Looks to me its to much team gameplay on express atm.

someone is dumping low agritech and keep buying up all food to benefit 1-2 farmers.

[16:56:55] <Market> Jan/03/2014 08:57:00 -- Agricultural -- $1,600 -- 10,192 -- SO: Yes
[16:50:31] <Market> Jan/03/2014 08:50:37 -- Agricultural -- $1,600 -- 6,386 -- SO: No -- Remaining: 0 Agricultural
[16:43:59] <Market> Jan/03/2014 08:44:04 -- Agricultural -- $1,599 -- 13,991 -- SO: No -- Remaining: 0 Agricultural
[16:44:00] <Market> Jan/03/2014 08:44:07 -- Agricultural -- $1,600 -- 5,392 -- Asking: $1,200 -- Trend: UP (was $1,599)
[16:44:02] <Market> Jan/03/2014 08:44:07 -- Agricultural -- $1,600 -- 5,392 -- SO: No -- Remaining: 0 Agricultural
[16:22:04] <Market> Jan/03/2014 08:22:10 -- Agricultural -- $1,600 -- 13,899 -- SO: No -- Remaining: 38,426 Agricultural
[16:22:05] <Market> Jan/03/2014 08:22:10 -- Agricultural -- $1,600 -- 6,101 -- SO: No -- Remaining: 32,325 Agricultural
[15:37:14] <Market> Jan/03/2014 07:37:20 -- Agricultural -- $1,599 -- 22,035 -- SO: No -- Remaining: 0 Agricultural
[15:37:15] <Market> Jan/03/2014 07:37:20 -- Agricultural -- $1,599 -- 3,814 -- SO: No -- Remaining: 0 Agricultural


lots more, cant be bothered pasting.

[17:00:35] <Market> Jan/03/2014 09:00:40 -- Bushels -- $60 -- 900,000 -- SO: No -- Remaining: 0 Bushels

who buys 900k bushels this early at $60?

Iam buying up all these cheap agritech and reselling it.

Friendly word to other gamers either store youre turns and make food go down or build some farms up cuz food at 60 and up this time in the set is nothing you should buy!!!!

I was posting about this also. Hey, now all tech is sub 2000 on Friday. That's something new.

Cheap tech, heh. Time to run some turns

hmm interesting. another set i'm not playing so i can't speak to the market but...

any chance a techer or farmer is going to war and they are selling off cheap agri to fund it?
what was the asking price and what was the price agri was selling at before hand?
if all tech is sub 2000 now how out of the ordinary can it be that agri lead the trend downward?

i dunno , if people were coordinating why wouldn't they sell for closer to 1100 or 1000? and as for $60 bushels, 900k bought? hmmm, does that sound that crazy? what if a commie is near 360(360) and is betting on bushels going even higher or betting on no bushel supply at some point today. it's happened.
the commie could then continue grabbing and sufficiently grow out of range of retals while everyone else waits for bushels that may not even be 50% cheaper.

all in all doesn't sound like too much team play to me but again i'm not in this one this set so maybe you guys are seeing more than i am in this thread

Well at the time all the other techs were $2300 and someone started selling loads of ag for $1600. Was strange.

Ill confess Blid no one's helping me but im profiting from all this. I bought up a ton of low bushels and resold at 65 for double what paid. As for cheap tech I got alot of it but no SOs on it but ive been buying and slow playing since the start and working the market pretty hard.

You'd better win then!

The only countries that can afford to buy stock at this stage of the game are techers though LOL.

what about demo resellers?

I should have farmed this round LOL.. damn.

Well Vic, because all strategies other than Techers need Tech, essentially it's hard to find room to buy and resell unless it's at a rediculous rate because extra income has to go towards tech or military.

seventy five now for bushels.. this is killing me :(

Im doing my best to grow but I have 2 DHs on guys with no weapons no allies and I ran the math twice and over sent each time. I also failed one due to bad math so I'm behind where I should be in land but thems the breaks I guess. I should top 5 unless I screw something up bad, but I'm definatly enjoying milking the players holding turns because its run turns at current prices or run a rainbow.

huh?
blid said techs were at 2300 and someone picked up a load at 1600. whats wrong with a demo reseller having SOs out and a nice block of cash to fill those? it is hard to find room to buy and resell ? i don't get what you mean, that is a really subjective statement.

doesn't seem inconceivable for a demo techer to have made enough loot to fill all those SOs does it?
and if they can pick up agri for 1600 and flip it for 1900 or above, and it doesn't raise their costs, why not do so?

... and why is selling agri at 1600, when it sounds as if the rest of the techs quickly hit below 2000, any sign of coordination??

i just don't get why anyone thinks any of this was team play of any sort ... ?
doesn't seem that way to me from what's been presented here

food prices are ruining my set... argh

i'm curious what happened with the above?
was this team work or did it turn out to be not so much?
again from the evidence presented here, it didn't look like much was going on it to me.

