Re: Massive army thread in On-Topic
The reason people have bigger armies in Age I and spend a lot of time keeping them is, honestly, primarily for defense against a combined attack on you by many players, or by a massive attack by a war city that has ported in on top of you.
Sure, you could say "your alliance should help", but if someone is up close and personal, there's little warning and potentially long march times for reinforcements. Also, the alliance cannot rebuild the wall that was taken down. The individual player has to do that. The same applies to a coordinated attack on you by several players. Alliance support can only help so much.
What you are doing with the NPC sweeps on Age I, which will eventually target level 5 and 10 NPCs (once the sweep runs out of others, it will have to select those to serve any purpose), is you cut off the food supply for people to support defending themselves.
On the other hand, you have this item that you can buy for $30 called "Vesta's Blessing". It reduces food upkeep by 50% and is stackable.
Long-term, what you're doing by removing NPCs is shifting the balance of power even more away from the non-spender (or, in my case, previous spender) to those who spend constantly. While I'm sure having a higher percentage of spenders would be ideal for the company, when you starve out the non-spenders and only spenders are left, things will ultimately reach a point where there'll be stalemates and then the spenders will also leave, as they'll find the game "boring".
As several people have mentioned, Age I should be left as-is. The changing of the rules now is tantamount to saying that Mediterranean Avenue and Baltic Avenue are now worth more than Park Place and Boardwalk.
Additionally, the sweep process is inherently unfair, as it appears to simply start at 0 on the Y axis and clear candidate NPCs from 0-499 (or 499-0, if right-to-left) along the X axis, moving down 1 row on the Y axis, repeating the X axis sweep, and repeating by moving down and then across until the predefined number have been removed. It then stops. The stopping point last week was in the 110-120 Y axis area. This week it was the 130-135 Y axis area. Next week it will be a little farther down on the Y axis.
This means that some people are hit harder than others, and some not hit at all. That is why you have an uproar about what's being done. It's not 2 or 3 here and there, but concentrated at certain points. It's not people making a mountain out of a molehill, but an inherently flawed and unfair process. If you insist on continuing the sweeps, then there needs to be a change to where it divides the number of NPCs removed equally across all 16 states, and done all at the same time. That is the equitable / fair way to do it, not by removing hundreds from specific rows along the Y axis and gradually moving down. It needs to impact everyone as equally as possible, all at the same time (the entire map, not just a segment).