For me its the opposite of Assassin, the grabbing and other stuff is the chores I do to be able to do interesting strategizing and spreadsheeting of my stocking, techs and destocking.

If you look at the news of my countries compared to the other top players on all servers you will see that I grab hard for a shorter period of time than anyone else. Thats partly because I think its boring so I work to avoid it. :)

I think he will finish well but he isnt in a position to challenge for t3 right now (that may ofc change).

Maj1 and Ratski do that as a strategy to limit retal ability from players. Usually they follow up with retals on the retal from both countries if one of them gets retalled. Its a well known play and they have been deleted for that and much much worse many times before. I dont know if they are up to 20 or 50 deletions by now.

It's happened to me several times too, but because I have seen the play so many times before I know how to deal with it. Doesnt matter tho, when I get 2 PS and am forced to buy up enough defence to stop them which inflates my NW too early my whole turn save is ruined and my set is wasted, even if they get deleted after. Theres now one less reason not to play express, imo.

bayrock you gave them the ammunition with which to shoot you. You could have avoided being purpled with 100% chance.

As Ugo states most are amused by this. I'm not. I just hope you choose to learn and become a positive influence on this community rather than blaming everyone for your own mistakes.

Who is the cry baby here for real?

You got a guy sending messages that break the rules to what now, perhaps one, perhaps half a dozen players and getting deleted for it, then blaming the mods and the players who reported him. Comeon..

If you break the rules in a way that is actionable, its your own fault if you get deleted. And if you give your opponents the reason to want you deleted and the means to get you deleted why the heck wouldnt they use the chance they have been given?

If you follow the rules you won't get deleted. Celphi and whoever else you were up against know better than to break the rules.

You can read the rules just like anyone else can and you combined efforts this set led you to a purple country, no win. You have actually never won express so in all likelyhood you have either flawed game knowledge or a tendency to mess up like this over and over again. Would be good for you if you learn from your mistakes instead of blaming others.

My first 3 full sets on express:
1. farmed a player and got into war because I had no idea about bots and how to make them out. Finished T50. Could have blamed the player. Learned there were bots and how to find them instead.
2. Forgot GDI and got a missile shower from a dude I had not hit. Finished T10. Could have blamed the player, but instead I realized to join GDI.
3. Won with an indy.

I could have made more mistakes along the way and it could have taken 4 or 6 sets but its my attitude that made me learn from my mistakes and get better with every set. You should change yours. If you do; winning (eventually) is inevitable.

Indy is quite possibly the hardest strategy to jump/stock effectively with. Experience, attention to market, maths etc all play a role and theres variations for every server and perhaps every reset.

Oil based jump is a recipe that can be boiled down to 13-15 steps that you should just follow to the letter every reset. indy is as far from that as you can get. Which is nice. In general stocking and destocking in primary is still quite 'artful', which is epic.

I've been in the same situation. Only conclusion I've drawn is that cheaters fluff fluff.

Congrats man. Winning without GDI is a rare feat! Sure it takes a bit of luck too, but a lot of skill as well.

It's because everyone who asks a question or is looking for answers risks seeing your posts and your answers which convey faulty information most of the time. You drown out good advice and you drown out reason.

It's grey area, just like your spamming.

Whats the #?

You say dumbass i hear raw diamond. :P

Awesomeness!

if you finish top 10 you almost certainly qualified for game A. You probably just clicked the wrong button and joined lower level again.

What purpose would it serve?

Saying "I'm jealous" is better, it doesn't cause FR headaches and is better for both players.

I assume Neil is a new guy comming back for SoFs return and so he is not used to seeing this every reset. I would remind him that SoF introduced Land:Land retals back in E2025.

If you want land you should grab bots, it's much more efficient than land-trading with Omega.

armies always return on even minutes. I'm not sure how it rounds, but you can go to military screen and see return time of -0.01 at times, which just means your army will return at next minute change.

I guess some could be given the benefit of the doubt at times when a player has provoked two other players. But when its you and ratski for the 80th time double-teaming someone you cant expect them to give you that, can you?

There are minimum levels of cs and land and civs

First off most of that is just work i do. They are chores. Not the reason i play. If i wanted to grab bots i could play the ai server or ffa. I would be able to grab bots 500 times a day.

When the grabbing is done the fun begins. That said its enjoyable sometimes to compete with other good grabbers like Ebert(in express), hash(in alliance) and vic(in alliance).
I guess there are others who either quit or quit trying before my time.
Ebert does things i cant do almost every time he plays theo techer. Im pretty good with demo techer but nowhere near with theo techer. That gives me something to work towards when i play.

