I have toyed with this idea for years and now that we have an environment where widely accepted ideas can receive implementation I thought I would gauge others' opinions on this idea.

Basically the way it would work is that there is a fixed amount of land for the entire server to control. The most practical factor for setting what the land cap is would be number of countries in the server. I think something on the order of 15,000+/-5000 acres per country would be the appropriate quantity of land to make available. So for a server with 800 countries there would be 12,000,000 acres available in this scenario.

There is no doubt this would encourage land grabbing (which on the other hand may be a detriment to the game if the lazy player base can no longer remain competitive by purely exploring) which I think is something this game needs. To further encourage grabbing, exploring would be limited to something like 10,000 acres. That means if every country only explored only 2/3 of the land pool would be used (so to actually have some semblance of realism it would be necessary for people to grab to access all the land in the world). This cap on exploration could be thought of as exploring up to your neighbors borders if you like pretending things are in some way realistic as I do.

To protect late starters from having 15,000 acres added to the land pool and immediately explored out from under their noses it might make sense to add 10,000 acres to the free land pool and then reserve a 5,000 acre private pool for that country to tap before accessing the main land pool.

Ghost acres would clearly need to be eliminated.

I feel this would idea would be augmented with a revised land gains formula which is dependent on defense/acre. As a countries defenses become increasingly concentrated it becomes more difficult to seize its land. This would also require revision of military losses as bottom feeding would result in a feedback of increased gains.



Potential effects of this are certainly increased grabbing. Anyone who wants a top country will have to get it at the expense of smaller countries. Who will then suffer an end in the land. This theoretically could lead to farming to death (in a non-literal way) but would potentially be countered by a necessity for war (and thereby dead countries releasing their land back to the pool).

Tech would become more important as a means of separating one country from another, particularly for warring. This would certainly add hiccups to market trends.


Thoughts? Independent of the land pool idea I like the idea of making land gains dependent on defense/acre.

i'm against anything that forces people to grab in order to be successful...some of us are lazy (or just plain busy) and we need that all-x option to remain competitive.

what would you say to a land pool/ghost acres option based on dead country land and dropped land (kind of tying in to the dropped acres thread)...

all dropped acres and dead country land goes into the land pool. if your country has been successfully attacked in the past 24hrs, you get ghost acres back from the land pool, in some way proportional to the amount of land taken from you. SS and PS would not yield ghost acres unless you had lost land to a grab within 24hrs. if you lost 50% of your land to a suicider, you would get more ghost acres than someone who lost 10% to a couple grabs.

just a thought with holes and issues, of course :)

that is interesting...

I do realize it would make all-ex strats less competitive, and as someone who hates grabbing (and maybe got the first top-10 all-ex in Earth (very unverified)) I appreciate success without effort... I don't know that it is necessary to cater to the lazy masses though... why should people who work hard not do better than people who don't?

As for your redistribution idea, it is being discussed in the no dropping land thread.

detmer, i agree that working hard should be rewarded, however, all-x should at least remain something that, if played to perfection or very well, can compete in top ranks.

you sparked a whole bunch of land ideas which is awesome

so your saying the only access to the extra 5k per country is if a country A grabs country B and then B explores back up to 10k, thereby creating new land?

since ghost acres are removed?

Really interesting idea, that would create a completly different game.
I would suggest to make it "more realistic":
We have the Land Pool of example 15000/country.
Make the exploration rate fixed, but everybody is allowed to explore 15000 acres (at the start of the reset the Land pool will be only 100/country)
And no ghost acres if we have the pool.

DLance, yes, exactly

jedioda, I think that fixed exploration rate would make more sense in a larger land server - say fixed acreage = 1.2x10^11 (about real Earth size). That would be interesting in that countries a whole would get to experience acreages that were previously unimaginable, the downside would be BPT and building costs would be the limiting factors rather than ability to gain land. 2.4M players would be necessary to reach the land cap at real Earth size, with each country having 50k acres. At an explore rate of 48 acres/turn and 4680 turns in a reset, the maximum possible acreage to be built (with only building CS, exploring and building normal buildings) would be ~150,993 which would require 795k players to reach. Obviously that means real Earth size is too large for the game mechanics and possible player base. This 151k acre number could be useful in defining a limit though for the server size if explore rates didn't diminish. Maybe the acreage cap could be 50k/country in a constant explore-rate server.

For any fixed land system, I think the best way to handle explore rate would actually be to make your acres explored per turn dependent on your size and total acres available in the pool. Smaller players can explore for larger amounts relative to larger players, however the amount everyone explores at would be dictated by total land available.

I tried to make landpool an earth term a long time ago. No one understood me back then...