Automated intercity caravans

i am still against this idea. a STABLE city won't need this much automation. i could see for starting a new city but then the priority would be to get them resources up. if this idea would run lets say a temporary arrangement like 24 hours with 12-16 hour cool down this way it encourages you to keep the city in a decently stable situation. and it makes it so you cant rely on it

liberty6 wrote: i am still against this idea. a STABLE city won't need this much automation. i could see for starting a new city but then the priority would be to get them resources up. if this idea would run lets say a temporary arrangement like 24 hours with 12-16 hour cool down this way it encourages you to keep the city in a decently stable situation. and it makes it so you cant rely on it

Please explain to me how you get 10 cities while maintaining stable cities.

GM Stormcrow wrote: Very interesting discussion - please continue it! It's definitely something we've spent quite some time on internally, and there are good arguments on either side (both for and against automated vans of some description, and also for or against making it prestigable). There are some content releases upcoming that might alleviate some of these issues, but there are also some other content releases upcoming that might accentuate some of these issues as well, so it's something of a "hot topic" atm internally. Generally we use extreme caution around prestigable options, and we also apply extreme caution to automation. Equally we understand that grinding repetitive functions simply isn't quite as much fun as it really should be ;) I'd really like this discussion to continue, though - I think the broader the input the more likely we are to come to a sensible conclusion. Regards, SC

Did you arrive at any conclusions? Seems relevant to know what you ended up with after your discussion - mainly in relation to this thread, are we missing something?

liberty6 wrote: please explain to me why you would want 10 cities other than to be bigger badder than someone. also you can lower taxes for a time for that food bonus and have A natures bounty. vowala you may still go "red" but it wont be as bad with food as for gold your on your own with unlimited gold carrying capacity that shouldn't be to hard.

Why build something in general if the other reason behind it is to be "bigger and badder"? I build my cities up because that's one of the core mechanics of the game. Why going for 10 cities is any different from going for 5 in your mind is beyond me. However  the fact is some people want more than 9 cities, the reason behind it is irrelevant.

Also, if I had of lowered my taxes to 0% on my capital back when it only had 22k pop, I still would have had -4k food per hour. The negative food would have been higher still had my pop in that city been 26k. So no, that doesn't work, you still go through a ton of food even with low taxes and thus getting that 10th city is still very difficult. I don't see why you're so opposed to something that would help people in a situation you clearly have no experience with.

liberty6 wrote: now for my argument 10 cities ok but what other benefit would it have noobs getting resources that's nice and all but how many start then quite within the first week.

Well you would obviously need more than your first city to gain anything out of this, but it would make the second city that more attractive, encouraging growth. But mainly this would be a feature that would benefit players with multiple cities and a well established resource output - but thats fair since all players eventually will reach apoint where they can draw advantage from it.

You could flip the whole perspective and think of this as a critique of the current system, essentially that a player with a large excess of resources and regardless of prestige, will loose vast amounts of basic resources due to the limited caravan amount, and the fact that sending resources requires logging on in hourly intervals and do the tedious task of sending the vans.
An advantage to especially prestige users who can play most hours a day and essentially draw use from 100% of his resource output, where as players with little online time a day recieves nothing at all despite his efforts in the game. This difference should for the sake of a healthy gaming culture be mitigated somehow.
Am I wrong?