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.

We had active dev in short stints. They were driven away by the community.

Slagpits idea for how to change 1a that he was working on was pretty much exactly what derrick wrote up here a few posts ago... but at the time derrick got stuck on the plan to have retalling bots that he didn't like and joined the anti-changes posse.

Everyone complained on Express that only techers could win and a few other annoying things, Slagpit solved that and after then CI, casher and farmer win frequently as do techers. The bots were rebuilt from the ground up (and only implemented in express) so they act smarter and are harder to exploit, and those would replace the bots in 1a and FFA with some tweaks, was the plan. This didn't happen. He got tired of the community and the Derricks of this game before he had time to do that.

So the game stayed stale and people got tired and more toxic. Not saying Derrick is the only problem but he certainly participated in fighting changes that he now claims he wants, and which everyone really wanted.

Yes, if you identify who did them there should be a way to make sure during the round.

Spy DR yes and to find offender for hostile ops.

The intel ops should be given more power in general and this would be a step in that direction. There should be less things in the game that are unknowable.

I also want a news spy, and a spy on spies where you can see incomming and outgoing news(that do not show up on eestats) and ops.

I have suggested all this on multiple occasions. I'm glad I'm getting some support for it!

Absolutely wrong...

they can hit him back however much they want. Ofc without coordinating on discord or through ingame messages or elsewhere but there is absolutely no risk of deletion for retalling on a guy who suicided you.

If you can't choose who's bond you buy it's kinda weird to take a counterparty risk.

The other thing is if the market is in any way illiquid it's going to be a disaster on solo servers because either due to luck or due to team play a player will get a huge advantage due to buying or selling bonds that are not priced right.

This would perhaps not be a problem if a solo server had 1000 active players, and 5% of those knew roughly how to price a bond. But now idk... It would be problematic.

A bond market would be very interesting tbh.

Have a flat 10% coupon each 24 hours, on bonds that last up to 7 days(or redeemable at choice) and let players buy and sell contracts worth $1m. If you can't pay your stock, military and tech is force sold to the game, and if that isn't enough your country is barred from the bond market for the remainder of the round and your country loses half of what it produces until its payed back in full.

Given how adverse everyone is to actually doing math this is unlikely to be popular. So let's do it!

"In the final six hours of the game, you will not be able to engage in any offensive actions against countries that have not hit you at least once."

Yeah, I don't think its a bug but it's not well thought out. Perhaps the report button should cease to exist after reporting it. Or it should link to a confirmation that it had already been reported.

I'm not sure what you are getting at here. As I understand it the mod in question did exactly what the community had agreed for him to do. SOTS disappeared when 3 tags got deleted for hitting one tag because they couldn't kill it without breaking the SOTS rules they had all agreed on.

It's possible, even quite easy, to just never die if 5 countries are the only ones hitting you. This was a 'feature' or a 'problem' of SOTS depending on if you were walling or getting walled.

That could be rounding in the PCI or some rounding error in your own numbers.

I always calculate;
tax income per turn
tax income per turn while cashing
tax income per turn - food cost of pop
tax income per turn while cashing - food cost of pop

I also calculate those per acre.

Once you did one its so easy to do all that in a sheet.

Just to be clear; there is no SOTS (Spirit of the server) rules anymore. They came and went before I even started playing this game. The community wanted them implemented and then some of them wanted them gone because they couldn't kill a waller with 1 team.

The experiment was probably valuable tho.

The PCI growth formula doesn't even matter because startups don't matter anymore. You will have equilibrium PCI more or less for 99% of the turns of the round.

We all know the PCI formula and thus we can calculate the income/turn per acre of a rep/theo/demo casher after food expenses. PCI growth formula will only really limit PCI growth beyond just the equilibrium for maybe 50 turns per round and only if you make a very low acreage switch or are agressively trying to push your income up very early.

As far as I know the known parts of the PCI growth formula govern PCI growth in all scenarios other than walling.

The expenses scale exponentially with military units but the cost of a point of NW is the same when you oil destock to 200m 800m or 6000m NW. This is fundamentally why FFO is the only strat that can consistently compete on long servers.

Buy 6 turrets on Alpha and your expenses become $1. Instead buy 6 billion turrets and your expenses are now 20 billion or something, so each turret now costs 20 times as much to maintain. This is quite unrealistic, if that matters, but more crucially as the NW potential rises above a few hundred million it makes CI and any endgame that takes turns quickly unfeasible.

If you think about it a Commie indy actually outproduce an FFO on a NW to land basis as max tech CI produce about 2.4 NW of jets per acre per turn, plus tax revenues minus the basic non-military expenses equal to about 0.4 NW while cashing. So we are talking 2.8 NW per turn and acre. This is nearly what a casher makes if he buy military on private market for all his income each turn.
For FFO that number depends on the prices at hand but we are generally closer to 1.8 NW.

Humanitarians, the extra bonus boost FFOs have also make a difference. But those need not enter the conversation as long as we have the current expense fomula.

Tl;dr the oil destock is a weak way to finish until the exponential expenses destroy every other way to gain NW.

The food prices took out a lot of NWs for people I think. I was one of the few non-techers that sat on a food stock I think.

I was hoping to spot that someone bought out the food market but it seemed to have just dried out organically. A farmer went inactive?

Grats LB on the win and everyone else in the t10

Utopia gets most of its cash from players paying to the game dev to let one of their KD-mates take over their province for a number of hours. So you end up running 2 provinces most of the time that you are awake (assuming the activity is required).
This is a significant revenue stream and it is an alternative to cheating.
It was years since I played but back then if this feature didn't exist you wouldnt be able to win without cheating.

