I can get behind the idea of spies costing less the more you have (even so far as to have them decrease exponentially every million or so total spies), in addition to Spy_power=spies*acres^(-1/2).

The suggestion for making it a more dramatic -1/3 is due to the massive expense of holding high spal at high acres, which decreasing the expense curtails. It should be easier to run 200 spal at 50k acres than 5k which currently it is not. So if it were a combination of the two, the end result is roughly the same, although it does more to reward high acre high spal countries, rather than punish those with low acre high spal. Imo win/win. I can way get behind that.

I think decreasing CD to a constant 3% is also reasonable but not as effective as having a faster spy dr on CD. You'll still be breaking a 10m troop country at under 4m with 20 CD and 7 demo. If spy dr hits at 10 - 4% CDs, you'd be looking at more like 4.5m than a 3.8m break on a 10m troop country. Since 7% of troops is basically peanuts in most cases, i think both solutions are good.

I think you are 100% spot on Gerdler.

I think most of us do that. I wholeheartedly disagree with making it super easy for bad players to kill good players just for war participation sake tho. I get your point but you should simply have to build more than a 5k acre country with a little over a million spies to take down a 50k acre country with a little under 10.

I hate to revert to sarcasm but if the genuine argument of wardogs is "this is a war game," then more powerful nations should be more powerful. Right now running 200 spal on 5k acres is like the giving every millennial a participation trophy thing. It's just babying bad players so they can war better players and not feel like they are bad. When in reality half of the people that are better than them (i.e. 1a last 2 sets) didn't even want to war them in the first place.

Spies are one way along with the restart bonus and bot exploitation, that make wars endless instead of evident who has won. Fixing this flaw will improve the experience of war by greatly appreciating the value of a CF vs getting slaughtered after you lose repeatedly and still somehow hanging in there.

If this is a "war game," then wars should have definitive winners and losers.

Either way boltar it shouldnt be incentivized to run a country with 5k acres and 1m spies OVER running a country with 50k acres and 9m spies.

You have less cash expense, less food expense, cheaper production cost to maintain, lower spy losses on failed ops, fewer buildings required to produce spal thereby lowering cost, and a better spy power.

That's clearly not balanced in the most remote sense. It literally incentivizes having a bad country. If you needed something like 4 or 5m spies on 5k acres, you'd merely be hitting the same production walls as the larger country does, and not just be able to easily steal tech from bots to maintain an absurd spal. While that's easy peasy on 5k acres, on 50k acres same spal you get the same amount of tech per op but on higher expenses. It should be just as difficult to maintain spies on low acres as high acres and the fact that it isn't is a problem. Sin's rendition of Ugo's formula is spot on for a remedy to balance the cost of being low acres high spal.

I also don't think something that makes good players better at war and bad players worse at war degrades the war experience at all. This is absolutely not a case of something just to make war more difficult or something. It just means you will have a better chance of winning wars and distancing yourself if you are good at the game. And you should have to also be good to take down good players.

I would prefer spies*acres^(-1/3) for spy power, and spy drs to go into effect after 10 of any single op type, while CDs remain equal in power. The number of total ops before dr could remain the same tho.

I think tbh it's arbitrary because you'd probably have to run 50% indies to achieve a spal relative to someone who drops in. While dropping land still should benefit a waller, someone with under a million spies total should not be able to have a high success rate over a well built war country with 8m+.

I think what you just posted for a formula is more in line with how it should be. Ugo plainly had a great idea it just wasn't quite dramatic enough imo. By that formula a country with 50k acres and 100 spal (5m spies) is 135720 spy power. In order to achieve that on 5k acres, you'd need about 2.4m spies or around 480 SPAL. Not impossible but also as difficult to achieve/maintain.

That seems extremely fair to me.

Ugolinoll nailed how spies should work, though i dont think it is dramatic enough. It should be about half as effective as that on low acres or less.

I can personally speak for the fact that maintaining 8m spies on 50k acres is more economically difficult than 800k spies on 5k acres with a third MBs. If you wanted to accentuate the ability for people to run spy heavy strats you would in theory want them to grow and make huge spy countries and not dramatically implode their countries into 5k acre war machines like i often do in a stocks war and live off stock.

