Why should your gains be dependent upon your relative NWs? Why should hitting down or up have an influence?

Defender land
Maybe how much attacker oversends in an attack
Mil strat
Defense/acre

Those should be the determining factors.

because that naturally leads to the top players farming the small ones i think; and it's more interesting when similar countries hit each other

I feel that small countries tend to have less land
I feel that oversending shouldn't be worth a ton... doubling the attack power should not be equivalent to two grabs
I feel that mil strat doesn't favor anything
I feel that defense/acre tends to favor small countries

Really I think that the only thing that leads to farming the small ones is the safety of it, and that happens now despite penalties against it. I think that people will never hit countries near their own size as a result.

right; so this i think was mehuls attempt to change that by adjusting it to benefit more.

we'll see what happens as we get more players, and adjust accordingly

oversending is what you do when farming blind to make sure you suceed

attacking based on your guessed defence then sending extra

milstrat favours smaller countries because slower growing can have higher tech ratios

it also makes strats which have to spend less base income on other things (like rep cashers who dont do a tech start buying a lot of bus/res) more powerful

the third thing it does is speed up kill runs

and the last thing is it raises minimum gains from hitting countries in max DR compared to exploring

of course if it was taken out grabbing percentages would probably just be increased a bit anyway

the interisting suggestion detmer made though is defence per acre, imagine having a serverwide turretunits either raw or modded per acre average

then those above that average lost less land and those below it lost more, would make for more balanced countries particularly on clanless servers

I agree that oversending isn't something one generally does... it just makes some sense that the more you send the more you can gain.

Mil strat does favor small countries, fair point.

I am fine with low techs gaining a slight power bonus relative to the current system... no tech will come back to bite you... and that is still only relative to the current system - its not like it is giving people incentive to not get tech.

This weekend I'll figure out how much it will speed up a kill run by. If that is really a big factor.

It does encourage farming someone at min DR gains for small countries relative to now.

I am glad you like the def/acre suggestion enshula. It is my favorite part. I actually have another thread on it. 250 turrets/acre was the base defense amount that I thought things could be based upon but I do like the idea of comparing it to the average defense/acre across all countries (for computational load sake it could be calculated every 6-24 hours). I like raw average for this. Let mods just be bonuses.

a flat amount would be ok, but would leave the situation of early set grabs being a higher percentage of land than late set, which is ok

and retalling destocked mbr's might get you very little land back

the only downside is it could be one more thing that makes anything else than techer suck in certain situations since they usually have the highest defence/acre

might have an effect on wars where it gets lopsided and one side starts farming the other, it would probably increase land loss for a side trying to explore/grab more production

would be interisting having average defence being a visible stat

could have in the advisor something like:

warning your defence is less than half the server average for a country your size