Damn, I picked the wrong time to come back then :-(

I figured LaF was doing what it used to do last time I played, and have 3 or 4 netting sets in a row.

Damnit, I stole your wheels, and you still found a way to leave.

Let me know when LaF becomes warmongers. Enshula is a step in the wrong direction, he's a tree hugging pansy. But I guess thats what LaF wants :-(

Grats Enshula!

collectives have a ceo?

With SoL at war again, is it okay to grab them and accept the 1:1 retal from their police and to hope you come out ahead in land?

Or should the alliances that SoL grabbed while still under the protection of a war-DNH again grant SoL a war-DNH again and forget the past?

Good philosophy doesn't make a good alliance leader. Lack of self preservation instinct makes for a bad alliance leader. Lack of discipline makes for a bad alliance leader. Lack of interest makes for a bad alliance leader.

I didn't take every 3rd set off a while back just to avoid being promoted (although that was a contributing factor). I also took every 3rd set off because I lack the sustainable interest in the game to play it for more than a few months in a row. I lack self preservation instinct, discipline, and interest.

Yeah, that's where I'll go if I want to have a netting set. LaF needs more warmongers, and I'm too lazy to try and start a pro-war revolution inside LaF. Or maybe I just know I'd fail if I tried that.

I speak truth. Right, Pang?

It's foolish to grab an alliance and to believe that 1:1 retals should protect you. It is okay to grab an alliance and to believe that turrets should protect you. Unfortunately, its way too easy to break someone, so the practice of midfeeding has mostly disappeared from the server.

There is nothing inherently 'fair' about 1:1 retals, land:land retals, country:country retals, or alliance:alliance retals. It is all a preference of whatever benefits your own alliance the most, and whether you have the warring ability and willingness to enforce that policy.

Because it takes the willingness to piss off the leaders of your own alliance and to risk the netting sets of everyone in your alliance due to your own selfishness. But if you're in a war alliance that's looking for a fight, then it will happen a lot more often.

This is a Hobbesian state of nature. Might makes right, and whatever you have the ability to do, it is your right to do. There is no powerful force in the game attempting to force an arbitrary idea of fairness upon others. The most powerful alliance in the game decided to topfeed alliances while they were still under the protection of a war-DNH from those alliances. Their justification appears to be that the war-DNH was only given out of fear, not of fairness, so that they are in no way obligated to be fair to those who were fair to them.

Since there are players who play as untagged contrary to the 'best interests' of their country, and there are alliances that enjoy getting killed (specifically imaginary numbers), it is clear that countries in this game lack the self-preservation instinct and desire to thrive that countries and people have in the real world. Without this self-preservation instinct or the desire to meet traditional ideas of success, we find this anarchistic atmosphere to be especially lethal.

Until players and alliances see the continuation of the game as a primary goal, then the game will continue to be subjected to efforts by players and alliances which work towards the decrease of the player base of this game and will lead to its demise.

I think my post is sufficiently long and wordy that no one is reading it anymore, so I can say something inflammatory like "Pang is gay" and no one will even read it. But to prevent people from just reading the last few sentences and realizing the shocking revelation I have just uttered, I must now return to the previous topic.

Might makes right, and there is no morality in this game. If you wish to claim a morality for yourself, then you are in a minority here. Most players make no thought to morality and merely play as their alliances dictates they should. They farm not because they view it as moral, but because they've been taught that farming untaggeds is a necessary evil. And when some untaggeds fight back, alliances kill off all of them. Because this is an alliance based game, the alliance holds responsibility for the actions of any of its members, and unfortunately, untagged countries are forced to take responsibility for the actions of other unrelated untagged countries.

Despite this being an alliance server, we don't seem to have permitted retalling an alliance for a grab, merely retalling the country from that alliance. In Utopia's top kingdoms (back when I played Utopia 6-8ish years ago), retaliation was done kingdom to kingdom, not province to province, and that method was good for the game. It would be interesting to see an alliance try alliance:alliance retals instead of country:country retals.

