21JUL11 - Mobiles, other

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.

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

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.

Brids17 wrote: I'm unsure if it would be considered against the rules to say specifically what this exploit is but given that the update is coming so quickly I don't think it would be of any harm as no one will have the time to take advantage of it anyway. I apologize ahead of time if I'm not suppose to say this and completely understand if my post is removed. I was playing with my taxes a few days ago and I realized that as my cities are already running negative food there wasn't really any incentive to keep my taxes at 25%. I have over 12k+ of each resource coming in and don't need all of that as I'm pretty much done building. When I need to build I simply move some food over to the city, queue up some stuff and then let it run out again. That said, I tested something. I moved the slider to 100% and found I would still get 5k of each resource and already having negative food having more wouldn't matter. Sov is mostly used for stopping your cities from going negative food but since negative food as no penalty, sov is worthless. This being said, in a 22k pop city my taxes at 100% could get me over 84,000 gold per hour at no penalty. Doing this is 4 of my cities I could achieve around 112,000 units (average unit cost is 3 gold p/h) and if I did it in 7 cities (two to supply food) with maxed out population I could support around 200,000 units. All this could be done without breaking any rules or exploiting any bugs but I was unsure of whether or not I should use it to my advantage. I spoke to an alliance member privately about it and they suggested I message SC about it and see where he stood with the issue. It wasn't much of a surprise when he said this was not a desired effect. I didn't realize the update would be made so quickly though it's good that it is being implemented quickly as to stop people from taking advantage of it. I know a lot of people are going to disagree with the update because many people (including myself) are running on negative food to achieve a high population but at the same time, it is a huge exploit.

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.

I'm unsure if it would be considered against the rules to say specifically what this exploit is but given that the update is coming so quickly I don't think it would be of any harm as no one will have the time to take advantage of it anyway. I apologize ahead of time if I'm not suppose to say this and completely understand if my post is removed.

I was playing with my taxes a few days ago and I realized that as my cities are already running negative food there wasn't really any incentive to keep my taxes at 25%. I have over 12k+ of each resource coming in and don't need all of that as I'm pretty much done building. When I need to build I simply move some food over to the city, queue up some stuff and then let it run out again. That said, I tested something. I moved the slider to 100% and found I would still get 5k of each resource and already having negative food having more wouldn't matter. Sov is mostly used for stopping your cities from going negative food but since negative food as no penalty, sov is worthless.

This being said, in a 22k pop city my taxes at 100% could get me over 84,000 gold per hour at no penalty. Doing this is 4 of my cities I could achieve around 112,000 units (average unit cost is 3 gold p/h) and if I did it in 7 cities (two to supply food) with maxed out population I could support around 200,000 units. All this could be done without breaking any rules or exploiting any bugs but I was unsure of whether or not I should use it to my advantage. I spoke to an alliance member privately about it and they suggested I message SC about it and see where he stood with the issue. It wasn't much of a surprise when he said this was not a desired effect.

I didn't realize the update would be made so quickly though it's good that it is being implemented quickly as to stop people from taking advantage of it. I know a lot of people are going to disagree with the update because many people (including myself) are running on negative food to achieve a high population but at the same time, it is a huge exploit.


Edited by Brids17 - 22 Jul 2011 at 22:48