These requests apply to all three solo servers, but especially Primary. These servers were actually objectively far more functional, and subjectively far more fun than Alliance, but the small problems they do have are going unaddressed and they are being worsened by changes designed with Alliance in mind.

5 points:

1) Don't roll over the latest batch of changes at the next reset. I'm not adverse to change, but none of these changes were designed with Primary or the other solo servers in mind. Their effect will be to lower scores, make dictator even less feasible, MBR or rebuilding your land will no longer be viable. In general the changes will serve to make the game less fun. None of them are addressing any problems that exist in the solo servers.

2) Remove offensive allies, remove/redesign tech allies. This is because of leeching. It is very easy for a player to have a friend give them full-time use of their jets or send many thousands of free tech their way, which can give an unscrupulous player a big advantage over those playing without getting what basically amounts to FA.
http://forums.earthempires.com/...way-to-change-tech-allies

3) Do something about bomb structures, bomb banks, espionage. The fact here is that these ops are way too easy to get through. Even a player with superior spies can have their country completely gutted by bomb structures. There's nothing you can do to protect yourself. Lately there's also been an epidemic of people stealing millions of tech points from random players through espionage. I think these ops get through way too easily. People have mentioned allowing GDI to protect from those types of ops, but also they could be made much more difficult to get through.
http://forums.earthempires.com/...;z=spy-defense-impossible
http://forums.earthempires.com/...&z=spy-page-incorrect
http://forums.earthempires.com/...-the-curve-on-hostile-ops

4) Restore the old attack damages. Look, these changes were another instance of a change being designed exclusively for Alliance, but being released on all servers. They simply do not make sense on solo servers. Why do we have to "ramp up" damages when we are one player alone trying to attack one other player? It's not even possible to seriously ramp up damages in Primary, where you can only hold 80 turns at a time. Frankly it's nonsensical.
http://forums.earthempires.com/...=ab-damage-low-in-primary

5) "CHANGE #4: If in the past 24 hours a country has landgrabbed you and you have not landgrabbed them since, your first retal will ignore DR rules." <- This potential change was announced in February 2012, more than a year ago. All that time and it still has yet to be enacted, while Alliance has gotten a whole lot of attention.




PS: Remove earthquakes
http://forums.earthempires.com/...-the-point-of-earthquakes

I support all 5 of these points.

Signed and approved.

AGREED! It's two different enviornments, we can't expect the math to be the same for both.

Also, remove earthquakes.

Heh, earthquakes on big countries will be even more annoying after the building cost changes.

Liking this post, thx blid

Nice Blid. Signed.

signed.

Quoting this post from the Primary discussion thread:

(This is regarding a war that broke out between 2 countries, #175 and #125)

http://www.eestats.com/primary/country/175

The owner of #125 posted that he bombed 20k buildings with bomb buildings, and another 10k with CMs, for a total of 30k.

signed!

This is much needed!!!

Save primary from 1A's collateral damage!

***Only one of those I'm not on board with is getting rid of O allies. I know the odd loser uses leeches, but bottom fed countries need O allies to help attempt retals.

Point 3) You're not giving a chance to people who are way smaller a chance to 'retaliate' the bigger guys who farm them. If you make it more difficult to get those ops done successfully, more people will quit this game because they would just go, 'Ah, a top player farmed me and I cant do anything about it, whats the point?' Also, top players that grab to large acres should also dedicate more spies to help out in avoiding a tech stealer. Although its harder to keep a high SPAL compared to lower acre countries, if you had more SPAL compared to another top country, the tech stealer would instead steal from the other guy first.

Point 4)You could ramp up damages more in Primary, since only 80 turns can be spent at one go.


Support the other points.

@h2orich Regarding your point (3), it doesn't work by having more SPAL. I can have 50 SPAL, and another country can have 30 SPAL, the tech stealer is just going to steal from me if I have more stuff to steal - the fact I have more SPAL is irrelevant, his 120 SPAL is still going to be successful 95% of the time.

