Going to post my current thinking here. Please give whatever feedback you think would be helpful. Not sure when this will go live. Maybe after the NPC country count is increased but before NPC country retals.

There are a few issues with the current leaderboard model. For the all time leaderboards where playing more rounds is helpful, it's basically impossible for a newer player to catch up. Game mechanics also change over time which makes networths not really comparable as time goes on. For example, the removal of bonus turns and the elimination of what players described as the "bot buyout" lower the theoretical maximum networth. I do think that recent top networths are lower than what is possible, but the point remains. Someone starting out today probably will not be able to get a top 3 of 77 million NW. Finally, long time players no longer feel as motivated to get big finishes.

To solve some of these problems, a seasonal leaderboard model will be introduced. Seasons will start out consisting of four rounds, so you'd see a new season about once every month. It is my intent to keep the game rules static during each season as much as possible, but it may be necessary to make changes during a season to prevent exploits. However, I would avoid doing something like introducing NPC retals in the middle of a season. Lleaderboard metrics will be split into two buckets: all-time metrics and seasonal metrics.

The all-time metrics will be calculated over all rounds of Express. These are metrics which can be fairly compared historically. For example, a win 5 years ago is just as valid as a win today. Current planned list:

* First place finishes (NEW)
* Top 10
* Top 100
* Land and attack success will be removed

The seasonal metrics will only be calculated over rounds for each season. These are metrics which cannot be fairly compared historically. Current planned list:

* Total NW
* Best NW
* Best Farmer NW
* Best Casher NW
* Best Indy NW
* Best Techer NW
* Best All-X NW

Finally, I plan to introduce the concept of seasonal champions. This is a fairly straightforward idea - if you get the best score in one of the seven seasonal leaderboards then you are the champion of that leaderboard metric for the season. I think it would be cool one day to introduce the concept of forum or profile flair to let players show off whatever makes them the most proud, but that won't be introduced as part of this change. Here are some example use cases of the goals that players might aim for:

* A player with strong, consistent finishes who doesn't win often could play all four rounds to get as high of a Total NW score as possible.
* A player who really likes playing techer could aim to get the best techer NW of the season.
* Superstar players could aim to get as many champion medals as possible from one season. 6 is probably a realistic upper limit.
* Conscientious objectors could aim for the best all-X NW finish.
* Players with lots of historical top ten finishes can continue to aim to get top ten as often as possible.


Summary:

1) Express will start with four round seasons. Gameplay will mostly stay the same within each season.
2) Leaderboard metrics will be split into all-time (calculated over all rounds) and seasonal (calculated during the season).
3) The concept of season champions will be introduced. A champion is the player with the highest score in one of the metrics.

I think this is really good. But have you considered making the seasons a little longer? Thinking 8-10 rounds? Or even 5 rounds. Don't really have much more thoughts about it than that my initial reaction was that a season was rather on the short side.

At first when you mentioned the seasonal model I thought it would mean half a year or something like that.

Also, best all-x NW is a good idea for a metric, all-x puts emphasis on something very different than the other metrics.

How about you integrate the All-time metrics with the seasonal metrics by putting a all round metric that compares players total and/or average seasonal metric score over time?

This encourages changing strats up and even going all x sometimes. You could also focus on one thing every time to try and be the champ there. I like it!

I bet Gerdler wants 5 round seasons so he can try to get all seven championships in a single season!

My reasoning behind starting them out at 4 rounds is that game play is frozen during each season and there's still a lot of work that I need to do. Once the NPCs are behaving reasonably and the server feels to be in good shape I'd probably make seasons longer for Express. My initial thought for that was 8 rounds per season.

Other servers would have longer seasons, yes. A half year season feels reasonable for a server with a two month round.

First off, love the seasonal model.

My comment was going to be the same as Gerdler's. 4 sets isn't necessarily long enough to let people try a variety of strategies and for there to be a large enough sample to get a super accurate picture of the competition at that time.

If there are still many changes to be rolled out, then I see how 4 set seasons will make sense, but once the game state is caught more up to the present I also would like them to be around 8-10 sets long.

Also will there be retroactively defined sasons? I've got the highest score in the pre-bot era, the first 50m score, etc, but all that is just garbage compared to modern scores.

Yeah this looks really fun feature.

PS: I also really like that it'll track top scores for a variety of strats. Will the game look at your end-game buildings to automatically figure out if you're casher/farmer/techer/indy? Could it get it wrong? What if I dropped land and ended with just 60 MBs?

You could also apply a placing point system like in formula 1 racing....

I guess the game could figure it by the buildings you had most of during some time in the set.

Like if you tech started a farmer to 8k labs, grew to 15k farms and destocked with 60 MBs it I guess would be possible to look back but a lot harder. or he couls just add oil destock as a strat. :)

Thinking more about it if at some point there aren’t really any meaningful changes to the game coming through, I could see even see seasons potentially being as long as 4-6 months. 1 month hardly seems like a “season.”

By the way, "Best Farmer Net," "Best Commie Net," etc could just end up coming down to which top player played that strategy in the right market conditions.

But if the game can determine "Best [Strat]" scores, then I think in addition to counting wins you could also have a "Best Of Strat" counter. If you are the #1 farmer in a reset you get 1 "Best of Strat." But the #1 techer also gets 1 "Best of Strat" added to their tally. Obviously whoever wins a round would be getting not only 1 W but also 1 “Best of Strat.”

This is a great idea. It gives incentive to keep competing even if you're teching in a dog techer set, for example. Or if you're a casher in a reset where tech is $4000.

Love it. Of the same opinion that at some point it may be a little longer than 4 sets to a season, but good to start at 4.

Not sure if I missed this, but would the player with the most wins be crowned champion of a season as well?

On set length, I agree with most here - likely 3 months is the best length, but 1 month to start to get changes in quicker.

On champions, are these crowned per season? I think they should, and if we count total number of champions won, you then have another metric you can never catch... (most champions in a season could be a good one)

The best 'strat' nw is tricky though I love me an allx competition once in a while. =P

Wild idea: I actually do like the idea of rapid continuous changesets accompanied by short-er seasons, esp to govts or something. The strategy would evolve to be come who can best adapt to new rules instead. Say new changeset, people take 2-3 sets to feel it out, and maybe 1-2 sets to self-actualize. This way, any new player or returning player is kinda on more equal footing and everyone figures out the edge (but the game is largely the same so the core strategies apply, just edge optimizations).