This is Earth Empires:

Earth Empires is a free browser based strategy game where you take control of your nation's military and economy. Command your country's military to attack and defend against your enemies. Execute attack strategies to relieve opponents of their resources and land. Strategically invest in technology to outpace the economies of other countries. Ally with your friends or make new friendships by joining a clan. Conduct military operations, govern your country and build your empire.



What slag is proposing is creating a new game where everyone and everybody are winners with minimal risks, except some win by winning better than the other winners. (And severely limiting the need for diplomacy, which is the foundation on which the game is built on).

The primary goal of the admins is to increase the player count and for the game to cover its hosting costs. To that end, I'm going back to basics: what makes the game fun? What makes the servers different from each other?

Since folks are saying that I'm not grasping what the alliance server offers, hopefully a few of them are willing to answer this question: "In a short paragraph, how would you convince a newer player who likes the non-clan servers to play on the alliance server?"

To be clear, I don't plan to make any changes to the alliance server at this time.

This is where the flaw in your logic comes in. You don’t “convince” them. You befriend them.

Lots of us that play with each other on here are mostly doing it for the friendships.

If the new player never creates a country on the alliance server then how exactly are you going to befriend them? The first step to making a friendship is to recruit them into your alliance. Recruitment involves persuasion. What am I missing here?

I would emphasize the alliance server's social aspect– playing with others who help teach and foster your growth in the game. I would convey that it's not just about individual achievement; it's about being part of a team where your actions contribute to the success or failure of your alliance in both war or the top 10 list. The added layer of social interaction offers more than the other servers– join discord, irc, etc, and collaborate outside of the game.

It’s a 2 way street. They can always come to us too. Plus it’s hard to find which players are real because of all these extra added bots.

Also worth mentioning that we should agree not to manipulate new players to suicide other players.

The last group of new players that joined the game created a clan and were influenced to goto war against game’s 3 oldest warring groups and were subsequently demolished. All for an individual’s personal gain.

I think part of the challenge is that there are pretty polarizing views of what people enjoy in 1a. I think the majority believe that diplomacy and politics should play a big role in that though, as opposed to the initial implementation of ClanGDI which made it so that you could never have a threat of attacking to get what you want (including if others wanted to net differently, say by mass FA - or historically, land trading). I think many argued that was a step in the wrong direction and that was undone. That said, there's always some compromise where war tags can't war the same group repeatedly or they'll just abandon the server, and netters can't ignore everyone all the time, or we lose the politics and war tags lose their purpose.

To the question of how to get players to join alliance: I typically point users that I interact with in Primary / tourney (and to a smaller extent Team) to the alliance server if they're looking for a group to learn from. You still see quite a few rainbows in the solo world, and I often provide a few tips for people who regularly get farmed (especially if they reach out about why everyone is attacking them, which does happen) that can lead to that. It's less persuasion and more of an opportunity. That's been historically true - and in fact, Cath for instance talked with people on solo servers including Tmac, who then brought him over to Evo (not because he was getting farmed, but because he was asking the top players questions on how to improve). I think Primary with it's GDI and tourney with the small player numbers per group are probably the ideal place for new users to practice in lower stakes. Express is also great, but very unique.

I think it would be a mid ground to allow clan admins to designate specific tags as friendly or do not hit. At the point of making an attack a warning to the attacker would show asking them to confirm the attack. Would prevent more accidental hits and fat fingerings and also be a moderate way to implement in game politics.

I agree with Coalie, and we need to go back to basics where relationships are the building blocks of the alliance server. We also need to nurture these new players and figure out a way to help integrate them so they can be good members of the community.

That requires all of us to do our part, not just the game mods. Every person that places game is unique and special with different needs. There are some great people who play this game that are able to take people under their wings and we need to best utilize a talent we have.

If the goal is to grow membership, utilizing everyone's email addresses when they create a game account. We could send out emails every round. Whenever we signed up for EE we all agreed to them. If you guys can do that, we can do the heavy lifting of making the game fun for them. We have a shared responsibility here, it's not just on the mods to make it happen.

I'll keep on sending out emails and messages to all the people I know, but if it's a numbers game and we're trying to canvas the largest amount possible. I know that single one act would generate the best return on the time investment.

That is just 2024 and graphics if we want to be realistic.
Then again, somehow Utopia has had a huge growth since David and his gaming team took over and did something with it.
So my analogy is probably flawed.

Just for clarification, mods don't really do what I think you're implying. There is no community outreach or marketing staff that I'm aware of. But perhaps I misunderstood your post.

This is my first set back in about a decade.
Playing as a "Independent" mostly because non of my old clans are still around, and nobody recruits anymore.

