Change set #23 primarily makes a netgaining balance change on clan-based servers. These changes will be released on the standard roll out schedule:

* On clan-based servers only, countries cannot drop land during the final 25% of the round. This restriction does not apply to countries that are less than 24 hours old, including countries with restart bonuses.
* For all servers, NPC countries will be identified in yellow in the ingame search results and on the score pages.
* The "Market Spy" spy operation will reveal information on the target's standing orders.
* The "Allow other players to see the status of your past countries" user preference will be overridden for dead countries. All players can view the ending status of all dead countries after the round has concluded.

"Standard roll out schedule" means that changes will be applied to servers as they reset. For this change set, the changes will first go live on the next round of each server that begins after April 17th, 2024.

Thank you for playing Earth Empires. Questions, constructive criticism, and feedback made in good faith are welcome.

The land drop change will drastically impact FFO's, but also for countries in war (or who are suicided) where it will be prohibitively expensive to rebuild. Given there's already a mechanism that you can't drop land you recently grabbed, could there be an acre limit that you can drop instead? Like can't drop below 10k acres and/or below 80% of your max land for the set? (I think I prefer a percentile option, but it may be harder to code; a set threshold is unlikely to work in all scenarios.)

How often are there ongoing wars in the final 25% of the round where the victor isn't already decided?

Suicides are quite frequent, and will be more possible with a future humanitarian change (as currently proposed on alliance). In Team, wars continue further along typically. For Alliance, when Evo was blindsided by LaF after they had won against the others, that continued into latter quarter of the set. With future restart bonus changes, that could be less necessary, but currently, restarts in the last quarter do occur, and at that point your country is wrecked, your CS are low, SPAL / SDI are terrible, and so given a large stock, dropping acres is typical.

So I would say it's more frequent than you might expect, and the impact can be quite large.

100%

The FFO community will not stand for this tyranny!
You WILL NOT diminish the ability of 10 players to win every set. If you cant spen 60 days farming bots till 500k acres you simply dont want, nor deserve, a top 10 finish. Simple as. FFO players will be along shortly to "and thats a good thing".

At times when logging in during an active kill run on your country if getting BR'd or Chem'd, a player may choose to drop land to increase SPAL and SDI %. This changeset will impact that as well. But the trade-off of nerfing the historical common destock and conversion meta will be interesting to see.

Buh bye calculator nerds and your food to oil ratios and 60 acre destocks

Make earth great again!

25% of the round is a large amount of time. Why wouldn't it be closer to when humanitarian ranges increase at the end of the set?

If you have a parking lot country with 25% of the set remaining, you are basically useless and can't reinvent yourself for 25% of the round

The point of the change is to discourage FFO. If he makes it too late in set then they’ll just convert sooner and take the hit.

Perhaps the trick here is to check the variable of how old the country is and if it’s < 1 day old then allow them to drop land.

Then you get pros of both situations and shouldn’t be too hard to add that condition programmatically.

If country age isn’t available then I would think turns taken < 200 would be sufficient.

Not a fan of the dead country live profile link. In active wars this will allow the other side to actively track who the owners are of the restart because the restart lists the previous country, then that previous country will have the link to the profile.

The idea here is to allow recent restarts to drop land?

How would this information change the way that war is conducted?

If I’m understanding the complaint in this thread., the issues arises whenever a player is killed, their restart has an undesirable amount of unbuilt land which under the current proposal they would not be able to drop that land during the final 25% left of game.

It’s reasonable to believe that restarts would face this situation in the last 25% of the game since most wars are delayed/scheduled. The problems of having extra land as a restart makes paying for buildings significantly more expensive and greatly reduces all tech % across the board including spal. By placing your proposed mechanism only for players who have played more than 200 turns it would seem it would address the FFO issue while maintaining current functionality.

Fair enough, changed it to allow for that.

GJ Tertius for spotting this.

You take out the biggest threats first, but that's how it is in real life as well so I'm personally ok with this, we just have to get more creative and that's good for the game too because it'll promote more collaboration.

Most active players are in open chat areas such as irc/discord. If you know who owns which country and already know if they're online or active at certain times then this can influence the target selection per chat to make killing more efficient and walling harder.

I agree with steeps on this.

I changed it so it's only possible to view the owner of dead countries after the round has concluded.

If it's an issue because you're trying to reduce the risk of suiciders then limit the viewing to untagged countries during the set, all countries after the set. Personally I think suiciding is part of the game and it's a risk you take with clan reputation and farming untaggeds but if the aim of these changes is to protect the player base then I'm open to see these sorts of suggestions.

It's to partially close an existing gap. Currently, after a round ends you can view the owners of any country in the top 100, any country in a clan, and any country where the owner allows country statuses to be viewed. After this change it will be possible to see the owner of dead untagged countries as well.

Someone shouldn't be able to anonymously suicide SOL in one round and then join SOL the next without SOL being aware of their previous actions.

Why not? For decades we never had an ability to check this and we recruited on trust, if that did happen it was then the diplomacy of the alliance leaders that had to rectify any issues caused by members regardless of how new they were. Alliances used to be large enough that any new recruits had to go through a "training tag" to learn the game and respect the clan before they were allowed to tag up to the main clan.

This only seems to be a "I've had my netting set ruined I must know who did this so I can get my revenge when I'm going to run a country which actually has defense next set" tool.

I think you totally fluff the recent equilibrium the game finally managed to achieve with the last changeset.

As it stands this set almost any of the strategies could have won - casher is the only one that has a hard time now.

There will be a 1.5b commie indy this set - this strategy is still in its early days and public market prices werent awesome for commies either. There would have been a techer over 1.2b also except a late set fluff up and he actually played out a set helping others out and didn't have tech allies contributing to his finish. The best ffo this set without help will be somewhere in between those.

The only two viable strats to play to win now will be commie indy and techers.

You can view the owner of any country not tagged and not in the top 100 currently. This includes dead countries.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Is this a bug report? If so, please PM me a link that shows what you're saying. Thank you.

I have to agree here.
:(

CHALLENGE ACCEPTED

Allows alliances to target specifically target players on their offline times, making it far harder to attempt to wall/defend.

Slagpit,
Thank you very much for the much needed update here.

Any chance you can add a bot identifier in the ranks feed?

1,1,1,96,Nobel Netgaining Prize,31805,181832463,LaF,D,1,0,0,1,0
serverid,resetid,rank,number,name,land,networth,tag,gov,gdi,protection,vacation,alive,deleted

https://www.earthempires.com/ranks_feed?

Yes, please make a post on B&S.

done.

editted this one.

I thought I read somewhere that losing bonus (e.g build cost reduction, expense, resource decay etc) on govt switch would be removed?

I tested on Alpha and you still lose it :(

Did I imagine this?

That's intended for change set 25 (which Cooperation will start on).

ok cool thanks!

Slight change of plan this reset then :)