It s now a pay to win obviously .

The way to win wars is highly linked to the runing negative gold income .

People can aford to have huge armies as long they can buy prestige and get big amounts of gold from it .

There s no need to be a genius to have big armies , i could teach a monkey how to get more and more negative gold production and he could do it forever if his money will allow it .

This really changed the spirit in illy and obviously gives a big advantage to warmongers  . they dont even need to produce , hunt nor harvest to get the gold they need to finance their armies .

The natural tendance of rich people being to crush what is less rich than themselves the result is what we are seing now in Illy . Aggressive temper backed with money is slowly but surely killing that game .

That possibility to sell prestige for gold should just be removed .

i know it comes against economic but that s 0 dollar that the game will gain when this world will be over .

1. Even I have been able to build up a stash of a few hundred million gold to help me support larger armies without selling a single bit of prestige. Other players have been able to do the same to a far greater extent.

2. While maintaining large standing armies is advantageous, even large armies can die quickly. Victory in wars will therefore tend to go to the side that can replace its losses most quickly. While a large stash of gold can help with this, troop production speed is limited by a hard limit of 20 sovereign structures, and a soft limit of basic resource use.

3. There is no winning in Illyriad. In other thematically similar games it is possible to greatly increase the power at your disposal by conquering the cities of other players, but the difficulty of moving beyond ten cities in Illyriad, and the high cost of capturing a defended city compared to the return on that investment in greater troop production, means that a small group of players buying prestige cannot use the relatively small edge it gives them to accumulate far greater power within the game.

4. Enabling players who are unable, or unwilling, to purchase prestige with $, £ or €, to purchase prestige from other players with in game gold, encourages the purchase of prestige by players of the game, helping to fund the game servers, further development and support.

I don't have a fleet of perma-sat accounts to pull from. I don't have years of harvested items to sell. I don't have a built up gold farm (but I am working on one). I don't want to have to commit a year of my life into a game just to build a gold farm in order to see if I even like half the aspects of that game or not. Selling a few scraps lets me build a real army and participate now. It also keeps the game you're playing free for you to play it. 

PS - none of this means I'm rich (I'm a poor mofo, trust me) and none of it means I have a bad temper or wanna crush lesser people. It's hard for a farmer to understand, but pvp actually can be fun in a game.

one of the things liked in illy was that prestige was usefull but wasnt making such a big difference . I feel that time is over . It s most like if you dont spend money then u r way behind nowadays cause u got to work hard to gather few gold when other can get hundreds of Millions with one click .

Isn't that just your own opinion? I think everyone should play as they want to. 

And as for land claims, alliances have even coordinates listed on their alliance page.

Asking Devs to mark it is unfair because they do not and will not get involved in Illy politics. 

It is also lazy. Go check the coords on World Map.

There's:

a) The land you actually occupy.  This is the ultimate land claim.  This is where your town is/towns are.

b) The land you claim sovereignty over.  This can be contested, fought over etc.

c) Other 'land claims', such as "Our alliance owns the continent of Elgea".  These claims have no game-mechanic-enforcability, but may be enforced by the players who make the claim.  That's entirely up to them to try to enforce.  To attempt to make an ingame mechanic that highlights, illuminates and/or semi-legitimises such claims would, of course, be entirely futile.

Best,

SC

GM Stormcrow, in a livestream chat years ago, you mused about the concept of perhaps using the sovereignty mechanic to facilitate something like alliance claims, wherein clusters of allied players could form some kind of "alliance sov" that would link city to city. Not sure what this would impart (maybe some marginal modifer?) but is that concept ultimately impossible/futile? Is the sovereigty mechanic flexible enough to feature this kind of functionality? 

Alliance Land claims have endured in some form since the beginning of the game, and for the past 2 1/2, they have gained in use:

Actually, I think you're missing a great fun- and revenue-generating opportunity.

Players want to have the game reflect the territory that they claim, and you have the ability to code that function (at some cost). Simply create a variation of the strategic map that can show the land claimed by different alliances (just as it currently shows sov land by alliance). In order for an alliance to expand their claim, it costs prestige - maybe lots of it.

The (slightly) trickier part would be to create an alliance-level page to define the claim. This page would probably contain a series of form fields, each of which would take a pair of X and Y coordinates, using them to define the vertices of the shape of the land claim, with the final coordinate pair in the list connecting back to the first. The prestige cost could be related to the area of the shape, or it could just be a fixed amount.

The last required page would list the land claims by alliance, with the leader of an alliance being able to view and click a "Withdraw" button to withdraw a land claim.

Having land claims overlap is not an issue...it happens in the real world all the time. However, if an alliance decides to use a contested land claim as a reason to go to war, then it could demand the other alliance withdraw from their claim before making peace. If the losing alliance decides to create a new land claim, presumably without the contested territory, then it's simply another prestige payment to do so, with updated coordinate pairs.

Legitimized land claims = fun!

Also sounds awesome!

I even just think allowing players and/or alliances to create feudal structures, e.g. lieges and vassals, would be interesting. If large players offered protection to small players in exchange for some benefit (maybe a discovery that allows a tax boost based on combined population of vassals), then we'd create an interesting alternative to the we're-all-in-this-together alliance/confed structure.

Any sort of in-game hierarchy of players or alliances would be good, in my opinion, and spur new and interesting routes for game play.

 

+1