Looks like a 0cs challenge.

3

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Bonus

bonus

800m

Honestly, I think what this game needs is stability more than further huge changes. That said;

I don't have a huge problem, nor am I very much for any of these changes, Except the turns thing which imo is needed and wont bother casual players ability to play casually. 540 turns is still 8 days worth of turns(with bonuses).

I do not like the motivation: "techer is bad this round so lets make techer better".

You should be thinking along the lines "well the swings between the favored unfavored strats are too large lets find some way to make a dampener mechanism"

The game experience for people who happen to pick the wrong strategy is horrible for 2 months, which is something you can't afford. 2 months is long enough that people will quit over it in the worst case, and you will force people onto the "safe" strategies, and even worse you will make winning into a coin toss competition.

The switching mechanism is interesting, but huge and it's consequences unforseen. I do think it will provide a means to escape your strat if techer becomes really bad or provide perhaps a way to switch a tech start faster. Which is somewhat interesting. Not sure its needed.

I think a dampener for tech and military prices going too far off course is needed. And it shouldn't be about bot composition, unless you make them switch strats halfway based on price points. It needs to be a reactive mechanism.

Not a bug. As ugo said this is exactly what would happen if you were capped and hit at about the break from both hits.

Rumor has it that 1 bonus post a week is enough.

It's an interesting thought. I dont like the motivation that its to provide a crutch to make grabbing off-strat more profitable. I think it's alright that its a choice between turn efficiency and cost that comes down to predictions, planning and assumptions that players will do differently

Tho doing something to builds that could make it more complex of an optimisation is an interesting thought. There are so many ways to do it in a poor way tho. Could be quite hard to do it in a way that makes it better. It comes down to details.

Does this only have to do with coop or should it be on B&S?

Bushels decay right from the first bushel at 0.1% per turn. But it rounds so you need to have 500 bushels to decay 1 bushel.

So if you have 1m bushels on hand you decay 1k bushels per turn.
And if you have 500-1499 bushels on hand you decay 1 bushel per turn.

You can choose when to have off-strat and when to hit off-strat of each type.

That is not at all mundane. The top players struggle with that every round.

Theres room for a ton of variations, that are not going to make for identical optimal choices from round to round. And you rarely find two top players who play it identically, based on different interpretation of whatever they look at, stats or strategy-wise. How is that mundane?

Maybe you are the only player that have figured this out perfectly?

It's not a reasonable choice to only hit on strat in primary or tournament. And for express there are too few targets for it plus it's so short and thus quite different.

Do you have any other ways to complicate grabbing in perhaps a more intuitive way that provides players with choices that are not obvious and that could help differentiate between players even at the top?

We may not have ideal grabbing formulas, it's a patchwork, but I think every suggestion being made are about making grabbing more simple. More simple but with a tax, because if it's too rewarding it's somehow bad for the game?
Personally, I want complex grabbing that is very rewarding and where better grabbing is immediately and on the longer term more rewarding than worse grabbing.

I think you are talking about DR. We are talking about C:C DR.

And last round there was basically zero complexity in grabbing because what remains of it is units to send which is a simple math operation that may or may not matter depending on what stage you are in, c:c DR which remained low for all, and DR which remained under 2 for all bot types all round. Slagpit increased jet losses on SS to make grabbing complex, but in so doing removed all complexity that was there before and replaced it with basically a tax on land that isn't really complex at all. It's mainly just there as a fact of life. I don't think these patchwork features in the grabbing formula are ideally constructed and I wish they were. But you shouldn't just replace them with a tax.

In e2025 taking turns reduced DR. So camping was very profitable.

I believe the bot strat split should be 20% for each. Both because it seems hard to implement and because I don't think it's the split that causes the problem.

As for this round I don't see any great options. A lot of players have yet to pick a strategy so make sure you finalise it fast and make it clear so we can react to it.

Maybe I misunderstood your first post tertius. Your last one make a lot of sense. I agree with most of it. I blame the stocking behaviour of bot techers for the mid game, human techers ends up compounding that but the majority of the bushel volume is bought by the bot techers at least at that point.

