Conquering capitals

GM Stormcrow wrote:   This left us with the following options: 1. Make the first city built invulnerable to complete destruction by another player 2. Make the last city built invulnerable to complete destruction by another player 3. Allow a player to designate a single city as the capital (invulnerable) once they have a second city 4. Make no city invulnerable except the last suriving one 5. Make the player's first, invulnerable capital city expire its invulnerability after a period of time. ... I'm willing to entertain any other suggestions that are better - but please make sure you think them all through and argue them from all perspectives, including potentially exploitable ones.

You can't kill all of the people all of the time, or there'd be nobody left to respect you...

KillerPoodle wrote:   So let's see: 1) No sense of humor 2) Completely convinced he's right and everyone with a different view point is wrong. 3) Convinced that the sky is falling because of one game mechanic. 4) When given an answer, starts spamming everywhere to try to get around the answer. Good way to make friends and influence people there, bud. How about you actually live in the game for a while before writing it off so quickly.

P.S  Oh and the longer a city is pounded for without being destroyed the more likely it is that it will join the biggest alliances to get protection, polarising and stalemating the game even faster. Even second cities are unlikely to fall if a siege lasts too long. They will be saved by joining alliances.   More I think on it the more unlikely it seems that any decent action will be had. Its going to be all about wood gathering.

GM Stormcrow wrote: We'd much rather a player in this situation (who could not / would not / or was unwilling to seek an alternative way out of the situation) abandoned their account and - if they wished to restart on the same server - set up a new account and were randomly assigned to a new starting position as a new player. To help this process along we will be putting in place a procedure whereby accounts that have not grown in population (or had a player log in to that account) for a period of 3 weeks will go into "abandoned" mode.  The player will receive an out-of-game email telling him or her the city has effectively been abandoned, and the city will cease to generate resources.  One week later, if there's still no login, the account will be closed and the city removed from the game.

In regard to these points, I'm concerned about some prestige and identity-related issues:
1)  Can a player restart from the same account or somehow forward purchased prestige to the new account?  Can he optionally retain his username and account id?  Or is he forced to abandon one or both of financial investment and a username that he may consider intrinsic to his online presence?  Some people like myself invest heavily into a single username whose reputation has been cultivated for many years.  Losing my username would be a deeper fatality than losing my account.

2)  Are accounts that have purchased prestige also be subject to inactivity-triggered account closure?  Will the account holder be able to re-open/restart his account and retain the purchased prestige?  It becomes a sticky matter if real world money could be deducted without any recourse to reclaim the benefit of that investment.


Also, could you clarify the issue with option #4?  How does it make clusters more impenetrable?  Do you mean clusters comprised entirely of single-city accounts, and if so, why would any strategist allow those cities to be their last?  This is not a serious issue for me, but you know me...I'm picky.

I do believe #3 and #5 are the worst options by far.  Option #2 just complicates matters and makes no sense.