If you wish to play as an untagged, you must realize that you can and will be killed at any time without provocation. But you also have the right to grab any alliance you wish. Since you know that playing as an untagged, that you will not survive the whole reset, then you're self preservation instinct cannot kick in, and thus, you have no reason not to farm/maim a targetted alliance aside from waiting until you have a stronger ability to do harm to whichever enemies you have.

fourthed

The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact certainly was breakable. Silly Stalin, he should have signed a uNAP, not a NAP.

Because they cost around 1/3rd to 1/4th as much as tanks but provide half the offense. And if you send your tanks out on a planned strike, they provide 0 defense.

Did Blake & his crew ever come over to Earth Empires?

Rephrase: Why are they grabbing alliances that granted them a War DNH?

If they are, why are they topfeeding other alliances?

And if you're a good player, you're done grabbing in a week or two.

Can a random number generator picking from a finite set exist?
Can a random number generator picking from an infinite set exist?

What criteria must be met for randomness to be achieved?

It would be extremely difficult to prove the FA shipments, but yes, I would have a problem with that, too.

In Utopia, the top kingdoms didn't do kingdom:province retals, they did kingdom:kingdom retals. Earth has done things differently, but has never provided adequate justification for why that way is better.

Why should anyone in the alliance get to retal rather than just the country that was hit? Why should only the country that did the attack get retalled, rather than anyone in their alliance? Why should 1:1 retals be used, with escalating 2:1 on the 2nd hit etc? Why should land:land be used? Why should landgrabs be legit retals, but spy ops aren't legit?

It's all about whoever has the power determines what retal policies are accepted. The server will be a dangerous place if you let alliances boost one country up with FA/free land and give him free reign to grab other alliances who haven't done such a thing. The stigma against farming your alliance mates has prevented this from happening, but as the stigma wears off, I'm sure some alliances will start doing this. And then we'll have wars to determine whether or not you're allowed to feed someone land & FA to make them unbreakable so that they can grab the top countries of competing alliances without getting retalled.

If you gain land from alliancemates, then you have an unfair advantage over other countries. Give a techer free land at the start of the set, and his economy will now allow him to get enough defense to bounce retals, when without the donation from his alliance, he would be breakable.

Therefore, any hit he makes on another alliance should entitle his target to retaliate on anyone from the alliance that hit him, rather than having to hit back on the specific country that hit him.

If you gain any land from alliancemates, then you give up the right to grab any other alliance.

If you do gain land from alliancemates and then grab another alliance, in my opinion, the retalling alliance should be entitled to get all off its land back off anyone they want to in the grabbing alliance.

My first few months playing, I did a commie indy/techer hybrid and a dictator indy/techer hybrid, and got to about 8-10 million networth in tourney with them. Basically, I played an indy, and didn't know what to do with my turns, so I built some labs and started teching. While explore gains were good, I was mostly indies (to about 5k acres), and then started building just labs after that. My dictator ended up with like 14k acres, with around 8k of them as research labs. That was back when I played earth 2025 with a Utopia mindset - I played Utopia before I played Earth 2025.

Will Assange win the Nobel Peace Prize next year?

Cut and Paste FTL

gwagers - real mathematicians don't use numbers

imag warring? Wow so much has changed since I last played ....

Yeah, but my solution is filled with typos because I wrote it way too late at night :-(

The idea is there, but the grammar and spelling isn't.

edit: actually, your wording seems imprecise

Do you mean that there must exist a subset, or that there possibly could exist a subset?

It's a trivial question if you mean that there possibly could exist a subset, so I'm guessing you mean that there must exist a subset no matter what groupings you use.

True my first explanation was the most basic (and was correct), but it did not satisfy the requirement of proving that only one loop can be generated. I then decided that multiple loops could be generated, before realizing that my first thought was indeed correct that every displaced person could be traced back to the thieving Mr Ford.

Tertius - your explanation is needlessly complex.

By the way, all you fools using 'n's and numbers need to stop trying to do arithmetic and start doing mathematics.

Its 50%

Two possible outcomes with equal likelihood

Outcome 1: Mr Ford takes someone's seat who takes someone else's seat etc. until somewhere along the line, someone takes Mr. Ford's seat.

Outcome 2: Mr Ford takes someone's seat who takes someone else's seat etc. until somewhere along the line, someone takes the last person's seat.

As soon as one of the two outcomes is met, the loop closes.

