Petition for Dev intervention into Multiaccounting

 1) game mechanics favor defense of cities over attacks on cities -- not speaking of the military stats, which actually advantage attackers over defenders, but the results of those, because in Illy one attacks siege camps to defend and defends siege camps to attack. This results in cities rarely coming under serious threat.

2) The life cycle of Illyriad cities is that they consume more resources than they produce early in their lifetimes and later produce more than they consume (in general, with the exception of some very military-heavy players/cities). In order to maintain a resource balance and healthy level of competition for resources, the game is dependent on either a consistent influx of new players or upon existing players to build new cities. The game hasn't seen a substantial flow of new players since around 2015, and the developers compensated for this by encouraging players to build more and more new cities. However, the limits of this tactic have now been reached, because it is just not that fun to build 60 cities entirely composed of trade offices, at least not for most players. (For the elite players who find that resource management task amusing, kudos.) And alternative is that cities can be destroyed and rebuilt after wars, but see problem 1 for why that is not really a practical solution.

3) The above two flaws are of concern as the playberbase atrophies because of the overall low level of activity compared to the space and resources available. There's very little meaningful competition. If there were more competition for resources in Illyriad (and by resources I include prime real estate as well as harvestables, gold, etc.) then secondary and less active accounts would be less of an advantage because one would be required to defend them actively and they would consume time and resources in proportion to their advantage. In this case the time required to manage and defend is more of a factor than the resources required. Most players with large numbers of accounts and cities depend on them not being threatened in order to manage them effectively. Defense of 5-10 cities actively under attack can require the focus of a 20-30 player alliance, if the attackers are doing it right. If one actually had to defend four accounts with 10-20 cities each (or attack with four accounts with 10-20 cities each), the game would be unplayable.

Summary: For cultural and game mechanics reasons, more than half of players/cities (and probably more like 80-90%) have a net resource surplus. They don't consume resources in any meaningful way, and really don't need to. It's possible to have an entire account that consumes very little in gold or other items and therefore produces a large surplus. It is this structural fact of game mechanics combined with general lack of player interest in Illyriad that contributes to multi-accounting being a concern to players -- one that the developers have not adequately taken into account.