If a bottom country cannot retaliate a big one, then the bottom country is almost always playing his country in a non-optimal way in the first place (half rainbow country, and/or no production tech).

Well, nerfing the result of the op may seem more practical compared to nerfing the difficulty of the op.

Actually, we want the op (steal tech/bomb banks) protected by GDI, so whether the op gets nerfed isn't that relevant.

The actual concern is that ABs got nerfed, so the end result is that spy ops like bomb structures are way too strong now compared to ABs.

In my opinion harmful ops should not have 0% chance of success if the attacker has less SPAL than the defender after the ally and tech adjustments - kindof like attacks (but a wider range of failure chance).

Also I would suggest that intel ops should have 99% chance of success if you have >110% SPAL of the defender. You should still have a <50% chance of success if your SPAL is < the defender but, the possibility of success should approach 0 as your SPAL approaches 0.

Currently it appears that the difference in success rate between a 35 SPAL to 15 SPAL country is negligible on intel and damage ops. But for a 50k country that is 1M spies, a substantial expense and food upkeep by anybodies standards.

+This^

I currently do have a SPAL of over 50, with lots of spy tech, over a million spies, both my Intel allies have over 1mil spies as well, and I am sitting on 36k acres. But it doesn't do a damn thing to stop 10 successful bomb bank operations from a country I have never attacked before. His country has 12k land and he is a Communism, not even a Dictator. I had the steal tech problem last set, so I got even more spies this set, and a non-Dictator can still have his way with me spy-wise. I am afraid the amount of spies needed to counter this behavior would no longer be considered a viable netting strategy..

I don't see why GDI was added to protect against suicides, but then intentionally left wide fluffing open to certain spy operations. Is this a way to give the smaller guys the ability to retal the bigger guys in some way? If so, then we failed to make sure the bigger guy actually hit the smaller guy at least once before being opened up to these attacks..

And I realize some of these things will take time to code, especially changing how the allies work. But there are temporary solutions, like disabling offensive/research allies all together on the solo servers, until you can get the reworked ally fixes in place.

I endorse this thread and all its wisdom. Please stop forcing Alliance's fluffty problems on the Solo servers.. If the problems don't exist on some servers, it makes zero sense to implement them and screw up a mostly working server.

h2o, smaller countries using spy ops is all well and good, but it should be possible to defend against to some degree. If the defender has a superior SPAL, the black ops should succeed only a limited amount (especially because of how damaging they are). If the defender has a worse SPAL, they should still fail sometimes especially with spy DR, but we saw last set that spy DR never seemed to kick in.

In one of Rockman's threads he said:
"I tested spy defense a couple sets ago when I got 6.7m spies with 140% spy tech as a dictator, and I still couldn't stop harmful spy ops despite having one of the best spy defenses ever on the alliance server."

I think we can all agree that's crazy!

If I have it right the reason why they left those ops available was to throw a bone to the suiciders who were being mostly shut down by the new GDI rules. The thinking was to give them something to do, and that if you got robbed, you needed more spies. However, we've seen having more spies doesn't seem to help.

You should post your SPAL and the thief's SPAL and then share what % of his ops succeed. We can see how overpowered it is.

Well my own was just over 50 SPAL (including allies and tech) when the 10 spy ops got through (100% success, I found him by GDI letting me attempt to missile him). But I do not know what his SPAL is yet. I will see if I can get this info when I log in today, but I am not going to waste too many turns on it.

And btw, to me it doesn't make sense to both screw suiciders, then throw them a bone. Either yank the rug from out under their feet or allow them to do what they want. Don't tell them suicide is bad, but then still give them ways to do it..

Wholeheartedly approved.

Special emphasis:
It's also ridiculous the Bomb Structures is so much more powerful then ABs.

Agreed

Signed.

Signed. Great post blid. Agree with every point.

Signed.
It's odd that I can go to war with a better player and that player has about 0% chance of winning the war, farming me and moving on with the way spyops are now.

