since anything was ever done for another server? Can you remove offensive allies from solo servers yet? It's been a couple years. Can you let people retal someone even if they're in DR? It's been a year and this still happens on Express:

2013-09-01 01:38:53 PS Land Fanatic (#84) rumproast (#143) 1479A (1922A)
2013-09-01 00:11:55 PS Land Fanatic (#84) Teknomancer (#12) 177A (406A)
2013-08-31 20:03:32 GS commieB (#82) Land Fanatic (#84) 3187C 7229 F
2013-08-31 20:03:32 GS commieB (#82) Land Fanatic (#84) 3295C 7575 F
2013-08-31 20:03:32 GS commieB (#82) Land Fanatic (#84) 3408C 7943 F
2013-08-31 20:03:32 GS commieB (#82) Land Fanatic (#84) 3527C 8333 F
2013-08-31 20:03:31 GS commieB (#82) Land Fanatic (#84) 3653C 8748 F
2013-08-31 20:03:31 GS commieB (#82) Land Fanatic (#84) 3765C 9142 F
2013-08-31 20:03:31 GS commieB (#82) Land Fanatic (#84) 3881C 9555 F
2013-08-31 20:03:31 GS commieB (#82) Land Fanatic (#84) 4001C 9988 F
2013-08-31 20:03:30 GS commieB (#82) Land Fanatic (#84) 4126C 10442 F
2013-08-31 20:03:30 GS commieB (#82) Land Fanatic (#84) 4254C 10919 F
2013-08-31 20:03:30 GS commieB (#82) Land Fanatic (#84) 4387C 11419 F
2013-08-31 20:03:30 GS commieB (#82) Land Fanatic (#84) 4524C 11943 F
2013-08-31 20:03:29 GS commieB (#82) Land Fanatic (#84) 4667C 12493 F
2013-08-31 20:03:29 GS commieB (#82) Land Fanatic (#84) 4814C 13071 F

In the past year or so, building costs have been changed to address landtrading in Alliance, then changed again. Special attacks have been changed for Alliance, and then changed again. A new timing mechanism for special attacks has also been introduced. These are complicated changes that require testing and work, but offensive allies in solo servers still exist and are extremely overpowered. Harmful spy ops are still extremely powerful and nigh impossible to stop. Dictatorships have been nerfed to where they're no longer worth using to net in solo servers. Extra captchas have been introduced to fight alliance bot wall-ins. We still can't retal countries in DR on Express. You see what I'm saying here qzjul? This is getting to be beyond absurd. I know you only play Alliance but can you please give your other servers some attention?

Do you feel slightly guilty about this?

To an alliance player, it is all that matters.

Btw I still disagree with you blid. if you remove O allies, it only helps us at the top. The masses at the bottom will get farmed more with less chance of Retal. If you remove O allies you gotta remove all allies. The lower players need equal opportunity my friend. I know, remove D allies then PS is too strong, but that's why you leave it alone in the first place. Or if they gotta go, then PS would have to be dropped to 1.25 or something. Can't have every change help only one group 'the elite netters', just like every change shouldnt be for one group 'alliance server players'.

For the record, I don't use O allies in primary either.

You have a minority view on that, Serp. I respect your opinion but the alternative view has been discussed extensively and agreed on by an exceptionally large majority. The complaint has nothing to do with helping elite netters or fearing retals, it's about the mega abuse possible via o-leeching. If you make a bunch of small attacks, every single attack can be doubled by your o-ally, and THEN multipled by 1.5 for a PS on top of that, AND this saves you huge amounts of oil. Find an ally with jets who doesn't attack and nobody clean will be able to hold a candle to you.

Actually, Serp, I still respect your opinion but o-alliances are a straight up flaw in the game tbh, and there's no way anyone can say otherwise.

tbh, with the offensive bonuses available, 3 of them more than makes up for 2d def allies. should be reversed imo.

thats 3 def alies and 2 off allies for the record

I'm not so concerned about the balance of 3 off vs 2 def allies.

I'm concerned with the abuse that O-allies can offer. Time and time again, on solo servers, we see a country grow much quicker than is possible, and it is always due to having an O-leech. Just a single O-ally can surpass the advantage that even having 3 Tech allies giving you free tech can.