The goal of the game should be to grow your lands into these things. That's why oil destock feels so weird too. Building it all just to absolutely wreck it to help you win? Seems strange.....

No country with 200 spal has a good economy, large or small. The bigger country doesn't produce enough to offset the heavy expenses of spies. If you wanted to raise the economy of a large country who actually built up with their large spal, you could in theory reduce the expenses of spies to make them more worth building on a large country.

The floating CD scares me because i like concrete math. If you're going to kill someone you kinda want to not have to recalc. As sin suggested, CDs should plainly just hit heavy drs after 10, or be reduced to a concrete 2%. Ty <3 a warleader.

Whether or not they scale spies effictiveness better, if you're going to be a 200 spal person, I think it should be EASIER to maintain on higher acreage, not more difficult.

The only ways to achieve this are by either lowering the effectiveness of spies on low acres, or lowering the expenses of carrying spies. While they both achieve the same ends, lowering the effectiveness on low acres benefits those who are built well, such as the better netters and builders at war, whereas lowering the expense seems to only benefit those who build indies heavily.

Leto might know. They played in fake pdm together once or twice

I guess it just sorta showcases how many people are just here to click buttons with old friends haha.

Don't even care. Lets click buttons together bro.

http://www.earthempires.com/alliance/57/ranks/416

The funniest part is that country lived thru a war

There's honestly just too few very engaged war dogs atm. War clans now aside from us is like one semi active dude tries to tell some other semi active dude when to hit and then a bunch of people who just want to show up to hit something and go "hell yeah! It died" and have no interest in figuring out why they are hitting.

They also clearly have no education on how to build whatsoever. You can count on warclans for atrocious builds.

2006 with a splash of lime.

We already do kill suiciders for a pile of tags. Unfortunately we are the only non-isolationist war tag and theres like 10 of us.

If like stones or sol communicated with the community at all i think they'd be doing the obvious thing which is helping like elders because it does effect all of us.

Will help him get top 20ish or 30 or so if theres ever a server war again.

Whelp now you get to listen to marshal ask for reps that are owed from people who stole PDM's name in your absence.

Have fun! Lol

I didn't realize it was you and tan restarting PDM. I'm still not going to adjust my estimation but I will say I have slightly more faith in you. Gl

If evo and pdm go to war, how many total kills do you think we'd see? I'm going with 5...

57 mulligans is a lot of mulligans.

"New player"

You're*

Don't be offended by Marshal's offer. That's approximately how much he stocks in any given set.

*giggles wildly*

Yay TaSk1!!!

I'm only 60% disappointed this thread exists BECAUSE LoC kinda took last set off.

But I'm still 40% disappointed

Pffffffffffffft

And thats coming from the one fluffhead who has been right a few times doing that on this server. I know you are usually better but i promise you'll look and see how convoluted it is. It's waaaay harder on 1a

I think people would think its fun to trace kill on 1a if it were as underpopulated as ffa.

Bet you find it faster than me fluffhead.

I promise its so much harder on 1a. There's so much rif raf it gets convoluted sometimes. And josey is a hidden profile in the 700s on deaths. It's rrrrrrrrreal hard to figure which is him atm.

When a hidden profile with like 8 deaths on 1a ticks up one its just hard af. I get lucky sometimes but 1a is a fluffshow on that compared to ffa.

Yeah thats the one. 1 acct per ip (unless safelisted), 1 forum nick per acct, 100% mandatory open profiles (with perhaps closed country data if wanted). And a continuation of deletions for proxies and whatnot.

I don't think many players would have a problem with this at all.

Thats what i meant by 1 nick per IP. Yes forum nick but yes also 1 acct too. The whole shebang. Unless safelisted all other accts go poof.

I get theres vpns and proxies and whatnot but it just adds an extra step.

It's not like LCN had a 50 plus reunion and did the vanishing act the next set, while around 10 of them posed as new members to infiltrate tags for the purpose of suiciding.

No one remembers that at all......

Another mistake I won't make that would be solved by 1 nick per IP and 100% open profiles.