There's a lack of "fat" or "Quality" farmers and an Abundance of techers this set, thats whats going on from what I've seen from ops. Granted ive seen a few leachers but they weren't farmers, and a few techers with straight up agri and bus res but no tech allies. So its possible people are helping someone but I have no idea who that would be seeing as what I've gotten in ops. That being sai I dont bother to spy anyone top30 + even if they are allied to potential land farm.

ya tbh i really dont think anything was evidence of any sort of team play at all imo but who knows.
especially the 900k bushels at 60. why the heck would a commie with full turns and 200-250 m cash from military sales be shy to spend about 60million on bushels ?? especially when the same amount at 45 would only have saved them 15 million dollars LOL! so run the risk of losing out on huge land before it falls into DR to save 15 million dollars? ya right. lmao.
from the sounds of things bushels went up to 75 for the next day or so as well, so sounds like a good play to me.

so h2o is definitely off on the bushel call :p

i think it's important for us to be vigilant and be vocal when we find team play but imo this was not the right call. someone getting agri at 1600 when tech falls below 2000 and someone spending 60m on 900k bushels ... all sounds just about normal to me and i dont think we need threads getting everyone all excited when their isn't certain team play going on

i still want to hear from h2o on his bushel call though.
sounds kind of suspicious, like he was trying to draw attention away from himself maybe? :p

this happenned around turn 500. do you think any CI has 200-250m cash and spend 60m cash on 60 bucks bushels
those cash be put into better use with buying tech or building up your land. and why would need 900k bushels to run turns? are you gonna run 200 turns at one go (this means that u're at turn 300 when u spend 60m cash on bushels.. does that make sense?

i didn't realize it was at turn 500. i think it was later.
also it makes perfect sense in certain instances - you yourself have made the same sort of play early on: use all resources and turns to go for land before it gets grabbed and goes into dr. THEN the following day if you are lucky and outrun retals, build up land and buy tech.
makes perfect sense

Vic I was saying that at those prices a Techer couldn't stock because at those prices a Techer would have close to no spare cash.

So out of all the strats we have the Techer that can stock but the Techer is selling tech at an all time low! So clearly no one is stocking/reselling!

Or my theory anyway.

sorry my bad, time stamp on irc says 56 hours into game (840) turns. But still, it doesnt make sense for anyone to spend 60m on 900k food that early.

that sort of game play(early play), we use all resources but not on food, food is the last thing u're gonna have to spend on. tech on thursday is generally cheaper on friday too.



I dont know if this sentence made any sense. If I were to say
"because all strategies other than Farmers need food, essentially its hard to find room to buy and resell unless its at ridiculous rate because extra income has to go towards tech or military"
"because all strategies other than CI needs military, essentially its hard to find room to buy and resell unless its at ridiculous rate because extra income has to go towards tech or food"

No clue what tda said :p and I just felt like arguing with all you dorks for funz

I did some checking and I'm 99% sure the early ag tech sales (about 2 days ago) for $1600 are mine. Let me shine a little light on that:

First of all, there is absolutely no collusion occurring whatsoever. The mere suggestion is baseless, without evidence and completely irresponsible. I have no friends here (no enemies for that matter) and thus no one to help or be helped by. We all ought to be careful about wagging our fingers at people without proper evidence as the finger is rarely the appendage that ends up in our mouths on such occasions.

Secondly, if the string of sales seems preposterous to you, it's because you are clearly privy to some deep level of understanding of the game's mechanics that my dopey ole mind is not. I simply tech'd up some extras during a tech phase (which I regularly do with a couple of strats I like) and then sold them off at whatever seemed damned cheap and likely to sell immediately. I just wanted to make sure that I had ample cash in short order so that I could get some military and get converted quickly rather than get caught with me pants down.

I'm sure someone, in Friedmanian fashion, will post some sprawling probabilistic or statistical proof demonstrating utter ineptitude in my marketing skills but the fact remains: the grand machiavellian market conspiracy exists only in the mind of the original poster.

Yeah, yeah, thats what Milton Keynes said, but we all know that economists are the real rulers of the world. Spouting incomprehensible statistics and other bullfluff justifies printing fluffloads of money, controlling the behavior of the plebs with fiscal policy, and allows them to fly about in corporate jets snorting coke with playboy bunnies. And it all begins with selling cheap ag tech!

I dont know if it was too early in the set or not but i have played sets as a demo farmer where i will buy anything that goes on the market lower than what im selling. So if im selling at 65 i will buy anything below that and put it back on at 65. As long as nobody comes along and dumps a shed load of food on the market (which they eventually do at some point) it works. Will that not be the case for the 900k bushels at 60?

I was doing exactly what eddie is suggesting (coincidentally my name is also Eddie lol). I was stalking the market page and buying up anything below my own sell price, and I had about 2 bil cash on hand to work with. I ended up making a few hundred million in a couple of hours.

Lol! brilliant

Also damondusk - you're welcome. Looks like I'm the only one around here not on a witch hunt! And I live 20 minutes from Salem

stalking the market page ! brings back memories to 2025... just hit 'refresh' :p
but you know about SOs now, right?
you could have turned that 2 billion into much more than a few hundred mill extra if you had SOs in place instead of "stalking the market page" like the old days

I didn't forget you Vic =)
I considered posting my hypothesis that you were the last EE player over the age of 20 evidenced by examples of common sense postings that could not possibly have originated in a more youthful mind =P

Seems there are a lot of us in Oregon. When I joined SOL back in 2004, there were a ton of members within about 50 miles of me. There are fewer now, but I'm less social now so all is well that ends well =)

It's not THAT hard to understand is it :S.

At the start of the game Tech is a lot more expensive and everyone not running a techer needs tech or military.

So if food is really cheap at the start..

Cashers can't afford to stock food because they don't have enough income to buy large amounts of food because they need to buy tech/military.

CI's can't afford to stock food because they need tech and would get raped by the 10% resale anyway.

Farmers are automatically removed from reselling food early because where do they get cash from? FOOD ITSELF!

If theres like even a small amount of food (say 2m) it's really hard to just pull 100m out of your ass and not have that be put into anything into military or tech. Or you can waste 50 turns generating the required extra income to buyout that food and not grow instead. W/e :P

So this leaves techers because they are the ones making the expensive tech and they don't need that expensive tech! But if tech is low then it's harder for a techer to stock up because everything is cheap.