I spied h2o in Express this set, and, surprise surprise, he's leeching again. A casher with 3 offensive allies, 2 tech allies. The research allies don't even have def allies with him, they're just happily giving him FA, basically. This guy has 1/3 the jets I have and is grabbing more land than I am because of the o-allies. It's ludicrous.

I have two choices. Throw away my round time after time to suicide h2o every set (and oh, I've done it a lot, he never stops), or play for 2nd place. Or I guess I could make some friends who would dedicate their countries to me finishing higher as well but somehow I don't think that's how solo games should work.

It's been over a year since this has been brought up. Xin's "tech leech" thread is from January 2012, or about 60 Express rounds ago. Please, PLEASE, you don't need to put in any complicated changes to fix this. You can think about recoding tech allies or introducing new alliance types long-term, but for now, all you have to do is DISABLE offensive and research alliances from solo games. That's all it takes. Please.

Lol, h20 still needs the help of a small village for him to be half decent.

Hurry, before it gets too late.

I've been waiting to play a game without leeches. There will be less calculation involved before grabbing, and finding 3 off allies is hard because sometimes 1 or 2 decides to accept your pact and go all-x, or sometimes they get raped so hard that they dont even login anymore.

I support this thread to all solo servers. and Xin's tech leech thread is awesome idea. Disabling it shouldnt be hard, similar to the tourney server.

NOBODY ELSE FINDS 3 OFF ALLIES BECAUSE NOBODY ELSE IS A LEECHING fluff, RICH

and blid, you're not suppose to reveal my jets ratio to yours :( your allies would know how many jets I have and thats illegal since it requires an spy op to get my jet count.

blid, what if I find you at least 3 other person with 3 off allies(pending and accepted)?

I never said what country mine is or what country yours is, nor how many jets either of us have. It's general information pertaining to the Problem You Are Causing.

Relax. I'm just kidding.

Find one who's good and not just following the tips that says "you have open alliance slots."

It would be great if we could get this fixed before next Primary set begins.

It'd be worth a test round anyways.

this is part of the plan; but i'm setting up the new server atm!

That's really good, but I also hope you can take the 5 mins to do this before the next 2-month set begins :P Check out that exchange of time, say there's 50 people who could finish top ten in Primary that it will make a difference for...

50 people * 60 days * 24 hours * 60 minutes = 4,320,000 minutes, vs 5 mins we need from you to make it happen! <3

That and the DR crap is why i don't play xpress no more...

Nice! qz is going to fix OA and RA on the Primary server for next set. h2o will finish just about as good as his best Tourney finish, haha without all that help.

I really liked BigBen's method of removing tech leeching by multiplying the current tech allies gain by the % of your land that is Labs. This is extremely easy to implement, and Pang agreed with me on this.

And yes, remove O allies and Trade allies from solo servers.

TECH LEECHING is NOT A PROBLEM... IF YOUR ALLIES DONT TECH, ITS NOT A GAME PROBLEM, ITS AN ALLY PROBLEM.

sometimes tech leeching is preferred. I know from playing some sets as a leech myself, it could be a preferred method of teching and a perfectly viable strategy!

IF YOU DONT LIKE IT DROP YOUR TECH ALLY AND FIND ANOTHER. Simple as that. Live with it, buy a box of tissues. IT IS NOT A BUG OR ANYTHING THAT NEEDS TO BE FIXED. DROP YOUR "FRIENDS" AND BE SELFISH. WE ARE IN THIS TOGETHER.. ALL YOU ARE SAYING IS YOU DONT WANNA HELP A BROTHA OUT.

If youd don't wanna help them, why are you allied in the first place.

General Earl, the problem is not you as the techer.

The problem is the non-teching country (not playing a techer) gaining a lot of free tech, resulting in an unfair netting scenario on solo servers where he doesn't need to buy tech, and he can get more jets to gain land at a proportionately faster rate than others.

We want to remove the significant advantage the leeching country gets.

yes please remove O allies and change tech allies as Xin suggested.

remove all allies from individual servers, make them individual and they will be more competitive

That's how tourney is. I agree with that to a point, but there's a few things I like about def allies.

