May 20th 2014, 17:08:15
@deezyboy
The answer lies in efficiency. Attacking big countries is mathematically not worth it, especially since the change that makes building costs go up exponentially with land size about 4-5 resets back.
Basically, you attack someone big, sure you can gain a lot of land, and when they retal, you lose a little bit less, and make a gain out of it. Unfortunately, this usually means
1. You are double building. You building on land that you are going to lose a portion back to the guy you hit. For example, you attack for 1k acres, and get retalled for 600. But that 600 doesn't all come from your 1k new unbuilt land, in fact most of it comes from your built acres. So the actual reality is that although you are gaining 400a on that exchange, but you are losing maybe 500 buildings on the retal, so you end up really building 900a of land.
So not only are you wasting a ton of turns building that 500 structures that you will lose, you also lose a hefty portion of money that could have gone into defense or tech.
2. Top players usually don't attack each other, because of the above Double Building inefficiency, since attacking weak players that have vastly less/no chances of retalling is mathematically more efficient. Sure, you use more turns to make more smaller attacks, but that is still less turns used than the ones wasted in the above "Double Building" problem.
As a consequence, if 2 top players actually attack each other, it is usually because of some other reason that is not related to trying to maximize their ending NWs, such as warring, or the less scrupulous "bring some guy out of top 10 so my friend can hopefully win the reset", which falls under the deletable rules of coordination, or at least considered underhanded and will earn you a negative reputation.
3. Being retalled also means you lose out on a portion of your tech base, which negates any tech that you may have grabbed from him. More crucially, you will lose Construction Sites in the retal. The Ideal BPT formula is well known, in order to minimize turns used in a reset, Ideal BPT = sqrt(remainder acres to build / 4 * govt bonus), which you can derive if you simply write down the "Turns used to build X CS followed Y acres", and then differentiate that with respect to turns and setting the equation to 0. This relates again to losing efficiency.
For techers, every turn you lose, you are losing income directly. Every turn you can save now, means you can tech 1 more turn 4 weeks later when you have more land and you are at your land goal, and that translation is massive. You do NOT under any circumstances want to get retalled as a techer. Or even get grabbed. This relates to the Double Building problem. Every time you get retalled, you are losing future turns because of a lowered BPT.
Even on Alliance server, where landtrading is rampant because you can run 90k acre countries on only 1m turrets, no landtrader runs the techer strat, it is THAT inefficient.
4. Commies are unchecked now only because in the first 4 weeks, military demand is high. Once past that, and techers have started stocking, military demand will slump to reset lows, and they get overtaken easily by every other strat. Likewise, farmers start slow, I doubt there are any in the top 40 or 50 in NW because there is low demand for food at the start, demand picks up after techers start stocking in week 5 and they start to grow unchecked. For reference, see crest23's stellar performance last reset (he won last reset as a Demo Farmer, which only started to overtake the Commies week 6 onwards). You can also check how the top techer performed last reset, who finished at rank 2. He certainly only attacked small countries, not large ones. In fact, every top 10 country does that.
For reference, you can easily check the last few resets on http://www.eestats.com/primary, and check the top 10 ranks of each reset, and see how they grabbed, when they started grabbing, stopped grabbing and so on. The winners list (top 10) of each reset is in a stickied thread made by me on this very forum if you want to cross-reference who was which country, or check who has the most top 10s, what strats make up the top 10 every reset, etc. (Link: http://www.earthempires.com/forum/post/558487/perm). Owners for last reset: http://www.earthempires.com/forum/post/564529/perm
The answer lies in efficiency. Attacking big countries is mathematically not worth it, especially since the change that makes building costs go up exponentially with land size about 4-5 resets back.
Basically, you attack someone big, sure you can gain a lot of land, and when they retal, you lose a little bit less, and make a gain out of it. Unfortunately, this usually means
1. You are double building. You building on land that you are going to lose a portion back to the guy you hit. For example, you attack for 1k acres, and get retalled for 600. But that 600 doesn't all come from your 1k new unbuilt land, in fact most of it comes from your built acres. So the actual reality is that although you are gaining 400a on that exchange, but you are losing maybe 500 buildings on the retal, so you end up really building 900a of land.
So not only are you wasting a ton of turns building that 500 structures that you will lose, you also lose a hefty portion of money that could have gone into defense or tech.
2. Top players usually don't attack each other, because of the above Double Building inefficiency, since attacking weak players that have vastly less/no chances of retalling is mathematically more efficient. Sure, you use more turns to make more smaller attacks, but that is still less turns used than the ones wasted in the above "Double Building" problem.
As a consequence, if 2 top players actually attack each other, it is usually because of some other reason that is not related to trying to maximize their ending NWs, such as warring, or the less scrupulous "bring some guy out of top 10 so my friend can hopefully win the reset", which falls under the deletable rules of coordination, or at least considered underhanded and will earn you a negative reputation.
3. Being retalled also means you lose out on a portion of your tech base, which negates any tech that you may have grabbed from him. More crucially, you will lose Construction Sites in the retal. The Ideal BPT formula is well known, in order to minimize turns used in a reset, Ideal BPT = sqrt(remainder acres to build / 4 * govt bonus), which you can derive if you simply write down the "Turns used to build X CS followed Y acres", and then differentiate that with respect to turns and setting the equation to 0. This relates again to losing efficiency.
For techers, every turn you lose, you are losing income directly. Every turn you can save now, means you can tech 1 more turn 4 weeks later when you have more land and you are at your land goal, and that translation is massive. You do NOT under any circumstances want to get retalled as a techer. Or even get grabbed. This relates to the Double Building problem. Every time you get retalled, you are losing future turns because of a lowered BPT.
Even on Alliance server, where landtrading is rampant because you can run 90k acre countries on only 1m turrets, no landtrader runs the techer strat, it is THAT inefficient.
4. Commies are unchecked now only because in the first 4 weeks, military demand is high. Once past that, and techers have started stocking, military demand will slump to reset lows, and they get overtaken easily by every other strat. Likewise, farmers start slow, I doubt there are any in the top 40 or 50 in NW because there is low demand for food at the start, demand picks up after techers start stocking in week 5 and they start to grow unchecked. For reference, see crest23's stellar performance last reset (he won last reset as a Demo Farmer, which only started to overtake the Commies week 6 onwards). You can also check how the top techer performed last reset, who finished at rank 2. He certainly only attacked small countries, not large ones. In fact, every top 10 country does that.
For reference, you can easily check the last few resets on http://www.eestats.com/primary, and check the top 10 ranks of each reset, and see how they grabbed, when they started grabbing, stopped grabbing and so on. The winners list (top 10) of each reset is in a stickied thread made by me on this very forum if you want to cross-reference who was which country, or check who has the most top 10s, what strats make up the top 10 every reset, etc. (Link: http://www.earthempires.com/forum/post/558487/perm). Owners for last reset: http://www.earthempires.com/forum/post/564529/perm