Hi,

I love this game, and I keep trying to come back to play it, but every time, I play 1, 2 maybe 3 rounds and suddenly get slapped by a gold user who sucks at the game, and quit again.

Please fix this, it's a huge issue. Also, please tell the mods to stop having a go at people for discussing it in a chat, the law of the land is free speech, and that includes game chat. If I want to discuss gold use with others, mods should not be chat-banning me for it.

The issue:
This game is a brilliant strategy game, and really does require good strategy and thought to win most of the time.

However, it also allows some rich fruit nut to come along and spawn a huge army - or keep healing their own army - and win just by using gold. We know the game needs people buying gold to survive, but you also need regulation to survive, or everyone will eventually leave like with Supremacy, and the game will die anyway due to lack of player base (example: TORPIA, Age of Ultima.. same issues.. learn please!)

One of my rounds consisted of myself & my allies winning a "World at war" map... then all of a sudden some dude comes along, and Nuke-rockets literally EVERY SINGLE PROVINCE in Europe (yeah, 200+ nukes), from Algeria. All of my & my allies troops, buildings, everything just dead within 20 minutes after about 25 days of gameplay... it's a joke.

Similarly on a speed round, I'm winning, I'm dominating the map, I'm about to take over a player who hasnt even bothered to take any territory yet.. I have over 150 planes at this point, then all of a sudden some guy gets pissed, spawns 100+ interceptors to destroy all my planes, and beats me. It's just a joke, and a waste of time, and hence I, and others, just quit.

My suggestion:
Very simple - gold can't be used for anything troop-related. Not MANPOWER resources, not speeding them up in production, and not for healing them.

Justification:

• Lots of gold is still used for research & buildings anyway, so in terms of the games survival, it will be fine - any gold I use, is generally on airstrips anyway!
  
• It means people can't just mass spawn an army to win (i.e. destroying all credibility this is any kind of "strategy" game).
  
• It means that more strategy will be required for resource use, particularly at the start (e.g. sure, you can invest everything into industry, but you can no longer insta-spawn an army if someone attacks you before you're ready.. it requires more balance and strategy to survive)
  
• It's a nice balance of both, implemented by many other games, for example, Tribal Wars.
  

Cheers for reading, and let me know your thoughts.

Hi DoctorDR1,

With all due respect, that's simply not true. According to various online sources, Bytro as a company enjoyed a ~$35million+ revenue for 2020 across its games and consists of only ~43-50 employees (sources vary). Taking into account all factors (premises, tax, licensing/software, equipment, salaries) that would leave a pretty huge profit at the end of it.

To fob us off by suggesting that changing this 1 specific use-case to fix gold-abuse, that is quite literally destroying the game, would be the end of the game, is both absurd and just nonsense. Especially considering other variations of gold use haven't actually been tried or tested, you cannot just say "this is the only way".

I'm not suggesting you remove gold altogether, and I'm not bashing gold either. I'm suggesting that you keep all other use-cases of gold the same, but change the one specific use-case that allows players to ruin the game by instantly spawning troops. Even if you kept the ability to heal, or use gold to make resources to start troop building - fine... but the ability to speed up and finish troop building is the key issue with the game at the moment.

Even if you limited the use in specific game modes (e.g. Speed events) - that would be a good start to balancing the game.