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Yet another issue is that whenever you visit new area during travel, sandbag strategy gave you something worthwhile to do before you had time to make a base. Like, making base requires you to spend an hour in a close proximity to a single flag. Otherwise, all your captures are for nothing in terms of base points. Often I would rather go sightseeing (or pubcrawling) right away, and sandbagging gave me an opportunity to make a progress for the future base by placing lands in a right way along the trip. Now it's either "wait in one place" or "lose your progress", which ain't exactly travel-motivating.

As a sidenote though, I'd remind that sandbox merging already did carry a huge cost (resources), so it's not that these base points earned such way were in any way free. Now, however, that this is gone, there's no use for gold, and other resources can only be spent for army. It's just another example of how the game heads each leg towards different, conflicting directions.

@Mr. D The previous system, which I have already said, gave players two paths: a slow and simple (press the button once every 15 minutes) or fast and somewhat harder (plan your path to maximise base points output). You're basically eliminating the more "demanding/rewarding" path, but this means that: 1. Game becomes simple. Very simple. 2. The speed of growth at home is generally similar to the speed of growth during travel; this means a great imbalance between time bases and remote bases (your remote bases will forever be rather weak, like two weeks of travel vs two years of living in some place); this doesn't benefits travelers. 3. Regardless of one's will and effort, an active travelling player will never stand a chance against a resident but lazy player. This is terribly demotivating. Overally, I think the best option could be to: 1. Scale the TP cost, so that it's still 10 TP per level for lv100+ lands, but 1 TP for lower lands (you may think in more steps in between too). I'd say for the latter you could also charge TP only for lands growth levels, not the resultant size. 2. If you REALLY want to punish/tax sandbag mergers, hell, let be it, simply add to each merge a TP cost equal to base points gained, but please do not remove that feature completely. This could generally mean that merging a star of 6 fully sandbagged lv1's with a central lv1 land costs 6*11 (base points) + 6 (resulting land growth) TP = 72 TP. Any discount factor greatly appreciated With 1 TP per lv with no sandbags, well, it sounds better for fresh players and small lands. But 1 TP per lv for large lands is laughable for many players and thus does not solve the problem of huge land hoarding. My calculations give me easy 25 TP daily when not travelling. It's like two or three months for an lv1000+ land, not counting weekends and other travels. --- Regardless, I think you must at some point decide, if you want your app to be "Domination: Earth" with some strategy depth, player interaction, opportunities and losses, or "Exploration: Earth" that focuses on having some flags, and, well, "that's all, folks". The "Domination" part, I feel, is tempting many people into believing this will be a GPS-based simplified 4X-genre game. If you really don't want to head into this direction, and don't take me wrong, I don't mean is as a pun or mean comment, just an honest suggestion: maybe it's a right time to rethink the branding into something less aggressive and therefore less confusing.

Not to mention that this additionally brings down tenfold the guards set in these recent days against the original issue.

My position is reported quite properly. I did once or twice see it jump back to Warsaw for whatever reason, but this had nothing to do with VPN servers location (Canada and Netherlands). I've never seen my location to jump into any place related to my VPN connection. Even as far as my knowledge goes, this should never interfere. The only real symptom of using VPN is that is somehow enables Google-supported quicker GPS sync, which also makes position more erratic - but in a way that is exactly like it always worked back home, without VPN. As soon as I disable VPN the GPS position becomes much more stable, to an extent I've never seen before. Anyways, there is simply no imaginable failed location that would give such results. Look for how the US and CN bases are interleaved. It's physically impossible.

This just flushed a horrific amount of my work down the toilet. Vienna, Lviv, Hongkong, Nanchang, Lushan, Changsha, Zhangjiajie. I don't know how the decision process works here, but regardless of what playstyle started this whole affair, it is somehow that it's me getting f*cked up more and more by each new rule change applied, even though not only did I never take part in any of the targeted activities, I even long time ago abandoned the whole megaland craziness. This megasucks.

The base list screen always seemed to be ordered by the current distance from player. After arrival in China I've began experiencing some problems with the order. At first, I've noticed US bases being displayed higher than EU, though the latter are closer (real distance, great arc). Also, the Hongkong base, being closest to the first built Chinese base, displayed behind few US bases. Other Chinese bases seemed to display properly until now that I'm traveling westward. They to have been interleaved by US bases. Is it some distortion due to connection problems, access to map API etc., problem with CN GPS coordinates perhaps, or some real bug?

Have you tried if tracking fixes the issue?