In 1a because war countries are so often techers, netting techer is usually not viable because tech is oversupplied until war techers are almost all dead/crippled. Higher tech prices are needed to allow techers to compete. It's really the tech price:bushel price ratio that matters tho, and that wasn't very high at any point during which stocking was viable really. Techer bot stocking behaviour is my explanation for this, because when they stocked farmers could get rich to buy up tech prices higher and higher.

I can't predict what the new bot strat quotas will do and because I think the main issue remains we still get problems but they may manifest slightly differently, hopefully better for most.
Put another way I think the most obvious symptoms are being treated but not the root cause.

Surely you must see that farmer was by far the best strat last round. Out of a great breadth of skill and competition only one techer managed the moves on the market relatively good enough to compete with quite poor farmers (heck a support farmer is 2nd of all farmers).

You were the highest ranked CI and finished with like a hundred untaken turns, and some other inefficiencies that may be due to the guessing game of the first round. All human CI did reasonably well. Was it 3 in the t10? And andrewmose would have been there too had he played his turns.
Meanwhile techer has 2 top 10s.

Techer is outproduced by all other strats on all servers. That is the only way they are balanced and thar happens here as well. What makes techer able to compete on some servers at some time is their great efficiency in using that production, particularly by starting to stock on high tech prices and low bushel prices, and then selling those bushels expensively. Due to the flow of the server most techers missed both of those aspects, and indeed the hoops you'd have to jump through to manage to do both would not be worth it. So I, as everyone else, bought bushels at 60-80. Meanwhile my 90k labs are supposed to compete with 260-310k acre farmers, cashers and indies.

You are greatly overestimating techer. A properly played farmer of any reasonable govt would have crushed me last round. I did some mistakes too, and gave away a lot of tech, but not nearly enough that it would have mattered if say evilzergling, slagpit or kingme played a netting farmer.

We will learn a lot about how to play this new server over the next couple of rounds. A lot of our beliefs were proven wrong.

The problem with CI at the state of last round was it was miserable to play for like 45 days, and if it wasn't, it would have been overpowered. Because the endgame is so phenomenal and you can stock so many turns meaning you can play like 40% of the turns in the endgame where you outproduce techers, cashers and maybe even farmers, and use stock incredibly effectively on top of that.

I would have tweaked it in a different way. But the changes seem to be in a good direction from what I can see. And indy may be too weak this round, or the market and lower expenses will compensate for the lower production and bonus. We will simply have to see.

I ran rep farmer to theo mbr in team and won with it. No land drop, no oil. It was quite fun.

Can make some mechanism that raised prices if they were low and/or lowered them if they were high? Otherwise all it does might be add another very difficult to balance hit or miss strat.

Yes. And if you are PSed out you can't get back to war room to see the dec peace button.

To fix this, briefly log in to alphaui and dec peace, then log out and log back into standard ui. This is the one use case for alphaui. :)

In 1a it's always been the opposite btw... less farmed bots= dysfunctional market.

That dynamic might not be the same with the new bot code. We will see I guess. Just pointing out that the only experience we got suggests the opposite.

I think we will see t10 countries between 100k and 300k acres this round with 4 different strategies. When was that the case in 1a? Arguably balance and competition right now is better than it's been on 1a last 10 years, tho we don't yet know how that might change over the next few rounds as a new meta is formed.
Clearly some strats are better than others and people would have played it completely differently had they known the pace and market beforehand.

^^Are you sure its enough to make 5 bonus posts a week?

I think the NW/tech point thing starts to matter now or a little bit ago. But for the most part we have seen high tech prices due to just more demand for tech points than there was supply. the intrinsic NW value of tech just adds ~$500 to tech points value early on. Now its more I guess. I think its essential that theres a reasonable soft floor for tech prices.

Anyway my point is Im quite convinced we didn't see 10000$ tech because of 4NW per tech point. Maybe at some point later on we will see $1400 tech instead of $800 tech because of it tho. And I'm all for that.

