That's because a Dictatorship is not a netting strat. It's meant for war, pure and simple.

Does it need tweaking? Yes, spies either need to be enhanced (especially damage for some ops), or it needs to have something else in place of it's spy bonus.

That said, it's still a good strat. It's simply not meant for netting, and shouldn't be. Leave it a pure military strat.

enshula, thx for your thoughtful response
i know you to be a smart experienced winning player
so when i disagree with you i do not do it lightly

but first lets go over the ground we agree on
the timing of some things in express needs to be adjusted to better fit the compressed schedule
you mentioned DR i totally agree
it does seem to be on 24 hours
some people say it is on 4 but that has not been my experience this has to be changed
nothing we can do about multis and clans taking each other into dr but we can make them do it more often

the same with spy dr, it should be four or fewer hours not 24

ending alliances has to be shortened from 72 hours
during hours eight to 36 i am the best research ally you could ask for, after that i am a total leech. i have usually been ABed fifteen times by then and have no interest in teching
i should be able to drop my allies so they dont resent me or they should be able to drop me. same with defensive allies
this timing needs to drop to 12 hours or fewer, if i am in dr and likely to stay there why do i pay for defensive allies?

the set does not have enough turns
i propose adding 120 turns at one fell swoop during the food peak to aid farmers, say 36 hours prior to set end

its just not the right strat choice for the server
that is a flaw in the server not the strat
this flaw is easily fixed



now lets get to our disagreements:
the I advantage is grabbing and KEEPing land
qz seems to share this view
this is just flat wrong especially in express
your stats are correct of course but they disregard the opportunity costs of building
when you are building you are not capturing more booty

in order to make land worth keeping, you have to be able to build on it in an expeditous fashion
50 buildings at a bare minimum per turn
anything less is just too turn costly during prime growth time
so instead of using 200 turns to build cs an I has to use 260 turns to get the same ability to build that is 60 turns
and that sixty turns only catches you up to a monarchy not to the faster growing strats
in express that is 3% of the total turns on nongrowth activity
that does not count turns spent building on land that you keep. if you capture and build on 4000 vacant acres that is another 80 turns that could be spent elsewhere
and those 80 turns are spent during hunting season

those 80 turns could capture a lot more than 4000 built acres not counting the cash, food and tech

your biggest mistake is assuming that it takes a 5m jet PS to capture $100M plus land tech etc.
we are talking the express server
all i play is express, i have spied on every top 25 player for the last six sets, i have never seen a 5m jet air force in express maybe somebody on the last day gets there but i seriously doubt it

other than mine the largest air force i saw last set was 1.4M
again maybe somebody got bigger on monday afternoon but not during hunting season

last set on my $116M hit the net was $100M plus land
but after four or five hits the land so reduced my weapons tech that i could not hit the next target up the line
express is a target rich environment

let us make this simple
suppose there were four players each with $1B, 10k acres and no defense
you have 600 empty acres and can build at thirty a turn
you have twenty turns
do you spend twenty turns hitting or twenty turns building?

express is like that, it is a target rich environment with stockers galore
if we just return to the original rule that you can drop land it is a humter's paradise
if we have to make up a new rule that dropping land is illegal let us at least drop the timing on our made up rule to fit the server, say eight hours

enshula i look forward to your response

5m jets was just picked to make the gains low counting oil and losses, there was 1 set about a month ago when a large techer was farming everybody

i dont think its that target rich, with 24 hour DR

100 ish countries, and only some that have a lot of cash/food on hand you can easily run out of countries to hit

id expect not many countries would have 1b cash before -30 hours

the problem i see with reducing DR from grabs is if it was 2 hours i could farm the same person with 5 PS's every 2 hours while they slept and they would have great difficulty retaliating, with how fast the turns are there has to be a compromise to allow sleep :)

if a lot more people were grabbing stocks then perhaps a lot more people would hold turns a lot later, or they would spend more money for longer increasing production rather than picking a production point then cashing

so instead of me going to say 14k acres i might aim for 16k

one thing im not sure you realise is express is in a way the most stockpile stealing friendly server since food can only be hidden on the market for 8 hours at a time and stockpiling oil mil and tech all have other costs/risks

perhaps a compromise could be to treat dropped land as ghost acres

so if you grabbed 10k you could drop 8k for tech/spal reasons, but anyone who grabbed you would still grab you as though the ghost acres existed (not sure if some should count as having buildings if buildings were destroyed, probably not)

i would be interested in a change like that, particularly if deleted countries could also be grabbed, perhaps even dead countries as well but im not sure about that

i definitely understand that express is the most friendly stockpile stealing server that i have ever played

eighty seven countries played last set

six had a billion or more dollars in cash on hand or food x $32. as u say not a lot of countries but a large % of the field
the server lends itself to stockpiling for reasons u can elucidate better than i but that stockpile friendly nature of the server is all the more reason for the original rule regarding land

and as u say dropping land late makes much more sense than dropping it early. i think anyone can see that if i drop land with only two turns to play in order for my tech to let me grab 1400 acres that dropped land is of no consequence

make dr 4 hours then if somebody sleeps for more than four hours during express weekend they deserve what they get)))))))

-30 hours to -4 hours is what i call hunting season that is when the stockpiles are large and the defenses small

but u can carry 400 turns into -30 hours

as to your suggestion for a complex change
the admins are extremely busy and we have not seen a lot of complex rule changes initiated mostly simple stuff like nobody can drop land they grabbed ever under any circumstances on any server
so requesting a complex change is probably a no go

as far as psing somebody five times every two hours
thats my favorite tactic

theres roughly 1500 turns in express if im not mistaken, i really dont see why you cant put a dict over wha? 13-14m net to get into the top 10 there

without changing any rules and theres no need to drop land either just use it to your advantage instead of saying its a disadvantage without actually considering another option

Also you dont respond to my previous post and i dont really know why I keep posting on this thead because it doesnt seem to matter to you

fluff!

Hmmm that's a *VERY* interesting suggestion; that said it would confuse the fluff out of me as to how much i'd get if i hit a target....

like the new rule change
guess that concludes this thread

guess i need to start harping on improving spy ops)))))

good job game developers

Actually you should start improving your gameplay instead of whining about strats being bad

as for this change, it doesnt really do more or less its just silly over all

watch and learn ivan
watch and learn

its the other way around in our case, just that you dont take the hint

anyway starstalker, you should try to win the game instead of saying "its easy to win games with theos" or "dicts are too weak", then everyone will definitely give you some respect out of it.

Everyone can grab and steal stock. Not everyone can grab, steal stock, and win the game :)

i find it hard to gauge who 'deserved' a win in express with the amount of people that usually get suicided

even when i know i would have beetween #1's networth if i hadnt been suicided i dont know if someone else could have beaten me

but not getting suicided is a skill in itself in a way