Revitalizing Ikariam

User12996 · Nov 12th 2025

Quote from A.A

Quote from User12996

Quote from A.A

Quote from User12996

Quote from A.A

Did you read all the way through what I wrote? Or you just stopped reading and started writing a new reply when you encountered the "your version would cause a problem" part?

Because what I said would get exactly the same effect you want without harming other players!

The only person who would prefer your version would be a backend engineer who doesn't want to implement the extra code out of laziness. That engineer doesn't happen to be you, right?

Now you say "as the mine levels aren't going down, you aren't losing anything anyways" but you are obviously wrong, the player in this case will indeed lose a very important thing which is the ability to upgrade the mines!

The said player may end up paying tens of millions of wood before being able to upgrade his mines again, especially if when sharing more than one island with the removed account.

What will you do then? Give all the guys on the island a free city relocation? Or just keep them unable to upgrade their mines?

Now we can all see what I meant when I said sometimes players request changes but they "Don't take into consideration the the long lasting effects of such changes"

Please read what I wrote again, I know it's a bit lengthy but when you carefully read it you can clearly see that I do achieve your goal while addressing the potential problems.

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Yes. I read everything you wrote and I wrote why I disagreed with it. You want an individual punishment. I want an island wide punishment.

Yes, if it's 10s of millions, then they have to donate 10s of millions and then they can upgrade the mines. That's just how it works. If you don't like it, guess what? You can also ghost your account, too.

I am considering the long lasting effects of these changes and I believe that these changes would be better for the game overall, especially since mines aren't capped at 60/60 anymore.

I'll enumerate why now.

1. With the way donation accounts are used, this punishes you for ghosting them. You don't lose the mine levels, but you do have a huge donation debt. That means large donation accounts can only go once per island. With your solution, they can, too, but the users of the donation accounts still benefit as long as the account doesn't come back to the same island.

2. It does not require any additional data to be saved. When a player is deleted from an island, their donations are negated, but mine levels stay the same.

3. The mines can still be upgraded, you simply have to donate the debt off.

4. Islands with debt can have a special warning symbol on the mines that can be hovered to elaborate how much debt is present.

Honestly, I'd take the status quo over your solution. Assuming I'm a "lazy programmer" because I want a different solution certainly is a choice of words lol.

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I wanted to reply to this earlier but I was very busy and had very little time to give a proper reply, I apologize for that

Now let me reply to each point you mentioned:

I'd like to start with your number 2:

a) The game already saves all the needed data for all active players.

b) A quick story: Sometimes I build piracy towns and when I want to demolish them I donate any extra wood I have in such towns to their islands. When I build a new piracy town on any of those islands and l want to donate the extra wood as usual I find that the island has a record of my previous donations, donations made a month or more earlier. Conclusion: the game saves the donation data for islands on which you don't have any towns anymore.

c) The game used to save which island did you donate for before they came up with the donation compensation system. When an account returned to the game we could see the donation amounts it made to each island as soon as it returned.

So you need to save the exact same data as before the compensation system, same as in point (c) and you need to make this data assigned to player accounts instead of the island if it's not already assigned to player accounts.

Your number 1:
Your solution also makes them benefit if their account doesn't come back to the same island, what's your answer to this?

Let me guess, it will be either:

a) "Oh, they will be having a large penalty on the first island so it's not a problem if they go to another island". As your current faulty design suggests.

If so you they will be donating until they reach a very high level beyond which they aren't willing to upgrade then "ghost" their donation account, as you like to call it, and finally come back to another island and donate, so we are only giving innocent players large unfair penalties whenever a large legit player leaves the game to only make it a bit more expensive for cheaters.

b) "We will not allow the same player to donate to other islands until dept is paid on all islands". Since you already mentioned something like that.

Well, I thought you said your solution "does not require any additional data to be saved... their donations are negated, but mine levels stay...." so how can we keep track of this without saving additional data?

c) I won't mention because I want you to say it yourself to prove that you indeed don't know what you are talking about

Your number 3:

- "You can't take a breath while underwater"

- "You still can take a breath while underwater you will just suffocate and die"

If you can't see the analogy then I don't know what to say

I know that for someone like you who has 11 accounts on the same server paying 10s of millions of wood is considered a simple task as you mentioned "you simply have to donate the debt off."

But for the average player this might be undoable especially if the server is either active or old.

Your number 4:

Why do we need the warning and the tooltip? The current concern is players already on the affected island not players who are yet to colonize the island, because those new colonizers will, if you implement the idea of collective punishment you want, be checking the mines as soon as their colonies are built.

They will only lose 9000 gold and 1000 wood for building the colony, how thoughtful of you to consider this and prevent such a great loss

Finally, when I said:

Quote from A.A.

"The only person who would prefer your version would be a backend engineer who doesn't want to implement the extra code out of laziness. That engineer doesn't happen to be you, right? "

That was meant to be a joke since Cheech mentioned he thinks you are badidol's "burner account", you can also tell it's a joke by the smily/emoji, whatever you call it, I used at the end, I really don't know how you didn't get that.

Anyway, please don't get so personally offended and say nonsense like "That's just how it works. If you don't like it, guess what? You can also ghost your account, too."

This is has one of two meanings:

1."If you don't like it ghost you account and leave the game for good", I hope you don't mean this because:

a) It's very rude.

b) I didn't know you own the game.

c) Even if you own the game it still is very rude.

2. You mean "ghost your account then come back and change island" which is even worse than being rude because it will ruin the game even more.

If I do so the island will have event more dept wich will encourage more players to ghost their accounts and do the same until the island is empty and has a dept equivalent to the donations required to reach its current level and no one will build any town on this island again, in other words Congratulations you managed to produce uninhabitable ghost islands, YAY!

Keep this long enough and only cheaters with islands full of permanent multis are going to be able upgrade their mines.

Also why should I have to ghost my account and risk getting all of my cities looted and risk loosing spot on islands that aren't affected by the removed player?

And if I do so will I be able to donate freely to the new islands? or would you like to activate the rule that will forbid me from donating to new islands until I pay the dept of all other islands first?

There's a popular saying in the game industry:

"Everybody thinks they are a game designer"

Unfortunately it applies way more than I used to like to admit

Quote from User12996

Honestly, I'd take the status quo over your solution. Assuming I'm a "lazy programmer" because I want a different solution certainly is a choice of words lol.

Now that you said you prefer the status quo over someone else's solution you didn't only turn this purposeful discussion into a competition but also showed you are a bitter loser, for preferring to keep cheaters cheat over having a non toxic remedy doesn't make any sense at all, even if you think this remedy is incomplete.

I really hope that you have nothing to do with game team because with this mentality I'm highly concerned.

That said, you can always raise questions and generate ideas rather than whatever you call this thing you are doing.

So please if you have good, non toxic ideas share them, otherwise stick to mentioning your concerns regarding the ideas shared by others.

Thanks!

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Uh, wow.

First, I was not aware the data already existed on the island. That's great. That doesn't change how I feel that it should be an island wide penalty and not an individual penalty.

1a) Yep, any account can donate to an island and that's it. I didn't see how your solution changed this, either. IIRC, your solution was that if they came back to the same island, they'd have to pay off an individual debt. My solution is that they'd have to pay off the island's debt. I am completely fine with penalizing legitimate players when a large donator leaves, too. It happens regardless when a merge happens, plus, they still get the benefit of using a high level set of mines in the mean time.

1b) Player A is on Island B and Island C. Island B has a debt of X wood. Player A can't donate to Island C until Island B's debt is clear. This doesn't require any additional data, just a simple check of which islands player A are on and if they have any debt. I'd even be fine with letting Island C's towns donate directly to the debt without shipping wood.

1c) Won't mention what? Kind of a pointless conversation if you're not going to make a point but instead make an empty point about not having a point.

3) And what's the problem? You're already benefiting from the high level mines. Either donate the debt off or don't. You can wait until the next merge, you can decide to ghost your own account off and find other islands, etc. For the average player everything is doable and if the average player can't do it, then the mines are already much, much higher than they would be normally anyways.

4) We need the warning and the tooltip because if you're trying to shop around for mines, you should know if the island is in debt or not, especially since it would prevent you from donating elsewhere. Otherwise, you find a high set of mines, land a new city there, and have an unexpected penalty.

I honestly have no idea why you'd think I'm badidol's burner account. It's pretty funny. I'm probably just a realist.

I wasn't offended. Ghosting your account is a legitimate strategy in Ikariam that a lot of players don't consider. I ghost accounts all the time because it gives me free warps, etc. Ghosting your account does not imply leaving the game for good. It implies using a tool that we have, ghosting, and using it strategically to merge on your own terms and rechoose what islands, etc., that you want. I didn't mean to imply that you should take it or leave it, but instead use ghosting as a strategic tool in your arsenal.

If the mines are high enough, players will move their accounts there and pay the debt off. The debt isn't any different than moving to a different island and starting over with donations. That's the whole thing, you act like the debt is a huge penalty. It isn't. It's simply the price that was already donated to get the mines where they currently are.

You don't have to ghost, like I said, it's a strategic option that you can either choose to partake in or not partake in. If you don't? Then pay off the debt.

I don't even know what to say to the last part. I'd prefer an island wide penalty system over an individual penalty system because the mines in Ikariam are supposed to be about cooperation and that should cut both ways. There's nothing toxic about my idea, either, it's simply a different approach because I believe that mines and miracles should be shared per island. All it is is a difference of opinion.

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1.a) In case of a merge we:

1. Get free town relocation.

2. Have empty islands.

3. Coordinate with a friend or two and move together to suitable islands and cooperate to get the mines working quickly.

You don't get anything of this when a large player on your island goes to the graveyard server, if we follow your suggestion and ghost our account we are at risk of losing our place(s) on other islands when we get ghosted and loosing our resources to because getting ghosted requires not logging in for 30 days straight during which we are defenseless.

That said, a large amount of players hated resetting mine levels and wanted to keep things as is to keep the old mine levels but the devs got the wrong conclusion from their protest and made one of the new merge target worlds to be "the good old days" with no bonuses and ended up having it pretty much a ghost server in most language communities.

Other than this your reply to 1.a) did not remedy the design flaw I mentioned, a donation account will donate to one island until it gets it to a high level then move to the next after its owner is happy with current level which is making it expensive for cheaters same as my suggestion but mine does NOT have your problem of Penalizing honest players in needlessly.

