[2023] Holy Moly This is Going be a Wild Ride (ECO 10)

It seems there are several misunderstandings around - or the addition of new system lets people forget what was already possible before, so I want to address each of your points:

1. The only thing that would lead to is the server failing - players don't tolerate abuse and vote with their feet, rightfully so. On any official or recommended community administrated server with rules you will not encounter that either, as unclaiming is restricted. The exact same already works now, by the way, especially on unadministrated servers. First person to set up a government in v9 and get it passed with a few friends can unclaim anyone on the world anywhere. Now it's limited to a specific area. It is and has been a matter of trust - a core point of the game. Even a fully fleshed out elected government with checks and balances can do that when they go mad at any time. Though those are not the governments actually made in vanilla v9 on servers without rules.

2. Correct, that is intended. The plant spread was may too much and bad in reflecting the need of the civilization to actually protect the resources.

3. True, but intended. Linking claims to skill progression is something we wanted to get rid of for long, as dealing with land is one of the core duties of a government. Many community servers already switched to crafting and / or government sold papers via mods before.

4. They were before as well - other than if you had a global government enforcing rules. Though that very same government would have been able to unclaim anyone anywhere. There was never enough claims to claim all infrastructure, nor was that the preferred way of servers to do it, compared to districts.

5. A settlement that is not wanting to keep to community guidelines, destroying the planet? Exactly what annexations were made and are necessary for. Otherwise a settlement could for example simply turn on a nice lot of generators polluting air, drowning everyone else and you could not do anything against it.

6. Annexation doesn't remove anything.

7. That is not the purpose of a country. The purpose of a country is a local government structure fitting for the players within, to work towards the goal in the way those players would like to. It allows people to work towards the goal with different opinions and allows banding with settlements that have at least similar ideas. I guess it's pretty known that especially taxes and other approaches like economy are a general hot topic on most eco servers, now it allows you to have multiple approaches at the same time.

8. If a server wants to focus on that, they can do that but need to change settings for it to make sense. By default the system requires lots of effort for annexation and is to be used for where settlements go rogue.

9. This system has the purpose of making speed running much harder, as its one thing most of the community agrees to be damaging for servers. I'm absolute sure it's still possible if organized - we will find out in March, when we have another official speedrun server for record.

Annexations are done at an embassy table. They require you to have notably more citizens than the other settlement, notably more culture and to pay modules to the settlement you want to annex. Of course you also need a border dispute of specific size.

Originally posted by digiphaze: Thats not the case at all. Soon as you are under their town/country influence. All they have to do is issue an executive order claiming your property and then immediately evict you from your claim. I have done it as has many many others. Its become a strategy now. Those with more people or alt accounts and can play 24/7 will take over town and immediately steal/evict players from the annexed town. We are going through this now, we have two towns with 8 active people and the towns with near us with 6 active people but with 6 alts to rotate in voting on photos has completely enveloped us and are about to shut us out of the server. Nothing we can do about it.

The constant back n forth of culture radius also means its up in the air if the farmers can manage their fields that day. One day its under our control, the next they are locked out. Influence expands and encompass some stockpiles, boats or car and you lose em. Laws don't need waiting periods, they have constitutions that allow executor actions.

Alt accounts violate the rules of most servers, including all official servers. It seems like you are actually actively playing a border struggle game - you can do that. It won't be done on most servers. Neither have most players any interest in removing players from a server. I would hate if border struggle wouldn't be possible for those that want it, though. It sounds like a lot of fun when the alt accounts are removed from the equation, given they are basically cheating. You can easily avoid annexation though with the setup you seem to have - just found a country with your two towns. Only federations can annex a country and that requires two counries to exist. Towns cannot annex towns either, by the way. So if they don't have a country (as it reads), they cannot annex you.

And if it would appear to become a strategy in the future - current playtest data does not back that up - we will, as promised, look into that. Of course server admins can configure all aspects of the systems as well - from annexation requirements, over range, over culture gain and influence radii. Every single thing is fully configurable.

As for the border shifting, that was very valuable feedback we received on playtests and a update will roll out this week that allows towns to allow claiming into the border by authorized towns. You could then just settle your conflict and agree that either of you can claim into the others town. Then there is no reason anymore for border pushing and where borders change, it makes no difference.

The fact that two distinct groups of players settling near each other and wanting to have different rules, is working as intended, though. It is part of the game to figure out diplomatically how you deal with the problem - if you can't do that, the problem can be solved with the game mechanics as a last resort. Obviously both groups have the desire to play the game a specific way - so it is a problem that needs to be solved, it cannot be simply decided by the game that one specific party is right.