New player startup and food production

Oddly enough, this is the third "game like this" that I've started playing recently.  The other two are Three Kingdoms Online, a standalone browser game, and Kingdoms of Camelot, a Facebook game.  Both are like Illyriad in that you gather resources, build your city, raise an army, and cause trouble with your neighbors.   Illyriad has a lot going for it that the others don't but I wanted to bring up two things I liked from those two that Illyriad doesn't have.

1 - a reward system to help serious noobs get a quick start.

The quest system in both of those games acts as the tutorial.  Do this action, get this reward.  So both of them walk you through the initial steps of setting up your city, starting research and production, making your first units, and so on.  The rewards at the lower levels actually give you more resources than required to build the quest items, so you come out a little ahead.  As you go on, of course, the rewards become less and less useful, but by then you should have production of your own up and running.

In the big picture, it doesn't matter so much right now.  The server is new, and players who are just starting are not that far behind the players who helped kick it off.  But in six months, we'll all be dangerous monsters, and people who are just logging in will have a tough time gaining a foothold without some kind of bootstrapping.

The other thing that does is give more contact time with the game when you first start playing.  It can take a few hours to get all the first quests out of the way, and after putting in a few hours like that, you'll be more likely to come back and play more, rather than abandon your new city to be a farm for the regulars.

2 - Food scarcity - I ran into a food production limit a lot sooner than I thought I would, again, based on my recent experience with these othe two games.  (Kingdoms of Camelot has you manage your resource balance yourself, building farms, mines and so on as you see fit.  Three Kingdoms has fixed resource fields, but they level up output more quickly.)  I expect that you guys already thought about this in terms of balance, and have it where you want it, but wanted to bring it up anyway.  :)  It is another thing that slows down expansion at the beginning.

Great game, looking forward to playing more!