Come on, there are a lot of PC commies this round, what are we doing? $82 jets? $90 turrets? WTF!

no collusion

This is whining, not colluding.

Sounds like a price fixing attempt to me!

My initial impression is that it's a bit too annoying right now to play techer or indy on Express but I'm not sure what, if anything, could be done about it. I wonder what changing max turns to 270 (270) would do.

As much as I love easy bot farming being able to hit multiple targets with <10k turrets, at this stage in the set that seems weird (unless i'm not remembering right). It used to be that you'd get a few easy hits out of the gate but after that they seemed to grow so you could generally just about keep up with hitting them (especially when they had D allies!)

That makes me feel like something has changed where they aren't buying as much stuff as they used to? Do they need to buy more?

or, maybe add more bots to increase demand? (or indirectly through players growing bigger and buying more tech/military to grow?)

I hacked up some bot code a few years back that consistently took the majority of t10 on the AI server ;)

These bots run by you looked superior to the default ones...

https://www.earthempires.com/ai/889/ranks

This was about where I was at...

https://www.earthempires.com/ai/696/ranks/97

Looks like a lot changed though! :)

https://www.earthempires.com/ai/954/ranks

LOL

My bot repo:

This branch is 120 commits ahead of, 345 commits behind

You're looking at resets with different turn counts. They got 2900 turns for round 889 but only 1900 turns for round 954. They also didn't get farmed by players the whole round. For round 889, bushels spike so high that some NPC countries end up stocking tech and military instead. If I remember right one or two techers could often destock before the bushel market crashed. That's why https://www.earthempires.com/ai/889/ranks/139 had such a large victory. The market dynamics for some of those rounds were honestly quite educational, though military demand was of course too low to be realistic.

The NPC code has effectively been the same since 2021. Qz only fixed a few small bugs since then.

There are a ton more PC commies this set, maybe seeing some do well last set inspired people? And now the market sucks.

Well it's not all bad. Tech and bushels are cheap and oil is a reasonable price.

I'm guessing that what you're seeing here is either rainbows which deliberately have bad countries or countries that highly prioritize buying tech instead of military. There are different "buying schedules" now. You can read the NPC code for more details~

Hmm would have been interesting to run my bots at that time see how they did, last time I ran was October 2019.

I changed the code so much that I think it would be difficult to remerge from qzjul's master

Although, having had a quick look over, it looks like he mostly added things in different places as I had refactored out a lot of my code for "bot strategy"

They all inherited from a core Strategy class that established wether it was possible to do something, whether they should do it, and then decided if they would do it, then did it!

Each Strat effectively became setting a land goal, build goals and tech goals then running a turn based on logic ie for Rainbow it was:

if ($this->willSendStockToMarket()) { return PublicMarket::sellFood($this->c,true); }
if ($this->willSellMilitary()) { return PublicMarket::sell_max_military($this->c); }
if ($this->willSellTech()) { return PublicMarket::sell_max_tech($this->c); }
if ($this->willSellFood()) { return PublicMarket::sellFood($this->c,$this->stockpiling()); }
if ($this->willSellOil()) { return PublicMarket::sell_oil($this->c,$this->stockpiling()); }
if ($this->willBuildCS()) { return Build::cs(); }
if ($this->willBuildFullBPT()) { return Build::buildings($this->buildings()); }
if ($this->willExplore()) { return explore($this->c); }
if ($this->willCash()) { return cash($this->c); }
if ($this->c->canExplore()) { return explore($this->c); }

Other strats did/didn't do some of those steps (e.g an indy wouldn't sell food, a techer would tech when it was right)

They all prioritiesed their goals, stocked/destocked when the time was right,& bought mil & tech sensibly according to their priorities.

I also had a FFO, so that their was an oil market and they would stock oil for destock too (without land dropping).

This post probably provides the best single post info for how the NPCs changed: https://www.earthempires.com/...pril-13-2021-50020#974910

I also totally forgot the round where I grabbed on a single oil rig and just did 100 jet SS the whole time: https://eestats.lafamiglia-ee.eu/express/oldcountry/2327/18

Haha that express country is nuts.

Thanks for that link I am going to read it now.

There are other threads that you can find using forum search. I guess the info is spread all over the place.