Annexing people makes people upset!

Seeing Eco as a framework and society simulation, we try to offer tools to deal with any potential issues - in the intent that one day players will be able to do absolutely everything without needing any administrative commands in terms of self-policing, making admins unnecessary when it comes to rules and enforcement. We also have a justice system planned, though one can already be created in meta ways.

When we moved away from a global government to provide local settlements more power over their own matters (and as such making it easier for similar minded players to find together and have a more coherent local society), that also created the problem that a settlement could go rogue and do their very best to torpedo the efforts of the server community as a whole without there being any remedy to that beyond an admin. Annexations are the last resort mechanism to force the settlement into a jurisdiction where that is possible again.

There is however also tons of players liking the more competetive civilization-esque playstyle that annexations can provide - as such the feature is fully configurable on if it is available, how much an annexation costs and under which circumstances it is possible. The settings can be found in Settlements.eco.

And yes, of course one can solve issues diplomatically by talking. You can join settlements and in case of border-disputes use the open borders feature allowing players from all participating towns to use either towns claim papers in any other town. We also provide the culture system allowing defending against any form of annexation and the bigger a settlement is, the harder it becomes to get the prerequisites fulfilled for annexation. And last, it is pretty costly to do so, especially for larger settlements. There is tons of strategies that can be used to avoid it or make it unreasonably pricey. It can also even be used on purpose to get a gain out of it, as you will need to be provided at least the claim papers you already have plus a nice batch on top and other materials. You also can split off again after a grace period, to which the materials you gained in the process of annexation can be helpful if done right.

Eco has always been having PvP, where it wasn't settlement related, it was economy or space related. The game notes that the goal is to destroy the meteor without destroying the world in the process. That is not only a reference to pollution, but also one towards collaboration not being that easy with tons of people that have their own interests (for example having others goals in economic competition than just the meteor) and that a society can self-destruct long before it can agree on something.

We never intended Eco to be a completely peaceful game, we just don't want players to engage in problem solving by using a weapon and forcefully removing the disagreeing player from the game. So yes, being annexed can be upsetting, especially so if that was done without any notice. But the same is true for nearly every mechanic in the game when used in specific ways by players. The game revolves around these challenges. Sure, quitting is always possible in a game and there is absolutely nothing we can do about that, but I don't think that should mean that all of Eco's content should be made in a way where upsetting someone is not possible. The economic part of the game would get very bland that way and the law system would need to be mostly removed as in a game that has the idea of players self-policing with a powerful law mechanic it is also not possible to avoid any sort of potential misuse of the feature (or use in a way that some people disagree and would rather quit than play by the rules made - because who defines misuse, the cases I most often see are people simply disagreeing over equally legit ways to do things) - but the very same feature can be used to rectify or prevent that misuse and change what someone is unhappy with, dependant on players getting together.

With people having as many different ideas on how to play the game as people have ideas how things should work in real life that is the only suitable way I can think of to have things be to allow meaningful society building where people actually can have an impact on the state and there is a relation to what people are used to in real-life. The educational part of Eco has always included politics in school as well and the means of reaching consensus and deal with issues where that is not possible.

This thread alone has multiple comments on how people dislike doing something a specific way in Eco. (For example forced "global" currency in a settlement) The thing is, other people like to do it that way. Settlements allow smaller groups finding together to do that without it being a problem for the whole world. But some things a single settlement decides to do may go against the desires of the majority of the whole server - and then annexation is the only way to do something against that, otherwise they are potentially able to dictate what happens for everyone. Without annexation you can't remove their 100 permanently polluting objects in their settlement space that rises sea level for everyone. In any case, having big tools also always comes with big responsibility. If everyone just does what they think is the best they will find that noone wants to play with them and make them do their thing alone. A server failing that way was always a potential outcome of the game.

And I understand that can be frustrating and some people may simply not want to engage with that uncertainity or hold through something that isn't the preferred gameplay in their freetime - there is community servers that provide a more consistent experience where everyone mostly knows what to expect and can choose based on what they personally want to experience. But the vanilla game never had this idea, and I personally have learnt at least as much from holding through failed experiments as I did from successful ones. Everyone's mileage on that will certainly vary and that is perfectly fine - but should we really remove things that can be used in ways that may upset someone for everyone?

