21JUL11 - Mobiles, other

As long as the one-off penalty is not permanent (e.g. you lose a bunch of build levels which can be rebuilt) then I'm happy.

The food thing is about tying unit levels to food...not just gold.

Changing the negative food rule now, changes the dynamics of the game completely and penalizes those with many cities who have built them around this strategy. THIS IS VERY BAD FOR ILLY - why alienate your most loyal people, who have been in the game from the very beginning? 

GM Gryphon wrote: We do intend- Perhaps in light of this change, with increased priority- To allow players to move their cities to other squares of their choosing and take on the underlying terrain of their new square. This will, however, incur a very significant one-off penalty to the city that moves. We have, in the past, discussed terraforming magic, and do intend to release this in the more distant future.

  Thank you for taking into account the voice of the community on this issue. In my opinion you should be offering this relocation/rebalance thing at the same time as making this change though.

WarePhreak wrote: Either I am missing something or else. It was stated negative crop production AND no food supply. You can run negative production on food as long as you don't run out of supply. I suspect the exploit might actually have been with what happened when you hit zero supply with negative production. If it was, then this fix is appropriate as it means something actually happens when you run out of food and don't have any production.

The devs were already aware of this aspect of the game mechanics and already wrote code to deal with this exact situation. The penalty was that you cannot que anything in the affected city until food balance is above 0 again.

Brids17 wrote: So if I found a way to duplicate items without exploiting a bug but simply using an ingame feature you would defend it? No, you wouldn't because that's broken. As I said, since when does something broken going unnoticed instantly make it ok?

I take your point - but the fact is the dev team were clearly aware of this game mechanic LONG AGO because they wrote the game code for dealing with this situation before, the the existing penalties. What was before simply a 'game mechanic' is now dubbed 'an exploit' because some players are now complaining of 'inbalance'.

Correct me if I'm wrong... but how is a game mechanic unblanaced if EVERY player is able to use it?

Besides as HM pointed out several pages back - there was still in-game balancing mechanisms to limit growth in the form of basic resource income required to support sov squares - and research upkeep for sov squares (which drops as people put taxes up, hence preventing people from running huge gold income and huge sov bonuses.)

Brids17 wrote: I should point that you even with 100% taxes you could still manage sov, just less of it. So you'd build armies a bit slower. Ok, sure, that would suck if we were playing evony. However the majority of this game doesn't take place in a hostile environment. If you were using your army constantly maybe speed would mean a little more but current many players rarely use their armies and are at no disadvantage at doing so.

Reading that makes me feel pretty sick - do you really want to encourage people to sit passive with no action even more than they already do? If the dev team thinks this the same way as you then I have lost all hope for Illyriad - but I think the dev team is better than that.

Mandarins31 wrote: Createure wrote: So players using a game mechanic that the devs 'hadn't thought of' is now suddenly 'an exploit'? well about that, think about the lvl 1 structures on lv 5 sov squares... just a different point of view

You are right here Mandarins - I phrased my point poorly here.

There is a big difference between these 2 cases though.

The sov thing was clearly contrary to the dev team's intentions. When they released sov they said it would behave in 1 way ("Sov structures will delevel as a claim's level decreases") when infact it was discovered that these structures did not behave like this - so clearly part of the game code was broken and this was an exploit. Also patching this glitch caused very little disruption to people who might have thought this was a viable strategy, although I haven't actually heard of ANYONE who was using this well known exploit in any alliance, even though it was open for a long time, over 6 months I think.

This food thing on the other hand has long been held as a standard strategy by many of the veteran community for a very long time. Nobody ever called it an exploit before yesterday. It is difficult to call this game mechanics a contravention in the way the devs intended things to be when they had already written code to penalise cities in this situation (so they were clearly aware of this more than a year ago). Patching this will cause total disruption for many established accounts that didn't build on +7 food plots, potentially losing the dev team a number of paying accounts and veteran members of the community.

Patching the sov thing Mandarins mentioned was the dev team restoring the game mechanics to the mechanism that was originally intentioned when sov was released - as dictated in the sov release notes. Patching this food thing is basically completely changing the rules of Illy's economy, when people have already spent up to 15 or 16 months building up their accounts in a certain way - without giving them any prior warning.



Edited by Createure - 23 Jul 2011 at 10:21

I second Killerpoodle's sentiments. If it's a one off, one shot penalty of pretty much anything then i will be happy with it.

Also, good to see the Dev's listening to community concerns. While i never used this strategy myself, i can see where it causes problems for those who have! I do think that this clipping of food "exploit" should be combined with either an increase in the food storage cap or abolishing it all together.