Change set #21 resolves some minor issues on all servers.

* The Premium spy chance estimation chance now accounts for spy DR.

* Harmless spy op (spy, market spy, ally spy, and military spy) eligibility is not impacted by the shrinking humanitarian range during the final 30 turns of a round.

* Countries in GDI on Primary and Express can perform harmless spy ops even during the final six hours of the round.

* The Server Details page has been reworked to show more relevant information. For some settings, only non-default information will be shown.

* A country's networth now updates if it sells goods on the public market that were automatically due to low price. Previously, networth did not update until the user logged into the country.

* The user preference to hide the ingame tutorial by default is now respected.

* A new server setting was introduced to give countries an initial amount of bonus turns. Restarts will not get any bonus turns. This is intended for use on Express in the future but may also be added to other servers as well. Currently, no servers take advantage of this functionality.

* There was an issue during country creation which could result in players having more countries than the number allowed by the server. This should be resolved now. If this happens again, report it as a bug immediately. Players who do not report this as a bug may be deleted for taking advantage of exploits.


All servers with standard roll out schedule:

* The update to AB and BR returns as part of change set #19 had the unintended consequence that countries could lose more buildings if they had many different building types. The formula has been changed so returns are approximately the same regardless of the building distribution of the defender. Note that a defender with many different building types may still see slight differences in returns due to rounding.


All non-clan servers with standard roll out schedule:

* Ghost acre returns are now based on the total number of buildings owned by the attacker and the defender instead of doing a building to building comparison. This means that there should no longer be a reason for countries to build off-strategy buildings to increase their grabbing returns. The "10% rule" is still in effect.

* Military sanctions will be applied to a small number of player accounts. Reference: https://www.earthempires.com/...e-tool-49995?t=1618074323

* The effectiveness of "tech leeching" has been reduced. Countries with less than half of the tech per turn of the country doing the teching will no longer get the maximum possible benefit from the research alliance. The realized benefit will reduce linearly based on the tpt difference with a minimum benefit of 10%. Expressed as a formula: MIN(1.0, MAX(0.10, 2 * ally_tpt / techer_tpt))


Tournament with standard roll out schedule:

* Express style GDI will be used.


"Standard roll out schedule" in the notes above means that changes will be applied to servers as they reset. For this change set, the changes will first be live on the next round of each server that begins after May 4th, 2021. For clarity, round 597 of Express will be on change set #21.

Please let me know if you experience anything odd that might be related to the new changes.

Hope its ok to ask questions here, if not sorry. Sounds like solid changes to the servers.

"* A new server setting was introduced to give countries an initial amount of bonus turns. Restarts will not get any bonus turns. This is intended for use on Express in the future but may also be added to other servers as well. Currently, no servers take advantage of this functionality."

Do countries that self delete their restarted country get this bonus on their newest country?
We have noticed a few cases where countries that suicide self delete to hide their country history.

You know how you get more turns if you start late? It uses the same logic as that. I'm not sure if I explicitly tested your scenario, but I would expect them to not get the bonus turns.

Who gets sanctioned? Do they find out when trying to make an attack?

Report back when you get one :P


















/me runs

My last express country was stacked at 4717 net

Pfft, you're boring!

😂

Got no time. Sitting at the hospital with the mrs. Bored.

Oh snap, I hope whoever is being treated is ok...

This is spectacular. Great work Slagpit.

There are some big new things here all of which are great, but I would like to give extra appreciation for fixing the bugs and unwanted side effects of past changes as well as the little changes that are great for the game. I'm a big believer in that many small things and "maintainance" sort of things like this can get you very far.

To that end:
* Fixing the the AB/BR formula bug.
* Harmless spy op not being impacted by the shrinking humanitarian range.
* Countries in GDI on Primary and Express can perform harmless spy ops even during the final six hours of the round.
* The Server Details page being more extensive, +1
* The NW bug on autosell.

Some of these things are so obvious if you think about it, but could easily have been around for 8 years like the defence ally losses bug was until it was fixed(last year?). Its not game breaking by itself, but a lot of these things add up and annoy people. Some things are just nice.


anyway +8-sideways!

The most annoying bug that affected me every set was setting tutorial to off in country preferences. Thank god its fixed.

Looks pretty good, nothing really bad to say about it.

+1

Yeah that is going to be enjoyable now..

Sanctioned players can tell by going to the GDI, attack, or spy screen. All of the players currently under military sanctions are aware of their status.

Oh so some players ARE under these sanctions already?

The number of players under military sanctions is between 1 and 10.

* Ghost acre returns are now based on the total number of buildings owned by the attacker and the defender instead of doing a building to building comparison. This means that there should no longer be a reason for countries to build off-strategy buildings to increase their grabbing returns. The "10% rule" is still in effect.


Just seeking some clarity on the 10% rule here - how does this work.

It's the same as what you're used to seeing on Express. Does that help?

So if I have 10k acres and hit a 20k acres country NW matched the most I get is 10% of 10k?

You can't get more than 10% of your total buildings count in a single grab.

some good changes and bugfixes here

the grabbing change being the biggest one

i think i was in favour of reducing the required building amount from needing 1k for 43 to just 430 for 43 so by 57% then seeing how it went, but this has a lot of benefits too

making the solo servers be able to be on the same ruleset

tech leech nerf i guess is good, i did like the strategy of it though, but even in alliance with only slots for 50 leechers i checked a couple of sets and there was still open slots until the bots started sending their own pacts

however dying to landkill last set it was more of a pain playing without tech leeches on the restart, and it will make techer bots better compared to player countries if they get 30% more tech than this set

Sanctioned players should be public knowledge perhaps a special page dedicated to them so we can shame them daily!

The research ally change only applies to non-clan servers.

My guess is that sanctioned players will probably just quit playing on the servers that have that rule imposed. A public list would only keep toxic behavior propagating on the forums, which is a bad look for the game when someone new looks at it.

I hope that first-time offenders can have sanctions removed after a period of time to give a second chance before it is a permanent thing.

Also on second thought, why not remove tech allies from solo servers altogether?

Having fewer tech points produced will increase the price so it wouldn't hurt teachers most likely.

I think we should assume sanctions are not given to first time offenders at all.

I'd be careful what you assume ;)

oh i didnt notice it was solo server changes only

thats on the building change as well so still need up to about 30k offstrat for full benefit on alliance