or: The Ultimate Futility of Unlimited Troop Numbers

Recent events have once again highlighted the ultimate flaw in this game. Anyone who has reached endgame knows what it is and many have given up playing because of it.

That flaw is the fact that there is no restriction placed upon the size of your army, other than how much food it takes to keep them fed. I doubt that the developers ever foresaw the situation arising where troops would be counted in the millions and food consumption would also rise to the many millions an hour. For anyone it becomes a daunting task to maintain a standing army of many millions of troops, but because you know or suspect that your enemy has many millions of troops, you feel compelled to follow the same path, or risk being destroyed by superior numbers.

It was once thought that an army of X number defending a city would be unbeatable and that would be the end of the game. Much work has been done on developing advanced tactics to counter any size or composition of defending troops. Congratulations to those players who have taken the time and effort to develop those strategies. The fact remains that all these counter measures involve sending huge numbers of sacrificial troops to chip away at defending troops and wear them down. Ultimately all this has done has fuel a new round of the arms race.

Some players found it just too daunting to keep feeding an ever expanding army and have left the game. Some of them gave their account details to somebody else in their alliance, so that their efforts would not be a total waste. This is against the rules as written but was never policed. So this led to multi accounting as a strategy and on newer servers it became a strategy that was common from the very start. Once again, it was not policed, even though it was against the rules.

The next development was the rise of the bots. I suspect that bots have been around for quite some time, in one form or another, but because there was no policing it became more blatant and more widespread. I even suspect that there may be some who use a mixture of all the illegal (against the rules) strategies to develop far beyond any normal players reach.

It is not my intention to condemn or admire any strategy that is against the rules. It is simply my intention to highlight what is the ultimate flaw that lies at the heart of the game. It is my hope that somebody from Evony will read this and see the point I am trying to make, take it on board and perhaps think about a solution for Age II.

All strategies lead to ever increasing army sizes. It is an arms race without end because there is no limit to the number of troops a player can have.
Casual players reach a stage where the task of keeping up in this arms race becomes too daunting and stop playing. Those who continue to play will continue to develop strategies to keep increasing troop numbers, both within the rules and outside the rules.

A look at the older servers shows maps covered in black flags, with a few player cities scattered around. It is quite comical when you think that in the introduction to the game you are told that one of your goals is to defeat the barbarian hordes and bring civilization to the land. It's funny because in the end, the maps contain more barbarian cities than player cities by a ratio of up to 20:1.

In reality, armies of the time period the game is set in were never very large and were ultimately limited by the size of the city they came from, or the area that city could control. This is the major flaw in this game. There is no limit to the size of the army you can build, as long as you can find a way to feed it.

I am not trying to denigrate the game. It is what it is. I am hoping that the developers will see this flaw for what it is and find a solution for Age II.