I would like to see a few more countries.

Maybe take away ghost acres if you hit your own countries to increase to benefit of LG someone else.

I agree with more countries as it would most likely add lots more cashers and farmers (killers) that would buy goods making for a better market place. Getting rid of ghost aces completly would make selffarming carry a higher price as those acers they farm would be harder to replace.

But I think the most important thing right now is you people need to play your countries and buy some of my troops. LOL

I am still of the opinion that we need at least two new governments. The last time Earth got any new flavor to it was when Fascism was added, unfortunately, I am still of the mind that the Bio-Missile was better than the EM and to some degree the Cruise Missile.

Your defense isn't what determines your losses, its your landsize. Encouraging grabbing, with the current grabbing formulas, deters players from growing. If it was made more difficult to break people, then there would be more incentive to grow. The combination of 3 offensive allies and a 50% planned strike bonus and the ability to stockpile cash before buying jets to make a grab makes it way too easy to break a larger country than your own.

If you want people grabbing you, it doesn't mean that you're running a good defense, it means that you are growing slower than other people. Although the idea of making someone's gains related to how many turrets their target has is an interesting idea. Maybe take the current land gains and multiply them by the ratio of the attacker's turret count to the defender's turret count. Maybe doing something so that having a lot of turrets isn't just a waste of money, but actually gives you the ability to defend your land, or at least lose less of it.

I think it would be nice to make spies improved. Like bring back Stealing from banks, rather then blowing up cash. Spy DR happens way to fast, maybe just take it away. Maybe you can steal missiles instead of destorying them.

Also, this is seprate from the spy changes, but sort of along the same lines. I think spy work should be a tracked stat. Not in the news, but each alliance should be able to track spy stats. Like % of successful ops, total readiness lowered, total civs killed, total building destory, etc. Peronsally I never run countries to do ops, because there is no real way to be reconized for your work. If it could be tracked so, just your alliance knows how you are doing, and it shows up in personal stats, then it would be something I would spend more time on. But until then I will just try and keep a good enough SPAL to avoid being a easy spy target.

I like your idea, Rockman. However, I would impose a limit to how many Standard Strikes you can do, and how much of your military readiness is affected by doing repetitive SS's.

It would give smaller tags much more ability to grow without worrying about some prick cutting their land by half, simply because they decided to grab a single country 6-10 times in a row.

Also, another thing would be to do something about the explore rate, so lets day some ass-hat from a larger tag farms the ever-living hell out of a single country in a smaller tag. Make it so that the explore rate would fluctuate depending on the amount of land you have, so if you lose half of your land, you can get it back without suffering a lower explore rate because of some fluff-cheese too lazy enough to grab multiple targets, his own countries, or do a batch explore.

I think the main problem is that we're getting 72 turns a day. Cut it to 36 turns a day, and the number of targets a bottomfeeder needs to find is cut in half. And its feasible for them to only grab with PS attacks, whereas with 72 turns a day only using PS attacks would slow your growth down a bit much.

Too many turns per day is one problem, another problem is the high number of turns a country is allowed to save on hand, which not only makes FSs way too devastating, but it also helps all-explore countries by making batch exploring better.

If we cut it down to 36 turns per day and 75(50) as the maximum number of turns, that would weaken FSs and it would strengthen bottomfeeding, compared to right now where this huge number of turns per day makes exploring & land-trading so strong.

? the explore rate is based on how many acres you have. If you lose enough aces your explore rate will go up.

would also make the game boring as holy hell.

true popcom, with 36 turns a day we would need an 80 country limit. LOL

Thanks for clarifying JP. I don't really notice these things as I play through all sixteen of my countries in about 20 minutes.

I can't say I wouldn't be in favor of an 80 country limit, as it would help smaller tags giving them more of an ability to make retals depending on how well they played their countries, but it wouldn't change much as it would increase the amount per player and still keep things disproportionate. The larger tags would get bigger and the smaller tags would still be smaller by comparison.

Upping the limit could conceivably bring more of the old players back as some were more in favor of Free For All being unlimited before the bots, scripts and die-hard killers who would run upwards of 1,000 countries by hand made having any fun next to impossible over people getting too goddamned competitive with the way the game was being played.

I'd be more in favor of doubling the current limit.

How would cutting the number of turns per day make it more boring? We already do most things in bulk anyways, building, exploring, cashing. Heck, now we buy and sell for all 16 countries at once from the same page.

If cutting it from 72 to 36 makes it boring, then try not doing things in bulk. Build your construction sites one at a time. If your bpt is 150, then build your land 150 acres at a time, not 1500 acres at a time. Research your turns 1 at a time, not 10 or 20 at a time. There's ways to make it "interesting" to those who like spending as much time as possible on their countries.

For those who are like nightshade and me who spend very little time on our countries, this won't change how boring the game is.

One thing I just realized is that if we cut it from 72 to 36 turns a day, self-farmers putting their countries into DR becomes a lot more painful.

Explore gains are too high, we get too many turns per day, and our finishing networths are far too high. But I'm not the type that gets aroused merely by seeing big numbers, which apparently makes me an atypical Earth Empires player.

unlike many players I already tend to do things the hard way. doing things in batches a lot of the time does not give as much benifit as playing them one at a time. not to say that I play every single turn one at a time but there are times I do because there is great benifit in doing so. For example if your converting a country from a casher or farmer to a techer, destroying buildings and rebuilding them 1 turn at a time is much less costly than doing it in a batch. but it's much more than the time involved. the more turns the more thought you need in what to do with the turns. On the one countty servers there is not much to think about. The are many more options with more countries on the ffa server.

