1.3 hours ago
Enemy operatives stole $5,726,953 and destroyed $0 worth of cash!

1.6 hours ago
Enemy operatives stole $5,749,953 and destroyed $0 worth of cash!

1.6 hours ago
Howl at the moon (#100) attempted to bomb your banks! You killed 8599 enemy spies.

1.6 hours ago
Enemy operatives stole $5,773,045 and destroyed $0 worth of cash!

1.6 hours ago
Enemy operatives stole $5,796,230 and destroyed $0 worth of cash!

1.6 hours ago
Enemy operatives stole $5,819,508 and destroyed $0 worth of cash!

1.6 hours ago
Howl at the moon (#100) attempted to bomb your banks! You killed 8659 enemy spies.

1.6 hours ago
Enemy operatives stole $5,842,879 and destroyed $0 worth of cash!

1.6 hours ago
Enemy operatives stole $5,866,345 and destroyed $0 worth of cash!

1.7 hours ago
Howl at the moon (#100) attempted to bomb your banks! You killed 8782 enemy spies.

1.7 hours ago
Enemy operatives stole $5,889,904 and destroyed $0 worth of cash!

1.7 hours ago
Enemy operatives stole $5,913,559 and destroyed $0 worth of cash!

1.7 hours ago
Enemy operatives stole $5,937,308 and destroyed $0 worth of cash!

1.7 hours ago
Enemy operatives stole $5,961,153 and destroyed $0 worth of cash!

1.7 hours ago
Howl at the moon (#100) attempted to bomb your banks! You killed 8885 enemy spies.

1.7 hours ago
Enemy operatives stole $5,985,093 and destroyed $0 worth of cash!

1.7 hours ago
Enemy operatives stole $6,009,129 and destroyed $0 worth of cash!

1.7 hours ago
Enemy operatives stole $6,033,263 and destroyed $0 worth of cash!

1.7 hours ago
Enemy operatives stole $6,057,492 and destroyed $0 worth of cash!

1.7 hours ago
Enemy operatives stole $6,081,820 and destroyed $0 worth of cash!

1.7 hours ago
Enemy operatives stole $6,106,245 and destroyed $0 worth of cash!

yes

After my mass losses in Primary I vote we make more changes! No stealing.. ha ha ha ha ha

Stealing is fine, but it's quite easy for low land countries to carry a SPAL that it would be impossible for a big country to match. This is why Xinhuan convinced qzjul to remove espionage, but really the larger issue is that at a certain point, when you have 2-3 times as many spies as the guy doing the ops, the raw numbers should play a factor as well rather than SPAL alone. As Rockman has pointed out, the guide itself says that's how it is supposed to work, but that doesn't seem to be the case...

no its cheating. report it. =P

I only convinced qzjul to remove tech stealing because it was unpreventable - you needed so many spies as a large country that getting the tech stolen was actually less loss than paying the upkeep on said spies.

Food and Money stealing can be mitigated by stocking and storing food on the market. Holding it on hand is a calculated risk, so this makes for risk vs reward gameplay.

Whereas tech stealing was a lose-lose situation, there was no risk vs reward element and merely served to frustrate players. Likewise, this is the reason why I disagreed with the removal of D-allies, because having it around gave landgrabbing a risk vs reward gameplay element (of spending turns to spy vs risk of failure of a blind PS).

Corruption bonus is no longer viable

cry some moarrrr

if you don't want your fluffs stolen, stop being cheap and produce more spies.

if D-Allies or even I-allies returned, i would make sure that off allies arrive back as well. just maybe just not as unbalanced as before. no off allies and people having 2 def allies would make land grabbing pretty much a no-go. especially for those players who always share their numbers with others. they would just ally with each other, making it pretty much impossible for either of them to be grabbed all set.

if that were the case, i think that I would make a country just to SS suicide any of the top players with d allies. =/

how about the game asign random allies at the start of the reset. You end up with an inactive ? - better luck next time.

this would sure make people talk more with each other ...

I suppose that is hard to program tought. I sometimes just speak my mind without taking into account someone should do ( FREE ) programing work.

as explained, it's impossible to stop some 15k acre dict with 1.75m spies if you have 60k land.

this isn't true at all! Of course you can bottomfeed even with no o-allies, but also, I retal top players with top def allies all the time without offensive allies. In Express they retaled me, too! A couple sets ago in Primary I hit a guy who finished 117m net and a guy who finished 93m, and i finished with 27.6m haha. Jetting up with the PS bonus is a hell of a thing.

why should you have to majorily increase the risk to yourself to retal someone fully decked out with really good d-allies?

say the thief is running something like 1.75m spies * 1.25 dict bonus = 2.1875m, then say he's got a couple of intel allies with 800k spies, so add another 400k and this player's at like 2.6m spy power on 15k land = 173 SPAL. now you've got 60k acres, let's say you've got big int allies who both have 1.6m spies, that's 800k spy power added to your country. so, to get near that 173 SPAL, how many spies do you need?

