what does everyone mean when they say ghost acres?

When you make a landgrab, you see 350 (600) the # in the ( ) is the ghost acres ;)

is there a reason for them?

MOAR LAND

Its a way to make things easier for netgaining alliances. IMO the game has been dumbed down too far.

+1 thus you have self farming clans, LAME!

I've always said exactly this. If you want to get rid of self-farming, don't push to have it outlawed to hit your own countries--push to get rid of ghost acres. Then if people hit their own country, they're doing it at the expense of their other countries instead of benefitting all 16.

But bstrong: If I'm remembering correctly, ghost acres were originally due to a glitch or bug in the coding of E2025. I believe it was basically that when you grabbed someone and it said 400 acres and 200 buildings, the target lost 400 acres, but you gained 400 acres + 200 buildings (I could be wrong on this).

This generated additional land beyond exploring.

Clans in FFA especially have utilized this by using their countries to trade hits (country A hits country B, country B hits country A), generating ghost acres for both countries, so each country after the hits has more acres than they started with.

It's a "glitch" that the current E:E developers opted to include (clearly it's not technically a glitch in this case) to increase the amount of land in the game, especially since the count of players isn't exactly what it once was in E:2025 during the heyday (not to mention there aren't thousand of illegal countries that no one really pays attention to unless they go to war).

If I'm wrong on anything, for those who know better, please correct me.

so b could hit a for 200(300)

a could hit b for 200(300)

and each come out with 300 acres?

Thats it!

basically but in reality it differs quite much, either side can get more than other side.