this set shows already that you need to landtrade or you will not make it in the top ten by what was past accepted practices, ie no outside Fa yada yada yada. You will start to see clans doing other things to get their countries in the top ten like doing buyouts, sending Fa packages and things like that to get their members in the top ten, things once in the past that were frowned upon that are being accepted today. I think you are seeing more of that going on now more then ever because of landtrading, traced back even further to ghost ar.

For better or for worse can be debated, will be debated and i imagine this thread will morph into some of that but I am just saying that it has changed the game dramatically and hey if noting else we can all agree ghost ar has made a huge difference like no other change in the history of EE.

Ghost Ar ftw !!


i also have my crystal ball and it tells me that the next evolution in this is clans will get tires of trading with other clans and just use their boards to trade with eachother and realize that they can benefit from both sides of the trade ( clan gets land from both transactions )

That seems like a natural progression. I think RD has done something similar in previous sets, so it woudn't be anything new.

I'm a little sad that this is the direction the players and admins have chosen to take on this server and in the game, but you can't put the genie back in the bottle.

i would think that this would be an issue some would want to fight over but as of yet i don't know of a war being fought over ~ landtrading or any ~ buyout type thing. That is because the netters control the server making it possible. Really who is going to say no to LAF/Rd/PDm/EVO maybe more, (i don't look too deep or close at top 10's anymore on this server).

funny how in the FFa server the war clans decimated the netters and proved without question they decide who and when will net / here the netters control the power.

Make ghost acres gained in ratio with defense... no defense no ghost. Make it too expensive to trade.

Weren't you like super anti-landtrading though?

Like anything broken in this game, it will get fixed, eventually.

The war clans (SoF, SoL, Imag) don't really care who wins netting. So why would they fight over a buyout to #1, or landtrading to top 10? They have their own agendas that don't usually conflict with netters doing their own thing.

Now, if they just want to be fluffs or need a target, they may use landtrading or whatever as an excuse. But it wouldn't really be the root of the conflict.

Land trading is stupid.

And sooner or later, someone will abuse it, and break the game.

then EVO will finally fix it.

oh noes! people who cooperate are goings to wins da top 10. makes me feel kinda sorry abouts da country playing with itself in the corner.

=D

I do think landtrading is a bit too much abused;

The trick is how to adjust it without causing people to revert to extreme bottomfeeding...

Solution: Don't make NW the sole determinant of a country's rank. As long as Rank = NW you'll have landtrading and other douchey things.

...aaaand what is networth a determinant of?


No wonder DKnights is insignificant.

PENIS SIZE, OF COURSE!

How do we rank countries then?

I told you 1 year ago - you cannot have 2 countries attack each other and have it result in a win-win situation. LaF as a whole has actively looked down on landtrading but since the admins have decided to actively support landtrading for a whole year, this particular reset, LaF has instead gone with the "abuse it until they fix it" approach.

All you guys didn't believe that land trading is broken, so now LaF will show it to you how broken it is. Expect a couple of 400m countries, and a whole top 10 all above 300m.

LaF has entire coordinated shared forums between TIE and RD to land trade, with public chat channels to add to this, it really isn't any different from internal land trading other than the tag the country belongs to.

The fact is that almost 80% of the non-LaF countries have terrible built:unbuilt ratios, PDM is one of the worst clans to landtrade with because of this, you simply don't gain much ghost acres back from them, if LaF allowed internal trading, this wouldn't even be a problem and you might see countries approach 500m finishing NW instead. By far, LaF participating in landtrading has simply improved the landtrading experience in all other clans (maybe that's why PDM think they are kings of landtrading) because they can trade with better built countries and gain more out of it in a trade, but in reality with so much unbuilt acres, it really is a worse country because of the higher construction costs and lower income.

The fact that Balin even dared said "i'd definitely put myself, wari, ben, and perhaps one or two other PDMers up against anyone in laf playing a landtrading strat." in the other thread is incredibly stupid, maybe just 1 of the listed players might make t10 this reset, just because those players made t10 before in previous resets when LaF wasn't landtrading ever doesn't mean fluff.


And then see just how sad the top non-landtrading country will finish - probably about 220-230m at best.


And qzjul, your last change to introduce Country:Country DR did the exact opposite of what you intended. You intended it to nerf landtrading, but instead it harmed bottomfeeding because bottomfeeding no longer gets much acres. All the bottomfeeders switched to landtrading, and with so many countries landtrading, C:C DR isn't even close to becoming an issue.

