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Manual Map Movement

Sir Derf

Adept
For all those people complaining about not being moved by the automatic process, how about the ability to manually move your city to an open map location of the appropriate resource type?

Maybe cost a bucket of diamonds?

Maybe limit to once every 6 months?
 

Gargon667

Mentor
They´d first have to actually program the automatic process, before they can then in a second step display those automatic data for the user and make it possible to choose. It´s not like you can let everybody let loose on the system and do it themselves :D Although that would be fun of course...

Anyway by the time the automatic process works, the manual function becomes rather unimportant, but yes it could be a diamond feature, not sure enough people would pay for such a feature to make the investment into its development worthwhile...
 

Herodite

Forum mod extraordinaire
Elvenar Team
Hi @Sir Derf yes this has become quite a prominent subject in recent days. So I shall attempt to explain why we would be quite unable to facilitate manual/sudden movements.

Firstly, as most of you know, this is an automated process and as discussed before, this is something we are unable to override. It occurs once a week (normally on a Monday) so you may notice the appearance of new neighbours around that time.

Secondly, there are quite a few things that need to be taken into account when moving Cities across the world map. Of course the main objective is to bring all cities towards the centre and therefore moving the inactive cities to the outskirts. Thus giving everyone some nice new active neighbours to trade with and help. The issue the system has of course, is making sure there is room. For example... if you have a Marble/Crystal/Gem Boosted City surrounded by lets say 500 Completed/Scouted Provinces... the system needs to ensure that when moved, that's EXACTLY what you continue to have. Once there is a space that ticks all of your boxes, of course you will be moved, but meeting all of this criteria does take some time.

There are Thousands of active players across each world, and like the Butterfly Effect, one City move affects those around it, hence the reason that this is done via an automated process, and not manually. Unfortunately attempting to push that process along with premium game currency would not be possible :confused:

Kind Regards

Herodite.
 

Sir Derf

Adept
Most of the 'issues' being raised, while obviously needing to paid attention to, are not only not difficult, they are fairly trivial to accomplish. Obviously you can't allow people to move to just any open space on the map, but identifying which open spaces could be allowable for a given existing city is simple.

Identifying map locations that satisfy your resource types can be as basic as a nine part if statement that verifies that your three neighbors each match one of your three resources..

if(((n1 = Marble) | (n1 = Crystal) | (n1 = Gems)) & ((n2 = Marble) | (n2 = Crystal) | (n2 = Gems)) & ((n3 = Marble) | (n3 = Crystal) | (n3 = Gems)),TRUE,FALSE)

Less logically complicated, since the resource arrangement is a repeating sequence, if your city has Marble above it, simply testing each city for if Marble is above it will accomplish that task.

Or, simplest of all, again since the arrangement is a repeating sequence, given the map coordinates of your existing city, you can work out the acceptability of any other map coordinate. In the same row, every nine spaces left or right. Move up-left three ranks or down-right three ranks, that's acceptable, and every nine spaces in those row. Work out the right math from that, and every space can be determined acceptable or not simply by looking at the coordinates without having to look at any of the surrounding resource areas.


As for allowing enough surrounding provinces to provide for what you have scouted? One answer is, if I've scouted out to the 14th ring around my city, well then don't allow movement to open spaces within the 14 outermost rings around the center of the map. A second answer would be to only allow movement to spaces that are equal to or closer to the center of the map. Thirdly, I suspect that this is a functional non-issue. I would hope that the developers planned that the map extends beyond the bounds of the grid where playable cities can be placed, otherwise cities that were placed on the outermost edge of playable spaces would be penalized and unable to scout equally in all directions. Of course, anyone on the outermost edge of settled space would naturally have fewer trading partners, since they are looking out at unplayable spaces, but they could still easily have plenty of permanently unoccupiable space to scout into.


Programmatically, I see it as being a simple task, if they were to allow it. You go to Map view. You select "Move your City" mode. Your current location is identified. The Center of the Map is identified. Directional arrows pointing to your current location and the Center of the Map are provided. Buttons that center the map on your current location or the Center of the Map are provided. All spaces are greyed out, except those that meet your resource criteria (and possibly your scouted radius). Those that are acceptable show a Tent and Diamond graphic. You click on it and a warning dialog pops up, telling you that this will cost xxxx Diamonds, and can only be done once every 6 months. Or maybe there is no cool-off; we're encouraging Diamond purchase and use here. Accept the warning and *poof*, you've moved your city. Easy-peasy.


Bottom line... City movement can and does happen with the automated process, so moving a city is not impossible. Determining which locations are empty and acceptable for a given city to move to is a simple programming task. They could easily implement this feature if they wanted to.
 

Sir Derf

Adept
I do know it. I wrote the damn bill.

If they wanted to... They should want to.