1.b) Problematic donation accounts have only one city so there is no islands B and C it's just one island so they are having no problem.

1.c) I was expecting you to give certain answer, a not so smart one, but I didn't want to mention it and adress it like a) and b) actually I was not going to mention b) but changed my mind at the last minute.

3. What can I say, you don't see the analogy

I keep mentioning the draw backs of ghosting your account and you insist on it, you even gave a more flamboyant idea, wait for the next merge

Also what about new players, and soft merges? Because, make no mistake,the next merge is going to be a soft merge transferring the new small worlds they keep releasing every now and then to the older ones.

I know the benefits of ghosting but it's not easy for everyone as it's easy for your 11 accounts on the edge of the map, I hope you can get this.

4. Isn't the penalty island specific? So if they remove the colony they will not have the penalty anymore, are you confused about your own design? Because according to your design what I said is totally correct, you are concerned about players losing 9000 gold and 1000 wood for building the colony that you a tooltip to stop this from happening but you are not concerned about players having huge penalties.

Quote from User12996

I honestly have no idea why you'd think I'm badidol's burner account. It's pretty funny. I'm probably just a realist.

5. I did NOT say you are badidol's burner account, Cheech said so and I made a joke about it, a joke you didn't get.

Read carefully please.

Quote

The debt isn't any different than moving to a different island and starting over with donations. That's the whole thing, you act like the debt is a huge penalty. It isn't. It's simply the price that was already donated to get the mines where they currently are.

6. I thought you said "mine should be shared per island" now you are saying it's same as starting over with donations i.e. as if there were no cooperation or "sharing" per island, a bit contradictory.

Quote from User12996

Just for the sake of it, let me put some numbers to this.

Let's pretend the Saw Mill is level 30. This is a total amount donated of 7,657,355.

Player X is ghosting off and he's donated 6,130,869. The Saw Mill now has a 6,130,869 wood debt, but still functions as a level 30 Saw Mill. Plus, other players can now move to the island to take Player X's spot.

Once the players on the island pay off the 6,130,869 wood debt, they can continue donating to level up the Saw Mill. If that player never donated, the Saw Mill would be just under 23.

Saw mill | Ikariam | Fandom

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7. That's a bad example, try considering luxury goods, it takes more than 22M wood to reach level 29 for luxury goods not 30, just 29.

Now consider this for resources that doesn't have production boost in a certain world, like marble in the 3rd target world in the last merge.

Quote from User12996

All it is is a difference of opinion.

8. Correct, I'll have to leave it at this point and let the devs and the community decide on the subject.

Maybe even remove the whole idea of refunding donations unless there's a merge, like it was before.

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1. You also don't lose anything either. Like I pointed out, if your combined donation was level 23 and the person that ghosted donated until the saw mill is 30, the saw mill stays at 30, but you just have to pay the debt off. I guarantee people would show up on islands with level 50/50 mines, even if they had a debt, and simply wouldn't donate.

In regards to ghosting, it's very easy to do the following if you're worried about being looted: donate all wood, sell all luxury for gold, put your towns into donation mode, and ghost. You won't lose anything and will come back to a lot of research and gold. Yes, there's a small opportunity cost, but the long term gains of merging on your own are generally worthwhile.

If you don't want to sell your res, you can either pool your res and use traders to donate or use a trader in each town and donate. If you're worried because you're saving up res for a huge project, you finish building that project and then prepare to ghost. With proper planning you don't lose anything other than the slots on the other islands, but if you want to go back to those islands, it's easy to do with proper coordination.

In regards to 1a, your solution doesn't address this either. As the individual penalty is island, not account, specific they would simply merge back to a different island and repeat the process. If you're trying to say it should be account and server specific, then that means they donate to that server once and organize a swap to a different server and the cycle repeats. I don't agree with account specific penalties on a server because I do believe there's legitimate reasons to ghost and come back to the same server but in a different location.

So even if the penalty is server wide for a specific account (and I feel like this hurts legitimate players more), that just means that that specific donation account can only donate once per server and I don't believe that really solves the issue while legitimately hurting players that ghost, come back, and then can't spend their own donations. With an island penalty, they can come and donate and unless the remaining accounts pay the debt off, that's it, the island can't be upgraded anymore and that puts a hard ceiling on the maximum mine levels.

1b) Problematic donation accounts can have up to as many cities as they want. Building a palace up to level 6 is cheap, and then they can have a bunch of cities with a lot of corruption to donate their resources with because corruption doesn't matter and the flexibility of having more than one city does.

1c) Don't insult my intelligence because I disagree with you. That's the only reason you're so salty because I'm not instantly onboard with your idea; I've never denigrated you; I've only criticized your idea.

3. Ghosting is as easy or as hard as you make it out to be as I pointed out above. Yes, it involves a strategy and planning, but it's no different than anything else in the game. There's also no need to be in the center of the map or on specific islands anyways, especially since most alliances build alliance clusters on specific parts of the server. If you're in an alliance cluster, it should be easy enough to work with someone to block your slots until you return.

In regards to soft merges, that's why the last merge wasn't a soft merge. They explicitly stated that everyone was merging because soft merges were too advantageous for the accounts merging in.

I will say ghosting is easier for me because I built the mines I use. They're all my donations, so I can always leave, merge back, and rebuild them. I also have 11 accounts because that makes it easy for me to coordinate and block off slots so that I can make the islands how I want them. And no, my smaller accounts don't help my larger accounts. It's actually my largest account that has the most donations. Plus, anyone, with time and dedication, can easily do what I've done. Anyone can easily start on a new world, build the account up slowly, through economy, to 6 or more cities without much effort, and then use those account(s) to block slots for their main account. All it takes is the will to do so.

4. No, I'm not confused about my design. When you are settling a new colony, you would be looking at the islands nearby and the mine levels. The mines would need to have a warning because if the island is in debt, as it's island specific, you should be informed about the debt. For example, in my level 30 sawmill example, the island would be in 6.3m wood debt. Someone shouldn't colonize on the island to only find out about the debt after colonizing.

For the sake of your other points, I've edited the post and numbered them.

5. I know it was Cheech and I was laughing about you going on along with it because of your joke. Unfortunately, you took it way too literally.

6. Yes, the mines are shared per island. To reuse my example, we're going to assume the account in question has 6.3m in donations (enough to promote the sawmill from 23 to 30). The account has two options: warp to an island with a level 23 sawmill and warp to an island with a level 30 sawmill but the island has 6.3m donation debt. The choice is between leveling up the sawmill to level 30 without debt, which would cost ~6.3m in donations or start on an island with no debt, but a level 23 sawmill. Both are functionally equivalent assuming the account is going to use the ~6.3m in donations on the sawmill. In either scenario, the saw mill ends up at level 30 and with no debt. (Yes, if debt isn't forced to be paid off first, he could go to the level 30 saw mill and then spend his donations elsewhere, but that's not an option in this scenario because that's not the point I was trying to make in the opportunity cost analysis.)

7. And? You still get the benefit of the mine but you can't upgrade it further until you pay the debt off. If you don't have 22m in donations, it's not like the luxury mine would've made it to 30 in the first place.

8. badidol has stated many times that this won't happen because it encourages players to not return to the game. I do agree with badidol on that stance. I would not have come back to the game if I didn't get my donations refunded after ghosting. Ghosting gives me a huge amount of flexibility and is one of the reasons I am still playing.

User12996 · Nov 12th 2025

Also, I want to emphasize that my strategy with ghosting is a last resort. As you've already donated to the islands that exist, it's unlikely that moving to a different island would allow you to get higher mines unless you were moving to someone else's island and if you are moving to someone else's islands for higher mines, than the penalty is likely irrelevant anyways.

Personally, I don't think that either solution will get implemented, because they're likely too punishing for the average player that Ikariam simply wants to return without a complex penalty structure.

It's sort of like the Ogame problem. In Ogame, if you were a fleeter and got crashed, it was very easy to simply quit the game because you lost everything you worked for. That meant that in some servers in Ogame, it basically became a zero sum game. The largest fleet (we're ignoring ACS) eventually eats up all the other fleets and those players quit while the largest fleet gets even larger.

In Ikariam, if someone doesn't get their donations back after they return, it makes starting over even less appealing because they knew they had better islands before and they lost all of their work on the mines.

The crow · Nov 13th 2025

Untill they start enforcing the rules against scripting this game is doomed. Guys are useing ika legends to buy gens and gold in unbelievable numbers. Imagine being able to buy 600,000 generals in 5 minutes.

The amount of scripting and cheating has gotten out of control.

User12996 · Nov 14th 2025

Quote from The crow

Untill they start enforcing the rules against scripting this game is doomed. Guys are useing ika legends to buy gens and gold in unbelievable numbers. Imagine being able to buy 600,000 generals in 5 minutes.

The amount of scripting and cheating has gotten out of control.

They do enforce the rules against it. If you suspect someone cheating, use the report player button.

A.A · Nov 21st 2025

Quote from User12996

Quote from A.A

Quote from User12996

Quote from A.A

Quote from User12996

Yes. I read everything you wrote and I wrote why I disagreed with it. You want an individual punishment. I want an island wide punishment.

Yes, if it's 10s of millions, then they have to donate 10s of millions and then they can upgrade the mines. That's just how it works. If you don't like it, guess what? You can also ghost your account, too.

I am considering the long lasting effects of these changes and I believe that these changes would be better for the game overall, especially since mines aren't capped at 60/60 anymore.

I'll enumerate why now.

1. With the way donation accounts are used, this punishes you for ghosting them. You don't lose the mine levels, but you do have a huge donation debt. That means large donation accounts can only go once per island. With your solution, they can, too, but the users of the donation accounts still benefit as long as the account doesn't come back to the same island.

2. It does not require any additional data to be saved. When a player is deleted from an island, their donations are negated, but mine levels stay the same.

3. The mines can still be upgraded, you simply have to donate the debt off.

4. Islands with debt can have a special warning symbol on the mines that can be hovered to elaborate how much debt is present.

Honestly, I'd take the status quo over your solution. Assuming I'm a "lazy programmer" because I want a different solution certainly is a choice of words lol.