You should
A) Revert the C:C DR change
B) Half the ghost acres gained
C) Remove the Dict ghost acre bonus - you will notice almost all the landtraders are Dicts for a reason - and make the BPT penalty slightly less to compensate.

(You need both B and C because otherwise people will just switch to Theo casher land trading)

The whole point is, without competitive land grabbing (via bottomfeeding), Alliance is fast becoming a cooperative grabbing server.

My country is huge,
But my dinghy is tiny.
Yo Ho Ho And A Bottle of Rum!

i really think the admins are hoping for a political solution first but how long can they hold out? lets say next set they said no more ghost ar, it is so rooted now you would have a massive revolt.

this is so true:
you cannot have 2 countries attack each other and have it result in a win-win situation.

keep ghost ar, just make killing more powerful, not easier. killing a country gets 10% of land and assets.

A combination of stats, such as: networth, land, # attacks, # defends, pop killed, kills. Why not make a country score and base ranks on that, instead of purely on nw?

Increase CS loss by the defender in grabs by 10-25% across the board.

Landtrading is nerfed, "problem" solved.

Keep it simple, keep gameplay open. But yes, something is obviously off a tick :)

Rofl, increase CS loss?

What we might see then is some idiot just land trading to 250k acres and still get t10 from unbuilt acres

While an admirable solution, this doesn't work well because it
A) Gives suiciders too much suicide strength (grabbing land off low defense countries isn't enough, you want to cripple their CS too?)
B) Cripples untagged countries that are being farmed even further.

This again, is a suggestion that isn't well thought out.

Why would I kill a 20k country for a measly 2k acres when I can gain much more than that in a single landtrade?

If you are referring to killing countries with a lot of stock in order to gain their stock, then this just makes FSes even stronger, something we have wanted to avoid - there have been plenty of ways suggested to weaken FSes, but none have been implemented. In fact, quite the opposite, making it easier to stonewall makes FSes comparatively stronger.

I like how Xinhuan's post became a rant about PDM.

yet another landtrade topic and with same predictions as last thread had.

There is no political solution that any one single alliance can influence. If LaF warred clan A and B for landtrading, C/D/E/F would happily trade away. If LaF then warred C and D the following reset, A/B/E/F continues to trade away.

If you are suggesting maybe a large coalition forming to have a server-war against landtrading, honestly current clan politics and hostilities prevent that, and it is much easier to go along with something that the admins have always wanted - to promote landtrading than to go against them.

You'll notice that landtrading is a strategy that doesn't work on solo servers because you need to run high defenses on solo servers. Landtrading only works in clan servers (and FFA) due to tag protection.

You can always cap the ghost acres gained. If you cap it at 1k acres, people hitting each other for 8k acres and only gaining 1k ghost acres will realize it isn't worth the cost of rebuilding.

Adding a hard cap isn't a very nice formula, so you're better off with Xin's suggestion and reducing GA gains. Although even if you halve the GA gains, it would just mean people spend more time hitting/trading with each other. People would still continue to trade with each other just the same.

It really depends what your goal is - to eliminate land trading at higher extremes or to lower the nw achievable by land traders?

A) If I'm a suicider, I already have too much suicide strength. Given the batfluff crazy AB CS losses, you think I'm going to bother buying jets to grab-suicide when I can just AB a guy two dozen times to take out as many CS as I could in 50 grabs? If I were to even buy jets, just to entertain the argument, I'd take out much more CS and use less resources BRing the victim. The only case where a suicider is making landgrabs is to landgrab stockpile, and if you have enough stockpile to be landgrabbed by a suicider without enough defense to protect yourself from it, you deserve it.

(not to mention how easy it is, in comparison, to just stock warfare for the first 3 weeks, missile a trader who has no CHANCE to get SDI before 50k acres, and take out his CS that way)

B) No, a nominal increase in CS loss would not have a real effect on farmed, untagged countries. An elimination of landtrading would cripple untagged countries that are not currently being farmed quite as hard has they used to be. I've seen people here today lamenting the ineffectiveness of the C:C ghost acre changes because it penalizes bottomfeeders more than traders. You're fluffing about only getting ghosts on your first TEN freaking grabs on a country every reset? I call bullfluff.

Xin, you're smarter than this... This argument doesn't hold water.

Not really. If you half the GA gains, the cost of rebuilding acres in the trade will exceed the GA gains when your country size is sufficiently large enough to have high construction costs.

