So.. we're done with the 499 exploit.
Proposed changes for next round:
No aid to players with less than 5000 acres if they have greater than 50 mil net.
Dropping land currently has a floor of 250 acres, that's being raised +1000 every 10 mil net. So if you have 500 mil networth the lowest land you can drop to is 50k.
Remove Standards under 500.
No Kills.
I reserve the right to make mid-round changes if the above isn't enough of a deterrent. tbh I probably should have fixed it this round.
For players who can actually play reasonably well it's embarrassing that you have to exploit loopholes.
And having an invulnerable storehouse is not in the spirit of the game, you know you're being asshats.
Also tempted to add a 3 day delay to any market price changes, or spike the market fee for changing price.
The market is not designed to be a storehouse, that's lame.
Anyways.
Do you guys want a round theme for the next round?
I'm open to suggestions.
Woah.
I thought it was funny and semi harmless. Why not make kills possible? We can just restart, why so against us having fun? You want us to have no storage. No safety with our networth and not allowed to kill each other if we're in enemy clans?
This round is rubbish. There is a team that purposely made it a terrible round. Spreading land to slow down the action. Nobody runs when the land is spread to ensure noone has more than 100k. Look right now they done it on purpose again and they're intentionally maxing their own leaderers after every run. I mean they haven't even tried hitting the emperor and they've made sure we can't break it either.
Who are you mad at? This was a pointless round with an emperor way too heavy on leaders. Why even give an emperor 2 billion leaders on only 250k land? I resent you for that. Could have given us a heads up that breaking a lizard with leaders was impossible because you gave it 20MILLION acres worth of leaders. wat?
I've been on the road 3weeks I don't really care but you seem to be blaming one side in favor of another. Your bias is intense. Both sides have been filling the market because that's how you made it. We can't remove goods we have to sell them at merc prices. So we can't even store troops until its time to break.
This round is designed for a Rat to sack aid and store production at max prices. Nothing an opposition can do to stop them storing at max prices and maxing their own team. I don't blame them for the way they played its smart but it stinks that they ignored the emperor just so they could win like it was a normal round.
Don't blame the players blame the coding changes.
Last round we didn't have a market and this round it became a storehouse because you made it so storage prices can be very high.
If you made max prices lower it would have prevented this.
I say just delete the emperor cos coding literally made my round a complete waste of time. If shoot wasn't on 499acres we wouldn't have even been able to suicide the emperor and breaking with troops would have done nothing special. You sir are a bad person.
Next round them should be race to badgers gold
Yeah. Absolutely hilarious.
Carried By Sacks (#7)
Turns (?) 426 (max 550)
Turns Stored (?) 0 (max 150)
Rank (?) #28
Workers (?) 1,444,460
Acres (?) 499
Cash (?) $2,128,028,295,438
Food (?) 75,609,471,844
Loyalty (?) 124,966,342
Networth (?) $2,411,186,741
Location (?) Mossflower
Race (?) Fox
Health (?) 100%
Tax Rate (?) 5%
Rats (?) 54,734,062
Weasels (?) 28,695,894
Stoats (?) 50,714
Skiffs (?) 3,411,687
Leaders (?) 2,392,340
Fresh today, got legit, 'cause I got sacked down to 2,500 acres and had a 5000 leader ratio
2.4 billion untouchable networth. Yep, that's pretty funny alright. Not an exploit or anything, just pure hilarity.
Kills are lame and cause people to not want to play.
You may enjoy seeing weeks worth of effort vanish 'cause someone is trolling, most don't.
It also lets me remove standards-under-500.
No, I don't want any market storage. Hording rounds are boring, and having untouchable net is lame.
If both teams are abusing the market for storage I'm hardly taking a side by nerfing it right? Or is everything a targeted attack?
Making the set market price be base-Mercs is acceptable to me.
My next idea is market upkeep charges, it's already coded just not in use.
With the 499 thing I'm not blaming or taking a side.