Well the player you were warring self-deleted, there's little chance he can recover with 50% of his buildings gone in just 35 spy ops.

Continuing after further investigation..

The Communism Indy pulling the spy ops on me has a SPAL of 118 before allies with 1.2mil spies, 120% tech, and 12.2k acres.

After yesterday I upped my spy tech considerably and have a SPAL of just over 60 now. 1.2mil spies,

Today I get 20 more bomb banks with 19 of them successful...

As any strategy other than an Industrial, I don't think getting enough spies to stop these attacks by the end game would be a feasible netting strategy if you wanted to finish in the top ranks. Just to match his SPAL I would need over double the amount of spies I have now. And to put this in time perspective, there is 13.5 days left in Primary set of 2 months.

I'll also want to point out that, if you want to maintain about 30 SPAL, you need about 10% of your acres built as indies on 100% spies.

This already severely reduces income for techers and cashers, since their income is based on built land % of their strat type.

If you want to maintain 60 SPAL, you need about 20% of your land built as indies.

late to the thread, but i support all five of these.

#5 is not needed on primary or tourney so much, but on express it is urgently required.

regarding tech allies: a temporary quick fix could be that 50% of your buildings need to be labs in order to benefit anything from a res pact. that would cover the exploit while keeping the coding changes to the most simple of lookups.

@afaik Bigben made a great suggestion actually, that your research ally gains should just be multiplied by your built lab%, and Pang thought this is a great idea as well.

on a server as fast as express, this might not work as well. see. i always play techer, but i dont always run a techer start. so i might not actually have any labs until end of day 3. but my allies who are also techers started teching from the beginning may have switched to something else by this point, why can we not both take advantage of this?


I'm not completely sure that tech 'leeching' is such a bad thing anyway. sometimes, as a techer, its hard to find enough good tech allies anyway, so you barter with someone who can provide you good off or def ally for the sake of letting them leech off a spare tech pact. if i can use that to my advantage to, say, gain more acres(thus labs), i'm making up for not having that extra ally by making more tpt myself. i don't see this as cheating at all. i see it as a great use of diplomacy and a good example of player interaction.

I do understand that this is abused by those with friends who only play so called solo servers to just aid them. that said, i really dont want to nerf things so much that player interaction continues to diminish.

IMO, one of the toughest skills to get right on a solo server is picking good allies(without going to ur clan and sayin 'hey buds, ally me!'), and i like that about these servers. removing specific ally slots and pretty much making others less useful doesnt really help all that much.

I do agree that spyops need a good bit of work done on them, that dr is a big issue that needs addressed, and that the new damages arent really conducive to non-clan servers.

Oh dear, the one guy who doesn't want to fix leeching is an admin!

edit: not trying to be rude btw, heh. Just you're definitely in the minority here. There's some tech leech arrangements that might make a little sense, sure, but that doesn't change how open to abuse it is. A player with tech leeches can finish higher than a player without them, that's a simple fact. For those who are competing to win, we don't want to go against a talented player with a tech leech. It's not fair. Or do we have to get leeches too? And then it becomes an even bigger mess. This damage to the game is way more important than your once in awhile scenario where you like to give a guy free tech for some reason (I don't quite understand it, just leave the slot empty; is offering a guy free tech really the only way you can get a def ally?).

Offensive allies are even worse, because they're overpowered AND can be used for major leeching.

heh, i've got no problems with people disagreeing with me. i did say that i understand its open to abuse. i didn't say that i don't want to change it. just explaining my misgivings about making things too limiting.

The idea posted about linking tech received to number of labs built is probably the best idea. doesn't mean I have to like it.

Declaring that picking good allies is a "skill" is only a rationalization for a crappy user interface and directly works against the goal of increasing player action.

Fix tech alliances and make some other change to counterbalance any loss of player interaction. Everyone wins except the players who aren't good enough to compete on a level playing field.

And while we are at this, why do bomb structures on a country with different buildings crap? That one I don't get. My spies are highly trained, but seem to be incompetent in destroying research labs when I am a farmer.