You can still protect things outside of your initial claims within towns through the respective papers towns have, or if you enable the old way of claim distribution for learning skills, even beyond that. The way we intended to protect farms has always been district assignments, which makes it easy to protect from border-griefing that was possible just the same before as well and the most frequent reported issue on official servers together with people claimblocking. Back then, only the global government could have done that for everyone on the server, anywhere, though. Which is much more difficult to pull off than in a local town or country. The amount of claim papers now available is also bigger and more flexible compared to needing to read skill scrolls over the course of the game and then needing to get papers from other people that did the same and don't need them. And we're also discussing about making all the civics tables disconnected from the game progression to allow people to start through with their settlements from the moment of founding - especially as we actually never intended that towns lock themselves down to only their citizens, which is pretty counterproductive to collaborative gameplay, but understandable given the means to control immigration and make less wide restrictions isn't readily available at the start.

The thing that changed is that players are now by design focused on areas and need to buy space in other towns to have additional operations elsewhere - which indeed can be challenging for farmers and we're still looking into improving that by either making the growth areas for farmers better to need less of sprinkled claims or allow for them to have special claims. The original intent was that these bigger operations get easier when you found the bigger settlement types, which is not straightforward enough, though. There is several levers we can still pull.

For players that don't want to join a town there is also the outpost papers available from the very start at settlements, but the intention is to create and join towns, so that is a simple support option for different playstyles.

In our experience there really didn't change much around griefing frequency and ways to do that - it rather became less. I don't however consider an annexation to be griefing compared to people dropping tailings around your farm or blocking your claims in purposefully, as it is an intended game mechanic. Annexation alone doesn't need to have any negative impacts, it gives you materials and puts you under a different jurisdiction in which you can usually immediately vote and turn the tides around - you also can secede again. You even get additional claim papers to use. The settlement may have laws you don't agree with, but that alone doesn't classify griefing in my book and was no different with global governments where people had the same power over you (and everyone at once) with the only remedies being overthrowing the government which was only possible with higher tier rooms which was a very rare occasion to ever happen. Of course there is the option that the annexing settlement has a very weird government setup, but they had to get that through to start with as well and it could also happen in the Pre-10 system. That is by what I've seen only very rarely the case, though.

Using unclaimed space also isn't that frequently visible outside of farms, so protection seems to mostly work out fine. If annexation is something you personally wouldn't want in your gameplay and are fine with not having that option to remedy misbehaviour of a different settlement, you could play on a server that has it disabled. We intend to switch one of the official servers to have it turned off as well, to give more options.

As for the pollution: The maximum supported world size is 2.56 km² and the intended world size for 15 people is the default 0.52 km². I noted in a different post that we're looking into giving an option to artificially upscale pollution when oversized maps are used, but the way better option is to just use a map size that is fitting the player count and is typically possible without issues on servers that aren't long-term and hence have extreme vanity build space need.

Actually it was, the settlement system as it is now was a plan from the beginning of trying to bring Eco to a entertainment market from the educational prototype project it was before. A full society simulation. The culture and settlement systems were listed in the poll page as well in some form. If you look around the older parts of the internet you can even find a very bad idea we had at the start of Kickstarter that allowed specific backers to use I think it was nuclear weapons (not exactly sure, I didn't work here yet back then) to be an antagonist to all other players in their efforts to destroy the meteor, so players would not only have to run against the meteor time, but also the antagonist. We did obviously not do that.

The criminal justice system expansion from Kickstarter however is also designed to allow players to actually violate laws and need to be catched to be dealt with instead of simple "You can't do this". We don't think the feature as we had it there is good for the game in the current state anymore, which is why it doesn't yet exist - it would need to become an optional feature at this point and we still need to see how to handle that, but it was not forgotten. The general idea of having conflicts was always there.

We didn't back out of trains, trains are still planned. But we have communicated for very long (minimum since I work here) that it will not be in Early Access - mostly due to the fact that trains could add very little of value to the current gameplay in the form we intended them, as there is no real need for the large scale transportation they were intended to introduce and that boats will also cover later on. They are still strong on the current feedback tracker as well, but other things have surpassed it.

All the things on the original website roadmap were already planned things, the feature to give up to five votes (including to things like bugfixing) were to gauge interest. We implemented nearly all of the items, but in a order that we deemed fitting the needs of the game. Eco wouldn't work well without economy features, but they were voted pretty low compared to things that always appeal fancy like trains and boats. It just makes no sense to introduce trains, which requires notable art and code work to make happen, without them having much room to actually have a notable impact on gameplay.

Whenever I mention wealth taxes, people tell me very insisting that they would rather quit than pay them ;)