Why don't we return it to 48 turns a day and return it to a 3 month reset

In some ways, you're right. But unless people are utter morons or grab out of the blind based on formulas, defense makes a big difference. I don't have to be impenetrable. I just have to be less of an attractive target than YOU.

And should some player or clan decide to take liberties with my abundant land, I always have the option of killing their asses. Right?

Don't think for a MINUTE that I wouldn't sacrifice a entire reset to kick someone's ass if sufficiently motivated.

Why? How does that improve the game? I'd likely quit playing. Not that my opinion is really worth much or anything, mind you. The longer a reset is, the more of a chore it is, IMO.

And change it to 80(60) or 100 (80)

I can see how lowering the max turns/ stored turns could help the hugh FS advantage and make wars better but the market is lack luster already and needs much more buying and selling going on. cutting turns per day could only make that worse. more countires would make the market work more smothly.

The size of the storage willl not effect the market

Less turns a day will hurt supply but also lowers demand because countries have less income to spend

Lowering the turns per day also reduces the time it takes to play countries for casual player, many people don't play ffa because it takes too long, mainly at the start

I like the fact that you can start with 120 turns, and be OOP in mere minutes. Lowering the turn rate would make start-ups that much more of a chore.

To be a less attractive target, you need to have less land. Defense is irrelevant. Defense does not make a difference.

Defense definitely makes a difference.

If I cannot match your NW and carry 50/50 attack defense I will not grab you. I have hardly been able to find a TKO target this set. They are mostly running pure defense countries. Their 5mil NW countries with 18k or more acres are running 10mil jet breaks. I cannot have 18k acres with 10mil jets/turrets and the appropriate tech to max gains and still be 5mil NW so I pass those targets and grab the 180k break PAN/Focus countries with 25k+ acres.

Defense makes a huge difference.

All right. Here's a more complete way to look at it:

Generally, most of us that argue in favor of self-farming are of course saying that it's not against the rules, and since it's clearly more beneficial in the current state of FFA than exploring all set or looking for land targets all set (debatable on this one, of course it'd be a heck of a lot more work at the very least), then perhaps here are some rules that could help:

1) Put a bigger dent in the amount of ghost acres generated by any given hit. If it were dropped by even 25%, it would obviously put a dent in the growth of self-farmers.

2) Decrease the rate at which exploration drops. It can still start at 40 acres per turn, but perhaps the rate at which it drops is only half what it used to be, with a minimum explore rate of somewhere in the 10-15 acre range.

3) Consider finding a way to help explore rates with tech. Some type of new tech, or perhaps an old tech just renamed (like military strat maybe helping explore rates? Just a thought.)

4) Dump/change Cruise missiles. They suck. They suck so hard we have people every set that set aside a crap country so everyone can launch all their cruises at it to get rid of them.

5) The new government thing is kind of a fun idea, but it's pretty unnecessary.

6) Limit DRs to a type of attack (SS/PS could overlap still). This would force someone to actually use SS/PS to put themselves into DRs, which would take more military and be more of a pain in the ass, and could actually make it more beneficial for kill runs too, since attacking with BRs and GSs could actually accelerate a kill.

7) Limit the PS advantage to 120% instead of 150%, since there's just such a huge attacker advantage. I think favoring the attacker is generally the way to push for greater parity and more interaction, but there needs to be some ability to actually defend oneself, and with 3 off slots to 2 def and the 150% PS advantage, it's really hard to defend your land from a motivated top-feeder.

Ultimately, I think that someone who grabs or self-farms should still have an edge over all-explore guys, becuase it's a hell of a lot more work, whether you're self-farming (yes, it really is work) or finding and grabbing targets. However, if this edge were at least diminished, then it would even things out so that a) the self-farmers get top-fed less and b) people who have some moral objection to self-farming and choose to explore have some ability to at least be playing in the same realm as the self-farmers.

Khavic the reason you haven't found a TKO with low defence is because TKO isn't netting th is reset and we have already warred and might war again if we find a suitable target

If those are pure defense countries ... they're probably all-explore. What about bottomfeeders & self-farmers who can't be pure turrets? Is defense relevant for them?

it boils down to can i match their NW to get max gains and break their defense

it is all about the defense

And if they are 50/50 jets to turrets and you are 50/50 jets to turrets with less land than them .... you better be able to break them.

If you aren't a pure turret explorer, the only way to defend your country from someone with khavic's thinking is to have a high enough networth that Khavic is unable to match your networth. So the options are to either be pure defense (which completely eliminates any possibility of bottomfeeding or self-farming), or to be too high of a networth for khavic to hit you.

So defense only makes a difference ... if you play all-explore. Are you saying that you should only be allowed to grow if you play all-explore? That would be a pretty crappy setup to the game - go all-explore if you wanna grow, but if you wanna grab, we'll hit you until you're as small as our crappy countries which can't even match an all-explore country in landsize.

With PS and 3 OAs it's hard to have any amount of defense deter a land grab.. and countries that are fat fat chubby fat are usually land trading, so they will have more offensive power than defensive

I'd like to submit a complaint about the lack of beer and fluffes in FFA.