It would be great if there is some acknowledgement from the people making the decisions that the issues highlighted here are recognized, and that Primary will not be with the the newly rolled out alliance rules next set.

That and the spy op issues are the main ones. The rest can be up for further discussion if anything.

The o- and res allies have been on the docket for 2 years now

I was thinking about the Oil changes. It completely destroys the legitimacy of an oiler. Everyone will just build their own rigs.

An indy prodcues 1.35*1.55 = 209% that of a non indy.
A casher produces 1.75*1.75 = 306% more cash than a non-casher.
A farmer produces 225% more food than a non-farmer.
An oiler now produces 150% more oil than a non-oiler.

Where is the weakest link? Yes the supply/demand ratio was such that the server could only handle one or two oilers, but the demand side should have been adjusted - not the supply side.

Prices will need to average around $225 to equalize the production value of an oiler (same revenue as farms at $43).

They should increase next set...we will see how much.

Very smart, Andrew. Not to mention, oil already is sparse in Primary. If they're trying to make "oiler" a strategy this isn't the way to go.

But I don't think oiler should be a full strategy in normal circumstances - if you increase demand enough for that, it helps explorers so much that you have other things to balance.

Prior to these changes I was planning on playing an oiler/farmer to change things up. I still might, but I'm less excited about the possibilities.

Still no word on if the changes are rolling over.
Has anyone highlighted about this thread to the people in charge? Who are the people who make these decisions anyway?

I want to be able to send Foreign Aid from the Primary server just like I could waaaaay back when it was part of swerve.com

That kind of teamwork fits better in Alliance/Team/FFA(?)

Would just like to mention something on the bomb banks/steal tech again.

I logged in to my account today and a lot of cash went missing again to someone whom I didn't even attack this set. It's ridiculous that they are allowed to do such thing against someone in GDI. If GDI is there to protect against grieving/suiciding for no reason, then why allow bomb banks and steal tech? I just can't understand the reason behind this. I'm thinking it's likely a coding error or something.

There needs to be a reason to have spies

I agree that the bomb banks and espionage suck, but it is different from suiciding in that it benefits the attacker. Unfortunately there isn't much of a way to fight back. So I agree changes need to be made.

Slagpit wrote the code, so yeah, coding error.

I have now lost over a billion in cash to a single person who I have never done anything to yet this set. And if I had done anything to him before I make networth jump, he would of been able to completely decimate my country via spy ops. Over half my missiles will probably fail too because he does have SDI.

The only difference is the damage being done benefits the person using the spy op. From the viewpoint of the receiving end, there is no difference when someone you have never done anything to decides to spend 10-20 spy ops a day stealing your hard earned cash. It is a person looking for war, who has no chance to finish high in networth, but knows he can screw with the top players finish and maybe provoke one of them to war. If this is not a suicide then I want to hear your definition of it.

Well, if people decide to fluff with you they can do it in other ways too.

I was Town of Cats a year or so ago:
http://www.eestats.com/primary/oldcountry/298/46

Those three bounces that guy did for no reason killed 8,562,604 networth. That's twice as damaging as the $1b you lost. If the dude is doing it just to be an ass, there are lots of ways to do that in this game. Look at what LATC's friend has been doing to CROATIA as well. I don't see how to prevent it.

OTOH, if he's doing it because he thinks it's worth his while (as it clearly has been so far), there are ways to show him that it isn't. And I'm counting on you to make that point to this guy with a nice missile dump. Just like this guy is knocking you around with ops, people being farmed and 20x tapped in Tournament could say it's not fair. But they and you need to make it not worth the farmer's while, and it's possible.

People can fluff with people in this game, and there's not always a way for admins to stop it. People are idiots sometimes. (What could be done to save me from a guy that decides to bounce on me 3 days in a row? Nothing.)

In this case though, there is a way they can address it by tightening up the spy mechanics, and I believe they fully intend to do so.