of that. Everyone else seems to hate arranged wars tho, cursing them at every opportunity.