The other concern here is that because the game admins do not play solo servers, they do not understand this problem at all, nor the earthquake one in the other thread, and how it unbalances the solo game where finishing NWs of the top 10 are always so close to each other - a simple thing like having an O-leech has far-reaching effects.

Slagpit once played on Primary. That was 3 years ago.

just thought I'd introduce to whole 2 vs 3 debate when the 3 gets a lot more bonuses thant he 2 to start with :)

granted I'm also of the belief if someone wants to grab you it doesn't matter how much defense you have...

I +1 the DR abuse now.

Also O allies in theory are to balanced out D allies, but because PS breaks the concept of O allies, it's just a wierd counter-intuitive concept.

On Express it isn't that bad but it's still a problem but I can see 20 hour PS's being insane.

You PS, take your O allies offense and now your offense does jack squat for them till it comes back, but a good player has minimal downtime on their attacks so it'll be constantly sent out on PS's. Basically a leech.

The concern isn't about O > D though, it is about the abusability for gaining an advantage for finishing in the top 10 over other players that do not abuse O-allies.

It is almost on the same level as asking a friend to run a land-farm for you (though that is much worse, but also much more obvious).

Lets make the game to have 2 def allies, 3 o allies and 2 intel allies mandatory.

Just let O allies help out even if their own military is out.

So it makes the game more competitive, you have to judge how big your target's o allies are and whether is he able to retal you.

I think the proper fix would be to stop PS's using O allies.

Yes it'd make O allies suck but there's still SS :P.

if a country on a solo server is in DR above, i don't know lets call it 6, make their attacks return what their dr would otherwise give somebody else.

that way you can still retal after taking a few hits, but can't run around ps'ing for 1000 acres while the other guy retals for 86.

So if someone GSes me for 100 times, I have to grab 100 times to get back my normal gains? lol. I would just SS and bounce everyone to 30 DR so they cant grow other than exploring.

the only reason why somebody would gs you one hundred times is intentionally to put you into dr, certainly not to try and kill you, ha. and then when you're out of dr, you can continue to grab as you otherwise would.

failed attacks count for dr, do they?

But if someone wanted to intentionally put you in DR, they would intentionally keep you in DR too, so DR would never expire.

yea, but if somebody wanted intentionally to keep me as a parking lot, they'd continue to ab me..

at what point in time are you "at war" and not still landgrabbing/topfeeding?

Except, it is FAR easier to keep someone in DR (just attack and fail/lemming) than to actually make someone a parking lot - you actually need enough tanks or jets to AB or BR.

failed GS or SS or AB puts you into DR?

and it is my anecdotal experience that they have zero tanks and double tap either by accident, not realizing they'd hit a day or two earlier, or simply do not think to buy up tanks, i thought you'd stopped playing!

(i speak for express, it occurs to me you might be thinking along the lines of tourny or primary)

Maybe at the 6 hour mark all DR should decay.

six hours of total dr time, or six hours left in reset any previous DRs are set to zero?

Well, it's true that I understand Alliance better; I'd be happy to play primary if I had more time heh


I was going to look at lowering the amount O-allies could help in primary, esp for PS; I'll put that in my list again

I think o-allies are just entirely unnecessary, because I agree with elves:If someone wants to retal they can pump jets for a few days and use PS bonus and get it done. D-allies might be unnecessary too if you lower the PS bonus to 25%. That might actually make SS more useful in comparison as well?

six hours left in any reset, this might work because at 6 hours because it means only retals take place at this time.

braden: what if someone ABs u 100 times then, flattens you, and for the next 24 hours you are unable to grab to grow?

blid: if you remove D allies, it takes away the 'suspense' u get when you spy on a target allies and see 2 allies that are out of your range. and it becomes like tourney, you just need 1 spy op.

TDA101:too late to do anything 6 hours before set ends.

Of course it does....

Until I JUST remembered it got fixed a month back. Damn!

Failed special attacks doesnt put you into DR but failed SS or PS still adds on to DR.

