Critical Failure

[Surge]

So here is what I thought about: if one sells everything they have and end up with no coins or supplies to build even the basic BA buildings, is it still possible to restart the game by slowly reacquiring your lost resources?

The answer is no.

Any good game has certain nonpremium failsaves to prevent you from totally stopping the game for you with no hope of going anywhere ever again. This game doesn't.

Here's what I am talking about:

Spoiler

At 19 coins and 10 supplies with no producers of any sort and nothing to sell, I cannot build anything - not even an obelisk or tree. You can argue that the town hall will give you coins every day which would allow you to build a hunter, so technically you're not stuck. You would be wrong - a hunter requires supplies and population. This city has neither of that, and no matter how long you wait, you never gain any population.

Here is the loop if you don't understand: The town hall produces coins. The hunter requires 95 coins and 28 people to build. You have no coins, so you want to build a hut. But you can't build a hut because you don't have any supplies. Because you can't build a hut, you can't build the hunter because that needs population, so the coins you got from the town hall are useless. Technically you can't play the game anymore.

Oh wait, you can play if you pay money for diamond buildings. But, as I mentioned earlier, a good game has a nonpremium failsafe that prevents you from encountering this situation without having to pay money (hence nonpremium). You might think that you need to deliberately sell everything repeatedly to get there, but how about new players? Some overly curious player tries to keep changing his city initially because they think that their city looks quite ugly or someone who doesn't know that buildings only have a highly limited refund capability can do this quite easily. All it took me is to resell my hunter a few times and I am done.

This might not be cause for concern, but I hate the existence of this point of "critical failure" even if you have to be deliberate about it. If you manage to do it, don't punish the player by saying, "Hmm, well you can get out of this situation if you pay us at least $7 for the lowest premium building to get you back up." This shouldn't happen. I can list an example of a game that prevents you from ever completely stopping you from playing again, but because it's against the rules to do so, as it's supposedly advertising, I can't.

I don't know of an idea that can be implemented to prevent this from happening, so instead of going to the ideas forum, I'll post this in the discussion section.

 

[DeletedUser2989]

Theoretically the solution to the problem here would be to make a set of "stone age" buildings that will enable you to build up supplies, coins and population while requireing nothing. So a supplies building which needs nothing to build but produces minimal supplies, a house that requires nothing but provides minimal coins and pop. These two would give you a few ways to get out of the rut you dug yourself into.

Personally this is far from a critical issue as you really have to work yourself out of everything and if you do that you deserve to get stuck really. Also can't you "restart" by deleting your account and then sign up again.

 

[DeletedUser4089]

The failsafe is that it's almost impossible to get into this situation without trying to.

The other failsafe is that support have their ways to resolve it.

 

[Surge]

Theoretically the solution to the problem here would be to make a set of "stone age" buildings that will enable you to build up supplies, coins and population while requireing nothing. So a supplies building which needs nothing to build but produces minimal supplies, a house that requires nothing but provides minimal coins and pop. These two would give you a few ways to get out of the rut you dug yourself into.

Personally this is far from a critical issue as you really have to work yourself out of everything and if you do that you deserve to get stuck really. Also can't you "restart" by deleting your account and then sign up again.

But you can't build the supply building without any population. And yeah, I know this isn't a critical issue but it's not nice that this exists. The devs could think of something when FoE finally goes gold, but I personally think this predicament shouldn't exist, regardless of how minor it is. The fact that you can't restart adds to this.

Barti, I know that support can help you get unstuck, but the point here is that it shouldn't exist in the first place. I think that the excuse of "support can do it" isn't exactly a good excuse for this type of problem. The reason why support exists (mainly) is to fix bugs that player encounters repeatedly until the devs patch out the bugs. Technically no software is bug-free, so there will always be a demand for a support team, but why not just fix the dead-end issue? That way no one could reach the circumstance to bother mods in the first place.

I agree with your first point, though. You have to be very deliberate to do this, or just extreme misfortune that you accidentally did this. I'm mixed about it being a failsafe or not, but let's just leave it at that.

 

[Addonexus]

you can do the quests that give random rewards. the one that says spend FPs or collect coins will eventually give you supplies. another way is if you have some goods, you gather bps for babel, build it after you asked for goods from guild mates (assuming you had at least 1 good to start the trades, so you will have population for the hunter. a bit complicated, but it will work

 

[DeletedUser7719]

There is another option (other than contacting support as Barti has mentioned): Get a Tower of Babel :p
Never mind, you can't pay the goods costs either

 

[DeletedUser96901]

so you want a failsafe against the stupidity of the players :confused:

if people sell everything that is not the fault of the game
so the game mustn't give a solution for this problem

 

[DeletedUser]

So here is what I thought about: if one sells everything they have and end up with no coins or supplies to build even the basic BA buildings, is it still possible to restart the game by slowly reacquiring your lost resources?

The answer is no.

I don't know of an idea that can be implemented to prevent this from happening, so instead of going to the ideas forum, I'll post this in the discussion section.

I have deliberately destroyed buildings in one place, and the only fail safe I believe I had was to bear in mind that in order to start again from scratch was that I had to retain the minimum coins and supplies required not to fall into the critical failure state. It would have been my own fault if I had done so, and therefore I kept a very careful eye on what I was doing as I destroyed everything.

From a technical point of view, I would find it interesting to start from scratch either part way through the research tree, or having reached the end and wanting to do a more 'free play' mode. I don't think I have made it impossible to return to cities that I have devastated in the past, but it might be nice to have a 'restart' option that would give the absolute basic coins and supplies required without having to start a new world / restart an old world at the normal beginning point.

