Automated intercity caravans

In all honesty, I don't see how this could be used to give an upper hand to a player if designed correctly. Making it only usable to send to a player's own cities and limiting the amount of times per week it can be used would also lower the 'advantage' it gives. In actuality though, it just removes one needlessly mundane task from the game: Sending resources from one city to another on a schedule.

Whether it's supplying food or gold to a 'red' city, or sending resources to that new town you just settled, you're eliminating one repetitive task to allow yourself to get back to the fun of the game. Too much automation is just as bad as none at all.

Most sane people grow bored of doing repetitive tasks, causing them to grow bored of Illyriad and leaving. Also, as nvp33 stated, if you log in one day and realize that your military is gone because you forgot to send gold out the day before, it could cause you to give in and quit. Losing players is usually a bad thing.


Edited by Shuey707 - 17 Aug 2011 at 08:47

I'd vote against Prestige here. If something special needs automating, then it should be kept simple by using units, research or buildings.

The idea isn't to make prestige spenders even more powerful. The ide is to take a mundane repetetive task, which, if let to it self, can result in major loss of resources and troopsand uatomate it. Someone said "well just make balanced cities" but that's not possible for all of us aftet the big move 6 months back, and for other ppl it's just not plausible for their playstyle to make these "balanced" cities.

It might not need to be a prestige spending option, but in my opinion there's need for a look at sending resources around between a players own cities. It could also be done with a "shared pool" of food and/or gold, but that would be a bit overkill in my opinion. Automated caravans for an intercity commerce traderoute would seem to be the way to go. But if there are other ideas, other than "don't build that way then", then let's hear them, I'm all ears :-)

I'd love to have a couple of automated supply routes going out. I would have to renegotiate trade agreements for it, but that is fun. .)
How about having a limited number of automated routes without prestige, and more with prestige? Even one outgoing would reduce repetition a lot, and having two on prestige would make sense.

I would like to be able to "donate" excess basic resources from my established large cities, e.g. stone, in return for a quite small boost in my other smaller city's basic resource production per hour.
This is simply an alternative to shipping caravans each and every day all of the time because your stores cap out in your Cities and your smaller towns are in a constant demand for resources (if you use prestige).
It gets too monotonous overtime to be considered much fun to do, and so I for one would welcome a passive way of distributing excess resources, even if it would cost prestige.
The tricky part is that sovereignty also costs basic resources to maintain, so you would need a simple et effective arrangement that would not upset the gentle balance of economy. To ensure that it doesnt I would suggest that the accumulated amount of resources wasted were registered and the determining factor for the production bonus in the other cities. It makes no "realistic" sense (its a kind of magic..), but it increases the enjoyment for people who can only be on a short while daily or a few times a week, who cannot manage their mules constantly.

Hope you can follow my reasoning in this.

Cheers.


Edited by Tordenkaffen - 18 Aug 2011 at 22:50