That does actually make a lot of sense now that I think about it...

Particularly if two countries place the same order, who gets priority?

Anything can be used as a weapon, but a gun is unique in how difficult it is to defend against. How to collect existing guns would be a unique challenge, but really stopping sales and letting guns peter out over time would be more effective than continuing with the status quo. At least criminals would need to begin to use arms dealers rather than your local gun store. Its a lot easier to stop crime when you are dealing with a few points of control rather than a distributed network of legal operations.

Making punishment stop people from using guns would be great, but the death penalty has even been shown to be ineffective in deterring crime. People get in their heads that they have nothing to lose and that crime does pay.

Clever country name.

The bill of rights was meant to protect people. There are provisions for changing the government to reflect modern times, that is what an amendment. If people find that the second amendment allows for greater infringement of their pursuit of life, liberty and happiness than it enhances it, they have a right to repeal it.

So your approach to the issue is, we'll make it illegal to kill people and then turn a blind eye when people keep getting killed?

http://www.gun-control-network.org/International.gif

Clearly there is a direct relationship between owning guns and killing people with guns. Sure, most people are responsible and don't use their guns for illegal purposes, but it is the availability and access to guns that allows them to be used illegally.

The notion that owning a gun is somehow freedom from government is out-dated. When the military consisted of people with their personal fire arms that was one thing. If the US military were to mobilize its citizens, the US would be better prepared than the population of Britain... but until people own private tanks guns are nothing more than a symbol of the past, something used to kill defenseless animals and something used to commit successful home invasion.

I am pretty sure he was trying to express his right to get shot by a criminal by sarcastically saying that these crimes only happen in America when he can find an anomalous case in a place that has a gun ban.

.14*small ~= small
.14*big ~= big


I am certainly fine with it the way things are, I just see no reason why it needs to escalate.

I suppose for the purpose of this tool, one hour is a good limit. Any more detailed searches can be done on boxcar, which I feel only people with boxcar would really care to look up.

So you are saving ALL of the market data, rather than just min,max,volume in an hour interval? Any reason you chose to ceiling the input? Does it have anything to do with hitting intervals with no sales? I see now that there is a bug where if you search from the earliest to now in one hour intervals on mil strat you only get this:

Current Market: History
Current good: Military Strategy
Current time: Jun 2, 19:17
Time start Time end Min sold price Max sold price Avg price Total volume
May 31, 01:00 May 31, 02:00 $1011 $1011 $1,011.00 39,000

whereas if you do 12 hour intervals you get this:

Current Market: History
Current good: Military Strategy
Current time: Jun 2, 19:16
Time start Time end Min sold price Max sold price Avg price Total volume
May 30, 19:00 May 31, 07:00 $800 $1089 $1,043.21 158,857
May 31, 07:00 May 31, 19:00 $849 $999 $960.67 40,315
May 31, 19:00 Jun 1, 07:00 $800 $899 $842.50 18,750
Jun 1, 19:00 Jun 2, 07:00 $800 $850 $843.45 12,560

I assume that shows the consequence of hitting a blank interval, which I would consider a bug.

Looks great. Seemingly no bugs. Too bad 1 hour is the smallest increment allowed, but I can certainly understand practical reasons for that.

Right, but isn't that supposed to be decay on bushels sitting on hand, not produced bushels?

Clearly Mehul had a reason? hahahahaha
I do wonder if that was a result of some sort of feedback on game mechanics.

I feel like it might be from the concept of "the bigger you are the more you lose" but then in some way rather than destruction growing linearly with size it was selected to require an increasingly larger percentage. I suppose that would reflect having to get things down to some "base level" to be have been completely overthrown. I do think we have an interesting view of these revolutions, where they are a tool to improve the country, rather than people revolting for better lives ;)

On a related note, did you guys make the loss rate a continuous function or piece-wise?

I suppose it depends on the nature of spies... I feel in the current situation that doesn't make sense. if we adopted a more Utopia-esque intelligence system where you choose how many spies to send on an operation then that would make more sense.

I think they should be flat. I can't think of any compelling arguments for a non-flat switch.

Well I feel that is what 'Attack Intelligence Centers' is for.

Not like it would be worth it, but I don't know how I feel about being able to lemming someone's SPAL down.

1) College Football
2) NFL
3) MLB

I would give my first born and a large potion of my salary for the Huskies (Bow Down to Washington). I follow the Huskies obsessively online and never miss watching a down, in person or on TV if I can't see it live.

I like the Seahawks and watch football every Sunday.

I sort of keep up with the Mariner's and follow baseball enough to run a shoddy fantasy team.

Glad I can do my part!

Pang runs his DnD campaign out of that forum.

That is a pretty good deal actually.

Seconded!

You never know... like honestly, who HASN'T posed as a woman on the internet at one time or another?

Because they tried to reproduce Earth 2025 as closely as possible

You've never actually spoken to a girl before, have you? ;)

Alright, well if I knew their frequency I could make a suggestion on how tech could enhance this. I suppose it would be another netting tech for people to buy whereas most techs now are for war. (well, netters have use for many of them as well)

I have never paid much attention to these factors since they are out of my control. How much do they affect production?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3BVCCDZx7dw

I think Bushels are the biggest issue since it has the stablest prices and the largest volume. I do think that when it comes to end up set bushel peak and decline that the order does make a difference and it is more fair to sell the older ones first.