The already implemented city relocation automated algorithm...
  • Already exists. We're not asking for some game effect that does not already exist. Cities already can be moved.
  • All active players can opt in to request it. There's currently no generic bar preventing a player from moving.
  • The developers and mods all say this is something that can and should eventually happen. INNO is fine with players moving.
  • There are players that confirm that it does occasionally happen. Independent confirmation it does happen.
and...
  • when it happens, it does so for free, at no cost to the player.

And yet, we have players who want it to happen. They know it can happen, have requested it, are told by INNO it will happen, are told by others that it does happen, and yet... nothing. They see the periodic sweeps that clear out the inactive cities, they see the empty spaces opening up on the map, and they wonder "Why can't I move into one of those spaces?" They post to the forum, they ask the moderators, they raise Support tickets, and still... nothing

There is an unfulfilled demand for what appears to be an underperforming free service. They should be bending over backwards to implement this.

Give the user control over it. Let them see the options (or lack thereof) available to them. And if they see an opportunity, let them pay for it in diamonds. Remove a source of complaints and make money while they're at it.

And, thinking ahead to what might be pointed as the next issue with this as a viable feature, if there is some systemic problem with allowing a player to move at any moment, as opposed to doing all moves at one time, then let the player reserve an open spot for them to be moved to when the next automatic sweep takes place.

If you're good at something, never do it for free. Hey INNO, let's all get good at something...
 
And now a question that has no answer: why the heck they do not implement the movement of the cities, why they left tons of dead cities, why they move in worst places instead of better ones. Considering how many players are complaining about it, it should the first thing that INNO must change. And yet they don't. And the reason is.....?:eek:
 

Gargon667

Mentor
I do know it. I wrote the damn bill.

If they wanted to... They should want to.

The already implemented city relocation automated algorithm...
  • Already exists. We're not asking for some game effect that does not already exist. Cities already can be moved.
  • All active players can opt in to request it. There's currently no generic bar preventing a player from moving.
  • The developers and mods all say this is something that can and should eventually happen. INNO is fine with players moving.
  • There are players that confirm that it does occasionally happen. Independent confirmation it does happen.
and...
  • when it happens, it does so for free, at no cost to the player.

And yet, we have players who want it to happen. They know it can happen, have requested it, are told by INNO it will happen, are told by others that it does happen, and yet... nothing. They see the periodic sweeps that clear out the inactive cities, they see the empty spaces opening up on the map, and they wonder "Why can't I move into one of those spaces?" They post to the forum, they ask the moderators, they raise Support tickets, and still... nothing

There is an unfulfilled demand for what appears to be an underperforming free service. They should be bending over backwards to implement this.

Give the user control over it. Let them see the options (or lack thereof) available to them. And if they see an opportunity, let them pay for it in diamonds. Remove a source of complaints and make money while they're at it.

And, thinking ahead to what might be pointed as the next issue with this as a viable feature, if there is some systemic problem with allowing a player to move at any moment, as opposed to doing all moves at one time, then let the player reserve an open spot for them to be moved to when the next automatic sweep takes place.

If you're good at something, never do it for free. Hey INNO, let's all get good at something...

Well since not everybody is moved automatically, there clearly still is a problem with the tech, otherwise people would be moved.
I don´t know if the reason is unfinished/faulty tech or non-existing places to be moved, but no matter which it is, there is no point in offering it to the players: Either they will get an error message or they will see there is no space available for them. Either way they won´t pay for it, because there is nothing to purchase. So there is absolutely no point in developing a graphic interface for players which they cannot use for one reason or the other.
Once the tech works 100% people will be moved (well if there are no spaces available they still won´t be moved until someone in a suitable spot gets removed, in which case well an automated text message could be sent, saying something like you´re in the queue for a better spot as soon as one gets available)
 
I find really hard and weird to believe that a competent developer is not capable to write an algorithm which allows the movement of the cities accordingly to their needs, to free spots occupied by inactive towns.
 

Gargon667

Mentor
I find really hard and weird to believe that a competent developer is not capable to write an algorithm which allows the movement of the cities accordingly to their needs, to free spots occupied by inactive towns.

Well I don´t think it has much to do with capability, more with resource allocation... Inno has a certain budget and put the money on certain things they want done. Given the speed with which this topic is worked on I would say they get the bread crumbs that fall off the table to work on the moving of towns... And a few month ago a whole sandwich fell of the table, but it didn´t feed the dev long enough to finish the job, so now we gotta wait for the next sandwich to fall of the table before anything happens again, might be soon, or might be in a year or 3...
Either way this is not a high priority for Inno, that´s for sure. Event´s clearly are prio 1 right now, with a whole new game mechanic rolled out every other event. First the leagues, now the premium prizes... That´s where the money goes, because well it´s also where the money comes back to them...
 
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