I realize Laf and Evo aren't netting but isnt this getting a bit ridiculous? 60k acres and not even a month in is pretty damn fast. I would hate to see it done by some of the top netters in the game. Does someone need to break 400mill with this before it gets nerfed?

Oh and commence with arguing everyone, as I am sure it will happen :P

i agree its bullfluff..we have a netter in KSF and if he gets beat out by land traders he is going to quit the game and i dont blame him.. personally they need to take away ghost acres and add AI countries

Maybe you need to do away with your antiquated retal policies that try to punish people and adopt ones that help people. A rising tide lifts all ships.

for once I agree with locketubs... 60k acres and not even a month in is a tough task for any non landtraders to get.

-_-

When I hit 20k acres I was 5th in the server for land, and as a demo techer! A week later all the landtraders caught up and dwarfed me. Instead of using all that time finding and organizing grabs, I could have spent 30 seconds making all jet ps's back and forth. I don't think it really does much to stimulate the game.

it does nothing to stimulate the game

saw a situation today where a landtrader did SS hits for land:land retals because a PS would disrupt his landtrading

wtf is this game turning into?

mehul is turning in his grave? ;)

How about every alliance remove Land:Land retals, and make it Country:country - Land to land other wise its 1:1...

There's a thought...

If everyone wanted to LG in this game it wouldn't work. There isn't enough people in the game to support everyone LGing, at least with the way retals are now-a-days...

Right now the carrot dangles towards land trading. The game mechanics have to encourage something else before any player policies realistically change.

yea cuz you gain more landtrading than any other strat, so why bother doing anything else?

why bother at all

last reset PDM said "training members," this reset it's "your retal policies suck"

anyway it's complete fluff and if people are abusing the system the way PDM & co. are now we might as well go back to removing ghost acres and farming the hell out of untaggeds/running all explores

at least that's about who's got the most netting skill within that constrained environment instead of whose alliance allows landtrading

winning side of the server war should dec on PDM/RD to solve this :P

I thought they changed the formulas to try to stop/discourage this?

no helmet.. they nerfed it..

As far as I know, nothing was changed.

I would really like to dream what it would be like if LaF or Evo were to really sit down and plan out how best to land trade as an alliance, complete with the math and all, either internally or with each other.

We know its broken, which is why Rockman had suggested on B&S to penalize large countries in other ways.

simple, farm the land traders...

I like iScode's idea. :P

Bottomfeeders should win the race to 20k, and can still compete in growth between 20k and 40k acres. But past 40k acres, grabbers don't have a chance against landtraders.

I would argue that it takes more skill to landtrade properly than it does to farm untaggeds or bot countries properly. If you look at the wide range of networths people obtain on FFA while using landtrading, its clear that not all landtraders are equal in skill.

Bottom feeding still works quite well, and it's quite effective to start as that. Even later on, take a look at KSF's top player. He's done awesome this set and is fully built.

But currently there's a lot of carrots being dangled as someone said infront of land trading. Land is basically king in this game right now and there's 4 ways to get there...

1. Farm the few untagged 20 times a day
2. All Explore
3. Land Trade
4. Farm an alliance after winning a war.

Options 2 and 3 atleast allow so the untags don't get hit so often.
Option 2 is good for those without much time on thier hand, but not really all that fun.

3. Allows for player interaction and has higher possibilities of reward.

Take RD/PDM in this case... A few resets ago the 2 alliances were fighting and at eachothers throats. Now I'd venture to say about 1/3rd of the people I talk to on a daily basis from the game are in PDM and it sounds like they along with the RD members doing it are having a lot of fun and interacting with eachother constantly... both ingame and now by email, irc, and icq. They're having fun and have made new friends in the game.

Alliances at different times have 'exchanged hits' since I've started playing again I've seen arranged hitting involving countries from Evo, SoF, PDM, Monsters, RD, LaF NA, and a number of other alliances.

The only difference is this reset we're being quite a bit more blatent about it, but it's the same thing.

Even with the trading going on this reset I'll make 2 predictions.

1. The country that wins this reset will have been a non-trader.
2. There will be atleast 3 non-trading countries in the top ten, likely 4. (quite a few considering the number of alliances that fought this set and the %'age of alliances that traded of those left).

I don't know about that Silver. At the rate you're going, you're definitely going to win. At the risk of telling you exactly how to win, here's how you can shatter all NW records.

You're at 60k acres now. You gained 10k acres today. So you can get to 80k acres in two days. At 80k acres, you can switch to fascist with 220% agriculture tech, you will be farming at the rate of ~1M bushels per turn. 78 turns per day + 4 turn bonus puts you at 82 turns per day so 82M bushels per day.

If you stock for 30 days, that will take you to the end of november. That will be the equivalent of 2.46 billion bushels. Assume you convert to theo at the end of november and destock off your private market at a rate of $224/nw, that will be the equivalent of a 371M NW jump. No non-trader can possibly get that high.

bah edit your post highrock. Bad form!

Why edit? It's the truth and not any sort of secret. The game needs to change.

na won't get that high...

It's gonna take me days to get buildings on all my acres, They're pretty sparce right now heh.

My country is set up like Canada right now.. large amount of useless land.

I meant the advice he was giving :P the game does need to change.. i started the thread ;)

the game needs to change and landtrading is at the bottom of the "whats wrong with the game" list.

until people are more open about landgrabing and stop beng so stingy about getting retalled land trading will happen.

Skill in war and netgaining is being eroded at an alarming rate in this game.

In war, it's just gangbang, blindside or call more allies than the other side.