I have forgotten how to play.

I set up as a suicide retallier, because I know I can compete against the "big" clans, so I need to get my kicks somehow.

I am very disappointed that I have not even been land grabbed yet.

Maybe next set I will look for a clan, 🤔😜

Come have some fun with us brother, I'll send you a message on fb. We have some ai image generators and sweet games on our server

We have a Filipino guy in mercs that has been playing since the early 2000's. You guys can be great friends

Provide country number and i can fix that disappointment and give you some land grabs to turn your frown upside down!

Or even better as Coalie said join the friendly and welcoming Mercs team

Primeval hit the nail on the head. In the early 2k's a struggle started between the netters and the fighters. Established strats were around but weren't widely available to most players. PvP was the wildcard, magnified by the extensive proliferation of multi's on the server. You could net, but you had to know how to grow a country with defense, have an alliance that had your back and was able to retal. Belonging to a strong alliance meant protection, and it was need in 1a. If you were a small alliance or even worst untagged, you were gonna be farmed.

Somewhere along the line, everyone on started singing kumbaya and looking for a safe space. Bot's replaced land grabbing, and you didn't need defense unless you agreed to a war. Point is, the players made the change in the game culture and the Devs I imagine made some concessions to appease that (latest being clan gdi). There's been some great ideas on this thread, but the best and easiest change to be made is the one the players can make themselves. Theres no need to join an alliance if no ones going to grab you, make the clans mean something again.

We need to change the culture

Or Sakit - If you want a REALLY f'd up experience, ditch Leto and Mercs, and come join The Blackhole. I can absolutely guarantee you'll have all the enemies you'll ever want, and tons of drama to go with it.

Hindsight is always 20/20. I fought the culture changing to what exists now tooth and nail back in the day, and was labelled as toxic, evil, uncaring about the game community, and as interested in driving people out of the game :P

A lot of people at that time weren't that interested in the game anymore, and only stuck around for their friends. They wanted to run all XP countries that took 10 seconds a day to play, and to be otherwise left alone. Not leaving them alone (grabbing them) was seen as driving them away from the game.

BH, 25 years ago we could have been the best of enemies. Ever consider changing your name to Rainbow Hole?

I suspect he's referring to making wholesale game changes here.
I don't think wholesale changes are needed, just that change in the meta.

I'll suggest a change. Add some navy vessels. Aircraft and turrets would be their natural enemies.

That sounds a little too much like something Doug would like. And him and I are enemies now... so no.

Another thought.
Whilst war is indeed a part of the game, what we often saw happen was clans who would simply bulldoze a tag set in and set out, with no diplomacy, rhyme or reason, simply because they "didn't like" that tag. That doesn't keep players either. No one wants to play and get killed every single set because a group of other clans (and it was regularly coalitions) think its funny to do so.

Now, I'm not talking recent history, but going back way back, just to be clear.

I think the gameplay is fine the way it is. I think ads on Facebook and Instagram would bring in plenty of new players. I've recruited players through Facebook. I even made a private Facebook group for my clan members - where NO game sensitive information is ever shared but it makes recruiting brand new players easy- just invite Facebook friends to the group and if they're interested they can join the game. I'm one man doing it. If other clans all did the same we could probably see a minimum of a few hundred extra players by years end. If game developers ran an ad for a few months on those platforms then perhaps a few thousand.

id love to see an earth renaissance. A growth of natural players on alliance.

But this game was fun when we gathered for runs and did it by hand. A bot is fine, but this landgrab bots only thing is for the DOGS. Alliance is a netting/war server. You net, people grab, FA's can't solve the issue, we war for top dog spot.
When our country dies, IT DIES. You restart from scratch and the big dogs in the alliance FA you some cash and jets to get you rolling again.

Its easy.

I came back a couple months ago and albeit, I am having fun doing alliance stuff...but the game itself is pretty boring. Nobody hits anybody. No mayhem. The forums are a ghost town. (and you wonder why im blowin em up with my antics), because its too quiet.

We need players. We need an updated UI, but we need classic Earth alliance stuff going on. none of this new fangled AI and easy buttons all over the place.

The game got to be too much of a grind to sustain the low numbers. There was no such thing as a single set war over an in-game conflict, instead we had set after set of grudge wars that were driven by personality conflicts. "I hate you so my clan is going to OOP FS you every set until the end of time" became the primary driver of wars.

Meanwhile netting became more and more static and formulaic without any dynamic interaction. The days of the Tyr-techers clawing for land and fending off retals became let's all just play all-x fascist farmers and be safe.

