The real problems comes with the fact that Evony has no real end game, and the end game is pretty easy to reach in a month or two even without NPC farming.
Troops are just another form of resource, just like food and gold and wood and such. No one wants to spend their resources on something less valuable then what they already have. No one would spend a million wood on ten thousand wood would they? Why would they spend troops that take hours to build and millions of resources on hundreds of thousands of resources?
If they do use those troops to gain resources, they only do it for a decent profit, as troops require both resources AND time to build. And what do people spend those resources on after their cities and techs are maxed out?
More troops. That is the only thing they can spend their resources on.
This is called inflation. A 100k army is devalued because the only thing there is worth getting your troops killed for is enough resources to build a larger, say 150k army.
Then a 150k army is devalued because the only thing worth spending it on is a 225k army.
Then the 225k army is devalued because the only thing worth spending it on is a 338k army.
And so on and so on until people have millions of troops.
That right there is the only end game Evony has. Thats it. After you are done building your cities, that is the only reason you have to log on. That or griefing, and that only appeals to a few. Most people do not like taking something someone else has built unless it makes them stronger.
Like the title says, NPC farming isn't a problem, it is a symptom. Huge armies do not come from mountains of resources being available at a comparatively small loss via NPC farming. It comes from the fact that there is nothing else to do in Evony end game other then build massive armies.
Which means gimping NPC farming will not change anything. People will either find another way to keep building larger and larger armies, or they will quit because they will have nothing in the world left to spend their resources on.
Other then of course griefing newbies.
Because troops are just a different kind of resource, and because the only thing you can spend them on is sufficient resources to build bigger armies, the 'troop market' has become highly inflated, do to the fact that there is nothing to 'spend' troops on.
That has to change if you do not want people to have massive armies. There has to be a 'troop sink' the way other games have gold sinks. Something valuable you spend troops on because you want or need it more then you want or need the troops.
And that means creating an end game. That is the only way to end the massive army problem. Until there is an end game to spend troops on, people will always find a way to spend their troops on building more troops.
There is literally nothing else for them to do but figure out a way to do just that.




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