16MAY24 Bugfixes: Siege, Blockade, Occupy

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   Hi everyone,

Gosh, it's been an exciting week, hasn't it?

We have fixed a number of bugs relating to sieges, blockades and encampments.

1. The ability to remotely siege a town without being on a square located adjacent to the target city has been removed.  This was only possible if a player circumvented the public user interface and manually edited data contained within the underlying page before submitting the order to siege or blockade.

2. The ability to occupy / set up a siege or blockade from an impassable square has also now been removed.  This also involved editing the underlying data in the page before submitting the movement order.

3. I would like to make it clear that "using the User Interface" means using the User Interface that we have provided; not delving under the hood and pushing data into the back end that the public User Interface would not permit.  It also follows that simply "using the User Interface" does not absolve you from the other Rules of the Game.

Now we're not about to say that you can't peek under the hood, for two reasons: 1) We can't stop you, as it's an HTML game, and 2) Lots of amazing people like Tensmoor rely on doing this in order to build their awesome tools.

To those under-hood peekers:  please apply common sense. If you're going under the User Interface to edit underlying data, you are probably doing something the system does not intend you to do.  Reading from the data is almost always fine.  Writing to the data is most probably not.
Now that the method and practice being used to edit the underlying data is out in the open, we will take a very dim view of people doing anything to bypass the designed intentions of the public UI in the future. 

Obviously, if anyone has any loopholes that can be exploited using the public User Interface, we'd also really love to know about them.

4. There are still interesting scenarios with towns exodusing, and units arriving - perfectly legally via the User Interface- either before or after the town completes the exodus, these units having been despatched before the town actually arrived.  The Dev team are currently working out what we think should happen in these instances, and we will be implementing some changes.

The Dev & GM team would like to thank the players who have helped us out by either demonstrating the issue, or by submitting detailed petitions / documentation.

5. Finally, can we urge any players who are aware of other potentially serious issues to let us know about them via petition with a detailed step-by-step of how to reproduce the issue.  We won't be mad.  It's to the benefit of everyone if the interface and gameplay is fair.

Thanks for your time.

The Illy Team