Originally
posted by
DJBeif:
To your 1st point, candy, wouldn't lowering ghosts and making it more expensive also hurt those who are bottomfeeding or engaged in grabbing pacts with other alliances? It's a double-edged sword.
To your 4th point, the smaller can still catch up based on the formulas...he will always have a larger land pool to grab from, and could potentially even things out given enough trades. Also, he would be able to get to 95% NW to optimize the grab, and the bigger country would have to shrink, perhaps only by a small amount, to achieve the same optimization, which would always give the smaller country the advantage.
I can honestly say that I don't have the most knowledge of what to do with every acre, when to stop trading, what to do with this or that, and until I do, I won't be able to compete with the top 10ers, just as actual crappy netgainers won't be able to compete with people who have some knowledge of the game.
You can argue of any game that at some point, its ingenuity fades and things that were once new are now boring and 2nd nature, giving no challenge to anyone playing, so there will be a number of disillusioned people that will leave (unfortunately).
To answer your first point, lowering the ghosts won't really hurt bottomfeeders because they're the ones who repeatedly hit a country and by the time the bottomfeeders pass 30k-50k acres, most targets will be in deep country:country DR anyway such that most grabs will already entail 0 ghost acres. Therefore a ghost acre nerf at large land size won't hurt bottomfeeders.
Smaller countries won't catch up to the larger countries unless they're allowed to make lopsided landtrades. This won't happen in today's pacting environment which calls for more or less equal land gain if people are to trade. You see cases where small countries hit larger countries and the larger country will get two retals for one topfeed so that both gain roughly equal amounts of ghosts.
The simple argument I'm making is landtrading is not win-win. It's still win lose couched in the illusion that both are gaining ghost acres. People in this game are too dumb to realize that gaining land will only help you win relative to your competition if you gain more relatively to those you're trading against. So in aggregate, you'll have the sharp guys who landtrade well and get more ghosts than others for a t10 finish and the win, the middle of the pack guys who landtrade reasonably well and make t100, and then the folks who play all-explore or bottomfeed who get facepwned because the game structure doesn't support their viability. On top of that, landtrading is only really supportive of two strats: casher and farmer. Indy fails, techer fails (because by end of the reset tech always always crashes), oiler already fails, and MB already fails. If you look at the t10 this reset just look at the strat makeup to see for yourselves.
You can take a look at the reset that Xinhuan finished with 365mm nw on a 22k techer, but 1.) that was an absurd techer set where prices were uber-high the whole reset. they could get that high if we have an absurd number of landtraders I suppose but even so for the land it's much much much harder to finish that high. Rockman played an all explore techer that reset that finished 180mm which is pretty high for an all explore which is illustration of the favorable tech prices all set that set. 2.) Xinhuan beasted the markets that reset. I think there were multiple peaks and he hit them all. The point is it takes way way way more work for that to happen and on top of that a favorable market environment for a country to compete with fat landtraders. If you want to repeat that performance consistently it would take a tremendous amount of skill and also luck with the markets, both playing them and having serendipitous conditions.
We're now in an environment where only a couple strats are viable to do well. I don't think this is where we want to take the game. LaF and I could show everyone ourselves how silly things still are if we landtraded, but I think the game has gradually become a non-challenge and is really not fun so why bother.
