21JUL11 - Mobiles, other

MisterNo wrote: What is going on with mobile payment?

Its currently disabled in Webkit browsers (Safari, Chrome) due to some issues with the page going blank 

From reading Mandarins31's post and the long chain about -ve food production, it seems clear that the devs did not consider (all) the potential outcomes of -ve production.  I do not blame them for this, after all the vets of this game must have logged much more "play" time and being a far greater number of individuals will undoubtedly have pursued more avenues and strategies than the devs will have considered.

Nevertheless, it must/should appear to those who have employed the -ve production tactics that the tactics now banned as "cheating" were unintended.  As many others have posted -ve production in any normal life situation has devastating consequences so why any different here?

As a new-ish player I am just starting out on use of sov, and starting with my capital I therefore have balanced resource fields and (near enough) balanced production.  Therefore if I increased both my tax and sov to reduce my production severely I could see this town becoming very difficult to manage.  However, with any 7 food town I could see (based on Mandarins31's post above) a distinct advantage of specialising in production of one of several advanced resources (ones which require no food and no stone for example) so that there would be NO disadvantage at all of going into -ve stone production and every advantage in increasing tax and sov to maximise production of whatever advanced resource (or troop) I had chosen.

Following my own statement above that -ve production must have devastating consequences this scenario shows a disconnect, a flaw, an unintended consequence that should be fixed.

Maybe one solution is to break the linear reduction in all basic resources of an increase in tax or an increase in sov? By all means keep the overall cost of tax/sov at the same level as it is at the moment, but let the player decide which resources to sacrifice to raise tax/sov as part of city specialisation. And add a ban on -ve production of any basic resource as has been done for food to force compliance.

Would this work??

I would think that is a cheat yes. Of course I interpretted the stated food rules to mean that if I got to zero stored food EVERYTHING stopped . . . including Q's I'd already set up, and the timers for the buildings I already had going up. The only thing I could do was build food plots or buy food.

I don't consider these "loopholes" or "exploits" but rather bad program rule enforcement and pure cheating. I know that's a personal opinion, but its rather disappointing that I, as a new player, read the rules and planned to play by them, while other players found these "loopholes" didn't report them in a ticket, and are not getting HARSHLY punished for cheating.

Reading the rules for sov squares I also thought that if I couldn't support my sov I lost levels of the building, or they stopped working. Sounds like the devs have a real problem. They set up a system of balances where we have to play strategically, and then they don't enforce it, so players CAN cheat and gain huge advantage by doing things that are, on the face of it, simply non viable strategies.

There would be no problem here IF, from the start, you hit zero resources, couldn't pay your bills and lost your slots, and you hit zero food, couldn't feed your people, and they stopped working. People read the rules, same as me, and they simply would have spread the word: Those guys are serious! You have to have food and resources to pay your bills or stuff simply doesn't work.

GM ThunderCat wrote: We have postponed the Sitters and Food change until 31st August.

By the way, about the new sitter rules, I rarely sit accounts, however I have my alt as one of the accounts I sit to easily change between them, would it be possible to link two accounts if you have both passwords, (may also make it easier to track multi accounters)