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I wanted to reply to this earlier but I was very busy and had very little time to give a proper reply, I apologize for that

Now let me reply to each point you mentioned:

I'd like to start with your number 2:

a) The game already saves all the needed data for all active players.

b) A quick story: Sometimes I build piracy towns and when I want to demolish them I donate any extra wood I have in such towns to their islands. When I build a new piracy town on any of those islands and l want to donate the extra wood as usual I find that the island has a record of my previous donations, donations made a month or more earlier. Conclusion: the game saves the donation data for islands on which you don't have any towns anymore.

c) The game used to save which island did you donate for before they came up with the donation compensation system. When an account returned to the game we could see the donation amounts it made to each island as soon as it returned.

So you need to save the exact same data as before the compensation system, same as in point (c) and you need to make this data assigned to player accounts instead of the island if it's not already assigned to player accounts.

Your number 1:
Your solution also makes them benefit if their account doesn't come back to the same island, what's your answer to this?

Let me guess, it will be either:

a) "Oh, they will be having a large penalty on the first island so it's not a problem if they go to another island". As your current faulty design suggests.

If so you they will be donating until they reach a very high level beyond which they aren't willing to upgrade then "ghost" their donation account, as you like to call it, and finally come back to another island and donate, so we are only giving innocent players large unfair penalties whenever a large legit player leaves the game to only make it a bit more expensive for cheaters.

b) "We will not allow the same player to donate to other islands until dept is paid on all islands". Since you already mentioned something like that.

Well, I thought you said your solution "does not require any additional data to be saved... their donations are negated, but mine levels stay...." so how can we keep track of this without saving additional data?

c) I won't mention because I want you to say it yourself to prove that you indeed don't know what you are talking about

Your number 3:

- "You can't take a breath while underwater"

- "You still can take a breath while underwater you will just suffocate and die"

If you can't see the analogy then I don't know what to say

I know that for someone like you who has 11 accounts on the same server paying 10s of millions of wood is considered a simple task as you mentioned "you simply have to donate the debt off."

But for the average player this might be undoable especially if the server is either active or old.

Your number 4:

Why do we need the warning and the tooltip? The current concern is players already on the affected island not players who are yet to colonize the island, because those new colonizers will, if you implement the idea of collective punishment you want, be checking the mines as soon as their colonies are built.

They will only lose 9000 gold and 1000 wood for building the colony, how thoughtful of you to consider this and prevent such a great loss

Finally, when I said:

Quote from A.A.

"The only person who would prefer your version would be a backend engineer who doesn't want to implement the extra code out of laziness. That engineer doesn't happen to be you, right? "

That was meant to be a joke since Cheech mentioned he thinks you are badidol's "burner account", you can also tell it's a joke by the smily/emoji, whatever you call it, I used at the end, I really don't know how you didn't get that.

Anyway, please don't get so personally offended and say nonsense like "That's just how it works. If you don't like it, guess what? You can also ghost your account, too."

This is has one of two meanings:

1."If you don't like it ghost you account and leave the game for good", I hope you don't mean this because:

a) It's very rude.

b) I didn't know you own the game.

c) Even if you own the game it still is very rude.

2. You mean "ghost your account then come back and change island" which is even worse than being rude because it will ruin the game even more.

If I do so the island will have event more dept wich will encourage more players to ghost their accounts and do the same until the island is empty and has a dept equivalent to the donations required to reach its current level and no one will build any town on this island again, in other words Congratulations you managed to produce uninhabitable ghost islands, YAY!

Keep this long enough and only cheaters with islands full of permanent multis are going to be able upgrade their mines.

Also why should I have to ghost my account and risk getting all of my cities looted and risk loosing spot on islands that aren't affected by the removed player?

And if I do so will I be able to donate freely to the new islands? or would you like to activate the rule that will forbid me from donating to new islands until I pay the dept of all other islands first?

There's a popular saying in the game industry:

"Everybody thinks they are a game designer"

Unfortunately it applies way more than I used to like to admit

Quote from User12996

Honestly, I'd take the status quo over your solution. Assuming I'm a "lazy programmer" because I want a different solution certainly is a choice of words lol.

Now that you said you prefer the status quo over someone else's solution you didn't only turn this purposeful discussion into a competition but also showed you are a bitter loser, for preferring to keep cheaters cheat over having a non toxic remedy doesn't make any sense at all, even if you think this remedy is incomplete.

I really hope that you have nothing to do with game team because with this mentality I'm highly concerned.

That said, you can always raise questions and generate ideas rather than whatever you call this thing you are doing.

So please if you have good, non toxic ideas share them, otherwise stick to mentioning your concerns regarding the ideas shared by others.

Thanks!

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Uh, wow.

First, I was not aware the data already existed on the island. That's great. That doesn't change how I feel that it should be an island wide penalty and not an individual penalty.

1a) Yep, any account can donate to an island and that's it. I didn't see how your solution changed this, either. IIRC, your solution was that if they came back to the same island, they'd have to pay off an individual debt. My solution is that they'd have to pay off the island's debt. I am completely fine with penalizing legitimate players when a large donator leaves, too. It happens regardless when a merge happens, plus, they still get the benefit of using a high level set of mines in the mean time.

1b) Player A is on Island B and Island C. Island B has a debt of X wood. Player A can't donate to Island C until Island B's debt is clear. This doesn't require any additional data, just a simple check of which islands player A are on and if they have any debt. I'd even be fine with letting Island C's towns donate directly to the debt without shipping wood.

1c) Won't mention what? Kind of a pointless conversation if you're not going to make a point but instead make an empty point about not having a point.

3) And what's the problem? You're already benefiting from the high level mines. Either donate the debt off or don't. You can wait until the next merge, you can decide to ghost your own account off and find other islands, etc. For the average player everything is doable and if the average player can't do it, then the mines are already much, much higher than they would be normally anyways.

4) We need the warning and the tooltip because if you're trying to shop around for mines, you should know if the island is in debt or not, especially since it would prevent you from donating elsewhere. Otherwise, you find a high set of mines, land a new city there, and have an unexpected penalty.

I honestly have no idea why you'd think I'm badidol's burner account. It's pretty funny. I'm probably just a realist.

I wasn't offended. Ghosting your account is a legitimate strategy in Ikariam that a lot of players don't consider. I ghost accounts all the time because it gives me free warps, etc. Ghosting your account does not imply leaving the game for good. It implies using a tool that we have, ghosting, and using it strategically to merge on your own terms and rechoose what islands, etc., that you want. I didn't mean to imply that you should take it or leave it, but instead use ghosting as a strategic tool in your arsenal.

If the mines are high enough, players will move their accounts there and pay the debt off. The debt isn't any different than moving to a different island and starting over with donations. That's the whole thing, you act like the debt is a huge penalty. It isn't. It's simply the price that was already donated to get the mines where they currently are.

You don't have to ghost, like I said, it's a strategic option that you can either choose to partake in or not partake in. If you don't? Then pay off the debt.

I don't even know what to say to the last part. I'd prefer an island wide penalty system over an individual penalty system because the mines in Ikariam are supposed to be about cooperation and that should cut both ways. There's nothing toxic about my idea, either, it's simply a different approach because I believe that mines and miracles should be shared per island. All it is is a difference of opinion.

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1.a) In case of a merge we:

1. Get free town relocation.

2. Have empty islands.

3. Coordinate with a friend or two and move together to suitable islands and cooperate to get the mines working quickly.

You don't get anything of this when a large player on your island goes to the graveyard server, if we follow your suggestion and ghost our account we are at risk of losing our place(s) on other islands when we get ghosted and loosing our resources to because getting ghosted requires not logging in for 30 days straight during which we are defenseless.

That said, a large amount of players hated resetting mine levels and wanted to keep things as is to keep the old mine levels but the devs got the wrong conclusion from their protest and made one of the new merge target worlds to be "the good old days" with no bonuses and ended up having it pretty much a ghost server in most language communities.

Other than this your reply to 1.a) did not remedy the design flaw I mentioned, a donation account will donate to one island until it gets it to a high level then move to the next after its owner is happy with current level which is making it expensive for cheaters same as my suggestion but mine does NOT have your problem of Penalizing honest players in needlessly.

1.b) Problematic donation accounts have only one city so there is no islands B and C it's just one island so they are having no problem.

1.c) I was expecting you to give certain answer, a not so smart one, but I didn't want to mention it and adress it like a) and b) actually I was not going to mention b) but changed my mind at the last minute.

3. What can I say, you don't see the analogy

I keep mentioning the draw backs of ghosting your account and you insist on it, you even gave a more flamboyant idea, wait for the next merge

Also what about new players, and soft merges? Because, make no mistake,the next merge is going to be a soft merge transferring the new small worlds they keep releasing every now and then to the older ones.

I know the benefits of ghosting but it's not easy for everyone as it's easy for your 11 accounts on the edge of the map, I hope you can get this.

4. Isn't the penalty island specific? So if they remove the colony they will not have the penalty anymore, are you confused about your own design? Because according to your design what I said is totally correct, you are concerned about players losing 9000 gold and 1000 wood for building the colony that you a tooltip to stop this from happening but you are not concerned about players having huge penalties.

Quote from User12996

I honestly have no idea why you'd think I'm badidol's burner account. It's pretty funny. I'm probably just a realist.

5. I did NOT say you are badidol's burner account, Cheech said so and I made a joke about it, a joke you didn't get.

Read carefully please.

Quote

The debt isn't any different than moving to a different island and starting over with donations. That's the whole thing, you act like the debt is a huge penalty. It isn't. It's simply the price that was already donated to get the mines where they currently are.

6. I thought you said "mine should be shared per island" now you are saying it's same as starting over with donations i.e. as if there were no cooperation or "sharing" per island, a bit contradictory.

Quote from User12996

Just for the sake of it, let me put some numbers to this.

Let's pretend the Saw Mill is level 30. This is a total amount donated of 7,657,355.

Player X is ghosting off and he's donated 6,130,869. The Saw Mill now has a 6,130,869 wood debt, but still functions as a level 30 Saw Mill. Plus, other players can now move to the island to take Player X's spot.

Once the players on the island pay off the 6,130,869 wood debt, they can continue donating to level up the Saw Mill. If that player never donated, the Saw Mill would be just under 23.

Saw mill | Ikariam | Fandom

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7. That's a bad example, try considering luxury goods, it takes more than 22M wood to reach level 29 for luxury goods not 30, just 29.

Now consider this for resources that doesn't have production boost in a certain world, like marble in the 3rd target world in the last merge.

Quote from User12996

All it is is a difference of opinion.

8. Correct, I'll have to leave it at this point and let the devs and the community decide on the subject.

Maybe even remove the whole idea of refunding donations unless there's a merge, like it was before.

