Hi all!

I'm feeling a little more motivated to do things, but not ready to launch into serious development yet.

Are there any wee little things - paper cuts as they used to call them in Ubuntu - that would make things better but should be easy to fix?

Things I'm thinking of:
- Make bots auto-restart after they crash
- Get bots into team?
- Increase bots?

1. yes

2. maybe not

3. no unless goal is to break land records and nw records every set by giving players alot more land

Marshal yer a fluffy guy but for the love of god use your brain before you comment

1 yes
2 yes without a doubt, unless a server with all explorers and griefers is a goal
3 yes in alliance the bots either need to increase or change the market is just too thin
for most strats to work and its getting boring that the same strat wins every reset

fluff

I thought team was warserver and its not all-x when its netting.

and more alliance bots would only serve those who are most active on grabbing (I disagree with market being thin, more like overstuffed) so top players would get 250-300k acres and more land would mean that prices would be even lower since more production (especially tech).

a war server? all servers have the same purpose

and more alliance bots would serve those who are most active on grabbing yes just like they are now, the problem is with so few countries purchasing and selling the market is either thin like fluff or overstuffed on some items. A large country could easily buy the market out on quite a few products as theres no stability at all which favors 1 single strategy which makes netgaining pointless unless you like playing the same strategy over and over again.

not even bots would help make team-server better.

A check and delete all old spy op reports?

those get deleted auto after few days.

FFA could use links on its pages to jump to other countries on same page instead of having to manipulate address bar.

How many at a time? Cause I always have a lot of them. 😉

In market news showing purchases along with sold goods?

*waves* at qzjul \ (►◡◄) /

When grabbing land, attack results show only the troop and tank losses of your target's defensive allies. Turrets are still missing from the report.

Eestats want let you go to prevent. Stats

- Make bots auto-restart after they crash
G: yes, super important for continuity and to reduce frustration.

- Get bots into team?
G: personally I dont think team can get any worse, it's the lost server, though I dont see that bots necessarily make it better. Edit: trying something is likely better than not trying anything at all though.

- Increase bots?
G: I think they are where they need to be, if bots are too many there is no longer any competition for land. If there should be a change here I would suggest to flatten the DR-modifier curve a bit so that theres less difference between grabbing at the right time or the wrong time of day as well as the difference that occurs when a group or strat type stops grabbing. there are already times that the bots have a DR modifyer of 1.00 and times they are at max DR. If you make it like FFA you just remove the skill in finding the better grabs.
Grabbing has to remain an area in which great players can distinguish themselves from good ones. I too want to set land and NW records but not at the expense of removing the competetive aspect of grabbing.

Someone wrote in another thread that it would be nice if the servers didnt all end in the middle of the night for euros, a rolling schedule would rock

Nice post gerdler..I concur sir. ....Also it would be nice to have tech % with main spy op?

Gdi isn't free on tournament server (I don't think)

Please no bots in team.

because of braden?

that might been me. once staying up late (or short nap before logs in to restock and country creation) isn't that bad but 2 days (nights) in row (if wants to maximize turns early) is bad (I suggested day and night between end of set and start of set) especially during summertime (sets end at 3am for me) and if 2 or 3 servers end and start inside 3 days then that means 3 nights sleep gets reduced.

FFA needs minor fix-up: 20 acres bonus since day 1 not day 2+ and also land got by exploring is bit too random, usually there's ~200 acres difference between countries running same strat.

and yes, ivan. are you new? this is my server.

Please, no bots on team...

I do like that one, I think we had an idea for that at one point... Not sure if that's difficult...



Oh, really? OK. I might be able to fix that EZ



Explain this?



Hm fair enough; Thanks for the thoughtful post; The DR curve has been a perpetual source of "how do we fix this and not screw everything up" as it impacts landgrabbing, suicides, war, etc, and it's difficult to differentiate the lot...



How do you mean exactly? As in rolling forward a couple hours each day? That's potentially fair. I wonder if there's a slightly off-time we could choose that would work for a greater percentage of the planet?



I'll be sure to poll the server before doing anything there then, sounds like this would be a contentious issue...

team server is almost dead and burried, theres absolutely no advantage to not having bots on that server

regarding gerdlers input about number of bots on alliance, good grabbers will always grab better then bad grabbers and i wasnt talking about adding hundreds of more bots

The player base could fix team, but for admins there's nothing you can do unless you added/removed rules/ideas every set.