In netting, it's land trading, land:land retalling, dropping members to win ANW, FAing to the top 10.

It's sad. :(

*agrees with thread*

Dagga without L:L techers win every reset since they have the best networth/land and the other strategies cant afford to carry the same levels of military at an early stage to avoid topfeeds. Having said that, the majority of people seem clueless with techers so meh...

As far as land-trading goes, it can easily be solved through alliances taking a stand on it, the admins dont have to fix everything for you. Just drop pacts with land trading alliances farm anyone that landtrades, get into a war over it, and see which side wins. Similar to how L:L came about.

helmet the change was to stop the 6 million acre countries

and it doesnt actually stop them it just makes it a little more complex

anyway i want to see someone abuse this even more so that everyone realises how lame it is

what needs to happen is changes to make organic landtrading better than organised landtrading at a minimum

in simple terms this means diminished returns on ghost acres, the other things you could easily change are CS losses and change all retals done within x time period to hurt the initial grabber more

one potential way would be any retal done inside 20 hours takes the same amount of acres but ghost acres are taken from the original country

my main disapointment though is a lot of the people in favour of landtrading are against bots meaning that instead of being able to balance 2 or more ways of playing we will probably be arguing for one and against the other

I like the random AI bot idea.

S.S. : what war was fought over Land:Land retals? I remember a number of wars from then but none had much to do with retal policy.

the first of the sol vs laf wars in EE about 6 sets ago was over land:land

Im strongly considering to implement a policy for SOF next set that wont allow L:L retals on land trading countries ie if we hit a landtrading country there will be no such thing as topfeeding

Enshula : was it actually about that policy or deeper? since Land:Land had been around for a decade heh.

You're so big and bad Ivan, please inform us the next time you want to make policies no one else gives two fluffs about.

MD and Imag just fought a war last set based solely on L:L.

Highrock is right. Our war was over L:L.

Let's not forget the L:L disputes between iMag and LCN.

actually Ivan policy is basically what is used in FFA

and it doesnt hurt a landtrader at all if as an alliance u retal in the right way

::shakes fist::

LCN has had many discussions about the merits of landtrading. So far, the overwhelming response is that it's no better than intra-alliance farming. We recognize that exchanging hits can be beneficial, but we won't be engaging in organized landtrading anytime soon.

well it was either that or possibly:

1a hits 1b
2a hits 1b
b retals 2a 2:1

or

1a hits 1b
2a hits 2b
b retals 2b 2:1

sol had a weird policy that i think they dropped but its possible there policy was the first less weird policy or perhaps even a dispute over:

1a hits 1b
1a hits 2b
b retals 1a 3:2

but i think it was just about not accepting land:land retals

For what it's worth, as Head FA of PDM, I despise landtrading despite me capitulating and doing a few trades - probably the last time I do it. You can even ask RD about how I tried to torpedo landtrading with them (didn't work very well though).

But what are the other options? Bottomfeeding players out of the game? Aside from fluffing about our policies, what is your actual SOLUTION? This is the main problem with these criticisms - they fluff about something but offer no real solution.

Paradigm has worked hard to get where it is after being completely mediocre for years. Now we're one of the largest alliances around after fighting countless wars over retal policy. We are in this position BECAUSE of all the wars we fought. If you don't like what we do, well, I'm sorry for that. But here's the funny thing - you can do the SAME thing we're doing.

TL;DR - fluff the haters.

Another PDM "well we aren't good enough to get land from anywhere else" post.

How is that a justification for your 50k acre country or Mr. Silver cheating to win the server again?

War us or stfu and gtfo.

Qz Pang and Slag should make some AI countries that kills you after hitting them more than 3 times.

LOL@soviet

you should join EVO, could have babies with nukevil/slagpit or KJ

And yes landtrading is no different then interalliance farming and other crap so i guess we will see what alliances sides with what once and or if the server wars about this starts

dont think SOF has ever sided with EVO in one of those, sounds almost scary!

Time for ivan to marry anoniem.

Why does no one complain that all-explore countries don't have a chance to compete with the bottomfeeders who relentlessly farm an extremely small group of untaggeds?

Why should bottomfeeding be the only way to netgain?

Is it just that the old school netters are elitist and think that the traditional method of growth should be the only acceptable one? Are they scared that they will be unable to learn a new skill, and that other more skilled players will learn to landtrade, whereas these over the hill netters can't learn to landtrade?

Farming bot countries is basically identical to farming untaggeds, which is why unskilled netters want them. They won't have to learn a new skill, but they can be fed more targets to cover up for the fact that they aren't getting any better at bottomfeeding than they were five or ten years ago, but by making it easier to bottomfeed, these weak minded players can be deluded into thinking that they are somehow becoming more skilled at bottomfeeding.


I think its time to remove untaggeds from the alliance servers completely. Make ghost acre DR completely unable to wear off between countries. Then bottomfeeding is eliminated and landtrading is nerfed. Thus, to gain land by a method other than exploring (which is rather limited since it decreases down to under 10 acres per turn fairly fast), you'll have to actually have a little bit of skill.

Are you slow? It's easy to get land from somewhere else however that has an averse effect on the server too. If we all farm untaggs/ small alliances there will be no one left in the game to play with other than a handful of alliances that all can retal your hits, you obviously don't get that. What's hard or fun about farming a handful of small people 20 times a day? There is nothing hard about that, you're basically hitting a defenseless country over and over and over.

Listen, we all wish it was the golden days of single or double tapping different countries every day. This is not the reality that we live in today.

This is truly a community of babies and whiners. Pang/Qz should get into the cheese making business, they'd have a lot of customers here.