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1. You also don't lose anything either. Like I pointed out, if your combined donation was level 23 and the person that ghosted donated until the saw mill is 30, the saw mill stays at 30, but you just have to pay the debt off. I guarantee people would show up on islands with level 50/50 mines, even if they had a debt, and simply wouldn't donate.

In regards to ghosting, it's very easy to do the following if you're worried about being looted: donate all wood, sell all luxury for gold, put your towns into donation mode, and ghost. You won't lose anything and will come back to a lot of research and gold. Yes, there's a small opportunity cost, but the long term gains of merging on your own are generally worthwhile.

If you don't want to sell your res, you can either pool your res and use traders to donate or use a trader in each town and donate. If you're worried because you're saving up res for a huge project, you finish building that project and then prepare to ghost. With proper planning you don't lose anything other than the slots on the other islands, but if you want to go back to those islands, it's easy to do with proper coordination.

In regards to 1a, your solution doesn't address this either. As the individual penalty is island, not account, specific they would simply merge back to a different island and repeat the process. If you're trying to say it should be account and server specific, then that means they donate to that server once and organize a swap to a different server and the cycle repeats. I don't agree with account specific penalties on a server because I do believe there's legitimate reasons to ghost and come back to the same server but in a different location.

So even if the penalty is server wide for a specific account (and I feel like this hurts legitimate players more), that just means that that specific donation account can only donate once per server and I don't believe that really solves the issue while legitimately hurting players that ghost, come back, and then can't spend their own donations. With an island penalty, they can come and donate and unless the remaining accounts pay the debt off, that's it, the island can't be upgraded anymore and that puts a hard ceiling on the maximum mine levels.

1b) Problematic donation accounts can have up to as many cities as they want. Building a palace up to level 6 is cheap, and then they can have a bunch of cities with a lot of corruption to donate their resources with because corruption doesn't matter and the flexibility of having more than one city does.

1c) Don't insult my intelligence because I disagree with you. That's the only reason you're so salty because I'm not instantly onboard with your idea; I've never denigrated you; I've only criticized your idea.

3. Ghosting is as easy or as hard as you make it out to be as I pointed out above. Yes, it involves a strategy and planning, but it's no different than anything else in the game. There's also no need to be in the center of the map or on specific islands anyways, especially since most alliances build alliance clusters on specific parts of the server. If you're in an alliance cluster, it should be easy enough to work with someone to block your slots until you return.

In regards to soft merges, that's why the last merge wasn't a soft merge. They explicitly stated that everyone was merging because soft merges were too advantageous for the accounts merging in.

I will say ghosting is easier for me because I built the mines I use. They're all my donations, so I can always leave, merge back, and rebuild them. I also have 11 accounts because that makes it easy for me to coordinate and block off slots so that I can make the islands how I want them. And no, my smaller accounts don't help my larger accounts. It's actually my largest account that has the most donations. Plus, anyone, with time and dedication, can easily do what I've done. Anyone can easily start on a new world, build the account up slowly, through economy, to 6 or more cities without much effort, and then use those account(s) to block slots for their main account. All it takes is the will to do so.

4. No, I'm not confused about my design. When you are settling a new colony, you would be looking at the islands nearby and the mine levels. The mines would need to have a warning because if the island is in debt, as it's island specific, you should be informed about the debt. For example, in my level 30 sawmill example, the island would be in 6.3m wood debt. Someone shouldn't colonize on the island to only find out about the debt after colonizing.

For the sake of your other points, I've edited the post and numbered them.

5. I know it was Cheech and I was laughing about you going on along with it because of your joke. Unfortunately, you took it way too literally.

6. Yes, the mines are shared per island. To reuse my example, we're going to assume the account in question has 6.3m in donations (enough to promote the sawmill from 23 to 30). The account has two options: warp to an island with a level 23 sawmill and warp to an island with a level 30 sawmill but the island has 6.3m donation debt. The choice is between leveling up the sawmill to level 30 without debt, which would cost ~6.3m in donations or start on an island with no debt, but a level 23 sawmill. Both are functionally equivalent assuming the account is going to use the ~6.3m in donations on the sawmill. In either scenario, the saw mill ends up at level 30 and with no debt. (Yes, if debt isn't forced to be paid off first, he could go to the level 30 saw mill and then spend his donations elsewhere, but that's not an option in this scenario because that's not the point I was trying to make in the opportunity cost analysis.)

7. And? You still get the benefit of the mine but you can't upgrade it further until you pay the debt off. If you don't have 22m in donations, it's not like the luxury mine would've made it to 30 in the first place.

8. badidol has stated many times that this won't happen because it encourages players to not return to the game. I do agree with badidol on that stance. I would not have come back to the game if I didn't get my donations refunded after ghosting. Ghosting gives me a huge amount of flexibility and is one of the reasons I am still playing.

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I'll try to make my replay short because this is getting very repetitive, I'll try not to repeat what I've said before because repeating won't make anyone change their mind, lets go:

Quote from User12996

....donate all wood, sell all luxury for gold, put your towns into donation mode, and ghost. You won't lose anything and will come back to a lot of research and gold. Yes, there's a small opportunity cost, but the long term gains of merging on your own are generally worthwhile

If you don't want to sell your res, you can either pool your res and use traders to donate or use a trader in each town and donate....

Selling luxury goods isn't easy by the way, I'm currently in a small war and always offering the most needed goods in my server and the demand isn't that high.

And "come back to a lot of research"? Really? Are you suggesting using scientists? You know they are very cost ineffective, right?

Also "merging on your own"? We are talking about changing islands not changing world.

"Use traders" ? I thought we are considering the average player, the average player does NOT pay for free to play games, so suggesting a premium feature to remedy an issue the average player is bound to face is a big no no, you make premium feature to monetize your game and make the less talented people able to compete as well as to allow the willing players to support the game, some players use premium features and buy cosmetic content just to support the devs, they say so clearly "we buy this to support the devs we don't need it". Otherwise you are giving spenders an unfair advantage.

Quote from User12996

So even if the penalty is server wide for a specific account (and I feel like this hurts legitimate players more), that just means that that specific donation account can only donate once per server and I don't believe that really solves the issue while legitimately hurting players that ghost, come back, and then can't spend their own donations.

Is that why you were opposing my suggestion? Because that's NOT what I meant at all.

When I mentioned the server I meant keeping track of which server this account was in before, otherwise I can donate to Alpha EN, ghost, go to Beta FR, donate then back to Alpha EN and so on.

My suggestion is if the player donates to an island, 52:52 for example, and goes to the graveyard then back he will find a dept for this island, 52:52.

If he for any reason, mainly having no enough town spots on the islands of his area, wants to:

a) Leave the whole area he will move easily with the free town relocation and donations refund to a new area and donate to it as the situation is now and as per the refund's intended purpose.

b) Relocate 1 or more towns but not all of them he will have the dept on the islands he didn't departure, so if he wants to stay on 52:52 he will find in this island and won't be able to donate from the refunded wood to other islands before he pays off the dept.

Conclusion: NO penalty for legitimate players whatsoever.

1b) Just login to say... Minotaurs EN and take a look at the top 100 donations page. You will find that this type of donation accounts is of very little points max 2 towns, if 2 towns at all, I mean their main advantage is to repetitively donate to very large mines using a not equally large amount of wood, otherwise the guys would be buying Ambrosia and donating use his own large account, so why build many towns? To take more spots on the islands which could be taken by potential enemies who are waiting for the donation account to to the graveyard? Or to split the amount of wood donated between half a dozen islands with a dozen of resources production sites, sawmills and luxury goods?

1c) No no no. No insult intended here, I did NOT intend to insult your intelligence whatsoever, I do indeed thing your design is not well thought out but I won't insult you for this.

I may be a bit too straightforward for some people's taste but I definitely am not rude.

To be honest you have a valid reason to think I intended to say so, I should have been more careful when choosing my words but I often write these replies half asleep, including this reply, so you can find a lot of typos that bypass the quick proofreading I do.

Anyway you have my apology, I'm sorry

By the way, I'm not salty I just fear that this island based dept idea would find its way to the game, that's all.

Quote from User12996

In regards to soft merges, that's why the last merge wasn't a soft merge. They explicitly stated that everyone was merging because soft merges were too advantageous for the accounts merging in.

I don't know if they have said so but that's not the main reason, but an important reason was that a lot of the target servers in the last 2 merges were old servers which were build based on the "OLD" miracle system the one from 2008 with passive bonuses.

For example Hephaestus Forge used to boost sulphur production, accordingly it only existed on sulphur islands, so if you wanted to have permanent forge miracle while playing in one of these old servers/worlds you will need a lot of sulphur cities which caused people to rely on dozens of multis to get other resources illegally.

7. "And?" Well, all of your calculations are based on the sawmill that needs a much less amount of wood to get upgraded and doesn't need to be upgraded as much because most of the new servers have a production boost for wood, while some of the most crowded servers have either little or no boost for marble and crystal the currently most needed resources.

8. Exactly, so no need to make it hard for returning players by adding a penalty or making them return to find their islands heavily penalized.

User12996 · Nov 21st 2025

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I wanted to reply to this earlier but I was very busy and had very little time to give a proper reply, I apologize for that

Now let me reply to each point you mentioned:

I'd like to start with your number 2:

a) The game already saves all the needed data for all active players.

b) A quick story: Sometimes I build piracy towns and when I want to demolish them I donate any extra wood I have in such towns to their islands. When I build a new piracy town on any of those islands and l want to donate the extra wood as usual I find that the island has a record of my previous donations, donations made a month or more earlier. Conclusion: the game saves the donation data for islands on which you don't have any towns anymore.

c) The game used to save which island did you donate for before they came up with the donation compensation system. When an account returned to the game we could see the donation amounts it made to each island as soon as it returned.

So you need to save the exact same data as before the compensation system, same as in point (c) and you need to make this data assigned to player accounts instead of the island if it's not already assigned to player accounts.

Your number 1:
Your solution also makes them benefit if their account doesn't come back to the same island, what's your answer to this?

Let me guess, it will be either:

a) "Oh, they will be having a large penalty on the first island so it's not a problem if they go to another island". As your current faulty design suggests.

