December 2018 Round Immortalization

[Shadow]

 10 of the 39 Warlords in the game are considered active.

36 Warlords have been destroyed, and -35 Warlords have been abandoned.
1 accounts have been disabled by Administration.
There are 6 active Clans.

1. Imitation of life (#6)
$3,986,444,575 with 112,921 Acres

2. Baaarrrggghhd (#18)
$1,698,675,112 with 207,970 Acres

3. Glittery Gold (#35)
$530,990,049 with 1,856 Acres

4. Deterrence (#11)
$494,673,262 with 21,837 Acres

5. Sevz (#5)
$282,798,759 with 4,322 Acres

6. FailArmy (#24)
$196,234,020 with 34,174 Acres

7. Generous Harvest (#14)
$143,133,895 with 7,773 Acres

8. Krowdon (#10)
$125,417,614 with 10,368 Acres

9. Land Farm (Free Land) (#4)
$86,673,681 with 13,184 Acres

10. Laird Jeff (#38)
$46,144,949 with 15,070 Acres

11. Northern Hordes (#7)
$473,690,559 with 32,544 Acres

12. Pearls (#28)
$61,393,232 with 0 Acres

13. Eira (#12)
$30,067,390 with 7,807 Acres

14. Townsen (#32)
$25,290,067 with 15,930 Acres

15. Terra Calria (#17)
$16,194,587 with 8,907 Acres

Most Rats
Imitation of life (#6)
892,303,982 Rats

Most Weasels
Imitation of life (#6)
392,294,964 Weasels

Most Stoats
Imitation of life (#6)
201,934,898 Stoats

Most Skiffs
Imitation of life (#6)
167,601,293 Skiffs

Most Food
Baaarrrggghhd (#18)
17,327,445,713 Food

Most Cash
Glittery Gold (#35)
98,259,538,924 Cash

Most Leaders
Imitation of life (#6)
19,321,285 Leaders

Most Loyalty
Imitation of life (#6)
157,769,652 Loyalty

Most Land
Baaarrrggghhd (#18)
207,970 Land

Most Total Offenses
Deterrence (#11)
3,272 Total Offenses

Most Total Defenses
Sevz (#5)
2,343 Total Defenses

[Gier]

Anyone want to fight me this round?
I'll challenge an entire clan

Well that worked out nicely, didn't it?

[Shadow]

Would love to hear thoughts about the market after the fact.

[Wolf Snare]

Congrats gier and ryu on a flawless finish. Definitely a hard fought battle, your strategic foresight and tenacity earned you an impressive victory. I apologize for not being more active near the end; the whole team fell apart a few times and ultimately fizzled put entirely from what I can see. No excuses though, you guys killed it fair and square. You had great teamwork and we simply had no coordination  :-\

I personally prefer to bring back he old market. The dynamic is too easily manipulated and can be abused when fully understood. I found it Hard to stay interested when more active players can take away the fun with strategic market abuse. All in all it was a good set and I enjoyed getting outplayed despite my efforts. Learning curve was steep with the market cHange for me, and I learned a lot about fighting handicapped when teammates let me down. I Fought tooth and nail while I was active like I haven't had to do in years. No matter what I tried you guys were a few steps ahead.

Disl  has an unfathomable grasp and understanding of the game and code and is one of the most impressive teachers I've witnessed, though I'm sure gier was a pleasure to teach. He seems sharp, especially given English isn't his first language. I enjoyed the banter in ig messages, albeit I was annoyed at times when he taunted me ;)

Well done guys.

Sevz you suck, idc if you're busy Working, congrats on that, but you haven't put your soul into your playstyle in 4+ sets

[Gier]

It was a fun set. Lots of action, lots onlining and lots of trashtalk. Influencing someone's style of play solely through ingame messaging is the most efficient strategy there is :D.

By the end it was obvious the win would be pretty safe. The buy outs were all Disl's idea. They got tougher to do as you were on to us. We changed strategy (that was pretty much my only major tactical input) to just keep your troops on the market and buy you guys out completely in the last day(s) of the set leaving you with a ton of cash and no market to spend it on. It would have been such a neat way of winning with you guys producing our networth :). That didn't really work since you changed to stoat. I still don't get that. Sure you can make leaders real fast, but with this land, who can't? Suiciding our leaders was also kind of pointless with me being very active and a 22 hit limit. We also controled most of the market at that point. If you would just keep killing our leaders while playing indy and by taking our land, it would have been much tougher. I've seen what Disl can produce as a rat. It would take a lot of cash to buy you guys out.

I have played a ton of prom back in its starting years ('03 - '10). I've played sets with only a 20 active empires but also sets with at some point over 200 active empires. I have never played on servers with this few active players. It was pretty obvious that activity was the key in this set up with this market. I can only say I will not be doing that again. I was fortunate to have had 6 weeks off from work in this set (combo of holidays, vacation and faternity leave) being able to do the hyperactive style that I played. I'm still deleting all the screencaps I took on my phone from comparing nw, market amounts, ...

As for the "networth change notification program" that sevz and snare think I use. I never confirmed/declined, so you guys were always on your toes, but I do NOT have that. The first times that I caught you online were plain luck, later on it became luck combined with the recurring times when you guys were doing your runs. Again being active (and observant) was the key.

As for the market, Shadow, I'd keep it in place for at least a few sets. This might have been a one time thing since it might be tough to redo it. With this few players, I'm afraid 1 or 2 wolfs will always have the advantage making the leaderstrategy even more overpowered. That power would diminish with a big playerbase. Very hard to see what it would do with a big playerbase, but I think it would do more where it was designed for. It was designed to make the game more balanced, but I think it might unbalance it at this point.

Lastly, I had all the networth in the end just for safety reasons. I suggested sending it all to Disl the moment before the set ended but he refused. This win is all on him. He did a ton of thinking while having to put up with my spam on Messenger, my dumb moves (I still don't know who got that 20bil :D) and my questions. Shadows food and money injections and him being a decoy appearing to be kind of neutral were a major part of the win also.

[Disl]

Would love to hear thoughts about the market after the fact.

Market warfare is a legitimate strategy with dynamic pricing.  If an empire stores troops/food on public market, it is possible to crash that value 6 hours later with a single indy run (or ferret run for food). Then buyout as much as possible at profit while also having a chance to steal, poison or sack.  Suffice to say the dynamic market rewards monopolies. And from our experience, 'market attack'  success was contingent on how active our enemy is in checking their empire. Out of the maybe 20 or so buyouts, only a handful were Snare/Sevz able to log in time to save the cash by aiding to a leader player, unclanned.

Example: Rats at $600 on public. I do a 100% allocation rat run on 550 turns and load my public market or Gier's, then 6 hours later crash the price to $330 or so, and then have one of us buyout as much as possible in a single transaction, as the price will then skyrocket.

-How do we know where the cash goes? Open two tabs: 1 for scores and another for public market. Say we want to know who has rats, so we buy 10,000 rats on public market window. Change public market window to scores and watch for any networth changes between the old score page and new score page. Credit to Gier for finding this little trick. There is of course no way to find out how many troops each market player is holding exactly, but it makes tracking the cash possible without turn investment.


However as mentioned in an other thread this monopoly powerplay occurs consistently due to so few market players on the score board.  I recommended to Gier that we constantly buy out sevz and snare,then steal it back which was high risk, high reward and he liked that idea quite a bit :P  The reasoning was that our cash was exposed, so we put that burden on our enemy. Once we recovered most of the cash, we repeated until their markets were cleaned out as to reduce their chances at destroying our cash reserves. Game of hot potato, really.

Sevz disappeared for days while holding 10 bil+ food and $50 bil+ cash and $300 mil networth of troops, Snare was semi-active but making tons of networth on market. Pearls was buying our troops but made a fatal error in holding the networth. I destroyed most the purchased networth with Rat offense + chaos in just 22 hits lol.  Towards the very end Snare had 200 mil weasels which meant only murder was a feasible cost effective way to destroy their networth.

Finally Gier suggested we let Sevz and Snare fill their public market completely 1-2 days before reset, then we buy out all the troops and leave our opponents with the burden of converting that cash for networth.  This was the contingency plan if we couldn't loot as fast as they could industrialize troops. And in practice two rats clanned make far more networth than a wolf could loot and buy up. 

[Disl]

...though I'm sure gier was a pleasure to teach.

The very first 2 weeks he was looting on 80 ratio or so.  I explained he should loot on 175 ratio or close to it, which should yield $1500+ under $100 mil networth with wolf.  He picked up quick and in the final month did all the buyouts on his own. He explained on the final day he had a total monopoly on troops. Shadow had all the food. If you guys continued to play there is no way we would have got that score. I do agree that Sevz indeed, sucks :P

@Gier it was a pleasure working with you. We first met 2 rounds ago when Sevz/Snare had a total lockdown on land and we couldn't coordinate any kind of offense. When we finally got 600 mil rats on the market, it was all bought out leaving us with no hope haha. You mastered the nuances of the leader strategy, consistent with coordination/messaging and your own input further helped in our market warfare tactics making you a fine warlord to partner with all around. I hope you stick around!

@Austfit I recommended that you make 100% barracks, spam F5 + Enter with foreign aid which equals ton of networth. You disappeared shortly after. I hope you stick around too buddy!

@Shadow I suggested to Gier we buy your food and steal your cash in the 1st month, he advised not to. A sort of unspoken, non-aggression pact was established shortly after.  I am greatly surprised nobody poisoned you. The random food and cash shipments greatly helped, but shortly after Sevz went missing in action and we had the lead. I even asked you to revolt into Rat to help us keep up in indy production but that was not needed. We even pondered if you would come after us. Regardless thanks for your assistance, in particular holding my troops.

@Gorak you ran a solid solo indy. I was getting eviscerated with standard attacks lol. You need to work on your leader though. I appreciated the forum comment activity ;)

@Sevz You are really really bad and suck. Nah but you were amazing 2 rounds ago with the lock, and this past round disappeared leaving Snare hanging to fend for himself. I am disappointed to say the least  :'(

This round was certainly, dynamic.  I believe rat + rat is the strongest combo in the game- even if they are getting market robbed consistently as demonstrated by Sevz/Snare. Mostly a factor granted by unlimited foreign aid credits though. Ferret is certainly viable solo, but also a sitting duck for steals/poisons. Wolf/Marten are great as usual for solo play, 22 hit limit gives them much needed defense from leader attack suicides but they pale in comparison to indy + indy.

[Gorak]

You guy's influenced me in one way. I would cash up ans send it to Sevz and Snare, only to watch you guys immediately steal it all. So I stopped sending them anything. Saw it as a complete waste.
Also, I seemed to have the timing that market prices always were super high when I logged on. I noticed that there was little to no difference between market prices and mercenary prices, so I stopped buying from market all together.
All in all, I think I managed 2 or 3 turn runs without 3% myself into the ground due to not paying attention to food and cash, so that's a win for me

[Gorak]

and to Disl, I agree, I absolutely suck as Leaderer. I did not know what the hell to do as Martin. Was kinda fun fumbling through turns trying to get a handle on it though

[Shadow]

I honestly don't think it's possible to have a market that is not abusable in some way with a small player base. If I have to choose a particular form of abuse to live with, I prefer this one to the other option, for a couple of reasons:

1 - it gives players the ability to police market storing themselves. If your opponent is storing on the market, you can simply start doing the same, and you'll take half their cash when they try to pull out.

2 - market theft becomes a good strategic option, since you have some control over the price. But it comes at a risk, since they can log in and use the cash themselves. It's a bit asymmetric in favor of leader players, but what isn't in this game?

I don't actually mind the fact that you can manipulate prices. You're all vermin, I assume you're all cheating and insider trading already anyway ^_^. The best way for people to avoid the possibility of market manipulation is to pile more stuff on the market (the more that's already there, the more that is needed to affect the price), so the more active the market is, the harder it will be to attack.

I am happy to tweak the exact numbers, though. I could tune it so that the price responds a bit less to new orders, making it harder to crash the price, or have it equalize slower or faster, if that would be of interest to people.

@Shadow I suggested to Gier we buy your food and steal your cash in the 1st month, he advised not to. A sort of unspoken, non-aggression pact was established shortly after.  I am greatly surprised nobody poisoned you. The random food and cash shipments greatly helped, but shortly after Sevz went missing in action and we had the lead. I even asked you to revolt into Rat to help us keep up in indy production but that was not needed. We even pondered if you would come after us. Regardless thanks for your assistance, in particular holding my troops.

I considered messing with you guys, but my activity was not consistent enough to make an interesting fight. Plus I was just happy to see someone active who wasn't Sevs locking land for no reason. Maybe some other time when I can be more active.