As far as market manipulation I see how it is somewhat advantageous to buy off the newer ones first however you still have to get through all the lower prices to get there.

I am guessing Mehul did LIFO because it was easier to code. I doubt he gave it much thought. I suppose in a realism sense, given the choice of two otherwise identical products people will preferentially buy the newer one.

Basically as far as I can tell from "fairness" FIFO makes the most sense, but empirically this doesn't seem to be a big deal, so if it took more than ten minutes to fix I'd probably say it isn't worth it to change.

Alright, I'll trust you guys. I admit I certainly never payed it as close attention as many might.

So, I don't know how much of a hassle it would be to change that, but are there serious pros one way or another? I admit I have never felt the market it to be broken in that regard.

Sir Batman Bu! Another Camelotian back to rule PDM!

I am pretty sure swirve was FIFO. I suppose I strictly speaking never tested it, but I feel like when cycling through huge swathes of bushels that the older ones were cleared first. I never bothered to really keep track of that sort of thing though.

Why is LIFO superior in your opinion? Just from a country playability thing I feel like FIFO is better... as snawdog pointed out, first person to sell can really get screwed that way unless they sell really cheap.

Should be FIFO... after all the grocery store always puts the milk with the latest expiration date in from the back!

I only see that being a valid scenario if you forget to destock until really late so you need to blow your entire stock in like two days and you quadruple your acreage to jump as a plain theo - or something along those lines. Increasing your acreage like that increases your private market costs way too much to be an effective mbr jump.

That last part was a typo... beer and nudes (all accepted) to Detmer

I don't know how you define parotting, but the fact that there are a few ways established as the best for producing high networths, I see nothing wrong with that. There are definitely still ways to improve every single strat and its not my fault if people don't choose to be innovative. The whole stockpiling thing is a construct of the players, not the game... I say good for the players for figuring out that there is more to achieving high networth than attacking and producing military ad nauseum.

[quote poster=qzjul]

MAX
(
    10, Defender_Acres*MIN
    (
        1.5,MAX
        (
            .5,
            (
                Defender_NW/Attacker_NW
            )
            /2
        )
    )
)
*30/
(
    250+ETPA
)
*Current_DR_system

) ???

[/quote]

ok, I clearly can't count.

MAX(10, Defender_Acres*MIN(1.5,MAX(.5,((Defender_NW/Attacker_NW)/2)))*30/(250+ETPA)*Current_DR_system)


That *should* be right

That would be quite a bit of clicking... I am extremely skeptical of that... assuming you can just click refresh to get a view, that would be about six clicks a second... I encourage you to try though =P

I count 5 each way.

Why? I think all governments have a place in this game. Not all governments need to be equally good for achieving maximal networth - there are other ways to have fun in this game that other governments are superior for.

Omega did this on a small scale in E2025 however there was a community backlash so they stopped. The idea has been around for a long time.

I dunno, I look at that and see wasted networth ;)

Fair point, except I was missing two ;)

MAX(10, Defender_Acres*MIN(1.5,MAX(.5,(Defender_NW/Attacker_NW)/2)))*30/(250+ETPA)*Current_DR_system)

/me high fives TAN

fact

Why isn't this guy in charge?... he seems to have a decent grasp on things.

If it isn't FA endorsed then it isn't changing anything... one lone voice isn't enough unless it snowballs into a lot...

Easier said than done. I do think it would be in the best interest of alliances to get in grabbing wars... particularly with ghost acres as they are... land trading should be extremely lucrative...

AIM-MarsPDM... why not join PDM?.. your AIM is already ready for it!

MAX(10, Defender_Acres*MIN(1.5,MAX(.5,(Defender_NW/Attacker_NW)/2))*30/(250+ETPA)*Current_DR_system

ETPA stands for effective turrets per acre... so basically defense standardized to turrets.

I dislike piecewise formulas (and almost thought about suggesting a new formula but maybe that will be another post... I think they are pretty good though so I'll leave them be) so I have altered the way NW affects targets.. uphitting has a maximum benefit of 150% at 1/3 the targets size... bottom feeding has a maximum penalty of 50% at 4 times the target's size. These alterations are relative to 30/(250+ETPA) which is .06 at ETPA=250 (so 250 turrets/acre defense). That is something I consider to be empirically reasonable defense and would have the maximum and minimum gains (without DR modifications) be 9% and 3% respectively.

This allows for mostly the same mechanics as now but makes countries that are more heavily defended relatively speaking have fewer losses and those with sparser defenses lose more. This should largely help defense heavy small countries who get farmed despite quite large defensive numbers.

Basically, I think Earth died and this game might because it the environment was/is too hostile to new players. You get farmed to nothing if you aren't in a top alliance. There need to be more in-game protections that make it not worthwhile to farm countries into nothing because over 12 years the politics have proven to systematically farm people out of the game.

Thoughts?

The formulas would certainly require testing. One of the values I was wavering on the most was the coefficient of 1.5 in front of sqrt(-2*ln... That will clearly control how much spread there is to random success and failure. I have *no idea* what the current spy formula is for success/failure but this one will allow superior SPALs to be effective while still having chances of failure over some manner of lower SPAL ranges