This is exactly how I thought it to be according to the new rules. Nevertheless, I still think the price is enormous against the entry level lands. I've adjusted the way I set lands to focus on prepping single 1lv merges with up to 6 lands. But I will probably keep waiting with merging them until the dust settles and maybe by then the prices well get more rational

If it were, would you be charged twice? (once upon trade, once upon merge)

It started working somehow under another WiFi. Map still not present, but UI loads. Will tell more once I get a sim.

Hey @Mr. D, Arrived at Nanchang. All works pretty well (like server connection and resource collection) but the main screen won't load, likely due to blocked map engines. How hard would it be to add a "no map background" mode to the game? So that the game could load and work without the map in the background? (unless name resolutions for captured flags are done locally)

I would dare to name it "Experience" perhaps

Lol, this was fast Got the update before leaving home for airport

But these were your words: ...not on the sum of merging and merged land levels. This was in contrary with your calculations in the same paragraph. Thus I just asked for clarification, no wrong intentions Anyways, do you realise the TP cost would be insane even in a very small scale? To merge 30 lv1 lands you would need to travel 4640 km... ...as opposed to 290 km, if we assume only the merged land level counts. Perhaps the merging land levels should be added to merged land levels only on merges on lv100+ lands?

I understand the price will in fact be based on the merged land level only. Thus, in your example, the price will be 50 points, not 1050 points. Otherwise, you'd be paying multiple times for the levels already paid for or generated by captures.

Thanks! These answers made me withdraw all doubts I'm all in, though I hope if you update the game client before June 16th, you will share the APK with me via other channels than Google

Also, to address the issue raised over Discord that sandbag merging may be considered a couch play, let me repeat what I said over Discord: Sandbagging in China cannot be really considered a couch play, for Christ sake!

I quite like the general idea, though I have few problems with it, some of them, well, crucial. Great and longly awaited news! Never dreamt of saying that to any game developer, but... Mate, this is not how your game works Merging naked lands of any level gives 0 (zero) base points. Or it's just my account that's broken... @Mr. D, since it caused quite a confusion on Discord, I'd like to ask you to clarify: Do you intend to award base points upon land merge, based on the merged land level? This makes me quite bitter. I feel I've spent quite a lot of time gathering arguments to convince you to save the land trade, and now that you've decided to save it, you bring along changes that, well... invalidate my initial arguments. Namely, without what I could call "sandbag merges", the land trade looses it's appeal to players. We will no longer want to trade lands with newcomers. Considering the scale of such trade so far, it'd be not be worth the trouble; I've traded 6-7 lands this way in last yer, it gave me +1-2 levels across two or three bases would now count to nothing, and such pace considered, I'd need at least several years to grow any base one level up. But this also removes all the fun of meticulously planning land placing on my trips. All the additional effort would be pointless and the game will default to a dull button clicking every 15 minutes or so. Any player that cares to put more effort will not be able to be any better than one who just clicks. Moreover, you would never be able to outperform any player in remote location - it all cuts down to who sits longer in any chosen area. Not to say that the lands I've already staged in Vienna and Lviv, which were meant to grow both bases to lv 20 once winter comes and I'll get the required resources, all that effort would be wasted. This said, @Mr. D, I know there are some exploits involving massive merges using large amount of structures. Therefore consider: saving the ability to convert primary structure levels into base points, exclude only the secondary structures from conversion, ie. all the structures placed manually (utility structures and secondary sandbags, guard towers etc.). This will cause some severe inequality for commuters, depending on the size of land-free area between their home and work/school lands. Consider two cases below. They differ twice in daily travel distance, yet the Travel Points (TP) outcome differs sevenfold. This could well be fixed if the algorithm were to count the first capture of in-base object (upgrade of land or utility structure) after a normal new land capture.

@Mr. D Can we at least get some hint on the changes? Like, whatever is set firm by now or what current strategies (other than landmongering, if one can name it a strategy) will become invalidated? I'm going to China in next few days, for more than two weeks, and I'll be setting few new bases along with whatever I can do locally to make them strong. This involves setting many small lands within merging range to pump up sandboxes later and with them, pump up base level. And it involves some time and planning to maximise the effort while not sacrificing sightseeing opportunities... It would be a pity to learn after return that any effort I did there, dedicated time to etc., is no longer valid due to game rule changes. Or that, knowing new mechanics, I would play differently, put accent on different strategies. Again, it's not like I'll be coming back there any time soon to fix the errors in view of new mechanics

