This post announces change set #21. "Standard roll out schedule" in the notes below 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.


All servers already live:

* 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.

* 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.


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.


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