Land flow

[The Beatles]

Good point. And the early sets, especially at RWL, really showed that. Two things got around that: resets and monthly sets. I don't like either.

But hell, even that was more fun than the latter sets at ME and FAF, which only suited someone with an attention span of around a week.

So what ways could we limit or discourage monopolies and still keep a more sensible land dynamic?

[Freenhult]

Mmm. Surprisingly I have a good suggestion to fix that problem. In Travian, people who start about 3-4 days after world start tend to do better. The primary reason is that when you start the game, you're in beginners protection. Same thing can be done really, and I think that would help balance it out.

[Gen. Volkov]

I have a completely different idea. How about we bring back the ability to declare personal wars, but make it so that the ONLY way you can attack is to declare war on someone. Make war a big deal. Also, we should make it so that you can only declare war on someone after a certain time period has passed since the last time you declared war, and you can have only one war going at a time. It should give unlimited attacks, but we should remove the ability to kill another player from the game. When you bring a player down to a certain land total, he automatically surrenders, and loses a certain portion of his food and cash to you, as well as all his troops. Additionally, perhaps we should make it so that if you fail an attack on the other person, the war is over. It's not completely worked out, but it's the shell of an idea you guys could perhaps expand on. Remember, Discworld is a bunch of kingdoms and nation-states, not a tribal culture, so war is a big deal, and they are going to declare war on each other before they attack.

[Freenhult]

Explaining my idea:

In Travian, from the game start everyone can't be attacked for 3 days. However, you can attack out. This seems confusing because there are actually oasis's that give bonuses if you capture them late game that have NPC armies in them. So you can raid those for bonuses. However, we don't and that's irrelevant.

The interesting part is that if you start later, the protection extends more and more. The part of why this is good, is because when you can attack out and not be attacked, it lets new players that are behind hit weaker players or idle players for land and resources and they can slingshot ahead to where the majority of the players are. Since we're not supposed to be building a stockpile of men and resources this works well.

I've joined 2 weeks late and because of this, had good finishes on the server when thousands of people have played. (By good I mean 500th or higher) This could be a way to fix new players joining late and not being horrible.