Олег Поленин

I gave it a thought and got several more ideas. They might not be the perfect fix, but might also start another line of thought that would nail the problem. I use these concepts: asymmetric abuse: a single player gathering additional lands via described techniques, using either other player or fake account; symmetric abuse: two players performing a two-way asymmetric abuse, trying to circumvent various limitations; local/remote abuse: refers to distance between players, relevant to base range. 1. The Capital Base concept We could designate the player's Capital Base and impose trade limits on all lands. There are several methods that could be used to designate the player's Capital Base, eg.: base with the largest amount of lands, largest land or top aggregated lands level, base with the largest amount of check-ins (counter being reset upon moving the base more than eg. 50km). As an additional, but useful concept against certain kinds of symmetric abuse, we could also introduce a concept of Former Capital Base; each time a new Capital Base emerges, the Former Capital Base is set to the base that just lost the Capital Base status (ie., there is only one Former Capital Base at any time). There are several limitations scenarios that can be imposed: player cannot purchase a land located in his Capital Base or Former Capital Base - this is the most simple, and would clearly work against any kind of abuse, though might hamper some legitimate transactions; player cannot purchase a land located in his Capital Base or Former Capital Base, if it's also located in other player's Capital Base or Former Capital Base - a bit more complicated solution, but narrows the effect and does not hamper certain legitimate transactions. Additionally, the Capital Base concept could be used as a base for many more future game features! The nice part of this concept is that it's also followed by a pretty nice game plot rationale - we can imagine times and scenarios, when empires are willing to sell their remote lands; but we can hardly imagine an empire selling off it's capital The Capital Base recalculation should be pinned to various events that could influence the change of status, depending on algorithm chosen. It could also, alternatively, be scheduled daily or executed once per n events, to save the costs of calculations involved. Further concepts I thought of earlier, but now that I put the above into written form, they have lost their appeal. Still, I write them down as other potential solutions, or supplementary solutions to any imaginable ways to circumvent the previous concept: 2. Forbidding the purchase of lands contained within own large lands We could introduce a mechanism that would prevent player from acquiring any land that already resides within the borders of that player's land, if the land level exceeds certain size (like, lv100+). This concept still allows for rapid illegal growth up to the designated level, but that's hardly ever an issue here. It is also successful both against symmetric and asymmetric abuse, but lacks of certain, I don't know... dignity 3. The Exchange Balance concept Another interesting approach is an introduction of Exchange Balance. Let's say that each player pair has a digital indicator that expresses an equality in their trade. Once the indicator falls beyond certain limit, further trade would be impossible. Such counter could be permanent or diminishing with time. A code-wise example: Let's assume that before any offer being accepted (not placed), we select from global trade table all transactions between the two players involved that took place within a specified time (eg. 3-6 months) and calculate the balance by subtracting the number of outgoing transactions from incoming transactions (or the aggregated land levels involved). The smaller the result, the more equal the balance of trade between players. If the balance factor exceeds certain value (let's for a starter say, 10 transactions or 30 levels), the acceptance of trade offer would be denied with a specific information to the seller ("You sold too many lands/levels to that player; equal your balance by purchasing some of his lands"). This idea is prone to any kind of symmetric abuse, but is otherwise interesting to think about because of other applications: it could prevent trade induced by any form of harassment (were that ever an issue), it could prevent buying off resigning players, whatever the underlying reason (also, were that ever an issue).

My idea was rather to allow players to explode their huge lands into smaller lands. Not selling them to FoT.

@Irrelevents @Republic of America Please keep this conflict on Discord. Bringing it up here definitely won't help. (I know only one of you did bring it up, calling up both of you is just a preventive attempt :P)

Consider how many players, including me (but let @Ruvox also be a fine example) based their play style on land trade and flag accumulation. And this had hardly much to do with couch gaming. It motivates players to reach out to each other, to maintain diplomacy (~good relations), generally brings on good things. I also remember @Ruvox comment against one of my couch-surfing feature suggestions, that the game already has many sufficient features to occupy him and reward him, land trade being the most prominent one. @Mr. D, I urge you to reconsider. Do not resort to a collective punishment that has a likely potential of significantly reducing the fun we get from playing this game. Let's find that gentle solution

Actually, less developement than providing a resource trading feature unrelated to land trade. Spares significant UI changes...

I still think that a more gentle solution could be arranged, eg. stamping each land with a list of previous owners, so that a land once sold cannot ever return to the previous owner. This could even include taking over by force, ie. when a player attempts to take over the sold land, the land disappears, like what happens when you attack FoT. It's also easy enough to explain in a short warning on trade: "Once you sell this land, you will never be able to get it back again".

Removing land trade feature does, however, ruin few other features: An ability to trade lands in remote areas to grow your remote bases; this I hope never was discouraged and it did create many opportunities for positive interactions between players from far away locations; another downside might be that now a military action would be the only way to achieve same goals, thus game becoming more aggresive. An ability to purchase-off players that are leaving the game, though I do understand that this actually might be good (us being not so eager for other players to quit :P). An ability to traffic resources over large distances, through a chain of players; this will hamper alliance efforts to be, well, effective alliances in case of any conflict.

It happens every day roughly 2pm UTC. Starts like 1:45, ends like 2:20. Affects both game and website which returns error 504. This is not a complete error, while it affects a high percentage of connection attempts, some pass through without error and rapidly served.