If so you they will be donating until they reach a very high level beyond which they aren't willing to upgrade then "ghost" their donation account, as you like to call it, and finally come back to another island and donate, so we are only giving innocent players large unfair penalties whenever a large legit player leaves the game to only make it a bit more expensive for cheaters.

b) "We will not allow the same player to donate to other islands until dept is paid on all islands". Since you already mentioned something like that.

Well, I thought you said your solution "does not require any additional data to be saved... their donations are negated, but mine levels stay...." so how can we keep track of this without saving additional data?

c) I won't mention because I want you to say it yourself to prove that you indeed don't know what you are talking about

Your number 3:

- "You can't take a breath while underwater"

- "You still can take a breath while underwater you will just suffocate and die"

If you can't see the analogy then I don't know what to say

I know that for someone like you who has 11 accounts on the same server paying 10s of millions of wood is considered a simple task as you mentioned "you simply have to donate the debt off."

But for the average player this might be undoable especially if the server is either active or old.

Your number 4:

Why do we need the warning and the tooltip? The current concern is players already on the affected island not players who are yet to colonize the island, because those new colonizers will, if you implement the idea of collective punishment you want, be checking the mines as soon as their colonies are built.

They will only lose 9000 gold and 1000 wood for building the colony, how thoughtful of you to consider this and prevent such a great loss

Finally, when I said:

That was meant to be a joke since Cheech mentioned he thinks you are badidol's "burner account", you can also tell it's a joke by the smily/emoji, whatever you call it, I used at the end, I really don't know how you didn't get that.

Anyway, please don't get so personally offended and say nonsense like "That's just how it works. If you don't like it, guess what? You can also ghost your account, too."

This is has one of two meanings:

1."If you don't like it ghost you account and leave the game for good", I hope you don't mean this because:

a) It's very rude.

b) I didn't know you own the game.

c) Even if you own the game it still is very rude.

2. You mean "ghost your account then come back and change island" which is even worse than being rude because it will ruin the game even more.

If I do so the island will have event more dept wich will encourage more players to ghost their accounts and do the same until the island is empty and has a dept equivalent to the donations required to reach its current level and no one will build any town on this island again, in other words Congratulations you managed to produce uninhabitable ghost islands, YAY!

Keep this long enough and only cheaters with islands full of permanent multis are going to be able upgrade their mines.

Also why should I have to ghost my account and risk getting all of my cities looted and risk loosing spot on islands that aren't affected by the removed player?

And if I do so will I be able to donate freely to the new islands? or would you like to activate the rule that will forbid me from donating to new islands until I pay the dept of all other islands first?

There's a popular saying in the game industry:

"Everybody thinks they are a game designer"

Unfortunately it applies way more than I used to like to admit

Now that you said you prefer the status quo over someone else's solution you didn't only turn this purposeful discussion into a competition but also showed you are a bitter loser, for preferring to keep cheaters cheat over having a non toxic remedy doesn't make any sense at all, even if you think this remedy is incomplete.

I really hope that you have nothing to do with game team because with this mentality I'm highly concerned.

That said, you can always raise questions and generate ideas rather than whatever you call this thing you are doing.

So please if you have good, non toxic ideas share them, otherwise stick to mentioning your concerns regarding the ideas shared by others.

Thanks!

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Uh, wow.

First, I was not aware the data already existed on the island. That's great. That doesn't change how I feel that it should be an island wide penalty and not an individual penalty.

1a) Yep, any account can donate to an island and that's it. I didn't see how your solution changed this, either. IIRC, your solution was that if they came back to the same island, they'd have to pay off an individual debt. My solution is that they'd have to pay off the island's debt. I am completely fine with penalizing legitimate players when a large donator leaves, too. It happens regardless when a merge happens, plus, they still get the benefit of using a high level set of mines in the mean time.

1b) Player A is on Island B and Island C. Island B has a debt of X wood. Player A can't donate to Island C until Island B's debt is clear. This doesn't require any additional data, just a simple check of which islands player A are on and if they have any debt. I'd even be fine with letting Island C's towns donate directly to the debt without shipping wood.

1c) Won't mention what? Kind of a pointless conversation if you're not going to make a point but instead make an empty point about not having a point.

3) And what's the problem? You're already benefiting from the high level mines. Either donate the debt off or don't. You can wait until the next merge, you can decide to ghost your own account off and find other islands, etc. For the average player everything is doable and if the average player can't do it, then the mines are already much, much higher than they would be normally anyways.

4) We need the warning and the tooltip because if you're trying to shop around for mines, you should know if the island is in debt or not, especially since it would prevent you from donating elsewhere. Otherwise, you find a high set of mines, land a new city there, and have an unexpected penalty.

I honestly have no idea why you'd think I'm badidol's burner account. It's pretty funny. I'm probably just a realist.

I wasn't offended. Ghosting your account is a legitimate strategy in Ikariam that a lot of players don't consider. I ghost accounts all the time because it gives me free warps, etc. Ghosting your account does not imply leaving the game for good. It implies using a tool that we have, ghosting, and using it strategically to merge on your own terms and rechoose what islands, etc., that you want. I didn't mean to imply that you should take it or leave it, but instead use ghosting as a strategic tool in your arsenal.

If the mines are high enough, players will move their accounts there and pay the debt off. The debt isn't any different than moving to a different island and starting over with donations. That's the whole thing, you act like the debt is a huge penalty. It isn't. It's simply the price that was already donated to get the mines where they currently are.

You don't have to ghost, like I said, it's a strategic option that you can either choose to partake in or not partake in. If you don't? Then pay off the debt.

I don't even know what to say to the last part. I'd prefer an island wide penalty system over an individual penalty system because the mines in Ikariam are supposed to be about cooperation and that should cut both ways. There's nothing toxic about my idea, either, it's simply a different approach because I believe that mines and miracles should be shared per island. All it is is a difference of opinion.

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1.a) In case of a merge we:

1. Get free town relocation.

2. Have empty islands.

3. Coordinate with a friend or two and move together to suitable islands and cooperate to get the mines working quickly.

You don't get anything of this when a large player on your island goes to the graveyard server, if we follow your suggestion and ghost our account we are at risk of losing our place(s) on other islands when we get ghosted and loosing our resources to because getting ghosted requires not logging in for 30 days straight during which we are defenseless.

That said, a large amount of players hated resetting mine levels and wanted to keep things as is to keep the old mine levels but the devs got the wrong conclusion from their protest and made one of the new merge target worlds to be "the good old days" with no bonuses and ended up having it pretty much a ghost server in most language communities.

Other than this your reply to 1.a) did not remedy the design flaw I mentioned, a donation account will donate to one island until it gets it to a high level then move to the next after its owner is happy with current level which is making it expensive for cheaters same as my suggestion but mine does NOT have your problem of Penalizing honest players in needlessly.

1.b) Problematic donation accounts have only one city so there is no islands B and C it's just one island so they are having no problem.

1.c) I was expecting you to give certain answer, a not so smart one, but I didn't want to mention it and adress it like a) and b) actually I was not going to mention b) but changed my mind at the last minute.

3. What can I say, you don't see the analogy

I keep mentioning the draw backs of ghosting your account and you insist on it, you even gave a more flamboyant idea, wait for the next merge

Also what about new players, and soft merges? Because, make no mistake,the next merge is going to be a soft merge transferring the new small worlds they keep releasing every now and then to the older ones.

I know the benefits of ghosting but it's not easy for everyone as it's easy for your 11 accounts on the edge of the map, I hope you can get this.

4. Isn't the penalty island specific? So if they remove the colony they will not have the penalty anymore, are you confused about your own design? Because according to your design what I said is totally correct, you are concerned about players losing 9000 gold and 1000 wood for building the colony that you a tooltip to stop this from happening but you are not concerned about players having huge penalties.

Quote from User12996

I honestly have no idea why you'd think I'm badidol's burner account. It's pretty funny. I'm probably just a realist.

5. I did NOT say you are badidol's burner account, Cheech said so and I made a joke about it, a joke you didn't get.

Read carefully please.

Quote

The debt isn't any different than moving to a different island and starting over with donations. That's the whole thing, you act like the debt is a huge penalty. It isn't. It's simply the price that was already donated to get the mines where they currently are.

6. I thought you said "mine should be shared per island" now you are saying it's same as starting over with donations i.e. as if there were no cooperation or "sharing" per island, a bit contradictory.

Quote from User12996

Just for the sake of it, let me put some numbers to this.

Let's pretend the Saw Mill is level 30. This is a total amount donated of 7,657,355.

Player X is ghosting off and he's donated 6,130,869. The Saw Mill now has a 6,130,869 wood debt, but still functions as a level 30 Saw Mill. Plus, other players can now move to the island to take Player X's spot.

Once the players on the island pay off the 6,130,869 wood debt, they can continue donating to level up the Saw Mill. If that player never donated, the Saw Mill would be just under 23.

Saw mill | Ikariam | Fandom

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7. That's a bad example, try considering luxury goods, it takes more than 22M wood to reach level 29 for luxury goods not 30, just 29.

Now consider this for resources that doesn't have production boost in a certain world, like marble in the 3rd target world in the last merge.

Quote from User12996

All it is is a difference of opinion.

8. Correct, I'll have to leave it at this point and let the devs and the community decide on the subject.

Maybe even remove the whole idea of refunding donations unless there's a merge, like it was before.

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1. You also don't lose anything either. Like I pointed out, if your combined donation was level 23 and the person that ghosted donated until the saw mill is 30, the saw mill stays at 30, but you just have to pay the debt off. I guarantee people would show up on islands with level 50/50 mines, even if they had a debt, and simply wouldn't donate.

In regards to ghosting, it's very easy to do the following if you're worried about being looted: donate all wood, sell all luxury for gold, put your towns into donation mode, and ghost. You won't lose anything and will come back to a lot of research and gold. Yes, there's a small opportunity cost, but the long term gains of merging on your own are generally worthwhile.

If you don't want to sell your res, you can either pool your res and use traders to donate or use a trader in each town and donate. If you're worried because you're saving up res for a huge project, you finish building that project and then prepare to ghost. With proper planning you don't lose anything other than the slots on the other islands, but if you want to go back to those islands, it's easy to do with proper coordination.

In regards to 1a, your solution doesn't address this either. As the individual penalty is island, not account, specific they would simply merge back to a different island and repeat the process. If you're trying to say it should be account and server specific, then that means they donate to that server once and organize a swap to a different server and the cycle repeats. I don't agree with account specific penalties on a server because I do believe there's legitimate reasons to ghost and come back to the same server but in a different location.