Right now, for every 10k acres you gain in a land trade, you are probably building 20-22k acres (as a non-Dict generic trading, its 30-40% less if you are a Dict, and/or trading with the same strategy-type country), but if you half the GA gains, then for every 10k acres you gain, you have to construct 40-44k acres (and take twice as many turns doing so), a significant increase that marginalizes the potential gain.

To modify CS losses

A) countries with less than 10k acres don't lose CSes from land grabs.

B) countries with more than 10k acres lose more CSes from land grabs



also, a properly done stock grabber suicider, can create a LOT of damages.

I don't play this server but I do play FFA. I find landtrading to be a good thing on that server, it makes the server unique. Without landtrading there wouldn't be much benefit to running 16 countries vs 1 country.

One of the great things about the game is that all servers have the same mechanics for the most part, but have to be played very differently. This is due to length of the set, alliances, politics and the amount of countries that play the server.

I am afraid that if any rules are changed here on Alliance it will hinder what is widely considered a good thing on FFA.

A suggestion from an outsider that knows very little about Alliance. If the politics of the server would allow for 1:1 retals instead of L:L, would that kill Land Trading? Of course it would make top feeds much more valuable - but then that would force people to run with more defense...I don't know just a thought.

A) The AB CS losses is another change that I highly disagreed with, and wish that qzjul would revert the change. It clearly made suiciders a lot stronger on countries that had no tanks (while it did limit damage on countries with considerable amount of tanks).

B) You try being an untagged then, and spending twice the amount of turns exploring and building acres on low BPT after being hit 10x a day. A typical landgrab might make a country lose about 1% of his CS (when being bottomfed, losses are less), so you are losing 10% CS a day if you are being farmed into 10 DR everyday. If you increase the CS loss by even just 50%, that is significant, I would have to rebuild extra CSes everyday, or spend extra turns to rebuild newly explored acres.

It's actually better off being killed as an untagged and restarting with insane amounts of CS as it is.

I'm not fluffing about getting ghosts on bottomfeeding. I'm comparing the relative effectiveness of landtrading (which requires significantly less time and effort) than bottomfeeding, the rewards does not consumerate with the time and effort spent. All-explore countries have always not finished well in NW, but that is to be expected, it literally requires no time to be one.

What you aren't realizing is qzjul still wants to protect the untagged countries being farmed somewhat, increasing their CS losses doesn't help. Increasing/reducing ghost acres on the other hand doesn't affect the untagged country in any manner that is positive or negative, it is simply additional free land for the attacker.

The politics doesn't allow for it. Clan servers means if you have more members, you have more weight to back your clan policies, and if you can back L:L and go to war over it and win, then other clans are going to give in.

That's exactly how L:L even came about, the larger clans were able to enforce it over 1:1 in order to keep their land.

Like landtrading, L:L is too entrenched at this moment, just about every single tag practices it.


In fact, landtrading even _supports_ L:L. This reset, LaF had some cases where a 80k country would setup a 2:1 trade with a 50k country (that is, the 80k retals the 50k country twice) in order to reach a fair and agreeable trade where both parties end up in a win:win scenario (essentially a L:L was performed). This situation is obviously due to a lack of 80k countries to perform a 1:1 trade with.

I don't disagree with any of that.

Maybe eliminate CS losses completely for the defender under a certain acreage lost (500?), or only increase the % lost on grabs above a certain acreage (5,000?)?

we need in this game:

1) get rid of annoying super frequent captchas
2) change the cruise missile to something worthwhile
3) facebook implementation

Landtrading is definitely over-powered but eliminating it completely creates tons of issues. To find an acceptable solution you need to weaken trading and while increasing the ability to generate land in other ways.

If you eliminate trading completely then everyone starts bottomfeeding, thus reducing available acreage and making All X the predominant strat.

I would suggest:
reducing ghost acres by 10% (38% instead of 48%)
reducing dict GA bonus by 5% (27% instead of 32%)
make building cost exponential, (Land^2 / 25000 + 1500) * 3 or similar
create land bots that grow x amount of acres per day and always have 250 turrets per acre for defense
increase the drop-off acreages for exploring

This nerfs trading without eliminating it, nerfs the dict bonus a bit without screwing dict completely, makes trading only beneficial to a certain point, adds extra land to the server without making farming them too easy, and gives All X guys a chance to compete again.

Also, not that I'm not trying to remove landtrading. I'm trying to get it NERFED so that it is less effective _comparatively_.

I'm not trying to get untagged countries farmed into the ground again Wari. Well they still get farmed, but instead of 30 countries each doing 3 hits for a total of 90 hits, it is currently 10 countries each doing 9 hits for the same 90 hits because there are less bottomfeeders.

