That isn't actually a horrible idea. All you'd need to do to make oiler viable is to lower the price of food to like $20 on the private market.

Or, alternatively, take the bottom out for food and watch as everyone switches to oil :P

If you boost production without increasing demand, all that happens is prices fall.

blid, if you really want attention that badly you'll have to get it somewhere else; I'm not going to oblige you. If you really feel like you need to contact me, try forum messages or IRC.

Some of you should really take a look in the mirror.

This is well past serving any purpose, if it ever did.

That's a misreading of how things work in alliance. A lot of those netgainers are accomplished fighters in their own right, while a lot of those fighters could easily netgain if they bothered to. The same skills are used to properly prepare countries for either case, on alliance.

When you suicide, you're deciding that your reset is effectively over. You're getting into a fight with a bigger country that's going to be able to strike back and likely win any kind of prolonged fight. You open yourself up to other countries hitting you since you're completely focused on the one, as well. What happens if you decide you don't like suiciding? Wait until next 'set? You can always do it later on if the rest of the round doesn't go how you'd like, but you can't unsuicide.

Well, an indy with expenses bonses produces the absolute cheapest NW available in the game, so long as you have the cash to fund it and leave yourself enough time to actually finish the cashout. Tyr/tech cashing out as C/I sounds viable.

Oil needs to be above $120 per barrel in order to be competitive with farmer at destock. That's an additional $74/NW, which is a pretty big hit.

If I were playing tyr/indy, I'd be petrified that I'd soon be a target for the commies. For any given amount of land, they'll absolutely outproduce you, and as an indy you'd be their favourite kind of landgrab target.

Commie is probably a better bet unless you can really leverage that extra land you get or you're running with a really low BPT or both. If you're planning on staying indy, you're going to want to switch away from tyr at some point anyway, and probably to commie. You're going to lose 14% of everything except land, so I'm not at all sure that there's a real benefit to going tyr, to be honest.

silentwolf: Express and team. I've still got my training wheels on, though.

I'm really uncomfortable with telling new players that suiciding is a good idea, and is a good way to spend time. Encouraging them to stockpile, jet up, and retal strikes me as far more useful, and a way better way to teach the country hitting them a lesson.

It is easy to stand your ground when you've reasons for what you're saying. Of course, since no one here knows me what I post comes off as me complaining about how I can't adapt to the server and how that's everyone else's fault. I get that, so I'm not really bothered by the response I got, as it is mostly deserved.

If you run a solid enough country, no one will think once of farming you.

Womens rights is a thing of the past in the US? :P

You seem to want to cherry pick which stuff belongs in the past and which doesn't. The constitution could well be argued to be a "thing of the past", in much the same way, yet you provide no reason for why it shouldn't be.

It isn't that technology has changed humanity, it is that we're all very much the products of our environment. The founding fathers lived in an era where slavery was common, women couldn't vote, and where the US was a new country finding it's way in the world.

The system they put into place does not directly protect against tyranny: what it does instead is protect the status quo. The system they set up instituted it's own hard-to-change tyrannies, by doing things like not giving women the vote and by not recognizing all people as equal, but sure, the relatively blank slate they had made it significantly less likely that there'd ever be a dictatorship of any kind in the US. Now, though, there's over 300 years of laws on the books that are being protected by the system they put in place and rather than "slow down the leviathan" they ensure it remains in place, warts and all.

While suiciding may be satisfying in the short term, it doesn't fix anything in the long term. Better play is the best protection from getting grabbed like this in future resets; practice and learning are your best bet.

http://www.earthempires.com/...mation-34398?t=1418144818

Might be email issues at the moment.

The reverence towards the founding fathers and the belief that they somehow knew better than the rest of us (omg they could predict the future!) is one of the worst diseases in US political discourse. They were just men doing the best they could; what they did is not perfect and flawless by any stretch.

If you think racist remarks are required for you to find things interesting, I feel bad for you.

Anyway, if you don't want threads locked or deleted, don't break the rules. It is pretty simple.

UpTheIrons: Thanks.

silentwolf: Let me phrase this differently.

This server is chaos. The market is wild, countries can change hugely in a short amount of time, people take risks they wouldn't elsewhere due to the short resets, and people get crushed for minor issues or for no reason at all. I can absolutely see why some people would really enjoy this, but I am not one of them. My complaints about play quality are an aspect of that, as it is an environment where it is easy to miss the difference between "can grab" and "should grab".

Maybe I'll try again later, but for now I can't and won't, heh.

I doubt there are that many indies relative to other strategies, especially farmer.

Is it weak because of commissions, or because demand is too low?

I mentioned this on IRC so it isn't new feedback, but just to throw it out there for discussion:

The public market is one of the best mechanisms in the game since it allows for some automatic balancing between strat types from 'set to 'set, as people have to adapt to each other. Where the game tends to get unbalanced (as I'd argue it is now, with farmers finishing theo) is in situations where the private market is relied upon. Accordingly, I'm not thrilled with a gameplay change that is likely to increase private market usage.

*facepalm*

I was petrified.
Kept thinking I could never live without you by my side.
But then I spent so many nights thinking how you'd done me wrong
And I grew strong!
And I learned how to get along

Congrats to AzN, damn nice job this round.

I'd have assumed all of them would have been in the top 10 anyway, to be honest, and I have been paying attention :P

Since we're talking about Paradigm in context, let's look at them:

Last 'set, Paradigm fought on the winning side of a coalition war. They have friends, and they probably have a few favours they can call in. So, who are you suggesting hits them? Their allies? The people on the opposite side of the coalition war from last 'set, which would probably result in the war just getting fought all over again? I may be reading the specifics of the situation wrong because I'm not privy to anything related to alliance politics, but the general point stands: alliances don't just decide to spontaneously go to war against some other alliance, as there are a lot of other factors to take into consideration.

