 The_Dude wrote:
My goodness! I step away from Illy for a couple of hours to do some actual work and look at all the ... I dunno... excitement?
I want to be sure I am following this whole "excitement". Please indulge me by starting at the beginning.
So the "exploit" that is currently in use is this: A fully developed city cranks up taxes and depletes food in order to support as many units as possible. Even going into the red on gold income and provide gold through other means than taxes.
The current "penalty" for no food is that you can't order new research or buildings in your queues. Since the city is fully developed, this no real penalty. Hence the exploit.
Do I understand the initial problem being addressed by the Devs?
If so, I disagree with the sentiment that this exploit is somehow not playing fair.
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The exploit the GMs are talking about. as I understand, deals only with food. If you go negative in taxes your entire military and diplomatic corps walks out on you. However, you can max pop your city out, running ridiculously negative on food maintaining 100% tax all the time. This leaves you with an income of roughly 125K per hour. With food at 0 stored and running a negative food per hour income, the only penalty was that you could not queue up any more builds or any more advanced resources. At max pop or near max pop, the inability to queue more buildings is not a penalty since you will not be planning on building anything anyway. To get around the penalty for the advanced resources you need only ship yourself enough food to sustain a positive storage of food while you queue up the advanced resources you wish to produced. Once queued, you will still crank out whatever is in the queue as you let your food fall back to 0.
This has been fixed or will be fixed in the future by whenever one of your basic resources reaches a negative amount your taxes will not be adjusted to a level that you are producing a postive amount of that resources. Further, the GM's are saying that during your 0/negative levels of basic resources you will neither collect taxes nor will you produce any advanced resources.
Yes, as I understand the exploit, I do not feel it is fair. I have no problem with any of these fixes as I have never taken advantage of this exploit nor do I know anyone that has. I will add that since April I have made between 30-50M selling food so I have my suspicions of players that might have been using this means to sustain their empires.
With that said, my argument has been to fix the huge disparity between 5 farm cities and 7 farm cities.
I do not agree with decoupling food from taxes because it basically allows you to do the above legitemately if you have built your cities on a 7 farm square. As I've mentioned several times: it would take a mere 50% increase to food to run a 7 farm city at max pop(26995) at 100% maintaining a food income of 1K. This only enhances, in my opinion, the disparity between a 5 farm city and 7 farm city since you need over 129% to to maintain a max pop city on a 5 farm square.
My position regarding the food decoupling is that tieing resource income to a percentage of your settlement's base production only enhances this disparity. It forces players, in order to maintain competiveness, to settle only on 7 farm squares. For every percent increase you claim for a 5 farm city the same percent increase will net a 140% bonus production to a 7 farm city. This goes against the Developers professed ideal of encouraging diversity.
My idea to bring the disparity between 5 farm cities and 7 farm cities more inline would be have the basic resource soveriegn buildings produce a flat rate. Mind you, it isn't perfect either, but it would benefit newer players more since the initial claims would net a higher percent of their initial resource income provided they specialized their research fully down that tree. Further, it will open up more of the map to viable settlement. One has only to look at the strategic map and zoom into all the empty spots to see that 95% of the large empty space is hill/mountain/forest. A 7 farm city would still maintain a 2.5K food per hour food income advantage over a like 5 farm city; however, the disparity would not increase by 465 food per hour for every 10% bonus that each city claims for their sovereign squares.
I hope that clarifies my stance on these changes.
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