Yay or Nay, the goal is to see if Syko is correct or incorrect about more people coming back if there was no bots in this server.


Yay for me.

Signed yours truly.

Yay for me. Now let's see where this goes.

pass

Incorrect form, please try again.

Pass, after playing in LaF for nearly 8 years, I know what will happen. The ol' mid-feed and jump will come out and hurt my butthole.

KoH, be careful about what you wish for!

I vote no bots!

But wishful thinking as LaF and the other netters can’t play without bots so this will never happen

I'll play a set without bots, I'm wishing hard for this Syko experiment 👍

yeah, Ima pass on this..

It will end in a slug fest and angry players across the board.

Bots saved the small tags from getting farmed to death in favor of killing the politics which made the game more than surface level enjoyment and numbers. I dont think bot free would bring people back as much as like fixing the wiki and IRC and getting at least one working stats site again, but I hear the sentiment. I havent played in a while but would play that specific round for old times sake. And yes, some people would probably end the set pissed. 1a drama rox tho. Yay.

Imagine having the necessity for a retal team and a kill team and a spy team etc again. Back when structure won chips.

My understanding is the bots were brought in because of the lack of players. If enough people were playing, they wouldn't be necessary. The market would be inconsistent. Every small tag would disappear. The one netting tag would be laf, and they would be all explore mostly unless there was any small clans left to farm. Bots aren't the problem. They are the solution to lack of players.

The real issue is this is an old game that came out in the 90s back then this was a pretty new and cool concept for. A game. Now we have games with graphics and sound, and weapons lol. Most people play games like that not text based games. The game has lost people because there are very few new players willing to give games like this a chance and the old timers have left college, started families, work demanding jobs ect. We are busy, that's why we get a few coming back here and there like myself, when they have time, are feeling nostalgic, or checking in on old friends.


As for bots. Let's be honest there have always been bots. It was always rumored that mehul even had bot countries to boost number counts and income. Then you had player bots and there were thousands of those, and I means thousands.

Negative. I enjoy grabbing without fearing if someone is going to grab back the land I took.

Let go of your fear!

Wise words Syko, I will PS u now. Are u 5 by chance?

SF you're full of fluff. Bomb was here you had your chance you pussed out. Now they are all banned and I am peaceful.

For your punishment FA me.

You know full well I am not the best player in 1A so 5 couldn't possibly be me.

This is the only server where I know too many people and I don’t inadvertently want to hurt the wrong guys feelings.

Where it team, express or tourney I wouldn’t even bat an eye into getting in an altercation with another country lol

I could see this becoming WAY too competitive. Everyone would probably gang up on LaF. I played this game back in the 90s and took over a 15 year hiatus because I kept spawn dying from you campers. I feel it would stagnate, as we’d all be hitting each other and it would just turn into a retal-fest. Again, I haven’t been around as long as some of you, but I’m down for whatever. Oh, it probably won’t draw new attention unless we make it graphic-based, which my @$$ would be down for. Don’t get excited Coalie, that wasn’t an offer.

Bonus

id give it a whirl for old times sake

Express just did a set with dead bots. People started hitting each other. No rq's, no forum flames. Mods couldn't be bothered, super busy y'all, what else is new.
In the end it was very competitive and it seems everyone had fun, even n00bs got a fair share this round. I love getting 50,000-80,000 acres too, but most everyone was equal in land. Short on farmers though. Only downside I guess.

Edit: We were short on farmers when the set began. Without getting 90,000 acres they had to sell at slightly higher prices. So for the players who like 5 million acre farms, it's Jet only 4-life.

no one wants to play and be farmed

has everyone forgot that before bots there was a very small number of people getting farmed, most people all exploring, and everyone actually netting was landtrading

Oh wow, there used to be PvP interaction, how dare us bring back interaction for a set!

The problem is that people don't accept being grabbed even once. And then you get these crazy 200% L:L policies that people try to enforce. It would be cool to war over policies a bit, but I'm not sure the player base is all that into it anymore.

Most of us have gotten older and do not wish to spend the necessary time to wage a successful war like that.

The game is in a weird spot, and I understand your feelings - longing for the days of old! Let's be kids again :p

I would try with no bots.. but would probably be killed as i dont always have time to login..

You were probably one of those whining about landtrading also that it was not enough interaction with players ;-)

Bug is correct !
If you all want to play with no Bots in the set , play tournament where every hit is a live player !

Nope, I didn't care about what everyone else did to expand their land, I didn't even care for netting before joining LaF, then it got stale, then again, I get bored easily, eventually I'll give farming the bots and reach new heights another go at some point, and I'll most likely join you tree huggers again when I decide to ;-)

Land trading was a big PITA. It also depended on coordinating closely with a partner or a few partners to make it work right.

If that style of gameplay came back, that would be the end 1a for me :p

Would landtrading actually come back tho? Ghosts used to be way bigger and destruction way less. I haven't tested it at all, but anecdotally I've seen people do it in teams since the land grab changes and it seemed to do more harm than good...