CI has too much production in terms of raw NW/(acre*turn). If CI had any kind of half decent market for the early and mid round it would be impossible to compete with any other strat. And it's weird because we have all grown up playing a game where CI has a great early game and then tech doesn't go high enough to let it keep up unless it has a huge lead already.

I forget what mehuls indy tech max was, but it was lower(I wanna say 140%), and C had +25% indy production. Either way we are talking 15-20% higher production now than then.

What you got right now is that as soon as rep casher cant buy cheaper on public market, CI produces as about as much NW each turn as the rep casher can afford to purchase on its income. Thats weird from a legacy perspective. Rep casher is supposed to own the endgame because its been bad all round, takes forever to get techs to decent levels, and cs have to be built in a turn inefficient manner in order to balance income for getting those techs up or even run a tech start(the horror).

This is going to be really hard to balance unless you do something about indy production. Indy kind of HAS to be terrible for 4/5ths of the round in order for other strats to somehow compete against it. And I dont think indy players want that, they want to be able to sell their stuff at 100-150 and actually live on their ICs rather than being forced to build as a half rainbow or something.
Getting rid of the exponential expenses was a good thing but it hid the overproduction that CI had been allowed to aquire because expenses made CI impossible in the endgame anyway.

New permanent bonuses may be popular, and thats a utility in its own right, but its quite risky stuff, and I would recommend not adding anything like that for the purpose of balancing a strat. % goods sold could be a viable alternative to private market units after some strats stop taking turns(which is a useless bonus until you are done with turns). If introduced it should be balanced towards that purpose and against that alternative bonus, rather than what would make a CI/techer take this bonus early game rather than whatever their other options are. Theres luck too remember?

Keep ANW. But make a "combined title" that uses all relevant metrics; members, TNW, ANW, T10 countries, top rank and the alliance that scores the lowest sum of combined ranks in all of these gets put first. that way if you drop members you might gain on ANW but since you lose tnw and members its not very clear if its even an advantage for you.

Example
Clan A is
4th in ANW
top country ranked 1st
3rd in members
2nd in TNW
3rd in number of top 10 countries

So they get 4+1+3+2+3 = 13 in score which is a very strong score that might make them #1 or #2 among all clans (lower score is better)

If they drop 2 low ranked members they might be 4th in members, and they might even get a worse TNW rank, even if they get up to 3rd in ANW.

You can always make it so that you cant drop people unless its before the last 10 days or something, thereby making it a very difficult choice that most leaders wont see a reason to do.

the only way to find a specific op now is through searching with ctrl+f or find on page on mobile browser. I guess it works this way too. I forget how it was before, cnum without timestamps?

On the search tab. Make it so the name only remains hyperlink to the attack tab but the number is a hyperlink to copy the number into clipboard.

I think theres more than me who grabs with a country list open and writing/copy pasting into the attack tab.

This will leave both options available.

Demorialize takes out 5% of current readiness rounded to the next integer(and for some reason its rounded down on x.5). So its not 3% per success.

So 100>95>90>86>82>78>74>70>67 for 0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 demos.

readiness has no effect on defensive military strength under 70% readiness. so 50% readiness = 70% break.
Readiness 80% = 80% break.

I believe what the code does is in fact creating an array of tries without simulating the turns(just the one op over and over again). Thereby, except for extreme conditions that can only be created artificially on alphaffa more or less you can't actually run the same op with the same conditions over and over again to test it.

Two clues:
1. The code is slow, you can see it takes time to run it after the page is loaded. We could perhaps draw some conclusion from this but we might not agree.
2. It actually changes back and forth as you said. This means its not running like 1k or more simulations. It's 3-50 or something such, otherwise the results would have been fixed in such a vast majority of cases that it would be very rare to observe this phenomena. Its not rare, tho.

Given that spy ops often take time to perform I will suggest (and you might not agree) that the code doing intel ops is one of the slower ones in the game. Which could also be why we are only allowed to do 10 ops at a time. This could be why we are seeing a great variation in the results of this feature, because if the code was fast there would be no reason not to run 1000+ simulations on it as you suggest.

That is why I have come to the conclusion I have.

