Confirmed!

If you don't know the backstory of the previous prequels to Skyrim, it is fine. Skyrim is still a self-contained game.

If you really wanted to get into it, you could easily google/wiki out the storylines for the prequel games and get some backstory setting to better enjoy the game - That's if you have no intention of buying/playing the previous prequels.

Steam had a sale for the prequels just 1 or 2 days ago, 75% off, maybe you missed it.

I miss the days where there was no Scores and NW changes feed, and you actually had 25 searches only.

"Oil cannot be purchased or sold on the private market, except on the Express server. In express, the base selling price for oil is $60 and the base buying price is $400."

"The minimum price for oil on the public market is $13. Any oil priced at $12 or below will be automatically purchased by the market and will not be available for other players to buy. The maximum price for oil is based on the seller's private market discount. The maximum is $4320 multiplied by all factors which lower private market prices."

Taken from http://wiki.earthempires.com/index.php/Oil

Says you can sell oil for up to $4320.

For a moment, I thought the alliance is selling themselves for $29.99. :D

Well, you know what I mean!

So how do you propose to encourage even wars by changing game mechanics Dagga? Give larger tags disadvantages? What happens if the larger clans start subdividing their tags into multiple smaller tags?

Politics cannot be solved by game mechanics.

You guys are killing the oil prices! :(

Not quite true Pang.

POP emails stay on the server until they are deleted off the server as well. However, all email clients default to deleting it off the server after retrieving it (because most email servers don't let you keep more than 10 or 20 mb of emails anyway), except email clients on mobile devices.

I know why! Hehe!

You forgot NA and Rage.

Words can be a double edged sword. Be careful how you phrase them in your dealings.

I actually agree with Detmer here. Any single FA from a single alliance should be sufficient to represent his alliance, an alliance should not have to contact a second or third FA from the other party in order to "fish for a more favorable outcome". In this case, Thomas was the FA contact. How many of you always go "I think I'll talk to Hanlong instead" when dealing with LaF?

While things could have turned out better, I do think Sanct could probably have done more to avoid war... The market prices this reset is ridiculous.

This is a good bonus thread!

Thank you for the update, appreciate it!

That's correct, because you lose too much income if you land trade as a techer. All those turns you spend rebuilding CS, and building up the ghost acres to have 60% of it lost again to be rebuilt again, no income.

400m should be possible though. Mr Silver would be there.

Let's face it.

Land trading is only viable as a strategy if you have tag protection (or in FFA, group protection afforded by your countries). Without the protection, the countries involved in trading would be weakened enough for other countries to take advantage of.

Without considering mod intervention by altering the game, if any alliance wants to stop it as a strategy, it has to be at the alliance vs alliance level.

While Hanlong's approach is the right one, where some changes in retal policy at the alliance level might help to curb it, it is unlikely all alliances would agree to the same policy. PDM's policy is the right one then - you war over it - topfeed/kill the countries that land trade, and back up your policies of "no to landtrading" over their policy of "yes to landtrading".

I honestly do not think any changes will be made by the mods. I'm all for trying out landtrading myself, but there are some in LaF which oppose it quite strongly.

Locket, your argument about beating SS/Bakku's NW record via landtrading is somewhat irrelevant, if someone can do it, I actually want to see it, because my sentiments is that landtrading is a strategy that is far too strong with tag protection, and that it really should be played by a group of strong players to push the boundaries and extent to see just how broken it is to get it nerfed.

Rockman, Bakku/SS's NW records are by no means unbeatable even by traditional means, Eugene/me came within 1-4m NW of Bakku's record just last reset, and neither of us used Decay, neither of us took or gave loans. And yet looking back, both of us can find at least 5 ways we could have improved our finish.

As far as I know, nothing was changed.

I would really like to dream what it would be like if LaF or Evo were to really sit down and plan out how best to land trade as an alliance, complete with the math and all, either internally or with each other.

We know its broken, which is why Rockman had suggested on B&S to penalize large countries in other ways.

Fat fat fat fat fat!

Now I do not personally have an issue with Slagpit, however, I do have a problem when an admin starts calling another player or alliance as a cheater. That is a serious allegation, plus with no actual proof or action taken, it can be viewed as either slander or supporting cheating.

That is the problem, it is unprofessional.

If you truly think LaF is driving away players from the game, then think about the mechanics that led to the current politics and change it. And even then, Pang says the game is growing, not shrinking.

Slagpit, it is not that the community doesn't appreciate what you have done. It is that the message you portray across the boards that undo what you have done.

If you would just step back, and only post about stuff relating to the game and not your alliance, it would be far better.

I'm not saying you shouldn't post at all. But generally speaking, if you have nothing to add to a discussion, you simply shouldn't post -- especially with an admin tag.

There is a difference between engaging the community, and engaging in veiled insults directed at clan tags. An admin should not do the latter, even though as a player, you very much want to. It simply sends the wrong message. You really should use a non-admin account for it, so the line is drawn clearer because many things you post, isn't immediately clear if it was from an admin viewpoint, or a player viewpoint.

I hope you understand, and think over the criticisms directed at you. If there's one quality a Community Manager must have, it must be thick-skinned.

Someone should make a bot statistic for average kill run times, discarding the ones that are longer than 15 min.

You guys aren't getting it. The request for Evo to FS SoL was not the cause of the void pact.

The request was only to find out if SoL is pacted to Evo, which diez confirmed - and that is the cause of the void pact - that Evo is pacted to a warring clan without everyone else in the coalition also getting the same pact.

You guys are fixated on the 50% or 66% or whatever clause; it has little relevance.

I don't. That's why we FSed Evolution for pact-breaking for pacting SoL.