Also you need to at some point unleash "aliens" or zombies into 1a/FFA with weird coordinated attacks to defeat them. That would breath some life back into the game.

ADD PACTS TO GAME

FOP gets a % of pacted clans Off

FDP gets a % of pacted clans Def

I must be oblivious to issues on Team. What is so bad about it?

Add EXPRESS GDI rule set to TEAM, but with an exception:

Allow anyone in the defenders team to attack back with special attacks, whereas EXPRESS only allows the the defending individual to attack back with special attacks.


To be frank I think alliance should work that way too., but at an alliance level.

^supported

team: small player base (and gets smaller nearly every set) and some idiot players (although same applies to every server) and lack of land (bots wouldn't fix that since those would be farmed to ground evereyday).

a fix to team would be unpleasant for most but it would work, if you create a 1a country you also get a team country and if you don't take care of your team country you get penalized for it on 1a.

I think there should be a limit on how many times you can post a day.

Sometimes zero is a good number, right?

then we would have to make it retro active so people like marshal and mob wont' be able to post for a few years.

m0bby spammed thousands of 1 letter posts to several places.

that is why we make it retroactive.

fix tech bots

Could you have bots tag up and mass attack people that provoke them? Like an AI war vs real alliances, and heck AI vs AI at times.

I feel like we'll be getting enough of that in real life within the next couple decades as AI becomes self-aware and starts to kill off humanity

These have both always been part of my plan, they are, however, way the crap more complicated than you can imagine

making bots attack wasn't problem for rd et co.

If bots retal it should be slightly random and mild suicides/retal grabs that incentivize netters to get SDI, tanks and turrets, which will also help them against human griefers. The NW modifyer for grabs, expenses etc all incentivize netters to run 0 defence so strongly that winning some servers is more about who gets picked by the griefers than who is the best as defending against them in all areas of attack (SDI, spies, LGs, ABs, BRs, even GS) is too wasteful to a country that wants to win.
Now if the bots guaranteed that a player who hits them a lot would take missiles and ABs it would force netters to run well defended countries which is the opposite of what the game does today.

I imagine some tuning would be needed but getting bots to buy modest amounts of warfare tech and be given like 1-5 attacks a day at random aggressors (with significantly higher risk for repeat offenders). risk could increse with DR your attacks have on the target at login and start at 1. Like this Probability_of_being_targeted=If((DR_your_hits)>1,(DR_your_hits - 1)/sum(DR_player_x-1),0) where DR_player_x is the sum of all the players who added more than 1 DRs '(DR hits -1)' terms.

This would create opportunity for netters to calculate the number of hits they can afford to make without being retaliated, or witha very low risk of being retaliated, based on bots login times and the other peoples hits against those bots which would increase the skill in grabbing. if it was just 100% random attacks it does not increase the skill at all, just makes incentivizes netters to run a bit more defended.

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Ofc you could lower the effect or broaden peak in the NW modifyers for landgrabs as well as reducing expenses for turrets and tanks (perhaps increase it for jets) and increase the divisor on NW in the expenses formula to perhaps 400m to get some of the same effects.

^^ OK thats not a simple thing so that was completely off topic.

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So I will add something that might be quick to fix:

If you change the tag admin password everyone is locked out of tag admin and the no password works to get it back... it is a really dangerous trap that makes no sense to have.
If you cant fix the problem we would be helped by just removing the option to change tag admin password.

tag pass can still be changed back and forth and it works like a charm.

well if they update the game code so that the bot API's actually have access to spy room and war room this wouldn't be such a complicated issue as it stands the major hurdle is the game code itself being a frankestein

not frankenstein, only swamp thing.

Heh, yes

Confirmed, qz. Changing the tag admin pw is buggy.

paper cut ? wrap it with regular white paper, tape around that, leave it for 20 minutes - miraculously healed ! ;)

I'm really impressed with the player base this server has in this day and age, maybe not like yesteryear but for text based it's alot . I use to play a game called Conquest that died out in 2008 that was similar. I think the creator based it off Utopia and EE. But anyway, what if some of the slightest image changes were made like for the military units or avatars for forums. It kind of goes along the lines as a book with pictures,lol. Can you image how well Playboy would have done if they explained the description of a female body instead of photos.heh Im not saying lose the Nostalgia but maybe a slight makeover. What about calling units a more futuristic sending name or something?