Banning you for spamming would be grey area at most.

Well, I think if I understand it right he will just use his powers to remove all of Marshal's post count. Hopefully nothing else.

That doesnt display DR, it only shows how many successful hits on them last 24 hours. Doesnt account for half-lives, hits out, type of hit or def helds. So while it can give somewhat of a hint its not an accurate repressentation of what the DR actually is.

But either way Celphi is fooling himself if he believes the best grabbers now wont still be the best grabbers when his tool is completed. And yet even more if he believes grabbing is the only determinant of who does well.

I just checked. There are 7 sets in which a country have managed 70m+ NW, 6 of those times occured when we had 50 bots and they had not been modified to get more defence as QZ changed them last summer. Once was with low def bots but with 35 bots.

Four times by me, three times by ebert, zero times by everyone else. So if it was so easy why was it only the two of us?

As sinistril demonstrated techer is not even dominating anymore with the bot code we have played with for almost a year now and you are complaining on a meta that no longer exists (and indeed only existed for like 4-5 months).

Back when we had 50 bots with the old code and it was possible to get 70m nw, how many players other than ebert an i managed that? It was that way for like 30 sets. So if 70m was easy why didn't more people make it?

I welcome you to make a script to calculate DR, celphi. The main result from it will be that it saves time for people. I used to calculate DR by hand for each target in Express. Thats a very tedious process and its boring too but i was the first to 70m nw doing that even before there were 50 bots and the old nw record was 55 m ne or something.

Landgrabbing returns also has a nw component and DR cant be calculated precisely since there are hidden parameters that we cant know. So even with a script to calculate dr grabbing will still be an artform, one in which great grabbers will still excel, just that it will take less time for everyone.
The excessive time that this game demands from people is one of the main reasons people stop playing so i think you would do the game a great favor doing that.

"Contest who can exploit the bots best" is such a weird thing to say. I think the expression is idiotic. Tournament/Primary is a "contest of who can exploit nubs best" then? Its the same skillset roughly. I sell at a price I think will sell, I grab players/bots with a number of jets I think will break, etc.

Because Express has fewer turns than other servers it would be a mostly all-xp server without bots, so the bots make the server better. 1900 turns is like 12k acre all-xp casher/indy then cash out for the win. We already have that on another server: Tournament.
In order for express to be a unique experience to the other servers it needs to have bots. maybe not 50 bots, and maybe the casher/farmer/indy bots can be designed to spend their cash in another way and maybe the techer and rainbow bots can do more to balance it out.

Either way the bots with the correct up to date code are better than no bots for a unique and fun experience. QZ should just wake up and restart the bot asap.

there are 3 servers without bots and 3 with bots. I find the variety is great.

back 1 year ago you could have said techer was the only strat that could compete in express but as sinistril has demonstrated thats not the case now. You got essentially 2 strategies that can win. How is that different from any other server?

If you dont like techer or indy you will have to work a lot harder for a little less or try another server. Casher is great in primary. Techer sucks in primary.

Express would be dead without bots. The bot code should be modified so they themselves create a balanced market, thats requires someone who plays the game to tinker with it back and forth a couple of months making small changes instead of the fluffing upheavals we have had every time QZ has touched the code lately.

he also for no reason doubled the express bots and while it was suggested that 1a needed 50 more bots he added 150 more.

The bots are not the problem, the problem is how they are implemented. also when the bots actually work with the current up to date code indies can compete with techers, and casher has been improved by it.

Either way you can't any assertion of what the bots do the game when the bot code is wrong, we are not playing with current code, so anything you see this set does not repressent the status quo.

Your constitution has had amendments due to the world changing since it was written. It will be changed again. Your second amendment will be rewritten or reinterpreted, just a matter of time. <3

Also when your military turns on you with tanks and blackhawks I really hope you don't face them with shotguns and AR-15s.

In the failed coup in turkey people walked up to a bridge that was blocked by tanks and talked the tank commanders down. The people were unarmed. If they had been armed with AR-15s I think the tanks would have won. :)

The latest school massacre in Sweden had a deranged person walking in there with a machete/sword hacking away at people.

Death toll: 3 (including assailant who was shot by a policeman)
Injuries: 2 (1 with only minor injuries)

That was our columbine.

