I know I did, I took 12.000 acres from a farmer and kept 39.000 after the 4 time retail, and he didn't have enough turns left to even try to kill me, lol. This one was of my best sets of war tactics build up, wait to the last 15 hours and then hit a live play with low defense. Many know I am out here. And I have had some beat downs, and live to the end and I have done my fair share of dishing it out too. I do like to tread land and see who keeps more, after the retail is done. The key to kind of tactic, is don't double tap, a live player. Live players give up more land, this makes a live player tempting, and some times I just can't stop my self.

I did, getting my PB's last two rounds, its been great!

I'm the farmer you land traded with last round and no i haven't been having fun. Right now getting a high NW finish requires minimizing expenses and risking getting grabbed. So a minority of players who don't care about netgaining are making the experience for a larger number of players who want to maximize networth worse.

This is why I feel like Express is fundamentally broken. Because of how many turns you get in such a short time it's essentially impossible to fully defend against a motivated attacker. So no matter how skilled you are there is way more luck involved in Express than any of the other servers. It's gotten to the point over the last few rounds that i'm considering quitting or taking a break from Express because I'm being attacked/suicided on more often than not when I'm trying to netgain and putting the effort into get 50-60k acres only to see it ruined most of the time just isn't really worth it.

Not sure if @Slagpit will read this or agree, but I've been thinking of ways that rules in Express can change to allow it to be more netting friendly while still keeping the human competition element of the game in tact. Here's what I have so far:

- Increase the DR rate of Human countries. Ratski took about 27% of my land in 6 attacks. With less than 24 hours to go there's nothing I can do to recover from that. So 6 grabs ruins my round. If the DR rate was higher and I lost maybe 10% of my land - that's annoying but recoverable.

- Increase the Human moratorium period to 36-48 hours (Keep bots at current time) . This gives players 24 hours to maximize bot attacks adding another dimension of strategy, and gives more time to recover from getting farmed.

- Change GDI back to something you can join and players in GDI can only have receive two offensive actions taken without a retaliatory offensive action. This would let players who want to hit humans still get grabs, limit the damage, and then allow the defender the decision on if they want to retal and escalate, or absorb the hits and focus on netting. This may also encourage more human-on-human grabbing.

- Significantly reduce the expense cost for carrying a certain amount of turrets. Because Bots have very little Jets you tend to have to carry much higher volume of jets than turrets. Add that to needing to min/max expenses and carrying turrets is generally counter intuitive right now. So reducing turret expenses would incentivize better defense without hurting netting chances. This one would imbalance indys, so probably not the best idea.

I agree that the incentives are somewhat bad but am still trying to find the best way to try to fix that. Some of the best historical finishes in Express were countries that kept decent levels of defense all round. Express also offers unique ways to keep your military expenses down:

* You can play up to 18% of your turns at once and buy defense only at the end of that. That's up to 360 turns with reduced expenses compared to other servers.

* You can sell 45% or 60% of your turrets in a single public market sale before playing a big block of turns. That dramatically lowers the amount of time you spend under-defended and your NW stays high until the units actually sell.

* In some cases it's even profitable to sell some of your defense on your private market, play a big block of turns, and to rebuy after that.

The advice that I would give you is threefold:

1) Don't be predictable. If you play a 60k acre very low defense country every round then other players are going to notice that pattern and punish you.

2) Take risks at the start instead of the end. I can understand why a player would forgo defense at the beginning of the round in order to focus on tech while they haven't invested too much time yet, but is it really necessary to take big risk towards the end even though your tech levels are good by that point?

3) Take a break from time to time. We used to offer Express about four times a month and now it runs six times per month. The server will still be here five days from now!

You make fair points. I was just a little salty. Taking a break from time to time is probably the best advice. Thanks for reading my post and responding :)

Even I take a break from express, now and then.