Game 85 OBN Victory!

Can the FP defeat a DS team trying to start an OMN under the current rules… Yes… But if it’s employed the FP chances are slim! With the DS holding at the start the only 2 emmy artifacts which is their economic sliver lining it creates a situation where DS have no economic implications to pay for their Character advantage… With the ability to run at low tax rates making DS pc’s basically invulnerable to emmy attacks by FP it like giving the FP and order where 80% of DS agents ineffective against assasinations?kidnappings…

I say this only becuase IF i was to actaully use OMN as DS I would put my tax rate @ 26% a constant 0 to +2 loyalty increase still pay for my characters.troops (equiped in steel and Bronze) and improve my PC’s tax base! Plus have the best starting characters and Huge agent imbalance that is already there to insure No team no matter how Good they are could win in a Long game! This is not conjecture any game that goes long this can already be done without it… The game should be about player skill not a code problem that creates unrealistic market conditions that even a novice player can exploit!

My knowledge of how broken it is once employed before it got totally out of control was playing NG selling 30k of food @ 1 and watching market prices for food go to 2… while running a deficit trying to supress the OBN or OMN… That means burning up gold reserves which is a strategy of destroying the market making the DS pay for their expensive characters forcing them to steal not assisnate! BTW everything went up in that game on that turn… every resource was sold also…

So those who say OMN can be countered never faced players who know how to fully exploit it… I would never want to face the expert players if they was using it… because as FP a powerful weapon that Is definitely designed into the game economic warfare… How effective wnd who winning is determined many times by how much assasinating vs stealing the DS are forced to do…

This is The BIG PICTURE! :smiley:

uh oh! I go on vacation and look what happens!

Clint, I am opposed to your proposed change to the OBN ruling. It is arbitrary and will have all kinds of silly unintended consequences. It is quite possible to have a well played nation end up with an economy that has reserves that are too high by your ruling. This is especially true in some FA nation designs or some GB games. I think your ruling is flat out broken in those scenarios. Please note that in FA, there is no clear economic disparity between allegiances anyway. I can’t ever decide if I want the FA GB economy to grow or shrink (whether I’m FP or DS) as I have no clear idea of the economic strength/weaknesses of my allies/enemies. If you limit your ruling to 1650 & 2950 Indie & Grudge games, then you damage things less, but your ruling is still an extremely ugly rule. It’s like telling the FP that they can’t have big armies. Of course the FP want big armies. And of course the DS want to stabilize the market, build reserves, etc.

Kevin Given gave a very eloquent description of how the OMN strategy can be countered in 1650/2950 indie/grudge games:
a. the DS don’t have that many nations that can be the Miser Nation making it easy for the FP to figure out who the culprit is
b. the FP just need to devote some agents to steal gold and they’ll take that OMN treasury down lickety-split fast. (Frankly they need to devote a lot less resources to this than the “hidden city in Mordor” strategy that was brought up as a FP success in 85. And taking out the OMN treasury is much more strategic than that hiddent city which will quickly be located and subdued)
c. the DS can’t defend against concerted OMN thefts as they can’t transfer the miser nation’s treasury around.
d. the FP need to ensure that they keep their own treasuries low so that gold thefts don’t provide the fuel for DS treasury bloat.

But really, others have said it right in pointing out that the real fix is to correct the code. The economy should work differently than it does.
Until then, my vote is to leave the OBN ruling as it was. We pointed out the problem 2 years ago and you appropriately fixed it. Now Brad is whining and you seem (despite your claims to the contrary) to have reacted far too quickly to his whining with an extremely ugly band-aid.

My $0.02,
Dave

John - This is an unfair characterization. No one that you’ve been arguing with has been using “OBN”. For the record, OMN is only now being discussed as being potentially illegal. The ruling that Clint put in place after OBN was very specific and no one to my knowledge has violated that ruling since. You may remember that we brought up the OBN problem to Clint’s attention in the first place?

As to not wanting to play DS… I’m on a grudge team with a lot of the folks that you and Brad have been arguing with and we just finished playing as FP. Now we’re DS again. We alternate allegiances.

And finally, I believe OBN is unfair and an impossible to counter exploit. I’m nowhere near convinced that OMN is unfair, nor difficult to counter. As Tony says, we’ll be happy to play FP against a DS team using (or not using) OMN.

Dave

Fixing the Economy:

ok, so it seems that almost everyone (except Ed) thinks that the correct thing to do is fix the code. Ahhhhh… But what does that mean? Here’s a suggestion:

a. Trailing 5-turn average of Aggregate nation treasuries, represent the total capacity to buy/sell and as such establish the relative strength/weakness of the overall economy, thus setting pricing “baselines”
b. supply & demand should dictate price deviation from the baselines.
c. it’s not number of nations buying or selling that matters. It’s quantity that is being bought or sold vs. how much is available on the market that should drive price deviation from the baseline.

purchases happen before sales in this game. Thus, the algorithm can be relatively simple:

  1. Adjust baselines for 5-turn trailing aggregate treasuries average
  2. if the market quantity decreases in a turn, there is upward price pressure relative to the baseline;
    or 3. if the market quantity increases in a turn, there is downward price pressure to the baseline.
    (the amount of upward pressure or downward pressure depends on the change magnitude in market quantity from a per-commodity baseline, with price limits for both sell & buy on high & low sides.)

If aggregate nation balances were extremely high and stay high, then the baseline rises as do the price limits (proportionately). Call this inflation. If aggregate nation balances were extremely low and stay there, then the baseline drops. Call this deflation.

Anyway, the point is that aggregate nation treasury balance should affect the baseline of all commodities. The trailing average mutes any “step function” type behavior in pricing. And the market would behave correctly as most of the per-turn change in pricing would be market buy/sell activity.

No one nation could skew the baselines.

Dave

Are all new games starting with the new code?

Not yet, being tested. Thanks to my whining, hopefully the error that Clint couldn’t paper over will finally get fixed like GSI tried and failed to do years ago. Your welcome all you open-minded, big-picture types. :stuck_out_tongue:

guys I will sign up for a game to test code… But since it’s in grudge format didn’t know i was specifically invited… since I have no grudge team currently :slight_smile: I would gladly play 2 nations… I have alot energy in this matter and would perfer to not gold reserve resictions from good play… Maybe the fix would be so good we could test the transfer on turn 1 also… Then we would know the fix truly worked well… Even if market prices did climb could they be lowered through enmass sells… This would also show a workable market…

I don’t care how often the turns are once a week twice a week or every two weeks… becuase getting this right is best for the game!

The GB game 90 will start with new coding, or so they say…

There’s a GB game needing one player that is testing the no-OBN code. Email me if you want to join that.

We’re also testing a Grudge game.

Clint

What about Gunboat though? Im in a couple and am using all of my orders. Many cities and armies. Using loads of skill orders every turn, needing to do more and have no spare orders to do everything I want/need to do. On top of this I have multiple economies with 70-80k each every turn. I march one too many armies away without leaving a seed to buy in steel/mithril for recruiting and that will bump instantly. Factor in a couple of turns until I can free a comm to create a new army and reserves will have sky rocketed with no real way of bringing them down. What if everyone in the game, or a few to be realistic, are in the same situation. I can see a time when the market has little to no product because its being baought in by rich nations driving prices up just as easily…

I have one GB position with 1-2000 mounts from conjures and its worth almost 150k, with gold reserves close to breaking. Must I then use multiple orders to buy product so that the market lowers. what about the others in the same game, GB b definition doesnt allow for turn by turn co-ordination.

What turn are we talking about , eventually it doesn’t matter what you do the market prices will go up – have been in a couple games where they went over 90 to 100 turns and was running with over 1 million in treasury etc – but eventually in long games and I think its somewhere around the late 20’s in turns – like 25 to 30 the market goes up without any OBN taking effect !! Have had food at sell price of 3 and 4 in my late games !!

That has been my observations also. Eventually inflation kicks in.

Do you have all nation’s files to confirm these presumptions?

An observation is neither a presumption nor a documented fact.

“Eventually inflation kicks in.” is stated as a fact. I deigned to call it a presumption. But, play at talk like a wife all you want, the answer to my Yes or No question is obviously No. Cheers.

Game 43 just finished on turn 37 and normal prices in that one with buyouts every second turn to keep the market off the floor.

Product Leather Bronze Steel Mithril Food Timber Mounts
Market units available 27243 17687 13801 0 143918 29503 1984
Purchase at market price/unit 3 3 4 105 2 3 11
Sell to market price/unit 2 2 2 58 1 2 6

Prior to that my longest game was game 73 in 2006 that finished on t41 with even lower prices

Product Leather Bronze Steel Mithril Food Timber Mounts
Market units available 37041 32190 26126 87 216300 27192 3230
Purchase at market price/unit 2 2 2 92 2 2 10
Sell to market price/unit 1 1 1 55 1 1 6

Naturally in these games one side was trying to supress the market…

My take is not so much inflation kicking in, but nations being eliminated. When I tend to see the high rise in prices is when you lose about 1/4 to 1/3 of the nations in the game. This is understandable though. Gold hexes will always produce gold and for the most part the taxes from PC’s does not change much, depending on what people have there levels set at. These are pretty much gold revenues which do not change. Even if someone is eliminated, someone is is going to be getting this revenue. We don’t tend to leave those ally/enemy pc’s sitting around for long and we also tend to try to place camps again until camp limit is hit. But the maintenance costs are now going down because there are now 21 less characters per nation that nobody has to pay for. There are now many less armies in the field because we can only hire so much and field so much. So what happens as nations are eliminated is we have less maintenance fees being paid gamewide but we have the same revenue. Someones coffers are going to start piling up, unless you somehow have enough orders to leave people sitting around to do purchases. I think this is the point when peoples reserves get out of hand and the accidental OBN kicks in, but I am pretty sure it is not just one nation, but most likely several nations at this point that have treasuries over 100k. At this point you just do not have enough orders in the game to spend down the money and still continue to keep pressure on the enemy.

Also people are not selling resources anymore, and this could be something in the code where if stockpiles are high and the amount of goods on the open market are low then it could drive prices up. Think of this in the way that when the Oil Countries decide to cut back on oil production, the prices rise and when they flood the market, the prices come back down.

I think the market works fine when there are 25 nations in the game as long as the OBN is not being attempted. It is after you lose several nations that there really isn’t any recourse without increasing the number of characters per nation to allow for more maintenance fees, more orders, more armies. I am not saying that I ever want that to happen. I am just saying that is about the only way to combat it some without a complete overhaul of the economy or a major tweak.

Just my take on it.

Jeff

Nice insight Jeff.

So Clint fixed the market code??
for my part i played in gunboat nations with nations avec with 30 k de deficit and i was quiet happy to have 120 k gold at around turn 3 and 5 (all first 5 turns with more than 80k)
because without that i couldn t have develloped the nation correctly and probably i could have die later… since turn 6 reserves were under 80 but with deficit of 25 k-30 k with no production(winter) was very risked to have less than 60k in store …
that nation was the eothraim.