You keep saying we broke a pact, but we really didn't as Hanlong has kindly pointed out several times. Just the act of Evo pacting SoL (without LaF also pacting SoL) already voids the pact. Everything else written in the pact about the 50% or 66% numbers or the requesting FS part is just additional fluff.

Your end voided it first at the start of the reset. If you want to talk about pact breaking, please look at yourself first for pacting SoL.

So keep posting false accusations if you feel that we did, and everyone else will judge by themselves.

I guess Evo doesn't understand that politics is player-created. A successful alliance isn't one that just knows how to net. It also needs to war well when required, and be politically smart. From all indications, Evo has neither of the last two and only knows how to post on the forums, all bark and no bite to actually FS anyone and make a statement/stand. You can argue over policies all you want, such as with SoF about 2-stepping, but if you don't do anything but make idle threats, nobody will take your chatter seriously.

If we are the scumbags that Evo keeps claiming us to be, how has LaF survived for 12 years?

Lots of people on AT have asked for a war between us, and we're giving one to make a statement. If you failed to recognize you might be blind-sided, and not jumped on red alert the moment SS contacted you to FS SoL, that is your own fault.

At the end of the day, this is a game. And we are having fun. And the riled-up posts just adds to our amusement.

Bonus

Me!

You can keep arguing about us "FAing countries into top 10", but at the end of the day, we know it didn't happen, and the FA only occurred between countries that would have finished top 10s _in_the_first_place_ without the loans/repayments.

We wouldn't even mind if you implemented a system into EE to allow for full disclosure of the tag admin news. But hey, that's your job as admin, not ours. You can keep talking and not implement it so that we can continue to troll each other on the forums, or you can implement it because we have nothing to hide or lose.

Wouldn't you waste more turns by having them suicide all your land off to Evo?

I don't even understand why those countries are left alive the first 24 hours, so they can do a second round the next day before the first BR even occurs.

We don't have access to last reset's tag admin news. Care to tell us how?

Eugene and my country has 0 FA sent and received all reset. At the minimum there is no argument about our 2 countries that finished above 300m.

The FA sent between Bakku, Hanlong and SS's countries are loans and repayments, they were not FA sent for finishing top 10s. Why would they need to FA each other into top 10 when all 3 countries are already top 10 countries to begin with? A top 10 country FAing a top 10 country doesn't magically create a 3rd top 10 country you know.

I agree the 2-stepping via LT's country is not that "clean", but otherwise it wouldn't be possible for Hanlong to regain 200% L:L land, plus stock lost via the top feed which Sanct had to FA about 10 times to repay. Furthermore, if you do the math, you'll easily see that Hanlong's country would have been better off without the topfeed or 2-stepping on LT or any of the Sanct FA by at least 10-20m NW. That is, Hanlong would have finished even higher IF all that didn't happen.

Slagpit, use some logic before you post.

Chicken.

Does your IP address keep changing every 5 minutes when you are at work?

If military units used oil on a upkeep basis every turn, how is that different from food? We don't need oil to become exactly like food, might as well just double the food upkeep (which was already done with the recent food upkeep fix).

Furthermore, if oil is required for upkeep, that would necessitate its addition to the private market for purchase.

I didn't raise the bar! I finished 2m NW lower than Bakku's record NW (which has now been beaten by SolidSnake). I'll even argue that the record NW isn't really beaten because Bakku would have finished 328m if he didn't run out of food accidentally.

The decay nerf didn't nerf techers at all (which was the intended effect based on the blog about it). It instead had the opposite effect of buffing techers because it delays the food peak by 15 days (decay takes 15-20 days longer to max depending if you're Fascist or not), and directly nerfs cashers as a result of having a sustained high food price for most of the stocking phase.

I hope the admins think about this.

I haven't played this game since a single reset in 2007. I guess competition got easier if I can finish 3rd in my first ever reset in EE.

:(

.

I am a very un-notable player.

Oh and make sure your ::GetName() and ::GetAge() are const member functions for that to work.

os << id.GetName() << ' ' << id.GetAge();

Since your class is not allowed to declare that overloaded << operator function as a friend function, your only ways are:

A) Make the members age_ and name_ public members of the class.

B) Create ::GetAge() and ::GetName() public methods that return those member values respectively and have your overloaded operator function use them for its output.


Yes, its that simple.

Bonus

post.

The argument is that these random events (taxes, droughts, earthquakes, strikes) don't add any value or strategy to the game at all.

We used to build 1 building of each type of land to spread out earthquake damage in the past, that at least had arguable "strategy value", but now this is gone too. There is no inherent value of it remaining other than to "oh a drought, ok, lets move on", since you cannot do anything about it.

bonus post!

Drow, buying off private is considerably cheaper - however, you are limited by the fact that private market only regenerates at a certain speed, you can only destock a certain amount of cash everyday off it. If this takes too long to destock a large amount of stock, it may simply be better to partial destock on public to end up with less destocking days - which means more stocking days for a potential higher finish.

The other thing is that converting to TMBR typically takes 3 days of turns, and a substantial amount of cash to do the convert, so again its not necessarily better.

As to whether "the public gets down as low as the private", that depends entirely on the number of countries that go TMBR. If everyone does it and tries to resell, the reselling profit margin drops and drops as every TMBR tries to undercut each other to the point its no longer viable to go TMBR.

The point of the 3rd O-slot is to prevent run-away big countries so that smaller countries still have a chance to retal if they are sufficiently organized.

Does that mean its fixed for next reset, or fixed, like immediately now?

Then the game needs to be changed to make warring an alternative effective netting strategy. If the winning side profits off winning a war to finish even higher in NW, then the line between "warring" and "netting" is blurred and they would become the same thing.