If a player account was set up using Google authentication, is it possible to either enable additional, manual credential authentication or, if that's an only solution, to completely switch to such mode? I am planning to travel into an area in which Google services might be largely unavailable and would like to guarantee that I will be able to play nontheless. What can I do?

It's a premium resource, so... two common ways are: 1. $ 2. Occasional events. Last time you could gather UBT during xmas event, as a resource on map, though extremely rare.

For some time I thought game could benefit from a floating button in Android, alike Messenger, that would mimic the in-game capture button, ie. display the timer and allow to punch capture regardless to the app you're in. Since this would likely need additional programming, and I bet the game could use some additional cash flow that is not aggressive in terms of monetization, I think it could pretty well work as an UBT subscription incentive, ie. that the feature would be available only to players that have any active subscription, nano included. Just leaving the thought here.

Imagine a scenario: land A is of higher level than land B; lands A and B are within merge range; player clicks capture (flag button) on land A or within it's radius. What happens in game in such situation: land A merges with land B without warning; a capture charge is lot (timer resets); the +1 lv from capture does not apply, the result is land A having lv of (A+B) while should be (A+B+1). Suggested solution: upon capture on land that would result in merge, display standard merge confirmation dialog to avoid unnecessary/unwanted merges; do not reset the capture timer regardless of the outcome of the above action, ie. player should still have an option to perform a valid capture, as merge action is free/not timed. (in analogy to other "cancelled capture" actions, eg. when there is a larger land in proximity that prohibits land expansion)

When capturing/upgrading a remote land, player cannot easily determine whether the land is already linked to a base or not. Well, one could say: the map should give a clue, but map can be misleading (I will post a screen in next comment) and in my case, I've lost 15 UBT trying to create a base until I realized that there will be a problem: I should be aware after first upgrade that something is wrong due to the text in post-upgrade messagebox, but the Notifications cover message boxes in Samsung One UI and thus It's really hard to notice it Thus I'm left 15 UBT poorer and keen to propose this solution: Could you expand the "remote capture" window with additional information about land affiliation? ("This land is not linked to any base." vs "This land is linked to base %s.")

Oh, sorry. NOT A BUG. "defend surrounding lands" disabled. Lol.

AI gaining in strength

Sandbags prevent losing land, but fight still on and defenders counter still off.

Same thing happening with second land... (notably, identical name) Trying to fight this off by building sandbags...

Well, AI took my land away against all odds. This is what took place: 1. I've attacked a land of Valandil, won the combat and took it over. 2. Shortly after combat, AI attacked me over the same land, clearly without much chance: (I was relating that to discord as a funny case of FoT supporting Valandil, hence the screen was taken, I did not yet know what will happen next) 3. Then amazingly, I get this: And the land is gone: I assume that somehow the game likely counted in Valandil's army as defending forces, instead of mine. Especially when you take a look at the bottom of first screen, where the 0 defenders is visible against 375 on the main display. @Mr. D Is it traceable in your logs?

@Mr. D Thanks for at least partial refund! The idea sounds quite fine and surely needs some warnings but I wonder it could use some tuning along a following line: Calculate the "overall" value of transaction (let's say: $value = $gold + 10 * $personnel + 10 * $supplies) Assign a "chance" of offer invalidation that varies on value, either by fixed threshold and 0/100% chance or a variable chance, let's say: $chance = min( 1, max( 0, ( $value - $minthreshold ) / $maxthreshold ) ) based on two thresholds: $minthreshold - any value equal or below has 0% chance to be intercepted; $maxthreshold - any value equal or above has 100% chance to be intercepted. Display the risk in warning message upon offer commission. This way relatively standard offers will be safe from FoT while the feature would target the more abusive trades. This could be of course bypassed by abusive side making lots of small offers, but: there is an offer limit, smaller offers are more risky, eg. colluding player might change his heart and accept a trade to the mishap of offering player, it would take a lot of effort to store lots of resources this way. I'm throwing this idea because I'm often sending some smaller offers for lv1 lands to not very active players, especially those that don't use discord, and would hate for these offers to disappear accidentally due to FoT. Not for the sake of resource value, but just the lack of tools to monitor these events and reapply offers (sidenote: if possible to add to any todo list, it would be awesome to have access to some long-lasting message log regarding most important events, like information on non-FoT attacks taking place, rejection or acceptation of trades, alliances and truces etc.; current message log has very short history and dies on restart, and it is very easy to actually miss out an attack and hard to track trades and other events)

Hi, Several days ago, during the trip to Spain, I have sent an offer of 15k Personnel to @Ruvox for one of his lands. Now I found the offer disappeared without trace. Ruvox neither accepted nor declined the offer, and I neither saw the resources returned nor the land being transferred. @Mr. D I'd be really grateful if you could take a look on this issue, any logs, tables etc., and it would be awesome if, when confirmed via logs, a refund could be applied. Ruvox mentioned same problem has occurred to him some long time ago, and thus there might be some bug behind it, that affects trade heavily. It's, well, not a problem if we're talking about small, three-digit trades, but losing 15k Personnel is a huge problem

Take a note though, that at least on my phone I observed gray popups stop working after the game process is active for a long time (by active I mean just running, not necessarily in foreground). Restarting app brings popups back.

I think it is somehow related to the amount of objects in the player's current draw area. While the problem occurs in high rate around my home area, it is definitely a lesser issue in Spain, where I have a very limited number of flags. Still it's kind of 5-10% rate even here.

(and this is way below Catalonia)

Hmm. I thought that the only binoculars in Spain are Spanish. This is what I see there: