no need to mention particular players/countries

but its become obvious that using networth differential its possible to earn more networth with two countries attacking eachother than any other method as turns decrease and land increases

its too effective in my opinion, so would be interisting to hear others thoughts about it

hopefully theres a change in the pipeline to make it not the optimal way to netgain

the most benefit comes from having milstrat, tyrannies and 4-5 ps's

its also better to have more land in the low net country than the high one if networths allow it since thats where the land is created


anyway heres a little math:

acres 100000 unbuilt
relative networths 100% and 33%
turns per exchange 2 for 100% country, use additional 33% if needed
exchanges per day 39 (if no selling is required)

100 hits 33 gains ~6000 and 50 loses ~4000, gained land 2000 in 2 turns = ~70k nw = ~14-21m/turn

then theres is 202k land total, land has increased by 1%, and about 47% in a day

so the next day income increases by about half

it doesnt take many days of doing that until income is greater than any built country could have, and expenses are a lot lower

depending on gov you would be making a fair amount of money, for mono .4 food per acre and about $34 of income per acre after pop food expenses so about $46.8 for no tech, at 100k thats $4.68m or roughly 1/3 to 1/4 of the unbuilt acres networth but enough to buy some defence if you want it sometimes, some tech, and jets or PS'd mil to increase networth

a built country would be making about 70m/turn at 100k, which while more than the 20m/turn the unbuilt makes is reduced by stocking while the unbuilt country would grow fairly linearly

additionally it is quicker to grow an unbuilt country since it does not need to build csites or buildings, if started at the beginning of a reset using just networth disparity once exploring yielded less than half of your acreage in a day on about day 5 at a guess

resulting in potential land totals of ~8b which i believe exceeds the land cap of 4b, and would be 280b nw +more

(just increasing land by 47% for 55 days from 5k, could easily be more if most income was spent on mil strat tech, tyrannies were used and networth was kept closer to 10% or 8%)

of course at some point the 80m nw doubling of expenses would begin to bite but not at any networth easily achieved by any other means

the risks of course are losing land to grabs, but if you wanted to GS yourself you could but even losing the odd 100k acres it wouldnt really matter

as networths would quickly outpace humanitarian range of countries not using the method

tldr: please provide a cap on landtrading or crazy unbuilt acres

Almost all the ghost acres are building related; you destroy equal buildings to what you take, and you take most of it's fully built; you have to fully build to get most of the ghost acres.

if a 100m country hits a 50m country it gains 100% and the 50m loses only 66%

the hits in the other direction have no land gain

there is two different types of ghost acres

if i may quote you refer to section 2 of this post ;p

http://forums.earthempires.com/...;z=repost-of-new-lg-rules

ah that; it's not a 100% gain unless you're infinitely bigger; you can get close to 2x as much as what they lost if you're 10x as big....

100*(1+1/1)/2 = 100 (target same nw or bigger)
100*(1+1/10)/2 = 55 (target 1/10th nw)

100*(1+1/2)/2 = 75; so the attacker gets 33% more than what the defender lost yes; and while that's reasonably large, it's smaller than the 100% that happened in old earth when you grabbed 10A but got 20A....


I assumed you weren't talking about this simply because of the fact that you need to be much bigger to really create land fast


I'm not sure I 100% follow your argument, I'd have to try it in excel; did you take into account diminishing returns?

from the countries ive watched in the news that hit eachother backwards and forwards the DR didnt seem to kick in

Jun 14/10 5:41:17 AM PS DISinherited (#177) (EEVIL) Mr Nike (#501) (EEVIL) 1113 A (+462 A)
Jun 14/10 5:40:37 AM PS Mr Nike (#501) (EEVIL) DISinherited (#177) (EEVIL) 1129 A (+533 A)

for example this was the 7th exchange of the day for the 2 countries in alliance that started everyone talking, roughly 8k when they started and 12k when they finished i believe

even if countries didnt lose DR as much as they do now by attacking/running turns it doesnt solve the problem it just makes it go a bit slower and perhaps begin to kick in a bit later

it seems to be very easy to get much bigger, just buy some jets and your fine

i had been using jets to run 0 defence countries at 50% and later about 12% of my grabbers networths to maximise explore returns but it isnt anywhere near as efficient

you can find some examples among the very large land countries in FFA of what im talking about, i just wanted to try and discuss it theoretically rather than be all sour grapey :)

i really hope theres something in the pipeline or something quick you can do before FFA resets

its not as big a deal elsewhere but in ffa even if you get grabbed a bit it looks way better than any other form of netgaining, including the other ways of self farming and land trading

right but big hits like that aren't because of NW based ghost acres, that's due to their nw's being similar and getting huge hits + building based land... otherwise the hits wouldn't be symmetric...

and building-based grabbing/ghost acres does destroy a ton of buildings

you dont need the buildings

if 2 countries are 1m acres, 1 is 100m net and the other is 50m net

and the 100m net one grabs the 50m net one it gets about 60k acres, but the other country only loses about 40k

thats 20k free land and 700k networth

the small country then has to make perhaps 1.5 attacks to equal the land again, you dont need equal land but it keeps land growth higher, ideally youd run the higher networth country with the right ratio of land so that 1 attack each makes them keep growing at the same rate

it doesnt matter though, thats just for added efficiency

and the buildings arnt the issue, this is working now, with unbuilt countries

you get about $47 income per acre unbuilt which is enough at crazy acreages

right but it's the same difference even at smaller land...

you have to do a pyramid in this case, which becomes increasingly difficult to maintain the higher nw you get

seems countries are being made like this, so it must not be that difficult.

it is kinda lame that the best way to get fat is to grab back and forth like that.

maybe mehul was on to something getting rid of the ghost acres?

but we all know how well no-ghost-acres worked =/ it eventually had to be added in again even in it's really reduced 5% / 10A form

it seems the best way to address this issue might be via the more general solution of adding in personal DR that has been discussed elsewhere. (The idea where it matters not just how many times a country has been hit in past 24 hrs, but how many times YOU have hit the country)

Also enshula has a great point that "secondary" ghost acres make landtrading even more beneficial when the two countries are at different NW levels.

maybe some formula change to significantly lower the pci of a country thats under x% built, that uses a turn for anything other than building. like 40% built or something. pci kill you after like 20+ turns if you dont build on your empty acres.

something that would discourage this type of land growth anyways. maybe another tweak on ghost acres affecting unbuilt land? lowering ghost acres effected by unbuilt land so much that it's simply not worth to trade land like that. surely something can be done before more people start playing. it just looks cheap =p

DR isn't even an issue here as both countries are coming out of DR by grabbing the other country.

Well don't think for a minute that these developers are stupid or mathematically impaired.
They know full well what they are doing,and that is turning this game into a 'netting match' whilst making the warring aspect insignificant or moot.

maz: wouldn't that open up kill by AB?

As for your DR point, you could set it up so that these secondary/personal/whatever you call them DR are not affected by attacks made by the country. So no matter what the country you attacked has done in past 24 hours, if this is your 3rd attack on it, there is a -10% land gained penalty, for your 4th attack -20% and so on or w/ever.

lol snawdog do you honestly feel that way? Thats too bad

Show me the wargaining aspect...

of what? this issue being discussed that a player not developer brought up?

I'm not sure anyone who makes this claim that the developers are hating on wargaining/war clans/etc. etc. really has any idea what they are talking about. Please prove me wrong sir, but the ball is in your court to actually explain what you are upset about not to make one line posts. If you do I would love to see what is bothering you and contemplate whether its legitimate or not, but until then sit down and SHUT THE fluff UP

as glorious as an AB kill would be ... as long as a country built CS or other buildings nothing bad would happen the people wouldn't flee from the devastated acres hehe

just throwing out ideas you know.

Well, i don't really want to "SHUT THE fluff UP", so i guess i will expand my redundant text to more then one line.
Why,if not for the sake of netting,would it be more advantageous to lg one of your own countries without fear of retal then to grab acres in a more traditional manner and worry about retribution?
Why would the developers code the game mechanics in such a way as to allow a much larger country/tag to farm a small country without leaving that country the option of retalling in anyway possible.
IE:they can farm the fluff out of a small country that has no chance of getting the land back,but takes away the option of that country to retal what he can and drop..
So SHUT THE fluff UP!

all they did was take away the ability to drop acres which doesn't affect the ability to actually retal. And we are trying to fix a problem of self-farming here. So what is your beef?

I really don't know you at all, but if i had to bet...you sound like a Laf'er from Alliance.

lol we aren't even back to one-line claims now, we are to what I guess I would call a personal insult haha.

And no I don't play in LaF

i am from laf, i am a netgainer, the person doing this the most effectively is a netgainer

i think qzjul is also a netter from red, i doubt he wants to see netgaining be as silly as networth ghost acres makes it

the reason the devs made the changes in the first time was to increase land but do it in a way that made new/small players have it a bit easier

its just in ffa it got crazy silly and we need some additional changes that will address the other land trading and self farming issues as well to balance it

i think most netgainers would agree this makes netgaining silly in ffa since its so much better if you dont do it you need to keep a list in your heads of which countries did do it and just stop thinking of them as competitors

i bring this issue up because its the most extreme and should provide the most urgency to fix the other issues as well, it should be obvious next FFA set will go crazy if a change is not made

(it would be possible for a political solution to reduce the impact like seems to happen in alliance but that seems unlikely in FFA)

(btw other forms of self farming also make competing silly, just not quite as silly)

the simplest solution is to make it so networth based ghost acres are only created by land which has buildings on it

you can either make it so the country grabbed loses more, or the country grabbing gets less, or a combination of the two

that doesnt fix built landtrading or selffarming though

a more complicated situation could involve some bonus acres, networth or ghost buildings being temporary unless you build them within a certain time period

that way you could keep losses and gains the same while making zero building strats less viable

could even be fun to make the land revert to the grabbed country if not used within a certain time period but that wouldnt help with networth differential land trading based netgaining unless the unbuilt land went back but the ghost land became destroyed

the other solution that i advise is

a) reducing how countries come out of DR by attacking, either slightly or harshly

.5 dr reduction per attack instead of 1 (could make warring countries less vulnerable to being farmed)
0 dr reduction for attacking someone who hit you in a time period (for normal retals wont make a lot of differance, could reduce farming by leaving DR higher)

b) heavier DR for hits that are repeated, could drop landgain per exchange significantly below 1% making the point at which NDLTBN becomes viable

two hits by country a on country c in 24 hours should gain less land than a hit by country a and a hit by country b on country c in 24 hours

every additional hit by country a on country c should reduce country a's gains over the course of a reset, can be reduced by more than c's losses at a certain point to maintain landkillings viability but should be tuned carefully and id suggest reducing landkillings desirability for larger land totals is an acceptable loss for reducing farming in general and self farming in particular

c) combine a form of reduced income from unbuilt acres with reduced cost to recover from being 100% unbuilt, this would reduce the income of an unbuilt land trader while not harming as much countries AB'd or switching strats

currently food is 0.4 per unbuilt acre and pop is 12 per acre for mono

it would be simple to reduce pop income food or a combination for unbuilt acres

also possible is increasing costs

land costs $10/acre which could be increased, food consumption could be increased on unbuilt acres, perhaps not food consumption from military units though

food brings in $12.8/acre/turn which exceeds land costs before networth scaling

you could even just increase networth expense scaling by unbuilt acres, could be helpful with other minor changes and would have little effect at the beginning of a reset, could even just make it kick in after a minimum acreage

ill put some suggested formulas in the next post

landexpenses = 10 * acres + (unbuiltpercentage/divisor*(acres-1500))^power

what this means is that it only kicks in at 1500, after the initial formula and that expenses increase if you have both very high land and high unbuilt percentages

the question of tuning is how much unbuilt land is acceptable

a 100k acre country makes about 5m/turn which isnt a big deal, a 1m acre country on the other hand makes 50m/turn which is a lot more competitive

so i would say the limit should be set somewhere inbetween so that countries perhaps up to about 200k could be ok after being ab'd but that it wouldnt be very beneficial netgaining with unbuilt acres

the relationship between divisor and power is that if you increase one you should increase the other, and the result is that the expenses scaling happens faster

rough ratios that make sense are:
power=1.5 divisor=7
power=2 divisor=100
power=3 divisor=1000
power=4 divisor=5000
power=5 divisor=10000
power=6 divisor=15000

the higher you go the less effect it has early but the faster it makes continuing on completely pointless

TLDR version at top:
land doubles about every 150 attacks, and you should be looking at 8b theoretical average performance in FFA using only 2 countries and not helping them

id expect a more optimal setup to go way higher, will be interisting to see

a) how much interference is acceptable, ie how much getting grabbed sets you back
b) how distorting grabbing these countries are to the rest of the server

one advantage is they dont seem to impact very much on the market, but once your income hit crazy levels you could probably do so if you wanted to

by comparison id expect the non self farmers in ffa to be able to max out at maybe 200m so thats a factor of at least 40




first 72 hits land went from 8k to 20k and 24k

3000 buildings in the 20k high net country

4100 buildings in the 24k low net country

175% average land gain for each country is 1.4% per hit average, but thats with buildings

next 76 hits

land went from 20k to 34k and 24k to 41k
70% extra land in 76 hits

buildings 1840 and 1388
down to .7% land gain per exchange averaged


33 hits per day after normalising for readiness

76 more hits

63.5k and 51.7k (57.6k average)
820 acres and 760 acres built
csites dont seem to be decreasing
77% extra land in 76 hits
.75% land gain per exchange averaged

178 turns for 77% more land

works out at about .31% land per turn
140k net per turn at 1m acres
or about $41m and about an extra $13m in income


76 more hits
101,291 and 65,773 (83532 average)
680 and 457 acres built
45% more land

the problem at this point seems to be coming from the land differance
at this point i decided to swap to theo in the high networth country for income, and tyranny in the low networth

country to try and fix the land gap
i also bought mil strat tech in the low net country and will try to equalise land a little

its interisting to note that combined net income went up a lot, but food production in the theo is now a lot lower in

net terms, could become negative at some point but the tyranny will probably produce enough for both


did 4 ps's with tyranny and 4 ss's with theo to this point
73,130 Acres 98,940 Acres

networth or land differance seems to be triggering increased readiness loss now
might need to use 2 low net countries instead of 1 since it seems to be taking 2.33 turns in the theo per attack and

3.33 turns per attack in the tyranny

18 hits only this time
102,240 Acres and 80,289 Acres (91264.5 average)
9.2% more land

18 more hits
screwed up DR a bit at the beginning so the tyranny was getting a lot less land
117,237 Acres 84,328 Acres (100.75)
partly reflected in the theos land increasing by more

continuing to spend cash on mil strat in the tyranny and keeping the theo at about 300% of its networth, income seems

fine, obviously i could boost things with tech leeches, more stock to begin with or lower tech prices, using 4k per

point at the moment which is representitive of most of the ffa reset

1540 turns gone at this point, which is getting close to an express reset
networth is at 12.6 and 4.3, so its getting up around express top 10 but thats using 2 countries and it would be easy

to get a lot more net in express with a friend helping

933 ghost acres created in 1 hit now at about 100k average land
was going to average it over 3.33 turns but i just realised i forgot aout tyrannys 1 turn per attack

so its 933/2.33 = 400 acres per turn

400*45 = 18019 networth
which is up to about 5.4m income/turn
6.05m in cash/turn
560k in food

so ~12m/turn but thats over 2 countries so about 6m/turns at 100k and turn 1540 without any help from other countries

or particularly favourable market conditions, 150 jets 32 food 4k tech

37 odd hits
133,904 Acres +14.25% 105,854 Acres +25.52% (119.85 average +18.95%)
thats a bit over 1 days turns and a bit under 20% per day

as the land gets more even gains will rise, tyranny will naturally benefit more from tech than theo and its better to

have the low net country with more land, im guessing theres no real need to have the high net country be tyranny

unless your going to use 2 low net countries, gains could be closer anyway using demo or mono instead of theo

also in a regular day you can do 4-5 ps's, im not sure whether doing them at the beginning to speed up compounding or

at the end to compound on the higher acres is better but it shouldnt make too much differance

151,005 Acres +12.77% 113,489 Acres +7.21% (132470 average +10.3%)
no sure why the numbers were so differant this time basically reversed

1284 land gained per hit now 0.4846% per hit per country

beginning to wonder whether letting the land differance grow and therefore the networth differance would gain more in

networth differential than you lose in having lower land in the low net country

anyway

644*45= 28980
28980 * 300 = 8.694m
8.694/2.33 = 3.72m /turn
(5.2+3)/2= 4.1m
(22.5-6.5)*32/2= 256k

about 8m/turn at 132k average

the important thing about that is its growing in line with land, and you never really need to stock

about 1675 turns now and about 18m and 6m

every 144 hits (335 turns) land and networth can double, income wont be able to keep up forever but you can drop back

to 200% networth of the farm and still keep growing if you have to, one interisting thing is since land growth is

linear, maintaining tech levels also has linear cost, unlike normal grabbing when you begin to get a lower %age of

your land each day allowing you to increase tech levels or start stocking

in another 3k ish turns in ffa networth and land should increase by 500 times to ~66m acres and ~8b networth

i might leave these countries for now and see if i can create a more extreme situation

ok... its creepy how much you think like me. i reading that, and it looks like something i would have written. my only comment is that your theorectical maxes and the doubling points are both, in practice, lower, than what you posted, i've found.

also, to answer your better if at end or beginning, if done long term think of it as if done at end of one day, its same as the beginning for the next day. so it would only really matter the first and last time you ever did it, which makes it a pretty moot point for long term usage

your at about 2:1 in networth

ive been doing 3:1 on the test server

and yes the PS thing is no big deal, i was just wondering since on test you can only do PS's every 24 hours, while you get 1500 turns in that time period so i couldnt easily test how the PS's affect it

it should just boost gains by 50% for 5 hits a day out of 33 so about 7% more land a day

pretty much

and 3:1 is impossible to maintain longterm IMO

i started without stocking at 8k with low tech levels, the theo makes a lot more income which helps

but the main expense will be how much defence you have

but early on if you can have it higher helps more anyway

going to try it again from about 30k built with higher tech levels and a bit of stock, and some tech leeching

why theo and not rep?

if tech levels are low theo makes more

50% pop is greater than 20% pci

plus if mil prices ever go high enough for reselling imagine having 10m land

perhaps theres even some benefit to having lower mil strat %age in one country to keep land a little more even though im not sure about that

i had no bus/res and only a bit of agri and mil tech, also went with no military tech and just sold bushels on private only in the tyranny

FYI we have a fix in the works for this

:)

hopefully any change also effects landtrading and self farming as well