05DEC11 - Advance Notice: Negative Resources

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RUNNING NEGATIVE BASIC RESOURCES WITHOUT SUPPLIES

On Wednesday the 7th of December we will be deploying a patch that changes the way the system handles players who have negative production of basic resources without any reserves stored.
Who this will affect
Anyone who has a town population of 100 or more citizens AND

Is running an hourly deficit of Wood, Clay, Iron, Stone or Food in that town AND

Does not have any of the deficit material stored in that town
ie this change only affects towns that are not just starting out in Illy, but have also completely run out of any one of the basic resources.

What will happen to a town in this situation
The buildings that are consuming the goods that you have run out of will fall into disrepair.  

This means that buildings will automatically level down to a level where the resource deficit goes back into the positive (ie the town's consumption of the resource is less than the total production).  

These buildings will level down in the order of most-recently built first, and they will level down all at once.  Resource production buildings (farmyards, clay pits etc) will be put to the very bottom of the level-down list, as will resource bonus buildings (flourmills etc).  These buildings will only level down if there is no other option.
Running a deficit production of other hourly resource types (gold, research and mana) will continue to function as before (ie units will abandon their posts, sovereignty will auto-cancel and spells will auto-cancel).

We will be entirely unsympathetic to any petitions along the lines of "the system trashed my town" - running a basic resource deficit has now become extremely dangerous.

However, we will look to put in some kind of warning system in the future if players are accidentally setting themselves up for a possible disaster.

We are aware that:
This change will give players the opportunity to quickly self-destroy very large portions of their towns if they so wish, simply by hocking the tax rate up to astronomical levels and leveling down essential basic resource production buildings.

This change will allow fortuitous siege hits on basic resource production buildings to potentially do "knock-on" damage to other buildings.

This change gives some new lease of life to the use of thieves, saboteurs and food blights in a siege context.

This change means that the consequences of accidentally choosing the wrong tax rate are potentially disastrous, and we will look to implement an "are you sure?" button on tax rate changes if the system believes this may cause the destruction of buildings due to running out of basic resources.
tldr;
Running negative resources is bad, m'kay?

CLEARING UP INACTIVES
Also on Wednesday the 7th of December we will be doing a bulk clean-out of a bunch of the inactive accounts.

This clear-out will have a number of separate phases:
All player accounts on the map that have not been logged into for more than 4 months will be removed from the game.

We will then remove an additional substantial proportion of randomly-chosen inactive accounts, and we will not be reseeding new players onto these squares.  This should thin the center of the map quite substantially and leave it available for active player expansion.

We will then be altering the new player seeding algorithm to expand the geographical candidate list when choosing where to settle a new player. New players will still be more likely to be near the center of the map, but this will be slightly relaxed and so there will be more empty space between the squares where new players can be seeded.

Finally, we will be enforcing a "one-in, one-out" policy for new players joining the game.  For each new player who joins, an inactive will be removed.  At some point the number of new players joining and staying will exceed the number of inactive candidates for deletion, and then we will review this policy.
tldr; 
There'll still be inactives to farm if that's what floats your boat, but they should be better distributed and new players should be seeded in such a way that the center of the map isn't gridlocked.

Regards,

SC

Edited by GM Stormcrow - 06 Dec 2011 at 17:07