I think the reason behind me wanting to do this is that I get almost as much enjoyment from destroying cities as I do from building them.

Edit: After destroying all my buildings in one world and thinking about it a bit, you need to ensure you have 120 supplies in order to build two huts and have enough population to build a hunter. Or you need to make sure that you have some unattached units so that you can attack and plunder someone else's supply buildings until you have enough supplies.

 

[Addonexus]

byeordie, you dont need to pay the goods. like i said, do the random quests collect coins and spend FPs. you can collect coins from townhall or from P/M, and spend FPs in other people's GBs. eventually you will either win supplies or goods as a reward. if you get supplies,you can restart. if you get goods,you can build babel and trade those 5 goods with friends, trade them 5 for 10, then 10 for 20 and so on... im sure people would be willing to give you 100 goods to help you started, epsecially if you put some FPs in their GBs while doing the spens FP quest.

 

[Amy Steele]

It is actually quite hard for a player to put themselves in this predicament, though easier for a new player to do so accidentally, but as Barti said, for those unfortunate enough to find themselves in the situation, the solution is to contact support as they have various ways to get such a 'stuck' player moving again.

Whether in the fullness of time a 'failsafe' such as Surge suggests will be implemented remains to be seen. I for one hope it will be. Meanwhile maybe either a tutorial quest text telling players the minimum 'safe' level of supplies and coin, or a 'did you know?' text advising the same (while the game is loading) would be the best solution? Or simply to set a minimum limit for coin below which you cannot sell your last residential building, and similarly a supply limit below which you cannot sell your last supplier - or at least a warning that pops up when you attempt to do so?

 

[DeletedUser15372]

One other way, although very slow and involves lots of luck, is an event where you can spin a wheel daily, open presents, etc. As I said it is very slow since you gotta wait for the event and it involves lots of luck in getting some supplies or maybe little luck even since getting resources from those kinda events is more common than other kind of rewards.

A proper fail-safe would be to allow a gradual increase of supplies and coins to maybe 200. That is to say if you had less than 200 or even none at all and no means of getting them through buildings, great buildings, quests, etc then the system would increase the amount by a little each hour (even 1 per hour will do) till it hits 200. Of course it would stop there or if you have over 200 then there would be no automatic increase (obviously).

 

[DeletedUser7719]

I think the easiest way would just be to change the town hall production from coins to supplies

byeordie, you dont need to pay the goods. like i said, do the random quests collect coins and spend FPs.

Well, according to Surge's picture, there are no side quests yet, so there is no way of reaching them without at least completing a few more of Ragu's (was that his name? :p) quests before they start to show up.

 

[DeletedUser]

I think the easiest way would just be to change the town hall production from coins to supplies

Actually that would work, because you can get coins by doing pol/mot runs. Although whether it would be a popular change is another matter.... Probably best to keep a minimum of 60 supplies so that you can build a hunter.

 

[DeletedUser97768]

Beats me how you would end up with no supplies / goods after selling buildings..dont you get something back everytime you sell a building??
An older player getting to such a point in the first place would be deliberate. A new player getting to this stage can simply start a new account

 

[DeletedUser]

Beats me how you would end up with no supplies / goods after selling buildings..dont you get something back everytime you sell a building??

I was wondering if this was possible, and I believe it isn't if you just concentrate on selling buildings. The closest you can get there is to have too few supplies to build a hunter. I also considered what would happen if you spent your last coins and supplies on army units, but you would have to have a barracks for that and when you sold it, you would still have something left. I think the answer is that you have to spend your last coins and supplies on roads, which do not give anything back at all. So if you deliberately build roads after deleting your buildings, you could end up with no coins and no supplies, but it would have to be carefully worked out so that the last bit of road leaves you with nothing.

 

[Surge]

Beats me how you would end up with no supplies / goods after selling buildings..dont you get something back everytime you sell a building??

Actually that's precisely how I got there. You do get something back, but it's only a quarter of your investment. If you ended up with 20 coins, you can build an obelisk and then sell it for 5 coins. Then you can't build anything because 5 coins get you nowhere. The same goes for supplies.

 

[DeletedUser6065]

I am reminded of the time a couple of years ago, we were wondering here in Forum how in the world people were selling their City Halls (I'm not making this up).

There was a period of time when you would visit a city, and poof! There you were looking at a great big empty. Well, maybe not totally empty. Some players were enjoined to leave behind final thoughts/words using their roads to write on the open field. Others (being more creative I suppose) used their Obelisks to be remembered by. Some adieus were rather witty, some not so much. Those who were 'plundered' out of the game were rather indelicate. I don't recall if we ever did figure out how this was happening (selling the City Halls, not the reasons for the left behind sayings).

It would seem to me, if someone had this amount of determination to achieve a certain end goal, is any 'Fail Safe' good enough (or necessary). But, this I suppose this is not for small minds to ponder . . mk

 

[DeletedUser]

In the end of the day this is a strategy game, which involves thinking forward. If you carelessly delete all your buildings then you should be able to carelessly pay some money for premium features in case you can't wait long enough to get out of this situation by doing the quests Overall you got to pay for mistakes in one way or another, bigger mistakes cost you more.

 

[DeletedUser653]

As a technical discussion its great but please please do not waste any INNO time providing a solution to a problem that no one other than Surge (and he worked hard to get in that state) is in.
If a player ever manages to get in this situation he/she must have done it be design and so be it.