Understand that people rarely hit a country past 10 DR, so the number of hits an untagged country suffers really isn't going to change much either way - and DR is supposed to protect them - and it does.

L:L and Landtrading are essentially the same thing, you're right.

What is so bad about the Landtrading anyways? I understand it makes bottomfeeding cashers/farmers less competitive. I would imagine it's still better to be a bottomfeeding techer then a landtrading techer.

Just because it requires less time to play a landtrader doesn't mean it requires less skill. Choosing targets based on build and returns, deciding on the appropriate BPT and growth rate, gaining tech at the right times...these are all slightly more complicated decisions when land trading.

@AndrewMose Let me put it this way, the top bottomfeeding non-trader this reset, is probably going to finish about 230m (which isn't going to be top 15).

The top landtrader this reset is probably going to be somewhere between 400-420m, which is almost double the above.


The disparity between the time spent between the 2 strategies are enormous. I know you argue that just because you spend less time, it doesn't mean it requires less skill. But a good player that is equally skilled at both, why would he then pick bottomfeeding over landtrading? This boils down to effort versus reward for the good player.

Wouldn't a good techer be in fine position if not for the lack of a food spike this reset?

The food market never took off because nineteen out of twenty landtraders went farmer. If they'd all been cashers and food had hit $80, suddenly this reset becomes one where a good techer can compete with anyone.

ESPECIALLY with the effect traders had on keeping the tech market so high, so late.

everything you say is true. But at some point shouldn't the bottomfeeding techers rise with the landtraders to comparable levels. If this is not the case then too many people are teching. Can a 35k techer compete with an 95k land trader? I think so under the right market conditions. And at 35k it is still better to bottomfeed I suspect.

The problem is a complete noob at land trading can get 300m, without breaking a sweat.

And right now, these noobs think they are king of the hill because they have gotten 300m, which was a crazy benchmark for top netters without land trading.

The reason why all the landtraders went farmer is precisely because everyone was afraid that if they went casher, they would have nobody to trade with (of the same casher strategy). In game terms, it is called splitting the player base (trading player base), and isn't exactly ideal.

And honestly, had food hit $80, the landtrading farmers would be laughing all the way, because a farmer stocks its own food and does not rely on market conditions for its finish. If food had actually reached $80 at any point, it would have just made them get their tech even faster and they would have traded faster for more land.

Landtrading cashers on the other hand has to stock food. The higher the food price, the more unfavourable it is for them. The lack of food peaks actually helps cashers in general more.

This reset was a particularly bad techer reset partly because there really was just too many techers. But despite that fact, the top 3 non-landtrading countries is probably still going to be techers (despite you claiming that the lack of a food peak harms techers more).

The lack of a food peak doesn't actually harm techers more - it just harms all Democracies that are trying to resell/sell down so they have a lot less potential profit margin (most techers stock as Demos, correlation that more techers get harmed doesn't imply causation). Similarly, the lack of a food peak "hurts" countries that went Decay bonus because non-decay stockers lose a lot less market value on stocked food.

it isn't an equilibrium market Andrew, where people will switch between bottomfeeding and landtrading until the marginal gains from both are equal.

Landtrading will always provide more than bottomfeeding, regardless of how many people are engaged in each.

You can gain 5k+ acres a day off 1 hit with landtrading, that will never be possible with bottomfeeding regardless of how much bottomfeeding competition there is.

In fact as the number of landtraders increases the marginal gains increase because the number of quality countries of similar size and build to trade with increases.

And there are never enough untags for bottom feeders,

I guess I didn't make my point well enough. I agree that a Landtrading casher/farmer will always be superior to a bottomfeeding cahser/farmer. The market equilibrium I was describing was between techers and casher/farmers. And unless a techer is attempting to get to 50k+ acres Landtrading isn't be best way to go. So there is still a place for bottomfeeding to be competitive as long as teching is competitive.

The old records in very good techer sets were all broken this set though in what was not a very good farmer set. They are not balanced. I always felt that techer was too strong compared to farmer and casher because of a lack of land and now that everyone trades and gets land too easily it is the opposite.

strats have never been balanced though locket.

back in the 90's casher reigned, then farmers did for a while (back when we had a few resets were food was sold at $41 or $42 on the PM, whatever it was).

and then techer was dominate for years.
Just because techer isn't dominate anymore... doesn't mean things are fundamentally off. As I just pointed out, it wasn't always the dominate strategy. What reason is there to maintain it as such? (other than arguments that it is harder to play and thus deserves "recognition").