21JUL11 - Mobiles, other

Perhaps 10th cities were only ever meant to be for alliance leaders and paid for by alliance Tax

Brids17 wrote: 42 with a level 13 library. Still lots of room to boost that up. Again, the taxes are so broken that sov is still useless. I could have 6 cities build stuff, 2 cities generate food and one city bringing in over 84,000 gold per hour. In a single that I would generate over 2M gold. So problem solved, you just buy your supplies on the market with your massive surplus of gold. The taxes currently hold no weight and do you really want players running around with armies large enough to wipe out entire small alliances? Not to mention they could sustain armies larger than anyone else while at the same time maintaining godly standards of diplo defense. I understand that people are upset with the update and like I said, I'm running negative food myself but I don't see how letting this go unfixed is taking a step forward. A city simply should not be able to run on negative food with no food at no penalty. There is no balance in that.

I think you're vastly underestimating the value of sovereignty for things besides food boosting, and its associated cost in research.  I have a city that produces infantry faster than any 3 other cities combined thanks to sovereignty.  But that means consuming a fair bit of research on sovereignty claims and provides the hard limit and balance point that negative food might seem to avoid.  Even if I were running negative food there, I couldn't exceed about 50% tax without running negative research (and thus losing everything).

Running negative food is also not without its stiff penalties/tradeoffs already.  Such high taxation limits research which in turn limits sovereignty claims which (as described in the example above) substantially limits a city's potential in areas other than simple gold income.  A sensible approach to optimize account power/effectiveness while maintaining diversity is to run high tax on one city, high food on another, and high military on yet another (with other minor areas focused on the side).  I thought this was just the kind of "specialization" tactic the devs wanted to promote.

I think you guys are missing the point here. No one is saying that this thing shouldn't be changed. However you look at this - if the devs say it is an exploit to be closed, it is an exploit - this is their game, and they design the game play.

What people are complaining about is the fact that this change gives some people (who built on all +7 food square) a large advantage and puts those people who only built on +5 plots a large disadvantage - The fact is we as a community were given no information about this and many veteran players have invested alot of time and money into the game while persuing a strategy that is now pronounced 'an explioit'.

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 HM has illustrated above - currently there is a wide diversity in city strategies - and veteran players will utilise a mixture of different cities to maximise their overall troop production. The devs have already stated several times how they were looking to promote a variety of strategies and specialisation. This change destroys alot of potential for specialisation in economy.

HMs post above discussed every so better than I could exactly how there is still balance in the game, and pinch points, without messing up many veteran players' accounts by changing the rules.

Birds, you mention how it is wrong that players should be able to support huge armies?

Well I have 2 points for you.

1. This change does not prevent huge armies - they are still easily possible through shipment of gold from other cities or players - huge armies never have been possible and sustainable through the use of only 1 city, but have always required many cities/accounts to support them, with negative food or not.

2. I can find a quote from SC approving of the idea of 'huge armies' gleefully when someone raised the idea in a thread months ago.

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.

Yes you can supply a negative food city with food from other cities if this change goes ahead. This DOESN'T mean that you have solved the problem, the amount of food you produce across all cities still directly dictates the max. amount of income you can have and hence the size of armies you can support - which still means that have 100% +7 food account is the ONLY strategy.


Edited by Createure - 23 Jul 2011 at 00:17

Createure wrote: 1. This change does not prevent huge armies - they are still easily possible through shipment of gold from other cities or players - huge armies never have been possible and sustainable through the use of only 1 city, but have always required many cities/accounts to support them, with negative food or not.

How is that any different from shipping for to cities to support a high population? You contradicted yourself. The point is that you would have to spend something to maintain something. Currently you don't have to spend anything to maintain something.

As a side note, perhaps with this change the devs should make food work like gold in that there's no cap on food. This would make it easier to run on negative food but still mean it would be costly and require constant micromanagement to maintain it.