21JUL11 - Mobiles, other

i agree with Creature, if Gm's are say that's an exploit, that is... but well, and now, is having negative production of basic ressources and suffering nothing but losing a producing city a game abuse? let's put everything on the table as we are doing so: i personnaly have a city running out -12k of basic ressource/hour because of a very high use of sov structure for Cav production... this city can produce nothing but soldiers, at a high rate of course, but it can't really produce advanced ressources (would ask too much time, that's too difficult). and the gold is given justly by the cities that are running out of food.
all the advantage i have on other players that use the usual way of playing, is that i can produce a big single army, while they produce medium armies, and if they do well, they produce soldiers faster , over their cities, than me, with my single big army... than has no overpower bonus.

so, if all that is game abuse, well that's hard to hear that suddenly, but ok. Maybe GM's also do that, because we will soon be granted of a new way to specialise our cities.

But that's a bit too sudden, this negative food prod issue was known by players for a long time ago as some discussions about that are the forum:
http://forum.illyriad.co.uk/food-attack-and-defence_topic962.html?KW=

GM's were certainly aware about that a long time ago... and if so, that would have been a good idea to write clearly that this wasnt expected, and that this would be changed one day... but i cant find it on the "todo" annoucements.


Well, i agree with this change if it must be, but there must be a compensation for such an unexpected, sudden and hard release. Maybe leting us more time and giving a general city move (city taking the total caracteristics of the new tile) when arrive the very big release like specilised buildings, Factions, water warfare... would be wiser... Illy doesnt need to loose more Veterans.

Brids17 wrote: As I brought up before, I believe it's because no one brought up the idea of using this to maintain huge armies. Judging by the response I got from SC, it doesn't sound like he had thought of that.

So players using a game mechanic that the devs 'hadn't thought of' is now suddenly 'an exploit'?

Again, correct me if I'm wrong - but I always remember SC mentioning about how part of the joy of the Illy 'sand-box' experience was seeing the ways that the community played with the tools the devs had given them in ways they hadn't imagined. Again I can find you a quote relating to this somewhere if necessary.

Also I think a more important point is:

How could negative food have not been an exploit before but is an exploit now when the dev team was already aware of the issue and introduced game mechanics to provide a disadvantage to cities with negative food (not being allowed to start any research or production).

Why did they write this code for part of the game that they were clearly aware of that is now suddenly "an Exploit"?


Edited by Createure - 23 Jul 2011 at 00:23

Darkwords wrote: Starry wrote: So by moving the slider to 100% what was your research at per hour?    Sovereignty costs research per hour, if you don't enough research per hour, you lose your sov squares or at least a portion of them.   For many with large troops who play the military side, sovereignty squares are vital to building, maintaining and expanding armies and related resources; some of us actually use the non-food sov squares and feel they are very important.  It's a delicate balance between increasing taxes and having enough research points per hour to support your sov squares.      I don't see why a player should have to drop sov squares due to this new rule.   It's a step back, a big one.     Implementing this new rule quickly will penalize many players, prohibit any future growth and frankly, will cost the game players. And by using that mechanic, you need no food sov what-so-ever, so can simply build recruitment sov, and if you have completed the statue mystery you can claim alot of it, more than doubling troop prod. Similtaneously you can have 90k gold with about 14k population (and I'm sure its alot more with 20k pop) enabling you to maintain a massive army and re-recruit loses extremely quickly.  This is a vast advantage which completely unbalances the game. However, it does make the 10th city unimaginable, and also makes the 9th city pretty much out of reach for those of us who have not acheived it.  So those that have been using this mechanic for long enough to get that 9th city are already at a big advantage to others.  Even if it means them having to delete a number of adv resource production structures and increase their sov claims solely for food, so that they can maintain a descent size army. This is what I will have to do myself even with just 8 cities. I hope some extra food prod will be possible soon, and not soon(TM). Yet I still support this decision.

Please explain your math on 90K gold with 14K pop.  I always thought that at 100% tax your gross income is calculated as 4*pop which in this case would = 56K gold.

Createure wrote: This change will effectively turn Illy into a single strategy game (in terms of economy) - build on +7 food squares always, or you will not be able to support as big a population, you will not be able to support as big an army and you will not be able to keep as much military/adv.res sov squares.

How is that any different from what people are doing now? As I said, I haven't seen a single person mention the idea of building massive armies and running them on negative food. Everyone was grabbing food sovs and 7 square spots to sustain a higher population without running negative food longer before I brought this exploit to the attention of the devs. Besides, you can still run on negative food just as I said, you need a city or two to supply it with food to stop it from running it. It just means you can't effectively run on -14,000 food anymore.

Edit: I should add that this seems like a great time for people to start mentioning alternatives on how to fix this issue. I can't really think of any other way of doing it without severely changing the way taxes work.


Edited by Brids17 - 23 Jul 2011 at 00:03