I don't want to put this into B&S without hearing from the express players on their thoughts.

As currently structured, the permanent bonuses from bonus points are of extremely limited utility in Express. For the most part, the play is spend on earthquakes, spend on turns if your a techer, save and spend on booms if you're not a techer.

I think it would be good for gameplay if the permanent bonuses were useful in Express. Toward this end, I think it would be a good idea to multiply all the current bonuses by 10. So building costs in this plan would be 12.5% instead of 1.25%, PM units would be 5% instead of 0.5%, etc. This would add a lot of variance to the game as far as useful strats, and could really change the risk/reward of playing out all your turns early vs. stacking up turns and spending bonus points before playing. Think of a commie breaking protection with 360(300) and 25% expenses reduction. Would that be enough to overcome the players who came out of protection early and kept up spending turns so to take advantage of the easier land from frontrunning? Would a defensive bonus of 5% change the endgame for people going into a long logout and trying to avoid end set grabs? Or would increased netting utility outweigh that functionality?

Given the turncount, and the compressed nature of the round, care must be taken to balance such an idea. a factor of 10 might be too high, it might be too strong an advantage. An FFO breaking protection with 25% building cost reduction could just be an unstoppable juggernaut, and a 5x factor could be more appropriate.

What say you?

I will add, regardless of what the meta is in any gaming environment with PvP, there will always be ways to exploit going off-meta. That said, I do see Resource Decay at 10x being potentially the most problematic. A techer can't afford to wait around and stack up full turns before breaking protection due to market forces but can easily get to 75% while still growing and have crazy stock at home. Having to pay the stocking cost of turns putting bushels on market is a strong balance against a techer's power currently in Express.

Game changes always welcomed as it rocks stale strategy meta.

The balance as mentioned will be rather difficult.

You also made a good point in players playing turn delayed if the bonuses are too big.

As a server concept, express should incentivize players to play as fast as possible.

And to be fair, given the average country sizes in express, not even sure if 50% building bonus or 50% lower expenses even make sense - the end game boost of a few boons might outweigh these.

When I spoke to slag about this (if I understood him correctly) this is the main reason why it can't happen.

I agree that the balance will be key. Im down for a change up however that looks.

I do agree that the bonus system seems to be lacking in Express, so any change to enhance them would be a great idea.

On that note, I have been wanting to ask if someone could explain exactly what this does? Maybe an example of the effect. sorry and thanks.

its one of the mods for fascist government- "0% Bonus effectiveness" ....?

This means that for a fascist, their bonus points get more bonus. In cooperation, for example, a fascist can actually achieve 100% building cost reduction, but no other government can.

I would like a 12 point bonus use for free govt change.

Ty Vic.

Fascist does not get that bonus on Express. It should say "+0%".

That's not bad, 12 points might be too light though. That's 2 ticks of booms, is a free govt change worth the same as 1 turn with triple production? I'd say it's worth considerably more.

playing delayed isnt a bad thing considering how your guys screw the bots into DR hell the first 2.5 days of the round.

Superfly that’s a good point that is the biggest downside to the bots. If you could solve that by doubling up the amount of bots to account for the number of players and turns and solve that issue by bringing the bots to 0 or 1-2 DR, that would be awesome. The big grabs are the best most fun part of the game so optimizing that will make it the most fun experience possible from a players perspective.

What Cathankins said. ^

Good points. To counter the potential delayed playing for bonuses, could make them expire faster?

should have 1k bots. what 20 real players? Then it will be super fun. Express is just too fast paced for me, I use to play a decent amount way back in the day, before the bots. I find bots really just make the game a lot less competitive might be different if bots ran harmful ops, retaled etc. I know obviously unless it wants to be all explore, bots come into the picture when you are looking at some of these express sets with so few real players. At the same time, the bots is when I left express. Eventaully you might have 10 or players tweaking all the little tricks for bot play to see who is the best bot farmer strategist. I was thinking before not so much more bots was the answer but a limit on how many times one player could hit them. But I know some people would just love to have fun popping bots and getting phat.

If you don't even play this server, your feedback isn't really helpful.

I’d like to understand the bot hate more because I see it a lot. Is this aspect something that could be changed and fixed?

As long as you still compete with other players and attack other players I just view them as irrelevant minus being able to grab them. What exactly is it the bots take away from the game?

Maybe there’s a middle ground everyone would enjoy.

Also I’m going to throw this out there just because it’s a crazy idea and I’m curious what you guys think.

What if there was an eternal server that never ends? Infinite turns? What would happen?

There would be no way to catch up after falling behind. Imagine a demo casher with -100% military expenses and -100% building costs. You'd have 99% SDI and as much military and spies as you want. Your PCI would keep growing forever too.

That actually sounds completely awesome too though. Number one rank would be the most dedicated player. Imagine how big superflies country would be as many sets on express as he’s played. Man it would be cool to see a country that took a decade to build. Superfly with max war techs and a monster like that sounds like quite a problem!

Superfly has amassed over 16.5 MILLION acres on the express server in all! Even ratski would have a top ten country in size, he may find that interesting to know.

These are the players with the most land ever on the express server to put this into perspective.

Rank Name Score
1 SuperFly 16,501,495
2 BaDonkaDonks 10,823,500
3 Yodal33t 10,444,293
4 NitelL 10,024,283
5 Ratski 7,313,061
6 commander1972 6,959,684
7 outlaw 6,188,921
8 MADMARK 6,089,033
9 mac23 5,993,452

There is alot of potential with the forever server idea. We could take the frown out of pvp hits being the top guys would have to build defense in order to protect themselves. Would also open all the elements which can currently be ignored, like spies and sdi.

Perhaps within the existing framework of express it would be difficult to get bonuses to work - but one thought is to think of completely different bonuses?

Like +5% tech per turn, or +10% cash per turn, +15% bushels, +8% oil, +20 bpt or whatever the equilibrium would be. Maybe even play around with them reset to reset so it becomes a true game of trying to guess what others will do to pick what strategy you should do

Personally I think one of the best things about this game is that every set is a new chance to finish #1 (or get a player kill, if that's your thing). Success is tied to skill!

As far as bonus goes, I'd like to see a 24 point free permanent GDI that works in effect like the 6 hr GDI lockout, just lasts longer.

It would be nice to get your grabbing done and see out the set unmolested

I agree Sap, on the flip side I really like the longer servers too. They have their aspects that are great too. I like that the mods have tinkered with the evolution of the game and have different servers with various experiences for the player. I have noticed the longer sets seem to attract players more serious about the game and less trolls. I enjoy that aspect. Trolls don’t seem to want to dedicate months to building monsters capable of even trolling the monsters. It may even take years to develop those type of skills. Far behind what trolls will dedicate of their time.



Express on the other hand, you log in for 30 seconds 3 times that week and you can totally ruin the game for any netter in the game simply going all X. That’s the biggest downside along with the high DR on the quick servers.

I'm with you about the longer format servers, they take patience and consistency to play well, and I would like them to periodically end so we can count chips, laugh at mistakes, and go again better or different.

Express is great for trolling as on the occasions that there are consequences for bad action they are gone soon enough. A new country name offers anonymity and a new chance to troll.

One of the upsides I consider to bonus point activated GDI is that trolls would be incentivised to attack earlier (or have fewer targets in the t-24 to t-6 hour window in which they thrive) which would improve the PvP side of gameplay - there would actually be time in the set to duke it out and have wars.

Sorry to bring up the elephant in the room but I think if we're talking about improving express, that's got to be one of the least enjoyable things about that server.