I have guns, my father has guns, my grandfather has guns. I think I shot my first gun when I was like 6, but no one in my family is so deranged as to believe that those guns protect us from tyranny or home invasions. I won't take out a tank, APC or a helicopter with a hunting rifle or a shotgun and they are locked in safes, as they should be, when they are not in use, so useless against a home invasion situation. Having a functional society and a somewhat functional democracy and having an education that leads to better paying jobs and thus living in better areas is how I keep safe.

The guns are a hobby, nothing more, nothing less. Some hunt, some shoot at the range for fun, some compete, those are all viable reasons to own a gun. If someone in my vicinity starts talking about fighting a tyrannical government or protecting themselves with their guns I will quickly remove myself from the vicinity of that person due to the psycho vibes. Thats another good way to stay safe.

This happens every time that you get the tax rebate on your last turn of attacking if your tax income is not divisible by 3.

Its probably quite an easy fix but we have no active devs so it wont be fixed, also this doesnt hurt anyone. :)

All the players in the game have adapted to a game with the changes that took place last year, and yet now we are playing with old bot code for no reason. The strats are unbalanced because players picked strats based on the market conditions etc that the 'current' bot code will result in, but since we are using old bot code that will not be balanced.

I wont tell exactly what will happen as I stand to benefit greatly from this and want to be alone in that but X players will have their resets completely ruined by this and there is nothing they can do about it.

PS I think the indy bots work better with the old code than the newest code, so there is that. But all the other improvements are gone.

You are no longer using the latest version of the bot code.

E2025 was not around in 94.

If you said the game had been around for 20+ years you would have been right. If you make arguements in a way that people don't like and you hit home your points with erroneous statements people are going to call you on them.

The game has changed quite a lot since then. It has not changed much in the last 5 years, but it changed quite a lot before. Yes we do suffer from neglectful devs at times and we need changes and bugfixes. But you have to learn to separate developers from moderators, they have very different tasks and responsibilities. Blanket statements about mods and devs not doing their jobs are not very helpful to the mods who actually do their job.

You can still use it in most browsers.

bore

Its just an outdated certificate again I think.

no

Instead of undo button they should make space so its harder to misclick and buy all food when you wanna buy all tanks

I think of Marshal like the Bell test for Quantum mechanics.

An analogy is a dice player who who bets on 7 and gets 7 100% of the time. Twice or Thrice in a row might be luck. Ten times is incredibly unlikely but a million times in a row would be impossible without some sort of interference like weighted dice or other forms of cheating.

Similarily improbable it would be if a player bet on 7 a million times in a row and never get it. Thats just another pattern that randomness cant predict.

And if you think about it Marshal has probably been wrong more than anyone else on these forums has been right - an impressive feat in itself. His accuracy is improbable if not impossible without knowing all the answers and deliberatly answering wrong. I therefore conclude that Marshal has to be one of the more knowledgeable players in EE in order to perform at such a (low) level so consistently.

Change the start-up procedure so that they always run

First off I don't think Prime can restart the bots on his own. perhaps he has a number to call/text tho. I have only sent a few forum messages but mind you I did that as I started my thread on this which was right after the game was up again and I saw the bots were not. That was 2 days and some hours change (and add the 12 hour EE downtime to make it closer to 3 days total). But remember its still not fixed.

This is all completely avoidable. Servers go down, fine, I'm sure its not worth it to create redundancies for this game, but when it is up there is no reason, aside from neglect, that it shouldnt function as intended.

Yes this express set was ruined, tho express is so short and theres a new set very soon. If it starts affecting FFA or alliance thats when people start to leave. Best avoid that.

Thats the problem, if you raise the price the demand goes down. Anyone who is stockpiling isnt buying a set amount of bushels a day but he buys bushels maybe with a set number of dollars each day. And a good player doesnt even do that but we change our behaviours depending on the food price - If the price is high enough or the market is thin enough we will avoid stocking bushels and you farmers will have lost part of the potential of your income peak which is around now.

unless you got a monopoly or you collude with the only other big farmer there should be no way to benefit from making a buyout against a game full of rational players. Most countries are governed by irrational players or bots(no bots on primary) tho, both of which can be taken advantage of.
I have only benefitted from my own buyouts on rare occasions on two servers. Primary is not one of them. It's generally a bad idea and most people lose money in such ventures.

Either way the devs have decided that there should be bots in FFA, express and alliance and right now they are offline due to the usual neglect they always show on downtimes.

I think the best case scenario for me is that the bots are down another 2-2.5 days. I guess the express set is completely botched for a lot of people if that happens, if someone were to care about them...

When you get that, don't forget that you were the one who asked for it.

It's more interesting without you.