The problem is that, from my point of view removing lands from trade really hampers some significant game aspects. Like, I do a lot of traveling, love to set up new bases where I get to, but the important reason for it is that these bases do expand my gameplay. After returning home, I can still visit them in game, looking for FoT, other players and... land trading opportunities. Trading lands in foreign lands allows me to grow my remote bases, thus the latter becoming less prone to enemy attacks (capacity). It's hardly a form of couch play for me, but an interesting part of the game, involving diplomacy, and also a resource sink. It's not couch play because it's hardly imaginable that, even If I were to travel all year round, would I like to travel to same place all time. Without land trade, once the trip ends and all FoT is eradicated, I could as well forget that I have made these new bases. No more need to meticulously search for new players in new range (game hardly makes this easy). Unless I turn towards warmongering. Also, think about fresh players. Right now, they're hungering for resources in early game, but do possess the option to easily craft new lands and sell them. What would they trade for if lands were excluded? Gold they lack for the personnel they lack too? No. I bet no-one unless local friends or some extremely samaritan players would care about sponsoring new gamers. I'd say the only use for resource-only trade would be during alliance wars. Already grown players would find it easier to support any conflict they wish. Finally, resource-only trade is also vulnerable to exploits. An example? If I set up few fake accounts (say, ten), ally them all and stock up lots of resources for gathering (or just go on a magnet run to some new city) it's enough for me to activate each fake account for few seconds and then run the magnet to tenfold the resource return (once I trade back all resources from my fake "allies"). No game, no trade is free of exploit chances. That said, I still urge you to consider saving the land trade.

In overall, I'd say that concepts #1 and #2 applied together will pretty much kill most ill-minded trade. #2 would hamper land hoarding significantly by itself, while #1 would prevent some larger schemes AND bring a new feature of Capital Bases for you to exploit further. Also, I think the idea of a 100% faul-proof solution is unrealistic. A solution for any invented set of rules and preventive measures will sooner or later be found. As in real world, I think the best we can set upon is hardening the system as much as possible, and making the potential bypass solutions as uncomfortable and unworthwhile as possible. Such as that when any player invents a way to crack the game and share the exploit, other players would feel discouraged by the amount of work and travel required. To think of it, we do want to target couch surfers mostly.

True, as long as we decide to designate the Capital Base by largest amount of anything. Not true. As soon as you move your base to a completely new place, it will likely loose the status of the Capital Base and become a Former Capital Base. At the same time, the lands in original area will either remain unlinked or became linked to a neighbouring/overlapping base. In latter case, this would be the base that comes to be the new Capital Base, with all the restrictions. In former case, I think you can easily restrict the sale of the unlinked lands. You're already restricting it other way around, eg. one cannot purchase a land outside of own territory.

@ValarMorghulis voiced a concern about #1 being hard to teach to players. I'll just repost my answer: #1, if implemented along the second option (cannot buy into Capital from other's Capital) would really rarely trigger and doesn't have to be explained much. All I would seem necessary would be: (a) a message: "You cannot purchase this land. Trading lands between players' capital bases is forbidden.\n\nCapital bases are designated automatically based on your gameplay.", (b) a way to designate your capital base, both in the base list screen and on the map (different icon, perhaps). I don't believe we need to expose every internal information at first glance. As with other games, curious people always find what they want to find (forums, etc) and the "automatically" magic word is well sufficient.

No idea where did you get such idea. Implementing any of the concepts wont in any way hamper your gamestyle. In idea #1, once you move your Capital Base: The "monstrous" lands you have near your home would either remain unlinked to any base (thus any purchase in the area would still not be possible), or... ...or would become linked to a nearest base that's overlapping the area, but this base would in most cases become the new Capital Base (after recalculation), then... Your former Capital Base would become a Former Capital Base, but that would only prevent you from buying lands in it's area for some period. After returning home and setting new base at home, it would in most cases again become your new Capital Base, with the neighbouring base (if any were involved) gaining the status of Former Capital Base and (in such scenario) your recently moved home base would then lose the status of Former Capital Base. Ideas #2 and #3 have completely no imaginable influence that you could worry about. I would agree, though I also think that hoarding resources is not a problems for many lategamers. Money is perhaps an issue, but so are Personnel and Supplies, and once P2P resource trade get's enabled, things will level out. But, like I said, #3 is a very far fetched idea that I think was only worth mentioning because it attempts to solve some completely unrelated problems (were these ever to arise significantly). Yeah, but there is a very specific issue when having a flag inside other players territory. Unless you ally with that player (and some people just wont ally), many of his actions over their land will trigger a war between you and him. And that's a bummer. But, otherwise, it is a simple and crude solution that would on itself largely limit the scale of the general issue.