There is a mathematical principle known as 'gamblers ruin' that implies that once a population drops below a given threshold that extinction is inevitable. We reached that point and the mods introduced bots to counter it, but the bots didn't counteract the underlying problems that caused the population drop. The game declined organically because it got old and tired and nobody really wanted to play anymore. By the end I was playing the forums much harder than I played the game and by the start of COVID even the forums were no longer any fun.

TL;DR the game has far outlived it's projected life expectancy, it's time to let the sand cover the solar panels and let it rest.

That doesn't address the problem with being unable to retain players. Sure it adds players, but I doubt they'll stick around.

Unless this game is made to be a bit more fun to lose, such as,
1. To lose land/buildings and quickly recover land/buildings in as many turns;
2. Dealing damage is balanced by the amount of effort it takes to do damage (put as much effort as it takes to produce assets); and
3. With the significant reduction in construction cost/turns, and military expenses/food consumption

I don't see any hope of being able to keep players in Alliance in its current form.

True. 🙂

I'll be a bit argumentative again. When exactly was this golden age of player to player interaction? I first played on alliance around 2004. I remember alliances heavily pacting out and most countries doing all-X or only hitting untagged countries. I also remember land:land becoming the standard retal policy. Players themselves are the ones who were always pushing for less interaction. Just look at what happened to the team server. The last time I looked there was essentially zero landgrabs. Some clans even boasted about their 1:kill policies.

We aren't advertising because we don't have a good enough product yet. A few folks were kind enough to answer my question about what makes the alliance server special and they said that playing with friends is fun. But that's just a property of the server. Nearly any multiplayer team-based game will have that feature. No one said "it's fun to play with your friends to compete for average NW", "it's fun to win a war with your friends", or "it's fun to create a new clan with your friends and to politically outmaneuver other clans". That's a big problem in terms of player retention.

I think that when players advocate for chaos, they imagine themselves being on the giving end of chaos and other players being on the receiving end of it. In many cases that's only going to be fun for one party.

Slag - Let me provide you with a different perspective to consider, that may or may not be valuable.


I am NOT one of the oldheads around here. I started playing a year ago, and do not have any of the previous experiences that basically everyone else here has. I think I'm probably an example of the player you're trying to recruit to the game.


I like a LOT of the ideas you've brought forth. I think having different ways of competing, different rule sets that teams have to navigate, new dynamics that change the way people play, I think that is all very interesting and positive.

I'll go a step further. Leaderboards, Stats, Records. Those are things that get people excited to continue playing, even when a set is F'd for them. They are contributing to their long-lasting legacy. So if you come up with new ideas to compete, and new ways of tracking stats, contributions to wins, new ways of measuring skill, I think those are valuable additions to the game and might retain help retain people.


I'm of the opinion that you can't try enough new things. And I do think you need to do things to make the game not absolutely suck if you got rocked three weeks into a set. Do you track player retention/activity through a set? How many turns are run the first month of a set vs the last month? How many players do you lose over the course of a 3 month set? And how many of those players don't return for the next set? Keeping people continuously engaged is important, IMO. And I think giving people a reason to keep playing even after they get hit hard will help in that regard.


I know people don't want to keep fighting people they've already beat, but I also think that is a short sighted response. If you defeat your enemy a month in, and all that's left is to continually clean them up, how fun is that? Whereas, if they can get back in the fight, REALLY back in the fight, faster, it keeps people more engaged because they have to be to protect the netters, or whatever it is their working towards.



Just some of my personal opinions that I expect very few here to agree with.

This isn't COD bro, if your country gets destroyed, start from square 1

Again, Ko. With respect, I think the player stag is trying to attract might not be the same as the remaining old heads here.

The restart bonus is an excellent feature for suiciders, isn't the goal to cripple suiciders so they don't grief netters???

I actually kinda think suiciders are good for the game. I think all conflict is good for the game. Drama, conflict, war, reasons to play, reasons to fight. Reasons to be here.


I think that it's too easy to get smushed and not have a reason to be here anymore though.

IMHO, the golden age was probably 1998-2003ish. The game saw several changes during that period as did the player base. The culture on the server started changing around 2002 with many wanting a heavy focus on netting and by this time every major alliance had turn by turn strats that proliferated throughout the community.