^^ Have a few Tank 7's... Then it will be fun... lol.. Good to see ya Req!

I think it would be possible but it requires a high level of corporation between the two players to make it work right ;)



Hell ya man! Cheers to that.

It would be better than only exploring in such a long set. Those people who are doing in in team are doing it extremely inefficiently as far as I have seen. I never played in the land trading era but I know quite well the formulas that govern it.

Back when I played team I considered building a team around it but the problem was that hitting each others over and over would cost a lot of turrets if we didnt run really low defences, and the land we gain would make us fatter than everyone else... So people would likely hit us, messing up the chain of grabs altogether when we retal.
Anyway the excel file I have with the rudimentary math for this suggests something like 5 countries of 35-38k acres was possible back then, but depending on govt, strategy and how long the grabbing phases lasted maybe 30-32k would be a more efficient target. I guess we will never know. :/

In alliance the most you could all-exp to would be about 40k acres, and you could land trade to close to 100k acres. So that would definatly be great for your NW if those were the only options.

What do mods have to do with dead bots?

On the topic of bots being totally on or totally off, has there been consideration for a “mixed” implementation? If the intent is to not be able to grab bots and thus go back to grabbing only other humans, then turn off the ability for them to be grabbed. They could remain in the game to balance the market, as Tmac mentioned.

Or, to mirror what happened recently in Express, have the bots play just their first 500-1000 turns and then not do anything further. This will stabilize and jump start both the market and land grabs early but will then rely on humans to take over afterwards.

Looking for a possible compromise that meets all the needs. Thoughts?

That's called "meeting in the middle" nobody wants to do that anymore either.

10/10

what id actually like is multiple leader boards at end of set

total
no offence or research allies or fa received
no non bot offence or research allies or fa received
total minus net offence/research/defence/fa

then for each of those categories youd have it further subdivided by

allx
allx self retals only
allx tag retals only
bot farming only (include hits on untags once the untag changes take place)
trading
trading+bots
all, basically player farmer

to seperate trading vs player farming youd track land gained vs lost vs country over the set and it would qualify if

none of the extra boards would be a big deal, but at the end of the round it would say you finished 30th, but you finished 2nd for allx for example, and the additional info would either be on your country history list or clicked through on the individual countries pages


as to where landtrading wound up, it was something like 140k due to escalating jets costs, but if you do it properly you can manage the late game a bit longer, and since then build cost reduction has gotten a lot quicker too

140k was probably possible because there was an element of landgrabbing untaggeds and the 10% rule was not around.

Build costs will be lower but I don't see how it converts to more land when MStrat is no longer beneficial. It will just mean people grow slower, spend more turns on grabbing and probably start building up a stock while still in their growth phase.

i looked through my old countries and it looks like every set i traded was within the 25 bot era and had maybe a little bit of player hitting too, so i might be exagerating a bit

https://www.eestats.com/alliance/oldcountry/914/206
this one i traded to 120k at the end, might have been before min jet sends, i barely traded after that set

yeah mil strat doesnt matter that much super late, its helpful early when you need to manage your DR more but it matters more the milstrat of the person hitting you since you need to get the most growth you can for each dr on you

actually the 10% rule might even be helpful to managing trades, although thats only if everyone is running the same strat ie ffo since anything else would distort the market

edit: i forgot its 6.8*1,5=10.2 so no millstrat required now on perfect even grabs and that would slow early growth rate even more since you wouldnt be doing 13% hits ideally during the midgame, but if growth does slow a bit its still better than allx and could be interesting if the slower growth combined with quicker bonus points leads to better tech levels earlier and longer grabbing might get total acres back up there

it would be even more annoying to setup trades though since youd need to know their buildings to propose a trade, and it would have to be some weird x% of rigs per day of the set so that everyone didnt completely crash oil but was still able to trade with eachother

build cost is always going to be the biggest limit to landtrading since your building 232% of the land you grow its going to make a huge difference if its growing maybe 10% quicker than it was

and it also lets you do a couple more hits at the end of grabbing that would otherwise be unviable

im not sure if it would allow extra hits once you hit -100 or very close though since youd be giving up a lot of turns if you keep doing it while not grabbing, maybe use 3 days to store up turns might give you 4.5 or 6, but it does give you other options, and you always need to have other people still wanting to exchange when you want to

The bots are active for first 1/3 or so. Long enough to give good acreage to farmers, while still being functional so they can operate on the market. From then on all attacks against bots are rejected by gdi or however the author likes. This permits early land grabbing, provides a timeframe for the ocd's here, and let's the bots continue activity in the markets. This would take a couple sets to adjust, but prices would eventually figure themselves. Not sure how much the bots would grow without being trimmed. Might need to adjust.

I’m down

Petition to do a one set with only bots

I want to see who wins!

A friend told me that Mods have sex with dead bots.

Orgasm Loop

Why not!

But there is already ad AI server!

i need my bonus point

Not as fun