So even if the penalty is server wide for a specific account (and I feel like this hurts legitimate players more), that just means that that specific donation account can only donate once per server and I don't believe that really solves the issue while legitimately hurting players that ghost, come back, and then can't spend their own donations. With an island penalty, they can come and donate and unless the remaining accounts pay the debt off, that's it, the island can't be upgraded anymore and that puts a hard ceiling on the maximum mine levels.

1b) Problematic donation accounts can have up to as many cities as they want. Building a palace up to level 6 is cheap, and then they can have a bunch of cities with a lot of corruption to donate their resources with because corruption doesn't matter and the flexibility of having more than one city does.

1c) Don't insult my intelligence because I disagree with you. That's the only reason you're so salty because I'm not instantly onboard with your idea; I've never denigrated you; I've only criticized your idea.

3. Ghosting is as easy or as hard as you make it out to be as I pointed out above. Yes, it involves a strategy and planning, but it's no different than anything else in the game. There's also no need to be in the center of the map or on specific islands anyways, especially since most alliances build alliance clusters on specific parts of the server. If you're in an alliance cluster, it should be easy enough to work with someone to block your slots until you return.

In regards to soft merges, that's why the last merge wasn't a soft merge. They explicitly stated that everyone was merging because soft merges were too advantageous for the accounts merging in.

I will say ghosting is easier for me because I built the mines I use. They're all my donations, so I can always leave, merge back, and rebuild them. I also have 11 accounts because that makes it easy for me to coordinate and block off slots so that I can make the islands how I want them. And no, my smaller accounts don't help my larger accounts. It's actually my largest account that has the most donations. Plus, anyone, with time and dedication, can easily do what I've done. Anyone can easily start on a new world, build the account up slowly, through economy, to 6 or more cities without much effort, and then use those account(s) to block slots for their main account. All it takes is the will to do so.

4. No, I'm not confused about my design. When you are settling a new colony, you would be looking at the islands nearby and the mine levels. The mines would need to have a warning because if the island is in debt, as it's island specific, you should be informed about the debt. For example, in my level 30 sawmill example, the island would be in 6.3m wood debt. Someone shouldn't colonize on the island to only find out about the debt after colonizing.

For the sake of your other points, I've edited the post and numbered them.

5. I know it was Cheech and I was laughing about you going on along with it because of your joke. Unfortunately, you took it way too literally.

6. Yes, the mines are shared per island. To reuse my example, we're going to assume the account in question has 6.3m in donations (enough to promote the sawmill from 23 to 30). The account has two options: warp to an island with a level 23 sawmill and warp to an island with a level 30 sawmill but the island has 6.3m donation debt. The choice is between leveling up the sawmill to level 30 without debt, which would cost ~6.3m in donations or start on an island with no debt, but a level 23 sawmill. Both are functionally equivalent assuming the account is going to use the ~6.3m in donations on the sawmill. In either scenario, the saw mill ends up at level 30 and with no debt. (Yes, if debt isn't forced to be paid off first, he could go to the level 30 saw mill and then spend his donations elsewhere, but that's not an option in this scenario because that's not the point I was trying to make in the opportunity cost analysis.)

7. And? You still get the benefit of the mine but you can't upgrade it further until you pay the debt off. If you don't have 22m in donations, it's not like the luxury mine would've made it to 30 in the first place.

8. badidol has stated many times that this won't happen because it encourages players to not return to the game. I do agree with badidol on that stance. I would not have come back to the game if I didn't get my donations refunded after ghosting. Ghosting gives me a huge amount of flexibility and is one of the reasons I am still playing.

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I'll try to make my replay short because this is getting very repetitive, I'll try not to repeat what I've said before because repeating won't make anyone change their mind, lets go:

Quote from User12996

....donate all wood, sell all luxury for gold, put your towns into donation mode, and ghost. You won't lose anything and will come back to a lot of research and gold. Yes, there's a small opportunity cost, but the long term gains of merging on your own are generally worthwhile

If you don't want to sell your res, you can either pool your res and use traders to donate or use a trader in each town and donate....

1. Selling luxury goods isn't easy by the way, I'm currently in a small war and always offering the most needed goods in my server and the demand isn't that high.

And "come back to a lot of research"? Really? Are you suggesting using scientists? You know they are very cost ineffective, right?

Also "merging on your own"? We are talking about changing islands not changing world.

2. "Use traders" ? I thought we are considering the average player, the average player does NOT pay for free to play games, so suggesting a premium feature to remedy an issue the average player is bound to face is a big no no, you make premium feature to monetize your game and make the less talented people able to compete as well as to allow the willing players to support the game, some players use premium features and buy cosmetic content just to support the devs, they say so clearly "we buy this to support the devs we don't need it". Otherwise you are giving spenders an unfair advantage.

Quote from User12996

So even if the penalty is server wide for a specific account (and I feel like this hurts legitimate players more), that just means that that specific donation account can only donate once per server and I don't believe that really solves the issue while legitimately hurting players that ghost, come back, and then can't spend their own donations.

3. Is that why you were opposing my suggestion? Because that's NOT what I meant at all.

When I mentioned the server I meant keeping track of which server this account was in before, otherwise I can donate to Alpha EN, ghost, go to Beta FR, donate then back to Alpha EN and so on.

My suggestion is if the player donates to an island, 52:52 for example, and goes to the graveyard then back he will find a dept for this island, 52:52.

If he for any reason, mainly having no enough town spots on the islands of his area, wants to:

a) Leave the whole area he will move easily with the free town relocation and donations refund to a new area and donate to it as the situation is now and as per the refund's intended purpose.

b) Relocate 1 or more towns but not all of them he will have the dept on the islands he didn't departure, so if he wants to stay on 52:52 he will find in this island and won't be able to donate from the refunded wood to other islands before he pays off the dept.

Conclusion: NO penalty for legitimate players whatsoever.

1b) Just login to say... Minotaurs EN and take a look at the top 100 donations page. You will find that this type of donation accounts is of very little points max 2 towns, if 2 towns at all, I mean their main advantage is to repetitively donate to very large mines using a not equally large amount of wood, otherwise the guys would be buying Ambrosia and donating use his own large account, so why build many towns? To take more spots on the islands which could be taken by potential enemies who are waiting for the donation account to to the graveyard? Or to split the amount of wood donated between half a dozen islands with a dozen of resources production sites, sawmills and luxury goods?

1c) No no no. No insult intended here, I did NOT intend to insult your intelligence whatsoever, I do indeed thing your design is not well thought out but I won't insult you for this.

I may be a bit too straightforward for some people's taste but I definitely am not rude.

To be honest you have a valid reason to think I intended to say so, I should have been more careful when choosing my words but I often write these replies half asleep, including this reply, so you can find a lot of typos that bypass the quick proofreading I do.

Anyway you have my apology, I'm sorry

By the way, I'm not salty I just fear that this island based dept idea would find its way to the game, that's all.

Quote from User12996

In regards to soft merges, that's why the last merge wasn't a soft merge. They explicitly stated that everyone was merging because soft merges were too advantageous for the accounts merging in.

4. I don't know if they have said so but that's not the main reason, but an important reason was that a lot of the target servers in the last 2 merges were old servers which were build based on the "OLD" miracle system the one from 2008 with passive bonuses.

For example Hephaestus Forge used to boost sulphur production, accordingly it only existed on sulphur islands, so if you wanted to have permanent forge miracle while playing in one of these old servers/worlds you will need a lot of sulphur cities which caused people to rely on dozens of multis to get other resources illegally.

7. "And?" Well, all of your calculations are based on the sawmill that needs a much less amount of wood to get upgraded and doesn't need to be upgraded as much because most of the new servers have a production boost for wood, while some of the most crowded servers have either little or no boost for marble and crystal the currently most needed resources.

8. Exactly, so no need to make it hard for returning players by adding a penalty or making them return to find their islands heavily penalized.

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Once again, I'll number things to make it easier us to communicate. I don't really see us coming to an agreement, but here goes.

1. Selling luxury goods is very easy. I sell all the time. Maybe you play on a barren server with no one using the trading post, but I've never had an issue dumping before graveyarding. I do sell at minimum price, but minimum price is usually higher than having citizens farm gold anyways.

2. I have 22 free traders from GF. If you were playing during the Hydra event, claimed last year's Christmas, etc., there's plenty of traders to be had and they're free! If you don't want to pay, it is best to use them wisely.

3. This is even more convoluted, but let's see if I understand. Player X donates 100k to 52:52 on server Y. If Player X graveyards and recovers to server Z, he'd still have a 100k debt on 52:52, even if the sawmill is a lower level? That makes even less sense, but I'm not sure how to understand what you're trying to say. But as long as he moves to 52:53, he's debt free? That's not a punishment at all; it doesn't even make sense to implement this.

3b. Again, as mines are shared, I'm very comfortable with having a community punishment if someone ghosts.

1b. So what if he has 2 towns? It is trivially easy to get to 6 towns or more if you don't care about corruption, especially if someone is giving you stuff to build a palace. I was simply pointing out that if you're going to build a donation account, you might as well build more cities for extra town warps, etc., for extra flexibility. Whether or not they want to do that is up to the donation account holder.

1c. My design is well thought out because I am comfortable punishing the island if someone ghosts. No one loses anything and the SM still functions at the level of the higher donations. You just gotta pay the debt. I see it as a minor problem, especially if you're getting the function of a higher level SM while not donating enough. You don't like this because it "penalizes innocent players" that's fine. I don't like your system, either.

4. badidol said this during the last merge. that's a quick search from Discord about the disaster of the soft merge in 2021.

7. The same principle applies to lux as sawmill. Yes, lux costs more, I understand that. It doesn't change my opinion about what I'm proposing.

8. Except there is no penalty. You're getting an advance. If I put you on an island right now with a 30/30 SM/Lux with 0 donations and a debt of the cost to get the island to 30/30 instead of 1/1 with 0 donations, you're at a huge *advantage*.

User12996 · Nov 21st 2025

Apologies, I forgot to address academies in point 1.

Assuming you are resource capped (as in you are maximally harvesting from the SM/Luxury item with HH) Academies can be very cost effective.

With baseline bonuses, 1 scientist produces 1.14 RP for the opportunity cost of 6 gold (assuming no Plutus). This is approximately 5.27 gold per RP (rounded up)

On most of the servers I play on, crystal goes for 9+ per piece (obviously, this will vary from server to server but with upgrades crystal demand has been much higher). Assuming a level 50 optician 1 crystal = 1 RP.

