Looking at the last round stats, I see:

* 1 country over a billion NW
* an NPC country finishing in 19th place
* about 70 NPC countries in the top 100
* no war decs on FFA talk

Are folks getting what they hope for out of this server?

A few of the netters have been warring a lot

idk I had 164 countries last set lol. not my fault the attackers didn't make a war dec :P

Your first two replies were from players that can't compete for top spots on any server they play, so they adjust their game goals accordingly. A few good netters stopped playing FFA the last few rounds because of it.

No war dec needed. Just a few guys on the other side taking out the trash.

That's interesting, coming from someone who doesn't have a public profile for us to compare.

It's an alternate forum handle so the game profile isn't listed. You can find it by going to last round's top ten.

I've played twice since coming back. My observations:

- It's a slog. By the end of both rounds, I didn't want to play anymore. The FFA control panel (reptile!) is so sick and i wish we had it back in the day. I think its a combination of getting old and the player base talent increasing. Mindlessly blowing through turns to save time is a great way to have a bad finish or not be war prepped.

- I had no idea m0bzta's retirement would have such an adverse effect on the server!

- The political environment is sterile/weird. It's a PvP server where PvP is frowned upon. In my opinion, this is very against the spirit of a server called `Free For All`. With the creation of the Cooperation server, I don't understand the complaints of having to protect your country. I played with two different groups and both times there were rules of "don't do X". It's essentially a sandbox server where you can't even fight through the markets. These are soft rules that admins cant/shouldnt correct? Usually a player base will self correct but it looks like it's not happening this time around.

PANLV rules

FFA is kinda dull these days, most players have left and the only action that happens is suiciders that turns into anklebiter after the first death.

The changes that screwed up the market prices some sets ago pushed the server into a spiral of death as well

increase the bot purchase ranges back to 9999 or even above (99999?) for all markets

increase number of bots by double, with a greater variety of indy and farmer bots.

decrease bot mil unit purchases until last 2 weeks of set

have majority of bots stock bushels and keep tens of millions or hundreds of millions of bushels on hand and not on the market until the very last couple of days/hours of the set

increase max turn retention from 120(120) to 150(150)


summary:

- keep bot military purchases to a minimum
- constant bot food purchases with the majority of stock to be kept on hand so it can be targeted by players
- increase max turn retention
- increase number of non-techer bots (farmer and indy not casher)
- increase overall number of bots
- increase bot purchase range and maximum price range for selling on the market to 100k per item

You're absolutely correct, i am not a keyboard warrior. I have had a ton of fun on my phone :p

I'd be personally interested in playing FFA except that 16 countries feels like too many. It also feels a bit pointless when all of my effort could be wiped out by the capriciousness of other players. The last time I played FFA was round 7. Another clan broke a pact to kill my countries because one of their friends got deleted for cheating on Primary. I haven't played the server since.

With the ease of getting land from NPC countries, I don't think that there's any possible meaningful PvP interaction between small tags anymore other than complete destruction. To use your very successful small tag as an example: https://www.earthempires.com/ffa/91/clans/xECx . You said that you defended your countries but I don't see any SDI. Someone could have chem killed all of your countries if they really wanted to (I'm glad that they didn't!).

An idea that I've had floating around is to give players a choice: they could choose a "safe mode" where they get a limited number of countries (4?) within their own tag. Those countries would be protected from other countries. The "normal mode" would still be available to the players who wanted it. They would be able to run more countries (16 or even more) without any restrictions.

I'm sure everyone will hate that idea, but we need some kind of corrective action now that we've reached the point of 20 players on FFA with only 3 tags that have 16 or more countries. I will admit that maybe there is no corrective action possible: folks could just be unenthusiastic about playing FFA.

I have to put my two cents worth, on this subject: FFA gets to be a job trying to keep up with 16 country's. I am retired, I don't a job anymore. I found FFA, a good place to learn to build different governments. and make them strong, and and rich cash wise.