(X + 800,000) / 60,000 = 170
X = 9,400,000 spies. Not possible, and even if it was, carrying that many spies would be more expensive than just letting people steal all your money/tech/bushels

i'm talking about defensive allies =)

If a player is running high defense, and has two really good def allies with just as much defense as he has, the PS bonus still cancels out everything the def allies give them.

but I'm fine with offensive allies returning, the key is fixing them first. What if I grab an offensive ally with strong jets who never attacks? I could make oldman my fluff every set :P

not exactly. but I can see your point in that situation. there are many situations where players have doubled defense simply because they ally with their mates who they know will have good defense, so they keep a lower defense banking on the def allies doubling them and then they're able to mid/top feed because of it, making someone with lots of defense have to either disregard the attack or 'jet up' to get a retal.

" carrying that many spies would be more expensive than just letting people steal all your money/tech/bushels "

where did the risk/reward argument go for that, though?

d allies on express should be there to mitigate the ps attack bonus or dare i say lessen the minus ten percent effectiveness of military for reps

"if D-Allies or even I-allies returned, i would make sure that off allies arrive back as well"

one person should never be in a position to decide such things categorically. not even pang holds that over peoples heads when they make suggestions,

if you want to think of a way to prevent coordination.. im sorry, there isnt.

pfft, let us work together towards preventative measures.. UH OH, COORDINATION! :p

Why not leave it like this but reduce the PS power from +50% to +25%?

Spoken like a true champ. Also, you would just be a pest for at most, 2 sets and you would go away like the rest of the suiciders. Cough, Cerb, cough!

ha braden. of course I don't really mean to say that categorically. maybe i should have rephrased it so say that i would make sure I would be on the petitioning side to allow other allies back in as well.

having good def allies is just as much 'coordination' as having any other ally type i'd say. i can see how the different ally slots can be exploited. but if you all want a truly solo server, I don't understand why you want to add the allies back in.

and thx crest23. i'm not the normal average joe. i have been around this game, not even playing, for about 2 years now. i don't imagine suiciding (a few failed SS, etc) a few people with their mates for def allies would slow me down that much. hmm.

in fairness, i myself should have mentioned that i didn't think for a moment that is what you meant, but it's still how it came off. from what i can tell you only ever strive to help, ie express scores, etc, so i have no complaints :/

now for your second paragraph, when i tell everybody openly that i'm running john birch, as i do every reset, and my friends, i won't farm you please don't farm me.. is agreement that, as friends, we aren't going to hit each other, is that not coordinating? def allies isn't all that far off from this, coordination wise..

for a truly solo server we'd literally need to do away with the public market, anything else is bandaids working towards that inevitable albeit undesirable end..

i've been watching the market this round and been looking at stats from previous rounds to look at ways of mitigating some of the most obvious methods of cheating but to still have a public market. not quite sure if we'll look at implementing them, leave the market as it is, or do away with it.

i've made it known that I don't really want it to go away. making it more of a solitaire server.

Have you thought of putting in a reasonable oil floor :D

hmz. thanks for that ... idea. next troll? =)

but, honestly.. oil is probably the least effective market cheat on the express server.

/me waits for the three page response proving me wrong.

Well, you're right in that with everyone having SOs in, it's very unlikely for it to successfully help a targeted player anymore. But it's still pretty messed up that all kinds of "gifts" can be given out like that quite so easily

i'd far rather see a ceiling for tech prices in the last few hours of the reset. we can't attack between a certain nw % after.. i'm blanking, but after however many hours til reset.. give us a max on tech, same where i can't sell tanks for 9999, the market refuses it at any time. (but for tech i suggest only the end of the game, not anywhere in the reset)

techers may argue here, but i can't speak to their concerns one way or another, as i pretty much never play techer, so..

you're forgetting food where prices can be inflated because one player spends all set cashing $300k/turn to buy as much food on the pub market as they can, sell it on priv market, buy on pub, sell on priv, etc etc etc to eventually spend over $10b attempting to inflate prices.

tho this is happening, i feel that $10b is a pitiful amount. ha.

when you see somebody doing that you should delete them for ruining the enjoyment of everybody else, ruining not the enjoyment, rather, but, the honest and fair playing field we all agreed to play on.

if we don't want entirely to change the game mechanics, let us enforce what we all understand to be the purpose of the server..?

The oil benefit is huge. I bought $8m worth at turn 360. By the time I played turns about 30 hours later I had multiplied the $8m to $90m and bought res/bus with it at $1800. I was at 170% res/bus at turn 375.

soo.. cheater? ;)

yes, Getafix, but you didn't arrange for ... that person to sell the oil at $21. i'm not sure I really see anything wrong. except for the two noob players who have sold about 80k between them at about $18/barrel, it's only been experienced players trolling teh staff this round.

i have seen previous resets where there was obvious coordination through selling oil on the cheap, but there's been a pretty even spread of players getting cheap oil this set.

LOL. Yeah, that ruins the whole game

Not this set. I'm open about it. And back in set #214 when I bought 10m barrels from Ebert's friend I reported it on this forum and created a bugs and suggestions thread. I would like to have systems in place to catch cheaters, and continue to improve the game, which I enjoy very much. But not so much when it is completely skewed and out of wack like it has been.

then to make it fair for the rest of us, delete those who sell the oil at such a low price..

coordinated or not, it's taking advantage of a specifically against the rules use of existing game features.. knowing it will happen, and using it, or asking for it to happen, and using it, should all together be made uncouth. how do you stop this? delete the people making a mockery of the game.