Yes, there is the additional costs of building an academy, but for the sake of it, let's say you built a level 20 academy (ROI is more expensive the higher you go, I usually stop around 20). At max redux, the cost is roughly ~180k, but we'll round up to 185k.

This is where things will get tricky because it does depend on the price of crystal on your server, but here are some of the highest prices on a random server I play on.

I chose sell orders because that's how much gold I could sell crystal directly for.

I'll assume that the academy is made purely of crystal for this. 185k * 15 = 2,775,000 gold up front cost and 1 RP = 5.27g. The research equivalent of this would be 185k RP and can employ 185 scientists. Conveniently, we can reduce this down to 1k RP for 1 scientist. After 1,000 hours (~42 days, GYing takes 37-44 days). This makes it so that the total cost for 1k RP is 15k (construction cost) + 5270 or 20,270 gold for 1k RP or 20.27g/RP. Obviously, this is not great, but the academy is a building so the longer it exists, the more RP it generates.

If we double the time to 2,000 hours, the costs are 10,540 + 15,000 = 25,540 / 2000 = 12.77g / RP. Doubling again is 21,080 +15k = 36,080 = 9.02g / RP.

And yes, obviously we can go back and forth forever on whether or not this is worth it because there's so many caveats, but the longer the academy functions the lower the costs become and it does get below parity of the cost of experimenting with crystal assuming you're buying crystal with gold.

Obviously, if crystal is 6g or less on your server and you can buy an unlimited amount of it, then you can make the argument that you shouldn't have academies, but I've always found that I'm usually mine capped (can't put more people on the mines) and that academies are a way for me to extract more resources by the conversion of gold to RP instead of gold to crystal to experiments.

I will say that academy upgrades, beyond 20, seem too weak, and I believe we should get a baseline % bonus to improve the efficiency of researches with the higher the academy, but that's another topic. For example, a level 20 academy could have the baseline researchers generate 1.4 RP per scientist with a multiplicative advantage for the bonuses so it'd be 1.4*1.14 = 1.596 RP for 6 gold or about 3.76g / RP which would dramatically change the above calculation.

User12996 · Nov 21st 2025

Another caveat, if you actually research any of the science futures, it reduces the opportunity cost of academies, but I assumed that was a given. For example, just 5 future research levels is 1.24 RP / 6 gold which reduces the baseline cost to 4.84g / RP. Maxed is 1.64 RP / 6 gold for a minimum cost of 3.66g / RP which is a really good price.

A.A · Nov 21st 2025

1. No not a barren server, just a lot of self sufficient big guys and illegal multis causing low demand on the market. You just don't play on many servers in many language communities to be aware of the variations.

2.I have more traders than this actually but still that's a design flaw, I played since 2008 with a few breaks and the occasions you mentioned are pretty much the only 2 times I got free traders during the last 17 years, by the way one winter event many years ago they were giving free Ambrosia for the 7th day login, should we ask the avreage player to use Ambrosia now?

Just go ask any game designer should the remedy of a potential problem in free to play game be using premium item just because the game gave the players some of this item once or twice before and let me know what they will tell you

3. I did not mean this at all, you got it totally incorrectly.

The crow bro, can you please tell me if the following 2 quotes refer to the same idea? Was I not clear?

Quote from A.A.

When I mentioned the server I meant keeping track of which server this account was in before, otherwise I can donate to Alpha EN, ghost, go to Beta FR, donate then back to Alpha EN and so on.

My suggestion is if the player donates to an island, 52:52 for example, and goes to the graveyard then back he will find a dept for this island, 52:52.

If he for any reason, mainly having no enough town spots on the islands of his area, wants to:

a) Leave the whole area he will move easily with the free town relocation and donations refund to a new area and donate to it as the situation is now and as per the refund's intended purpose.

b) Relocate 1 or more towns but not all of them he will have the dept on the islands he didn't departure, so if he wants to stay on 52:52 he will find dept in this island and won't be able to donate from the refunded wood to other islands before he pays off the dept.

Conclusion: NO penalty for legitimate players whatsoever.

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And

Quote from User12996

3. This is even more convoluted, but let's see if I understand. Player X donates 100k to 52:52 on server Y. If Player X graveyards and recovers to server Z, he'd still have a 100k debt on 52:52, even if the sawmill is a lower level? That makes even less sense, but I'm not sure how to understand what you're trying to say. But as long as he moves to 52:53, he's debt free? That's not a punishment at all; it doesn't even make sense to implement this.

Please tell us The crow maybe I'm too sleepy to know how unclear I was

I don't know why this is 3b but anyway, I mentioned town numbers just to let you know how things are, and why they don't build more cities, no need to repeat things.

4. Ok, I didn't say he didn't. I was just letting you know the facts, actually my old server got harmed by the first merge mor le yhan the second "soft" merge.

Probably other servers got jarmed more because our server was very competitive and it scared people away.

Also after the soft merge suddenly all players from the graveyard came back to world map, surely a flaw on the backend side of things but was nice for us to pillage them

7. I know you have no problem with it, you made it vividly clear that you want to PUNISH THE WHOLE ISLAND if a player goes to the graveyard, but using the sawmill example hides the severity of the problem you are requesting to be implemented I had to clarify the severity of your proposal

8. Why would I go back to an island with 1/1 production site? I won't be going back to a new world, your 1/1 example makes no sense.

It's either:

a) You go back to a level 30/30, or whatever, island and pay your personal dept and go on or move to a new place. Piece of cake!

Or, with your proposal:

b) 1. Go back to find your island a in dept because other players left it and be unable to upgrade it anytime soon and wish things were as before "no refund or penalties" or have to search for another set of islands that have the miracles you need and enough spaces for your towns which is very hard in active worlds.

2. Find no dept other than yours but decide to leave the island when you go back for any other reason and leave your neighbors with a further dept that they have nothing to do with.

Also can you answer this:

According to your design what will happen if I relocate a town without ghosting? Just relocating what will happen to donations? Will there be a dept?

A.A · Nov 21st 2025

Quote from User12996

Apologies, I forgot to address academies in point 1.

Assuming you are resource capped (as in you are maximally harvesting from the SM/Luxury item with HH) Academies can be very cost effective.

With baseline bonuses, 1 scientist produces 1.14 RP for the opportunity cost of 6 gold (assuming no Plutus). This is approximately 5.27 gold per RP (rounded up)

On most of the servers I play on, crystal goes for 9+ per piece (obviously, this will vary from server to server but with upgrades crystal demand has been much higher). Assuming a level 50 optician 1 crystal = 1 RP.

Yes, there is the additional costs of building an academy, but for the sake of it, let's say you built a level 20 academy (ROI is more expensive the higher you go, I usually stop around 20). At max redux, the cost is roughly ~180k, but we'll round up to 185k.

This is where things will get tricky because it does depend on the price of crystal on your server, but here are some of the highest prices on a random server I play on.

I chose sell orders because that's how much gold I could sell crystal directly for.

I'll assume that the academy is made purely of crystal for this. 185k * 15 = 2,775,000 gold up front cost and 1 RP = 5.27g. The research equivalent of this would be 185k RP and can employ 185 scientists. Conveniently, we can reduce this down to 1k RP for 1 scientist. After 1,000 hours (~42 days, GYing takes 37-44 days). This makes it so that the total cost for 1k RP is 15k (construction cost) + 5270 or 20,270 gold for 1k RP or 20.27g/RP. Obviously, this is not great, but the academy is a building so the longer it exists, the more RP it generates.

If we double the time to 2,000 hours, the costs are 10,540 + 15,000 = 25,540 / 2000 = 12.77g / RP. Doubling again is 21,080 +15k = 36,080 = 9.02g / RP.

And yes, obviously we can go back and forth forever on whether or not this is worth it because there's so many caveats, but the longer the academy functions the lower the costs become and it does get below parity of the cost of experimenting with crystal assuming you're buying crystal with gold.

Obviously, if crystal is 6g or less on your server and you can buy an unlimited amount of it, then you can make the argument that you shouldn't have academies, but I've always found that I'm usually mine capped (can't put more people on the mines) and that academies are a way for me to extract more resources by the conversion of gold to RP instead of gold to crystal to experiments.

I will say that academy upgrades, beyond 20, seem too weak, and I believe we should get a baseline % bonus to improve the efficiency of researches with the higher the academy, but that's another topic. For example, a level 20 academy could have the baseline researchers generate 1.4 RP per scientist with a multiplicative advantage for the bonuses so it'd be 1.4*1.14 = 1.596 RP for 6 gold or about 3.76g / RP which would dramatically change the above calculation.

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I took a quick look at this and I see your point.

It's very play style dependent though, most of other players can't do the same thing.

Also you have 14% bonus for research and not having theocracy as a government form so it makes more sense for you to do so.

It's a thing I'll keep in mind, maybe I'll find a use of it in the future.

Thanks for sharing it

User12996 · Nov 21st 2025

Quote from A.A

1. No not a barren server, just a lot of self sufficient big guys and illegal multis causing low demand on the market. You just don't play on many servers in many language communities to be aware of the variations.

2.I have more traders than this actually but still that's a design flaw, I played since 2008 with a few breaks and the occasions you mentioned are pretty much the only 2 times I got free traders during the last 17 years, by the way one winter event many years ago they were giving free Ambrosia for the 7th day login, should we ask the avreage player to use Ambrosia now?

Just go ask any game designer should the remedy of a potential problem in free to play game be using premium item just because the game gave the players some of this item once or twice before and let me know what they will tell you

3. I did not mean this at all, you got it totally incorrectly.

The crow bro, can you please tell me if the following 2 quotes refer to the same idea? Was I not clear?

Quote from A.A.

When I mentioned the server I meant keeping track of which server this account was in before, otherwise I can donate to Alpha EN, ghost, go to Beta FR, donate then back to Alpha EN and so on.

My suggestion is if the player donates to an island, 52:52 for example, and goes to the graveyard then back he will find a dept for this island, 52:52.

If he for any reason, mainly having no enough town spots on the islands of his area, wants to:

a) Leave the whole area he will move easily with the free town relocation and donations refund to a new area and donate to it as the situation is now and as per the refund's intended purpose.

b) Relocate 1 or more towns but not all of them he will have the dept on the islands he didn't departure, so if he wants to stay on 52:52 he will find dept in this island and won't be able to donate from the refunded wood to other islands before he pays off the dept.

