Good luck with that :)

Not quite but close.

Right now every time you go to the main screen, it shows you market activity since the last time you went to the main screen. Turn that into a summary and preserve the ability to get the same listing if desired.

Similarly you can also see your market history for the entire set. Organize that into a day by day summary while also preserving the ability to see the whole list.

I feel this may have unintentionally gone down a CD path. But more generally for spies and as said in the original post, why not reward specialization for spy countries like we do for other strategies? Basically disincentivize running a small, crappy, rainbow spy country.

A few thoughts:
-Require building specialization, e.g. a certain ratio of ICs or maybe MBs to spies for max effectiveness - combined with the prior ideas of square root or third root of land in the denominator of the new SPAL.
-At least for harmful ops, decrease the baseline success rate, up max tech to like 200%, and require 175% tech to get to today's baseline success rate.
-Increase military expenses due to spies when running ops (similar to how oil increases expenses for military actions). Those spies need hazard pay! Perhaps 2x or 3x the baseline spy expense. If taking my first idea to require MBs for max effectiveness, could also increase baseline spy expense to further encourage MBs.
-Increase spy losses for failed ops.
-Increase returns based on strat tech.
-Effectively ensure a failed op every 25 ops or so on harmful ops to discourage spy griefing.

Just some starting thoughts.

My post is about the main page when first logging into your country. But there’s not a thread for that, so this is a close-ish thread.

It would be really helpful to have a summary of market activity when hitting this page. Said in a slightly funny / snarky way, after a few hours logged out at certain parts of the reset, I would need to be a computer to make sense of the list of market activity.

What would be great is a table summary: good bought or sold, average (and maybe min and max)per unit price without commissions, total proceeds / cost, when last good was sold / bought, and volume remaining for sale or on SOs. Then, if I wanted to, I could tap into all news since last visit to the main page or into news for a particular good. And then could always see all market news as today and also see a daily personal summary in table form like I described above.

Thanks!

Wait wait! I thought EE was all about drama? Servant and I are learning, but we’re pretty terrible at drama still :(

Are you saying that this wasn’t an FS?? Now I don’t know what to do with the 35 tanks I bought for $320. Maybe AB CS isn’t a thing after all.

I always expected this from SOL. Waiting around until we were 5 resets in and didn’t expect it. And then launching a devastating FS. We’ll come back stronger than ever. You’ll see!

-Please let us enter number of turns to tech instead of points. It’s almost always how I plan to tech, and converting turns to points creates friction and slows me down.
-Consider allowing users to specify a target tech, e.g. 120% weapons tech, tell users how many turns to get there, and ask if they want to tech those turns (if available). Could extend this functionality to buying tech, too.

Those are both much more in line with how people actually play the game. I can think of no example where I wanted to tech exactly 27,193 points of a particular tech. There’s also no loss of advantage to anyone from this functionality- by trial and error someone can figure out how to get to 120%, for example.

Thank you!

Looks like I can post with my old LCN alt - so must be the member thing. Thanks!

I’d just ask us to collectively push on things that could reduce friction, make things faster/easier, and keep people in the game - especially when there is no advantage lost (e.g. my tech to x% idea). I’ll post more thoughts in UI.

I can’t post on the UI forum for some reason (which is maybe a bug report itself). So will do here.

It generally feels more modern which is great!

I do think most of the changes so far are technical rather than experiential. For example, I usually want to tech a certain number of turns instead of a certain number of points, say 25 bus and 25 res. I’m a math person, but doing the multiplication of turns and tpt on a phone and making sure I type it correctly just creates unnecessary friction.

That said, sometimes I might actually want points, e.g. getting to 120% strat before an attack. But then I have to go to the wiki, create an Excel formula, figure out how many points I need, tech those points and realize I did something wrong, go back to Excel to find a typo, recalculate how many more points I need, and then go tech those. An alternative would be an option to tech to a certain %, telling you how many turns that would take, and then letting you confirm that - same thought process for buying tech.

Or for attacking, an alternative could be an in-game version of country search based on various filters including DRs, a tap to attack (or spy if you really want to), pre-filling attacking forces based on your op or on parameters you pre-set (e.g. maybe you want to assume 2x allies and 20% oversend, or maybe 5 jets for every $1 of networth), and maybe suggesting and then buying any additional military needed. (I think the preference that already exists for public vs private goods is a simple but good example of the type of pre-set that I’m talking about that approaches the coding from the angle of what the user is trying to do.)

Some of what I suggest blurs the line between putting in the work (to understand strategy and to make sure you pay attention to details) and reducing friction on a phone jumping to other things like calculator - or of stupid mistakes like bad mental math or forgetting someone is a dict. And we can debate how far we go down that path. But I do think it’s be good to include in the UI rebuild what users might actually be trying to do (e.g. tech turns vs points), looking for natural connections across actions (e.g. ops into war room), and bringing in house at least the most basic functions that happens on third party applications or sites. I can provide more specifics if/when I can post on the UI forum :)

Agree with Gerdie on griefers. Also I’d take more outages because I would plan accordingly and not get to 120(100). But I did run nearly full on turns for probably three weeks last reset in alliance (pretty sure also lost turns all from my own fault), and an ill-timed outage like last night would have made a big dent in my final net. I also suspect that outages have impacted express outcomes - but griefers moreso (which is why I don’t play express anymore).

Free trial offer of statuses or in-game bonuses like 10 extra turns! I tell you I’m still paying for HBO after signing up to only watch a single movie like 12 months ago (and right now I’m sitting here posting on EE instead of saving myself $10 every month by going over there and canceling it).

I guarantee you that lots of people would be willing to put forward time, money, or resources they may have to address some basics. For example, I know many people said they had the technical expertise to get the bots up and running again several sets ago when they were down for a few days. And it’s great to see so many familiar names as developers. And maybe someone has a gently used UPS or for some reason an extra Tesla Powerwall. And finally, don’t over-index on me, but I’m somewhat less interested in any of my money going into a general pool as opposed to something specific such as cloud hosting - in the same way that the new developers are behind the very specific opportunity of a new UI because it is a pain point today for them and their EE friends.

Multi-tasking is apparently important! Wish I could do it!

It’s great to hear there is more to the plan besides UI (and apologies if I didn’t see it on another thread). I appreciate things have been side of life projects so to speak. But look for ways to make “bad” things like the outages yesterday into good things. For something with a clear plan on fixing a specific pain point for a specific price, I bet people will pitch in - just ask and tell us what you need. Maybe do a Wikipedia style ask in-game!

I really hope that doesn’t sound patronizing or anything...

I almost titled my post “ask for donations to keep servers running” but thought it was too narrow given some other items I listed. I know people have offered to pay to buy EE before. And I know many people are interested in seeing it do better. So, yes, what does it cost?

Also please don’t belittle people and call people names who make well-intentioned suggestions. Seems not a great way to get open feedback on things like UI development.

Nothing will turn off new, returning, or even existing players faster than continued outages. I lost 30-40 turns from this latest one - if that had happened last reset in alliance, it would have cost me at least $50m net, possibly a lot more at certain points of the reset. A power outage or the ineptitude of Verizon should not determine the winner of a reset or swing the outcome of a war.

To the list of basics I’d also add stopping bot outages, eliminating mid-reset code changes, significantly reducing the impacts of griefers, and automating a post on a thread every 5-10 minutes from Marshal’s account (should save him a lot of time).

This post is not intended to be snarky (maybe only the part about Marshal). It’s not saying abandon UI changes. Just don’t forget to do the basic blocking and tackling while adding new things to your playbook.