The Loop goes from Mr Ford takes person A's seat. Until we get to person A, everyone else takes their assigned seat. Then person A takes either your seat, Mr Ford's seat, or person B's seat. Until we get to person B, everyone else takes their assigned seat. Then person B takes either your seat, Mr Ford's seat, or person C's seat. We can go through as many people as we need to, but regardless of how many people we go through, the chances of it ending when someone takes Mr. Ford's seat are equal to the chances of it ending when someone takes your set.

W - why should there be a heavy tax associated with the stock goods on market function? That'd just cause everyone to use the maximum sale price for goods instead to avoid that tax.

We're all more mature now (hopefully).

Fooglmog - because I thought some of the attempts at proofs might be entertaining. Unfortunately, none of them turned out to be.

I also thought I might get someone to try and find a counterexample, without looking on the internet to realize that a supercomputer has already tested all even numbers under 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 and not found a counterexample. And that didn't happen either.

How about a "sell max" button for each type of good, so that one doesn't have to type in how much they want to sell unless they don't want to sell the maximum amount possible?

"you can't prove this"

That statement has not been proven, hanlong.

The Continuum Hypothesis has been proven to be unprovable in ZF and ZFC set theory. It is probably the best example of proving a statement to be unprovable. But if your assertion is that the goldbach conjecture is unprovable, then you must provide a proof that it is unprovable.


I'm a constructivist mathematician, along the lines of Brower and Godel, so my standards for proof are extremely rigid.

We're frowning on your idea that a change was needed.

Furthermore, you made a blatantly false assertion that everyone frowns on buyouts, when a large number of people do not frown on buyouts.

I'm against setting caps. I'm for individual player setting blocks out there to benefit from buyout attempts. Smarter players already do that.

And with markets that have smaller supply and demand, single players are already able to conduct buyouts. Due to the need of players for their goods to sell, players cannot afford to put too many goods at the market at a price that will likely not sell, thus markets are incredibly thin. At the right time of day, when demand is highest, it takes very little cash to poke a hole in the market and to send it far higher than it normally is. I 'exploited' this aspect of markets many times about 5-7 years ago on the tournament server with solo food buyouts.

If warring is a team-based affair, why can't netting be the same way? If 6 people can all attack someone one after another, with no gain for themselves and incurring military loss and oil usage, why is it wrong for 6 people to all buy the same type of technology one after another, at no gain to their own countries?

Your idea is basically against teamwork involved in netting. Furthermore, it penalizes the more intelligent players who had adapted to the buyouts aspect of Earth 2025 by making money with tech blocks.

Crap, does this mean you fixed the negative buildings bug, too?

Can every even number greater than two be written as the sum of two prime numbers? If yes, provide a valid proof. If no, provide a counterexample.

If you don't like land:land, then stop being such a crappy player that people can retal you. Get more turrets, or stop whining about people retalling your attacks. Just because you can't defend your country from retaliation doesn't mean we should take pity on your nubbishness.

What's the harm in this? The TMBR strategy needs a lot of help to become a valid strategy earlier on in sets, and once netters run out of stockpile, it will be balanced out by the huge influx of military being sent to the public market.

And on another note, the earth empires wiki appears to have been taken over by noobs (I removed a Communist techer strategy from there), but one thing I noticed is that in two places, it said that military bases ONLY reduce military upkeep costs for the first 29.5% of your land, and then only once you've built nearly 30% of your land as military bases, do they actually have an effect on private market prices.

I'm hoping that the earth empires wiki was wrong, and that it was just some idiot who doesn't understand the game that put in the bad information. If that's the case, I suggest that at a minimum, the formulas section of the earth empires wiki be non-editable except by the game administrators. There also should be some method of editing on the strategies section to keep strategies like Communist Techer out of there.

For someone like me returning after a long break - thats the site I get sent to when looking to see what has changed about the game. And I really hate having to sort through false information spread by nubs when trying to find out what has actually changed.

P.S. If Communist Techer is a viable strategy, then I apologize and formally acknowledge my current nubness.

You couldn't bounce the retal, so its a topfeed.

Thats my standards. Don't hit someone unless you're at war with their alliance, or unless you can bounce their retal. Get more defense!