Suppose that country A landgrabs country B and jumps in NW. Country B attempts to fight back but receives the "Your generals will not attack such a large opponent!" message. I understand that everything is mathematically fair but this mechanic has been a source of frustration for some players.

Thoughts on removing this restriction if there are recent attacks or failed harmful spy ops between the countries? In other words, country B can always attack or spy op country A if country A did at least one attack or one failed harmful spy op against country B in the previous 72 hours.

I want to be able to farm the low NW peasants into the ground and not allow them to retal me in primary. Lets keep the poor people poor and the rich, rich please.

This is primarily an issue on Primary and this would greatly lower the acre potential in primary and introduce a somewhat arbitrary 72 hour retal period. The current GDI mechanic in primary has no such 72 hour rule and a 400 acre landgrab in week 2 can have a retal land in week 6 for 4000 acres. The no-time limit retal mechanic does make strategies that start slower (casher & farmer) possible...so I wouldn't want that changed (although I'm sure my country will be receiving a big retal any day now).

I understand that GDI can remain as is without a time limit, and the new Humanitarians policy can have a time limit...but that doesn't seem consistent to me. The result of this change would simply be that missiles, AB's, and harmful spy ops can be launched at anyone who attacks more than once. With the amount of players on primary today a country would be hard pressed to grow past 30k acres with only single grabs. On a solo server it is very rare that a war ends with one player better than they were before. So single grabs on opponents who will likely never grow within range to retal will be the new meta. Speculative grabs will be harder to execute because you won't have the growth potential to continue to pull away. NW finishes in the top 5 will be much lower.

Can you explain why the bigger countries can't get enough SDI and tanks in order to grab the same target more than once? That was always the intended calculation for doing more than one grab. You can of course do it, but you need to accept some risk which you can offset by having a well-rounded defense. Spy ops are of course very difficult to defend against which is part of the reason for the 72 hour time limit.

It's a really bad new player experience to not even be able to spy op countries that have attacked you. If we want to keep Primary as a server without any NPC countries then it's more important to consider the experience of the new players and weaker countries.

Spy's and missiles are the primary issue. It's almost impossible to defend all the ways someone can ruin your set. I agree with you though that getting grabbed 5 times a day and not being able to do anything about it is an awful way to learn how to play a game. Like most game mechanics, when you change it the dynamics will change and a new equilibrium will be found. I wouldn't mind testing it out for a set or 2 and seeing what changes. Maybe the extra SDI bought will finally help the poor techers to keep up. Winning primary as a techer hasn't been done in many years (maybe a decade?).

How do you feel about this adjustment to harmful spy op returns? https://www.earthempires.com/...rimary-52625?t=1713899072

Would this cause more farming? The humanitarians go both ways, so if the small player ops them back, does it open them up for 72 more hours of farming?

Alternatively, should the humanitarians have lop-sided values? E.g. you can attack down by 4x or 12x, but the smaller person can hit back 5x or 15x etc. That has other repercussions, but maybe gets at the spirit of the goal in a slightly different way.