In Utopia, this feature was good for development(because it provided incentive to work on the game), it was good for the playerbase because of better QoL(being allowed to sleep without getting up for some wave or to do some theif ops or BS like that) and it was good for the integrity of the game because far fewer people cheated and those that did didn't gain a noticeable advantage anyway.

Not sure the same thing or a similar thing could work in EE. But for Utopia it was absolutely crucial and an excellent feature.

I'm not JJ23 but I can bench press my Volvo while driving my other Volvo.

I was DOM in E2025 and if you look up my old ICQ and message me on it I can log in and respond to you.

If we are talking about the first 100 turns its just CS pretty much. Sure I do stuff with my tax rate and maybe wait for tech and stuff but I do that despite knowing it doesn't matter. I calculated the tax rate switches to give me less than $10k over the course of 100 turns. Its actually the same tax rate changes as we used in E2025 or at least very close.

I maintain that the start no longer matters as much as it used to. Back when the startup mattered a lot(E2025) I was one of those who consistently pushed the limits round after round. I was always of the view that I didn't want to start at a disadvantage. Now its just CS tho and anyone can do that as well as I can. Just build CS until you can explore, rinse repeat and hold on turn 99.

I believe I told you this before in a way but my second best ever NW on express is more or less a replica of what YOU did Getafix. I saw you play in a certain way that I had used in other servers, that I had never considered for Express, but when you did it a few times I decided it was possible to get seriously high NWs with that. I perfected it over a few rounds and kept playing it until the market was favorable and then I got 101m NW or something with it. I am not sure I would have managed that without your inspiration. Or at least not as soon as I did. I have not seen many others play that way on express and those that did copied either you or me.

Math-heavy endgames like casher endgames and indy anywhere (except 1a because I never tried) there I have an edge against anyone who doesn't math when to stop grabbing, when to take what bonus, when to buy which tech and when to stock food vs stocking cash or starting to jump. I have done that math in spreadsheets in excel and google sheets that I recycle and improve over years.

As an example I have a spreadsheet that simulates every turn of an endgame for an indy. I'm decent at just winging it as well because I have experience of playing a couple perfect endgames and know roughly what the math would show as the perfect move.

-----

That said. If you want my 100 turn startup its mostly just what andrewmoose said with the waiting for bonus acres, then I set tax rate to 70% and build a CS, then depending on what govt+acreage I set tax rate to 35-42(it doesn't actually matter) and build a CS, then I set 35% tax and build CS until I can explore rinse repeat. It very rarely makes sense to do anything else. Now you can too, Cheers.

Derogatory and stigmatizing language such as ableist slurs, as well as racial and sexual slurs do not belong on these forums. I'm sure we miss some of it, and I'm sorry about that but we received several complaints recently and cleaned some of this up recently.

Because of replies some posts that are not offensive have to be edited or deleted as well, tho I don't think that applies to any of yours this time.

Most of us are able to inform others of our stance on the issues of the day in good form.

Cheers.

I think not overflowing remains a key factor. Especially early/mid game you can't afford inactivity.

"-Don't be a pest (this includes such things as topping ancient posts for spamming or other reasons)"

I don't see a reason to change either the wording or the interpretation of this. Don't spam-top old threads to mess with the boards is all.

They don't. They can't attack tags.

My suggestion was that attacking, just as costing oil would consume troops, tanks or turrets on the basis that GDI is a protective alliance and require military to generate that defense. Thereby it adds to market demand of those units without actually all going into military expenses, which a minimum military requirement would do.

So how it would display is something like this:

"You have enough oil for 75,000,000 military units and defensive units enough to for 13,000,000 military units"
and the mechanism would be that for every lets say 250 units you send you would lose an extra 1 tank, 4 troops or 4 turrets (plus 10 oil).

Depending on how much and what you grabbed and how effectively you grabbed it will cost different amounts. Generally it will add 5-20% to the cost of each grab(depending on prices).
If you were all explore you would pay nothing, which is fair and good for the game.
The cost structure will hurt FFO more than anything else and that will work to balance it compared to all the other strategies which the game could use(it wont make FFO bad or anything like that, so curb your expectations). But mostly it will drive up demand for units which have had low demand even long before clanGDI was implemented.

I was worried that cGDI would mess up the market, but it actually didn't. I think such a mechanism as I proposed would fix a long standing problem with unit demand even if it was not created by the implementation of cGDI.

A cost has no utility. forcing us to buy (but not keep) troops turrets tanks would be ideal.

Assuming you don't just want to cost us out of GDI so you can hit us.

Yes, you can click them on relations page.

It sadly contains unknowable unknowns. You can estimate the DR halflife quite well tho and for servers other than express andrewmoose's numbers will generally give you a very good clue what the DR is. Express halflife is iirc closer to what Tmac said.

It doesnt really need to be exact in order to give a very good clue if its a good target or not.

Right now if I AB a dude in primary 40 times, and someone checks 25 hours later and sees eestats show 0 DR and then he goes on to hit with a PS he will be quite dissappointed with the result. Just adding a continuous halflife for each hit and making each hit reset at the 72 hour mark (24 hours for express) will help a lot.

Its great. But how come of all names you name it eestats? or yeah ee_stats.

It will get weird if we tell people to go to look in eestats, which site will they go to?

statistics_ee
statguru_ee
stathub_ee

?

Opt out.

Those are retals I think.

It was a 79-tap.

I'm willing to pay reps next round but you'd have to tag up with us. Otherwise we will 80-tap.