I am closing a loophole, a fairly clever one I'll grant you.
Sacks is essentially invulnerable when he's not running, not because he's hard to break but because he found a set of circumstances that grants invulnerability.
Meanwhile your team is sacking the snot out of other players.
That is not okay.
I'm actually fine with disabling land dropping, I just thought the above solution was more clever.
Land dropped to the landfarm is extremely easy to recover, I'm not sure I'd blame that for the land spread. It's more likely because nearly everyone is unclanned (because people are being stupid-vicious lately) and people get maxed.
The emps are always heavy on leaders, because they don't run they can't replenish and are exceptionally vulnerable to suicides.
This round especially so because you had like two months to break it and an emp weak on leaders will just be murdered.
Which is, again, lame (I'm seeing a pattern..)
The emp wasn't even that hard to break. Lask could have been broken by a team in a couple weeks, 2.5 bil rats probably would have been plenty.
I never thought Lask would remain unbroken 5 days before reset, but I'm not deleting him because of your team's ineptitude.
Sacks could have easily food massed enough net to hit the emp w/o the 499 exploit. If people sacked him you'd have only yourself to blame.
Team Volky made a half-hearted attempt and you stopped them.
/shrug.
Quote from: windhound on June 24, 2018, 07:55:22 PM
So.. we're done with the 499 exploit.
Proposed changes for next round:
No aid to players with less than 5000 acres if they have greater than 50 mil net.
Dropping land currently has a floor of 250 acres, that's being raised +1000 every 10 mil net. So if you have 500 mil networth the lowest land you can drop to is 50k.
Remove Standards under 500.
No Kills.
I reserve the right to make mid-round changes if the above isn't enough of a deterrent. tbh I probably should have fixed it this round.
For players who can actually play reasonably well it's embarrassing that you have to exploit loopholes.
And having an invulnerable storehouse is not in the spirit of the game, you know you're being asshats.
Also tempted to add a 3 day delay to any market price changes, or spike the market fee for changing price.
The market is not designed to be a storehouse, that's lame.
Anyways.
Do you guys want a round theme for the next round?
I'm open to suggestions.
This all sounds reasonable to me. I don't plan on playing, so I can keep an eye on things on the admin side if you want to.
It's always been strange to me that people insist on exploiting code bugs in this game and playing by the letter of the code instead of the spirit of the game. Who are you trying to impress at this point?
I'm not being dragged into another pointless arguement, I just wanted to chip in to say I don't think the market should be in any future rounds.
It's always used as a storehouse, regardless of whatever changes are made. I can think of ways to try and mitigate this, but there's probably always going to be some way to abuse it (especially with such a small playerbase).
I don't disagree. It's a shame that it would be necessary to remove it.
It's a shame, but in every round I recollect playing recently, it's been abused.
As for the other changes, they sound good to me. Removing kills does seem a bit ... Weird, but considering the small playerbase and somewhat toxic atmosphere; I don't think it's a bad idea really.
I think forcing the sales price to be at or slightly below mercs would negate a lot of market storage.
Worst case, charging full upkeep completely solves market storage -- mostly 'cause noone would use it except for food.
And I've had an idea to add spoilage for a while, something like .01% of marketed food disappears each turn cycle.
Removing kills is mostly due to Sevz early this round, he was bored so he killed a couple random players.
Yes, you can respawn, and it was early round so they didn't lose much. It's still a lance move and will drive players away, we're small enough as is.
About all the game changes lately have been lance mitigation, it would be simpler to just ban the couple culprits.
Charging upkeep is a good idea, as is spoilage
both worth trying before scrapping it
Don't you think all these ideas might kind of be like, overkill? Remove the STD under X requirement and kick up PM pull penalties if people use it to store. Also add a land dropping spell.
Pull penalties don't do anything, people just team up and buy each other out, recycling cash back and forth until they've got it all off. Even if you make it impossible to pull it's still a storehouse. I think the only thing that could rescue the public market is a big playerbase, and you can't really code those. We did try, though. The bots were functional but not very adaptable.
Overkill is better than underkill, if you want somthin' dead you kill it thoroughly.
tbh the aid limitation alone would kill 499, but the other stuff addresses other lesser problems without affecting normal gameplay.
I've thought about rewriting the bots, they were originally designed for RWL3 and so would need to be gone over.
I _think_ their primary functions are fine, just their run order needs to be completely rewritten.
A leader strat is so dead simple it shouldn't take too long, 'could release them in pairs with a leader bot feeding an indy bot..
I like the idea of bots.
Why no kill?
Because right now its standards only under 500 land, which makes kills harder. If you remove standards only under 500 land, kills get a lot easier.
Or... just prevent people from land dropping themselves to less than 5000 acres so people cant easily game the 500 acre std rule? It's a mindblowingly simple solution and one that doesn't require 87 different code changes and the removal of core game mechanics to fix nor disrupts normal gameplay in any way ::)
Loophole still exists then, just requires more effort to lower someone to below 500 via attacking.
Still very doable with a clan, you'd just have the mule run or use a turn once every 7 days or whenever.
Again, I'm nuking this from orbit.
I proposed three changes, none of them exactly hard to implement, none of them affect legitimate gameplay as far as I can tell.
- No aid to players with less than 5000 acres if they have greater than 50 mil net. (one line of code plus a closing bracket, I might make this 100 mil net)
- Dropping land currently has a floor of 250 acres, that's being raised +1000 every 10 mil net. (altering one line of code)
- Remove Standards under 500 / No Kills. (already present, just flipping a switch in the control panel)
Oh, and Drakus -
Quote from: windhound on June 26, 2018, 07:28:23 PM
Removing kills is mostly due to Sevz early this round, he was bored so he killed a couple random players.
Yes, you can respawn, and it was early round so they didn't lose much. It's still a lance move and will drive players away, we're small enough as is.
Ouch. The land dropping change is extremely painful.
Any way we can fix it up for scouting purposes?
The whole land flood thing was never really an intended feature either, I'm not overly sad to see it go.
I only have two strategies for making a server have abundant land.
One of them is to play highly defensive which forces everyone who can't break my defense needs to scout new land into the game.
Locking land right now would be easy to do and devastating to redwall. It is my traditional style
The other is I happily generate acres early in the round for others to get a headstart and I play catch up later on.
On a side note
Could we have a brand new theme?
A round called 'Hunt Sevz'
I'll create my own race.
Windy can set a few bots onto me and everyone is on a mission to team up and kill me
Repeatedly kill me
How bored are you Sevz?
The landfarm constantly scouts land into the game, so there's your third option to just keep the landfarm low on land.
Do you think it would be interesting if we changed the themes regularly?
Put me on 500k land and a bunch of networth see if the server can catch up?
Random theme idea to consider
Whoever wins a round keeps their final networth?
Bring back clan storehouse?
Or admin selects a daily winner and gives them a game changing aid package?
Bot buddies for new players? Windy sets bots that can protect them and collect retals? Tinker around you could leak the land back to the player they're protecting.
Plenty of ideas if you feel like trying new tgings
to be fair we couldn't break 250k land emp last round
Re: Removal of market/use of market for storage
Maybe it's just because I'm a noob, but with such a small playerbase, clan play doesn't really seem to be the center focus (except in suuuuuuuper fun rounds where some group tries to stop Sevz and his shenanigans and it results in a completely ethical performance by both clans).
That said, clans are the most reliable way to store/build up NW. My problem is, if I want to play Indy and feel like I'm not wasting time/treading water for the entire round, I have to store the fruits of each run's labor SOMEWHERE. Last round, that was the market, because it was there and I could convert it to NW. This round, I have an idea, but it's probably also not really in line with what Windy has in mind by not wanting to use the marketplace as storage.
The point I'm trying to make is that, because of the costs associated with keeping up an army (ridiculously expensive runs) and the threat of having food stolen away that you are storing for NW lategame, there are very few reliable ways for an indy player to build NW for the endgame in an indy-dominated round. As a result, it feels kind of pointless for someone like me to play indy for 2 out of the 3 months; I can build up just about as much NW within the last month as I could have tried to squirrel away in the other 2 months, if there's no market on which for me to store it.
But, like I said, maybe it's just because I'm a noob who doesn't know how to hide/store/generate NW throughout the round. There's probably some secret technique that good players know, but aside from the tactic I'm going to be using this round, I can't really think of one.
Sure, Turbo rounds were fun in part 'cause of the varied themes.
1) You basically want me to give you control of an emp.
Given the server couldn't take down a static emp last round that would seem to be a bad idea. I can already tell you the answer, the the server as it now stands could not catch up. If you just sold all the troops then focused on food production with the land you'd very easily keep out of range.
2) Keeping the proceeds from the previous round just sets up a lock for the next. If we had 50+ players this could actually be doable, as by sheer turn quantity and mild cooperation most emps can be taken down. We don't have 50 players.
3) Storehouse rounds are kinda boring aren't they? It's just players stashing away as much as they can all round.
4) I guess we could do large random aid drops, but there is zero chance me and/or Shadow wont be called out as being unfair cheating admins -- even if we use a random number generator.
5) The bots need a fair amount of work before they're ready, I'm hoping to have some time in the upcoming month. If Shadow wants to he's more than welcome to play around with them.
As mentioned previously, the biggest problem is that promi as a game doesn't work all that well with a small playerbase.
And most of our past Turbo round themes don't cope well with limited players either. That, and most of them were kinda obnoxious; tolerable for a month, but three months is stretching it.
There's not a whole lot we can do about the small playerbase, our two main sources of new players has largely dried up. Most Promi games are dead, still can't believe we outlasted QMT, and the ROC has basically disbanded.
We actually get a handful of newbies each round, the last few rounds I've been sending them a message with my playing account welcoming them and asking if they need any help, along with sending aid if they break protection. Most of them don't reply or break protection.
/shrug.
Graceclaw, that is a legitimate gripe and has been one for years (and years).
I don't really have an answer for you, other than to team up with a leader player.
RWL sorta balanced Indy vs. Leader with Sack, but the current strategies in play sorta null that out. Certain attacks were designed to be 'last resort' war-time attacks, but we've lost basically all RP-aspects and people pretend like they're at war all the time with everyone.
You could be murdered or poisoned because someone is bored and noticed you had a bunch of stuff on you.
Or if you're playing leader you could be sacked to death because someone saw you had resources and wanted them.
Unless we completely remove poison and murder there's no way for an indy to protect their goods.
And with Sack there's no good way for a leader player to protect their resources.
We're basically in a free-for-all 100% all-out and imo the game is less fun for it.
But there's not many ways to fix it without breaking the game, esp at low player levels.
I think if we were going to make the bots relevant we would have to let them cheat a bit. Which might not be the worst idea ever, since the point would be to make an NPC that provides interesting gameplay to the real players, which is difficult to do when the best use of turns is not always something you can write into an algorithm easily.
We could think about making bots do very specific things, like a bot that always aggressively targets the guy in first place and gets an edge in breaking them with leader missions, or a bot that sends aid to the bottom few players periodically, etc. I think we could make some pretty interesting dynamics happen if we do away with the notion of trying to make a bot perform well subject to the same constraints as regular players and focus instead on making them do interesting things that enhance gameplay.
Wait, Sevah killing random people was a problem? In that case I've got to defend the guy, there was a stretch of many many months where 75% of the server at QMT would decide to just randomly kill him for no reason. I think maybe we broke him.
Haha so we have you to blame. Good to know. Brb coding a bot to kill Death all the time.