Yeah, I don't mind d allies or want them removed and like the extra options they present. But it just seems like qzjul is married to the idea that if d allies exist, o allies need to exist as well, which then forces him to consider big ideas like completely rewriting the way they work in order to curb abuse, instead of just doing the 5 minute fix of removing them.

don't you think it'd be tricky to break anybody if you can double with def allies, but only 1.5x on PS?

i dunno

maybe it wouldn't be?

It's very easy actually, I retal people all the time without having any offensive allies. You just pump more jets than turrets for awhile. Def allies *usually* don't double someone's defense anyway, unless that person's own personal defense is rather low.

You mean his allies are freaking HUGE. xD.

Why would you be needing to grab to grow when empty acres abound in your lands. If some one flattens you, I don't think 24 hrs DR is at the top of your list of problems.

thank you, crest.

if you get ab'd one hundred times you spend the next twenty four hours either fighting the war you're in, or rebuilding CS and then your empty acres.

there is no reason why you should be landgrabbing, and if you are, then it should garner the same results that one would get from you, you're in 112 dr? so is any country you attack.

Actually, if you have 360 turns on hand, you can rebuild those c-sites and that land in 5 minutes, and then still be in DR for another 23.9 hours. But that's not really a problem, the person can just wait in that case. The real problem with that suggestion is you can be in 0 DR when you make the hit and then end up in 100 DR before the person you hit logs in.

but for the next 23.9 hours you're still fighting your war and not landgrabbing.

the second part simply hadn't occured to me :P does this scenario happen often?

Crest, for example, I got flatenned with 26 ABs for 7.5k acres. After those ABs my BPT was still 50, it will only takes me 130 turns to rebuild those acres, I do not need additonal CS sites as my land goal(land needed to be built) wouldnt exceed my optimal BPT. Upon loggin in, I had 250 turns, even if I rebuilt them on the spot, I would still leave myself with 120 turns, and for the next 360 turns, wouldnt I need more land?

Braden, not every one wants to fight the war they get in.If you want to net while having ample troops/turrets and tanks, you can do well still as long as partner doesnt have warfare tech. If you can outgrow them out of range, its even better.

that's fair, but once you landgrab you're abusing your dr because you know either retals would be useless or return a fraction of the land you took.

Hence, this thread! We dont want them to just concentrate on alliance changes, but also concentrate on other servers that needs a nerf.

for express, twlve hour dr and then any dr you're in is used for the return of the country you grab, does this work better? or merely halve the previous issues with my particular fix?

I think the fix is simply that DR doesn't need to apply to people you've attacked, unless they've broken GDI on you (ie, they get one DR free hit back).

this would be wonderful, yes. but i also thought it was categorically denied, for whatever reason?

I don't think i follow the argument you guys are in?

Express server, where 24-hr DR lasts 20% of the game. If you get a big run of GS on you, you can be immune from grabs, basically, and abuse DR to freely attack people that would ordinarily retal. Those victims have no recourse because thanks to DR they'll only get 100 acres when they hit back. This is the thing that a big plan was announced to address a year or so ago. I think that proposal was basically a lot like what I suggested in my previous post in this thread. Some people suggest lowering DR time but one consequence of that would be that people could have their asses farmed off, getting hit 20 times a day or something and always coming back out of DR to be hit more.

mmm if you can find me whatever we or I announced, I'd definitely take a peek into it -- it probably got put off because of my back-end makeover

Here's Pang's post:

It's still sticky in Express forum. I know the planned changes got posted somewhere so I'll look around.

Slagpit posted about it also:

Not sure where the rest of the proposed changes are posted, it was a whole list, a big thing, people would get kicked out of GDI for farming and stuff like that, but the main thing is the DR end-around for retals.

I will try to find it. I know I have a log from an irc convo about this too somewhere

I think it's been hidden or deleted. All searches only come up with that post from Slagpit QUOTING the post. The post itself I haven't been able to find.

But the big thing to me is, #1 it was officially planned, and #2 it was a plan to address the Express DR issue.

Basically, if this could be put in:

it would be much appreciated.

That, remove o-allies, tweak tech allies, tighten up harmful op success rates, and I'll fall in line and be happy with you guys and quit whining.

ps: earthquakes

http://forums.earthempires.com/...or-express-please-comment

http://forums.earthempires.com/...y-dr-stop-gap-for-express

Look at how old those threads are.