No one is going to bother when the individual ranks really don't matter that much to alliances anyway. There's good reason why people rarely aid their players to the top and it isn't because of fairness.

So, you'd punish doing something wasteful by doing something more wasteful that'd only create resentment rather than doing anything useful?

The point of aiding is to get a player to the most visible spot in the game and get some (positive) attention for doing so to show how good your alliance is. The best way to respond to that is to say that no one cares about aided countries, 'cause individual rankings are a poor measure of alliance worth, and that it is really easy to win when you're the only one playing. The worst way to respond is to go overboard with your criticism, suggest impractical and pointless responses, and drown out the reasonable criticism :P

I'm no fan of buyouts and think they're usually pointless and wasteful, but they've been part of the game for ages. Calling them cheating and the like is pretty hilarious.

I honestly don't mind disagreement, but I'm comfortable with where I drew the line on that:

Any use of the "n" word or derivatives is likely going to result in an edit at least, probably a ban if there's already been a warning.

Oh this is cute. My bans aren't working.

So, here's how this is going to work: if you play nice and keep the racist fluff off, the ban was only going to be 6 hours so I'll just let the whole thing slide once this gets sorted. However, if you don't, I'll be campaigning to have you gone for a minimum of a week.

Dammit Heston, that was a perfectly fine post up until the last couple lines. Edited those, and you're on timeout for ignoring the warning.

You don't have to intentionally kill someone for the death to be criminal, and I'm not assuming that there was ever intent to kill. Things like negligence or involuntary manslaughter would absolutely seem to fit the bill in this case: regardless of someone's condition, if an officer doesn't take the appropriate level of care then they're criminally liable.

If the jury finds the officer not guilty, then that's fine (for now), at least it has gone to a jury and that's an improvement over the current situation.

I'm not judging this officer from hindsight, I'm laying down an argument about values and principles that can and should apply in cases beyond this specific one. If the officer didn't follow their own guidelines, I think that's all that needs to be said: he didn't take an appropriate level of care when doing his job, by the police's own standards. He should be dealt with the same way everyone else is: by the law.

Grand juries are not particularly transparent, and the only people who get special treatment from them are law enforcement. There shouldn't be a separate standard for law enforcement, everyone should be treated equally under the law.

I haven't touched EU4 yet. I've been playing Mount and Blade instead, but EU4 is still absolutely on my to-do list. The amount of work Paradox puts into those games is just amazing :D

If officers can't restrain people without causing death, they shouldn't be restraining people; death isn't an appropriate level of risk for any interaction with law enforcement where imminent harm isn't an issue. This would absolutely make it more difficult for police to do their jobs, but agents of the state should not be killing people without due process or a threat of imminent harm. The cost to the individual (dead), to police (who have public faith undermined) and society (who lose faith in the police) is far higher than the cost to police if they have to change how they work.

If officers can't follow their own guidelines and commit a crime in the line of duty, they should absolutely be prosecuted to the full extent of the law. In the US, it seems the only time that grand juries don't come back with an indictment is when it involves law enforcement. This is exactly the kind of thing that will undermine trust in important public institutions like the police and prosecutors. If people don't trust the police, it changes how they interact with them and makes everything more risky for everyone. The best course of action is for the police and prosecutors to act in a transparent and trustworthy manner.

Well, I could totally take his segway and use it.

I didn't even realize I'd done that. Originality is overrated anyway :P

Since we're already tangentially discussing moderation stuff: I'm pretty sure all of the mods would prefer to keep stuff open. A lock would likely only be warranted if the whole thread turned to fluff and became completely irredeemable rather than simply because a few people tried to ruin it for everyone; easier to just delete the posts and ban those responsible.

That said, please heed mrford's warning, especially if you've already been warned recently. Ignoring a warning likely results in a ban.

If you're going to claim that statistics support something that could be read as race baiting, provide proper citations and a good reason for why what you're posting is relevant or it will be deleted as racist.

We were actually clear until early November, this year.

Enough with that fluff, this thread is about trains.

http://en.wikipedia.org/...ile:ETS_Car1039_SD160.jpg

Light rail! Oh yeah.

Trife: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQvmCzILBfE

This thread is now about trains.

The right to free speech relates to what the government can and can't stop you from saying, not what private entities can stop you from saying on their forums.

I'm erring on the generous side here, but I'm also going to warn for what reads like a threat to the site, and a possible threat of physical harm. Threats of actions that have consequences in real life aren't cool, this is a game.

Racism is against the forum rules, Dibs. I'll delete this time, but going forward I'll be banning now that I've warned you directly.

There's nothing quite like putting up an end-of-'set military sale, only to see that half of it didn't take because you'd priced it too high, especially when you only budgeted cash for that one last turn.

Any chance we could get a warning about good being priced too high, rather than it accepting part of the sale and rejecting the rest?

Thanks dude. I honestly try not to be an asshole whenever I'm in any kind of a position of responsibility. The drama just isn't worth it for all involved.

No one went "racist that bad", hahahaha. Rather than engaging in any kind of discussion about how bad racism has to be in order to avoid locking and deletion I'll just say that if there isn't any racism, it probably won't get locked or deleted.

That's three locks by three different mods, for the record. I was quicker on that last one since the previous two had already been locked, though.

And, I'd hope this would be obvious, but citizenship is granted on birth and has nothing to do with tax. Unless you're advocating for a system where there are second-class citizens, tax-paying is besides the point in almost any civic discussion.