It was fun to be a part of an alliance, help it grow and help teach and protect the members
It was fun to make a landgrab and message the untagged country to join your alliance
It was fun to check the retal boards
It was fun to be a part of kill runs
It was fun to try different things while building your country, not quite knowing how it would turn out
It was fun to hunt multi's
It was fun to diplomatically interact
It was fun to build a better site than your competing alliances
It was fun to war for a cause, to die and restart as quickly as you could
It was probably fun to hit the top ten =)
Oh and it was fun to spam the AT boards

Fast forward to today and many of those things either don't apply or have been minimized. Time "in-game" has always been pretty minimal, especially after start up in peace-time. Maybe 20 mins a day if your researching bots to hit, likely no more than 10 min to run your turns. I'm sure we spend more time on our Discords, clan sites and the AT than we actually spend in-game.

I still enjoy the alliance server, mostly for the interaction with my alliance mates. I've found myself bored after using up my turns and played FFA server to fill in the gap. I use the express server to try out new builds and strats to use on alliance. 1A is a unique server, with aspects I don't think you can really get on the other servers. Some of the changes have been for neccessity due to the dwindling player base, some have been cultural made by the player base and some things haven't really changed for 25 years (for example, I use a strat from 2001 that works pretty well with just a few minor tweaks).

From the dev's point of view I'm sure the question is how do we drive more traffic to the site? If the "game" only takes 10 mins a day to play how much more traffic are you going to get even if you double or triple the current player base. Incorporating the tools, clan hosting and additional functions into the game will likely drive more traffic to the server AND as a result more players. If recruiting emails pointed them to join at clanx.earthempires.com vs , or checking stats at an earthempires link vs eestats.com, how much more traffic could be driven to the site.

I think you're on the right track, keep asking the questions. We are NOT ready to let this game die

In my opinion, the golden age of player to player interaction was mid to late 1990's to early 2000's. There were no land bots back then, but there were 1000's of multies. By 2008 the original 1A server was about to shut down and the game was losing a lot of its appeal. I think the retal policies and such were partially responsible for that.

Pang was good enough to provide EE when Mehul cut the cord on 2025 but I left here around 10 years ago or so after playing Earth for a couple of decades. I have to say it doesnt seem the game itself has progressed much since then.

Life bans on people who are talking smack? Forgiving those who took advantage of their position gained by having close relationships with owners/devs whatever the case was for their projection into being given exclusive access and then using it to cheat seems a bit worse to me, but what do I know, I just play the game

Is your complaint that your friend was treated too harshly or that people in the past weren't treated harshly enough?

Smells like a perma

https://www.stevenson.edu/...ify-reliable-information/

[quote poster=Slagpit; 52511; 1031136]https://www.stevenson.edu/...ify-reliable-information/ [/quote

The info came from an email, from you. Thanks for deleting my post though, gl with whatever it was you truly.camw back for other than to ban chevs.]

[quote poster=Shweezy; 52511; 1031137][quote poster=Slagpit; 52511; 1031136]https://www.stevenson.edu/...ify-reliable-information/ [/quote

The info came from an email, from you. Thanks for deleting my post though, gl with whatever it was you truly.camw back for other than to ban chevs.] [/quote]
I deleted your post. If you would like to discuss why, we can discuss it in a pm.

I didn't delete your post. Honestly I have no idea what you're even talking about. I didn't send a single email about banning Chevs.

I deleted his post. I stated that above yours post.
Weezy can come and discuss it with me.

My post was about pornhub, good site

It is not adding value to the conversation at the moment.

I know a lot of games tend to lose players based on not only the community but the moderation and developers. We saw this in runescape where one developer started implementing his own code into the game without the other developers back checking what he was doing. He ended up putting some stuff in that other people were able to exploit for gain. I remember they shed a bunch of players during that controversy. Sometimes some people have to just put their emotions aside and not let it get to their ego.

Hmm.

Creating a clan site linked to the game so new players don’t need to track down an old retired player for a hosting site.

Maybe updated wiki with no security fails and updated info

Bringing the pacts into the game or tag admin is a neat idea.

What’s posted from other and your self slag seem neat got to try something.

I believe that guy also gave powers to his girlfriend?

That is a good game. I forgot you were also playing RS.

The elephant in the room......
We have strayed from the original Earth 2025 and with each passing change (intended to increase player base), the player base has declined.
I am not into this whole community thing. I just come here to play a game. How are we supposed to recruit new players into a community that just wants to spend a few minutes/day hitting bots. I have recruited folks that won't stay for more than a day or two. They say it is too boring. Even online Chess matches require strategy. Chess requires offense and defense and sometimes you lose.....but like EE, you get to restart.
Make a server that leans on the original Earth 2025 and let's see what happens. Too many of you old folks no longer want to play that style of game. Real Life keeps you busy. Changes made to fit your current style of play will only result in the same old players from set to set.
Think aboout it.....old timers only return for war then leave when it goes back to just hitting bots.

P WeeZy should be along soon to confirm.