Conclusion: NO penalty for legitimate players whatsoever.

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And

Quote from User12996

3. This is even more convoluted, but let's see if I understand. Player X donates 100k to 52:52 on server Y. If Player X graveyards and recovers to server Z, he'd still have a 100k debt on 52:52, even if the sawmill is a lower level? That makes even less sense, but I'm not sure how to understand what you're trying to say. But as long as he moves to 52:53, he's debt free? That's not a punishment at all; it doesn't even make sense to implement this.

Please tell us The crow maybe I'm too sleepy to know how unclear I was

I don't know why this is 3b but anyway, I mentioned town numbers just to let you know how things are, and why they don't build more cities, no need to repeat things.

4. Ok, I didn't say he didn't. I was just letting you know the facts, actually my old server got harmed by the first merge mor le yhan the second "soft" merge.

Probably other servers got jarmed more because our server was very competitive and it scared people away.

Also after the soft merge suddenly all players from the graveyard came back to world map, surely a flaw on the backend side of things but was nice for us to pillage them

7. I know you have no problem with it, you made it vividly clear that you want to PUNISH THE WHOLE ISLAND if a player goes to the graveyard, but using the sawmill example hides the severity of the problem you are requesting to be implemented I had to clarify the severity of your proposal

8. Why would I go back to an island with 1/1 production site? I won't be going back to a new world, your 1/1 example makes no sense.

It's either:

a) You go back to a level 30/30, or whatever, island and pay your personal dept and go on or move to a new place. Piece of cake!

Or, with your proposal:

b) 1. Go back to find your island a in dept because other players left it and be unable to upgrade it anytime soon and wish things were as before "no refund or penalties" or have to search for another set of islands that have the miracles you need and enough spaces for your towns which is very hard in active worlds.

2. Find no dept other than yours but decide to leave the island when you go back for any other reason and leave your neighbors with a further dept that they have nothing to do with.

Also can you answer this:

According to your design what will happen if I relocate a town without ghosting? Just relocating what will happen to donations? Will there be a dept?

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1. Odd. On my server the big guys have so much banked gold that they're the buyers. I have 36 accounts and on any given server I'm near anyone I can sell plenty and I've never had an issue selling. The only server I could not sell out on is a server that I'm playing on with fewer than 200 people and the top 50 is <100k points, but on that server I'd just leave production on. There's so many people already inactive that I doubt they'd even notice me in time. Realistically, you can experiment all your crystal, donate all your wood, and only have wine/marble/sulfur left. This also assumes you don't try to build some large THs, Museums, etc. that take a lot of marble to burn down marble. Wine/Sulfur would be the most problematic to get rid of, but you could always build a higher CF, Palace, or GR.

2 Yes, but we have them now so they're a valid use case to use. I have 22 for doing nothing but playing the game. Thus, anyone who found themself in this situation would have them available and they're a tool that can be used. The only case they wouldn't work is for new accounts, but new accounts wouldn't have accumulated a lot of res anyways. Additionally, traders are a last resort, assuming you can't sell to your alliance mates, etc.

Any game designer who wants the game to sell microtransactions and makes money would be happy to say yes, premium items should be the solution.

3. Please try to write a clear examples of how it would work, then. All I can understand is:

Player X graveyards and has 100k in donations on 52:52. If Player X recovers from GY and stays on 52:52 on any server, he must donate 100k to the mill/lux on 52:52. My biggest complaint about this is if player X transfers from server A to server B, player X still has a personal debt on 52:52, even though he never donated on server B. I simply don't agree with that design because it's far too restrictive, especially if someone graveyards from one server to another.

3b. Again, I pointed out that building additional towns is trivial (and under your plan would make more sense to do) because of the additional warps.

4. Everything will vary from server to server, but most players found the soft merge more punishing because players are merging in and can self select where to go while if you're being merged into, all you can do is try to lock things down. Personally, I'd feel the merging in players have a huge advantage because they can collectively decide where to go and where to build their alliance islands while everyone else simply has to deal with it.

7. Yes. As island mines are shared, the punishment should be shared. Additionally, it is not strictly a punishment. The mines still function at the higher level, they simply can't be raised any higher. Since you prefer to focus on luxury, I'll use an example with a crystal mine. Let's say that there's a level 33 crystal mine (~61.1m total donations) and the player that ghosts off has donated 17m to the crystal mine. This would give the crystal mine a debt of 17m.

Now we can go through both scenarios. Assuming everyone is willing to donate and there's no debt, 33 > 34 is 17.1m. The island could bump it to 34 for an extra 46+23 workers. If the debt is in place, they would have to pay the 17m debt off which is only the opportunity cost of 1 mine level and the mine would still function at level 33 even though the remaining donations would only have the mine at level 31.

With these costs, I don't see that as problematic at all. If the ghoster has more and more of the donations, then the players contributed less and less to the island which, imo, favors my solution more.

8. Because it's a hypothetical where every other island slot is taken and you have to choose between 1/1 and an island with 30/30 but the debt to make the mines 30/30. I'm not making examples for what you want because I'm arguing for my case. Plus, the whole point is that there "is no penalty" A 30/30 island with 0 donations still functions as a 30/30 island. It simply can't become a 31/31 island until you donate enough where the mines would've ended up at 30/30.

9. If you relocate a town without ghosting nothing changes. If you relocate a town from 52:52 where you donated 100k to to 51:51 and then ghost, the island 52:52 would acquire a 100k debt after you ghosted.

User12996 · Nov 21st 2025

Quote from A.A

Quote from User12996

Apologies, I forgot to address academies in point 1.

Assuming you are resource capped (as in you are maximally harvesting from the SM/Luxury item with HH) Academies can be very cost effective.

With baseline bonuses, 1 scientist produces 1.14 RP for the opportunity cost of 6 gold (assuming no Plutus). This is approximately 5.27 gold per RP (rounded up)

On most of the servers I play on, crystal goes for 9+ per piece (obviously, this will vary from server to server but with upgrades crystal demand has been much higher). Assuming a level 50 optician 1 crystal = 1 RP.

Yes, there is the additional costs of building an academy, but for the sake of it, let's say you built a level 20 academy (ROI is more expensive the higher you go, I usually stop around 20). At max redux, the cost is roughly ~180k, but we'll round up to 185k.

This is where things will get tricky because it does depend on the price of crystal on your server, but here are some of the highest prices on a random server I play on.

I chose sell orders because that's how much gold I could sell crystal directly for.

I'll assume that the academy is made purely of crystal for this. 185k * 15 = 2,775,000 gold up front cost and 1 RP = 5.27g. The research equivalent of this would be 185k RP and can employ 185 scientists. Conveniently, we can reduce this down to 1k RP for 1 scientist. After 1,000 hours (~42 days, GYing takes 37-44 days). This makes it so that the total cost for 1k RP is 15k (construction cost) + 5270 or 20,270 gold for 1k RP or 20.27g/RP. Obviously, this is not great, but the academy is a building so the longer it exists, the more RP it generates.

If we double the time to 2,000 hours, the costs are 10,540 + 15,000 = 25,540 / 2000 = 12.77g / RP. Doubling again is 21,080 +15k = 36,080 = 9.02g / RP.

And yes, obviously we can go back and forth forever on whether or not this is worth it because there's so many caveats, but the longer the academy functions the lower the costs become and it does get below parity of the cost of experimenting with crystal assuming you're buying crystal with gold.

Obviously, if crystal is 6g or less on your server and you can buy an unlimited amount of it, then you can make the argument that you shouldn't have academies, but I've always found that I'm usually mine capped (can't put more people on the mines) and that academies are a way for me to extract more resources by the conversion of gold to RP instead of gold to crystal to experiments.

I will say that academy upgrades, beyond 20, seem too weak, and I believe we should get a baseline % bonus to improve the efficiency of researches with the higher the academy, but that's another topic. For example, a level 20 academy could have the baseline researchers generate 1.4 RP per scientist with a multiplicative advantage for the bonuses so it'd be 1.4*1.14 = 1.596 RP for 6 gold or about 3.76g / RP which would dramatically change the above calculation.

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I took a quick look at this and I see your point.

It's very play style dependent though, most of other players can't do the same thing.

Also you have 14% bonus for research and not having theocracy as a government form so it makes more sense for you to do so.

It's a thing I'll keep in mind, maybe I'll find a use of it in the future.

Thanks for sharing it

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Yes, but assuming you want to GY, you can actually change your government from Theocracy to whatever. Also theocracy is only a 5% penalty. It makes the upper bound 5.55g/RP which is still a good price (.95*1.14=1.083 and 6/1.083).

If you're GYing, it's not like there's any point in leaving priests in the temple, etc. and building an academy is also trivial if you are planning to GY. Though I'd recommend stopping at 15 or something lower if you planned on tearing it down immediately after recovering.

User12996 · Nov 21st 2025

I may have found a decent compromise. There is an amount of debt that is forgiven based on the highest person's donation score that isn't the player graveyarding.

For the example, I'm going to say the highest donator, an account intentionally designed to round trip to the GY for donations has a 2,000m donation score.

The second highest account has a 500m donation score.

Whenever an account graveyards, it looks at the highest person in the donation score and multiplies that donation value by 1/5th. A debt is only penalized for a donation value over that amount.

Let's look at some examples.

An account with a 400m donation score graveyards. as 2,000m * 1/5 = 400m, any island that that account graveyards from generates 0 debt.

The second place account, with a 500m donation score graveyards. As that's 100m over, that 100m debt is split up on every island by percentage he has donated. For example, say he donated 50m to island 1 250m to island 2 and 200m to island 3. Island 1 gets a 10m debt, island 2 gets a 50m debt, and island 3 gets a 40m debt.

Now let's look at the largest donation account. As it wouldn't use his donation for the 1/5th calculation, it'd look at the 2nd player who has a 500m donation score. This means anything over 100m would cause a debt and that would be a 1,900m debt. That means no matter how many times the 2000m account GY and returns, the same island he donates to is only making 100m of progress (unless he goes to different islands).

This does mean that large donation accounts wouldn't be favored and a lot of smaller donation accounts would work better, but smaller donation accounts would also likely fly under the rader of the player base a lot more so I see that as a win win.

Revitalizing Ikariam

Now let me reply to each point you mentioned:

Now let me reply to each point you mentioned:

Now let me reply to each point you mentioned:

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