Dynamic Market

[Wolf Snare]

Basically ruined Indy play. With predatory leader players routinely market robbing any passive storing efforts, a new version of super market hoarding has monopolized the game. Offensive leader strategies are nearly invincible. The current market is a storehouse and all 1.2 billion rats and most of the stoats are owned by disl & gier, as they hoard cash and buy everyone out, rob the money back, then manipulate the prices. I now know how shadow's felt for a decade being on the losing end of one unfair exploit or another lol 😂.

I'm confident we'll be able to catch gier with his pants down before reset if he stops camping online for a few hours, but leader math has changed since troop training was taken out of the game. We used to be able to accomplish ~98 leader defence ratio after 22 suicides (from 175), but with troop training gone we can only get to about 116 ratio, which makes it for a little more of a challenge (more so difficult for camping targets.) We were able to get a 186 attack ratio last night but gier logged on at 104 defence ratio before we could steal our 600bil cash back.

To top it all off, If an emperor were to attempt a land lock, the current system offers little advantage to the majority of the game, and the single army market storing strategy that gave disl a chance last round is no longer possible.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not whining and complaining that I'm getting spanked this set, and I won't just quit like a lot of others might when they've had everything taken from them overnight. Any ideas on preventing this invincible strategy? I wish I hadn't wasted a month and a half storin troops for the enemy lol but I'll figure out a way to get it back.

[Shadow]

I like that the market isn't really a good storehouse, which was most of the point of the change in the first place.

Not thrilled that it's now more of a rotating storehouse. The idea behind it is that there would be enough people involved in every market that you would have a hard time getting your troops off without also giving like 10 other people a lot of your money. With a small player base... meh. not sure there's much to be done about it short of removing the public market entirely.

[Disl]

The game has certainly shifted to public market monopoly play. But as shadow mentioned this is a symptom of the playerbase being too small. Or rather too few market players.

When we bought out rats the cash was spread out between sevz and snare. Two Indy rat empires had a rat market monopoly but they were fairly easy to rob. 22 steals takes about 60-70% of the empire's cash from what I witnessed. 350 bil split between 2 empires, that is 44 turns worth of stealing. If those rats were divided by say 4 empires, then we must spend 88 turns of stealing. Fail army and pearls seem to be on your side, it was a tactical error to keep all the rats between 2 rather than 4 empires. This would be a soft counter to market robbing. It would be less lucrative on our account stealing and the target empires would keep more cash after hitlimit. Suffice to say if there were say 8 market players holding rats, market robbing power would diminish.

The next part is when to to start stealing. There is a networth bug regarding the empire bank and public market transactions. The empire networth (in regards to cash) does not change until the empire logs in. It takes some espionages to figure out where the cash is leaking. The longer we wait to steal the more time the empire has to save all their cash .

Then comes the fact the whole operation blowing up in our faces if the empire targets log in, then they can save the cash by aiding it off to leader player and use it to buy us out. Tit for tat market warfare.

When to buy is critical too. Indy's depreciate their own goods due to the sheer volume of networth they make each run. Coupled with unlimited foreign aid.  If you hold troops we can murder it away. If you market we have a window of dirt cheap troops to buy favorably, with a chance of stealing it back too. Leader players cannot depress the price of 1 bil rats without investing cash in the first place. We let the indys not only make the goods but run down their own prices.

[Disl]

I don have a solution but I can recommend bringing back bots, 1 for each market rats/weasels/stoats/skiffs/food and increase bots as needed.   Over at earth empires bots are used in nearly every server and while they are terrible final day net finishers, they make great producers and buyers of goods on the market. More players on the market makes monopolies far more expensive aka difficult and eventually unviable. And with 3 month sets and dynamic pricing market monopolies make some of the best investment in terms of turns and resources built.

Holding networth like food or troops is begging to be destroyed. And leaders holding cash become prime targets for suicides>steal.

For all intents the market is still a storehouse. Can ya blame us though? It is so much easier to destroy networth than to create it, and in this game we can even take networth or be relieved of it. Only remedy I see is more market players to keep monopolies in check

[Shadow]

Bots that interact on the market is a good idea,  but a bit more time investment than I have in the near future,  sadly.

What do you think of a decay on market goods,  so that some percentage are sold off at market price to nobody every day?

[Disl]

Market decay is something I did not think of, and handles the market storage from getting out of hand on monopolies

Maybe the cash sold could be used for lottery or skiff races?

Either way I'm not opposed to it. But to be fair me and gier have less value on the market vs sevz and snare so this change would hurt them more

[Shadow]

I wouldn't change anything until next round either way.

I had pictured the cash just going to the people who are selling stuff, basically as though someone had bought their stuff. Maybe at merc prices though, so that price manipulation can't take advantage of it.

[Gier]

I'm confident we'll be able to catch gier with his pants down before reset if he stops camping online for a few hours, but leader math has changed since troop training was taken out of the game.

The only way you know I'm camping online is by doing it yourself, right? :P

[Shadow]

Another possibility, though a bit more complicated, would be to have everyone's collective mercs quota as an entry on the public market (and get rid of mercs as a separate page). That way, you are always losing a portion of any cash spent to mercs, and it guarantees competition on the market, as well as maintaining some troop presence there to help even out prices.

[Gorak]

One thing that helps out solo indy's and ledvel the playing field a bit would be to abolish limits of how much can be sold to mercenaries. If you have it, you should be able to sell it.
It was that way at other servers back in the day, and allowed solo indy to be a viable strat as you could instantly liquidate troops for instant cash as needed rather then having to wait for troops to hit market then potentially having to sit on billions in cash that cannot be defended from leaders, waiting for your next turn run

[Shadow]

I'd rather make merc sell a last resort though,  that's one reason the merc sell prices are so bad. That said,  removng sell limits is an option,  but with prices so low it's still not going to be very attractive.

The cash leak was implemented to make market theft harder, but it's still clearly viable on a delay. What about ideas focused on giving indices offensive tools to combat market theft rather than nerfing market theft? Beefed up sack or something

[Disl]

Ferret would need that boost too. Quite easy to market rob a forager :P

Hitlimit tends to keep sacks from doing too much damage. But a special attack to reprisal steal has merit.

[Gier]

Eventhough I'm not the biggest fan of the current market (no offense to everybody that helped coding it), I think the way it works is just fine. Instead of making any big adjustments to the market, some minor ones to other things might get rid of the buy outs.
- tweak $/loyalty when casting loot by either lowering the amount of cash produced, increasing loyalty costs or make it a 3 or 4 turn spell.
- reduce the current 550 turn maximum. Less turns means less leaders after a run regardless of the amount of land in the game. Less leaders means less cash.
- remove the 22 hitlimit for top 5 (debatable) players.
- slow down cash leaking out of the bank or drastically increase the amount of cash you can bank.
- tweak the stealing spell ratio. Instead of the >1.75 ratio, make it >2.2 or more, like muf (don't know the names you guys use over here :p).
- ask Sevz what to do with this issue. Although his current runs remind me more of a turtle laying on its back, he is after all THE ultimate redwallian. Unmachted!

Some of these things popped in my head when writing this so not much thought was put into it. Hence, I might be missing some really dumb. English is also not my first or second language so my phrasing might look funny :-).

[Shadow]

IIRC FAF had troop attacks that just took cash, and another that just took food, so ir was possible for indies to mess up the production of leaders/producers just as hard as leaders could mess them up.

I didn't mind it over there. Might be a way to deal with this - mutually assured destruction.

Bottom line is that the market will never be fully functional with a small player base, so pick your poison, I guess.

[Disl]

It dawned on me that over at QMT market cash and lottery wins would deposit to the empire as soon as they logged in. So if a mage wanted to market Rob they would have to camp online until their mark logs in, and be fast enough to respond.

We can take protection a step further, have the cash deposit to the bank instead so the empire has further grace period for their market cash in terms of maneuvering.

The bank would still leak cash, but only after the empire in question logs in. This gives the target empire a chance to respond to market theft.