So you are closer to the truth with your 10 sized vectors than with 1000 attempts.

I don't think it's a bug. It's because spy ops are random.

If you go back to espionage it will show high or moderate. It's not based on the op type. If you are getting that it means you are right between high and moderate. cheers.

what I suspect it does is it runs the code for spy ops and sees how many succeed in like X ops with these stats(without adding up spy DR) between the countries. It will come out 16/20, 15/20 and 14/20 all because of randomness and that could be the difference between high and moderate.

Yes

It's not a bug that the time to market varies. It should be random somehow. It is affected to a degree by luck (the permanent bonus) according to what is written about it.

Not sure if this is known already but the surrender button is bugged.

1. When the war is impending and you press it the result is a message:
"something wen wrong"

2. When the war is ongoing the surrender button seems to bug you out the game, but the war changes from ongoing to resolved.

The accept peace button doesn't seem to be working either, it just pushes the query to the other side back and forth, but doesn't end hostilities in any way shape or form.

Target.attack_bonus gives me a headache, lol. Better use the ingame name which is defense bonus or something, right?

More commies needed clearly. It's just 34% right now :P.

Sadly most of those M's will likely go T or I.

Every NW change of every FFA country since like 13 years back is stored there. Plus every news item but thats much less.

It looks to me like every market purchase that got uploaded to eestats is stored there as well, just it has never been presented other than the 6-12-24-48-72 hour summaries plus the market summary of the entire round.

When bots start retalling they will give much more land, first off they will regain land from bad players and secondly they will remove some of their DR every time they try to retal. Might be fun.

Rank 127 is my best score so far.

Most strategies are now viable.

Best are probably Commie indy and Fascist farmer.

It's pretty nice to be able to sell your food at 38 on the private market. Indy is a bit annoying because you gotta sell very often to do well and therefore play very often, but it is strong and easy to do well with currently. I think indy will be the strat that comes most natural to you because I think it was played the same way at all times.

Recent changes to bots, private market etc have made the other strats a little different from years before.

I even finished top 1000 once!

It was quite important that the bots started to act more like humans in terms of stocking and jumping so Slagpit made them each to start their jump at a random time instead of all at the same time. He also made them stop buying tech when it no longer benefitted them, calculated correctly by how much time theres left of the round and what the price is and so on. This made sure that the demand side of the tech equation wasn't messed up.
Even if a player played correctly back before these changes he would still be limited by a market where most of the demand is not rationally driven. This has improved express greatly.

And to be honest it should improve you as well. If you just spy a bot repetetively and copy its look and add a few grabs on bots you will get a personal best for sure, and you will beat all the bots every round because you get more land than them. They will teach you to buy tech, specialize, stock and jump quite well.

I think that in theory and to a certain degree you would benefit if everyone else grabbed efficiently as there would be fewer hits on the bots in total.
That said you don't want to grab right after a good grabber, and the bots would also get smaller in general.

More importantly what matters isn't that you get X land on turn Y, but that you get more land than your competition or the same land in fewer turns.

What needs to be considered tho is that the DR number that Eestats lists for express is wrong for a multitude of reasons. While it can serve as a very rough guide to which bots are being hit the least (and therefore generally give the most land) it doesn't account for DR halflife. So if someone farmed a bot 15 times 20 hours ago and no one hit it since it may be quite a good grab again even if the DR listed on eestats is high compared to many other bots.

I'd prefer if you postpone posting status until after the round ended. But I assume it doesn't matter in this case.

You fought all his changes because he was for bots retalling. I didnt care much for bots retalling as its so easy for a dev to turn that on and then leave without fine tuning it so that they dont act in a way entirely detrimental to the player base. Its always been an idea that the devs/admin had and the players mostly disliked. That said its all a package. And the changes we got on express were guaged against gameplay and the players who were playing for those 2-3 months of development. You would have seen the same active back forth for 1a development if you actually responded with anything other than vitriol to the proposals and requests for feedback that were posted.

And yes, I didn't agree with all his ideas either. But I'm not going to let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I tried to participate with constructive feedback as I and the majority of the express community had been on the express change process with great result.