#1 is they counteract the PS bonus to some degree. Without def allies, people are too easy to break. Right now in Primary, whenever I find a target with no def allies my mouth starts watering because it's such easy feeding.

#2 is the simplicity and ease of attacking if there aren't def allies. 1 spy op and go. That's why you see the 10th highest attack success on Primary being 97.69% which would get you 19th on the Tourney rankings. Having to factor in defensive allies a) makes spies more important, as it encourages taking more spy ops which also offers more chance of failing an op and losing spies, lowering your SPAL and so on, b) forces you to make a decision - just hit blind or with double offense? do a Spy on Allies and estimate the ally defense? or do a Spy on Allies and then spy all the allies? It's an extra wrinkle that makes the game better.

#3 is that it's not a game breaker. A low defense country still has low defense even if someone doubles that break. And even if it makes someone harder to break, you still have that PS 50% bonus.

#4 is that I think it is good to have people communicate in the game to some degree. I had an alliance (though not a def alliance) with OneMansArmy this set and it led to us talking a lot, trading thoughts and strategies for the reset. I think getting people together and talking increases their investment in the game.

Oh and

#5 it keeps the server distinct from Tournament. No allies whatsoever is already Tourney's thing.

While i am in agreement of removing offensive and tech allies - i think the unfair advantage extends to def allies too, albeit to a lesser extent.

I dont think def allies should be removed, but maybe the max should be 50% of your def to counteract the PS bonus and not doubling of defence.

That works for me :)

50% is puny.

I would most likely just send 1.5x and not bother to get his/her def allies spies ops. Waste of turns.

I think the current def allies works well.

Yeah 50% might be a little small... 50%? 75%? 100%? The important thing is removing o-allies and tech leeches because those are the alliances that top players are able to abuse to get a leg up on others, which can affect the top 10, the winner, etc. While def allies don't have as big an effect on the final scores because most top players don't really get attacked much anyway. Imo.

mooo

great posts above blid. Agree with you on all 5 points.

10 more hours! to remove them!

yeah! yeah!!! *seizes up*

Good point, blid. Off has gotta go. Tech either changes to be a % of tpt or removed altogether .

If RA's are removed all together we will need one or two more techers this set, and tech starts will need to be updated. I still think removing is the right way to go. There probably should be 1 or 2 more techer spaces available for a balanced market.

I don't even know what this means. Are you proposing that we assign everyone to specific strats so that we have a "balanced market"? "Only 7 techers allowed this set! You want to play techer? Tough! Put your name on the list earlier for next set." "Also, you 7 techers, only one of you is allowed to go over 35k acres, and none of you is allowed to stay below 20k acres from the 25th of March" Should we also have people assigned to switch strats throughout the set to continuously "balance" the market? What is this? Mother Russia? Just remove them already, the market will sort itself out.

No, he's saying without research alliances, the market can probably handle another techer or two without tech prices sucking. If three people aren't getting 10% of my tech from the research alliance, there's a lot less tech on the market and prices go up, and more people can tech most likely. It might help make techer more viable and slow down cashers I think...

Until the next set when everyone decides to go techer and it does a 180. There has been no change to it and we all know what happened in this last sets market, so no I don't buy that. Let's not make this anymore complicated than it really is, qz, just make this change already. Let the market deal with the market, no need to delay for you to write some special code to "stabilize" the market.

I wasn't proposing that any "market stabilizing code" be written. I am just pointing out that there will be up to 30% less tech produced.

I agree, the market will sort it out, and the strategies and tactics people play will have to be modified. Not modified because I or someone else is balancing the market - but modified because of market conditions balancing the market.

While this is a priority for me, making the code work in PHP 5.3 on the new server is currently a higher priority; it looks like i won't get to it before the reset start, given that's in 30 minutes.

You can still disable/remove the alliances today (and unally people if they allied up). Nobody can do much today while in 100 turn protection.

Its too late, I have 3 off allies now!