04 Oct, 2009, David Haley wrote in the 1st comment:
Votes: 0
Let's say that we're working on some kind of tactics/strategy game, with the twist that the world is persistent. The game involves accumulation of various resources, be they commodities (gold, wood, stone, …), units (various soldiers, henchmen, …), buildings (fortifications, barracks, helpful things in general). Let's also say that currently, we are agnostic to the scale of the game: it could be individuals building up followings, eventually getting a castle, etc., or it could be empires building up armies, capturing cities, and so forth. There could be some control of individual characters (MUD-style), but this is somewhat auxiliary to the higher-level tactics/strategy. (Individual control would be more along the lines of giving orders to units, rather than "being" a character.)

Typically, games like this are "one-off": you start a game, a world is (pre-)generated, the players show up, and mayhem ensues. This means that everybody starts on equal footing.

What would happen to a game like this in a persistent setting? Were we to simply move traditional RTS/4X mechanics to a persistent world, there are two main problems:
1. New players would be disadvantaged compared to old players, who would have had much more time to develop their position.
2. There is an issue of space: the world only has so many places for somebody to settle. How do new players enter the game world?

Here are some solution ideas for the first problem:

- Periodically wipe the entire slate and start over. This can be somewhat dissatisfying in some ways, and also doesn't wholly solve the problem of older players having had more time to strengthen their position.
- Enforce a time limit on any given player's empire, and then wipe out their position. This would be rather hard to explain, but it at least ensures a rotation of strong players.
- Introduce some kind of maximum empire size, so that one can only grow so much. The advantage one could have over others would therefore still exist, but be limited.

Some solution ideas for the second problem (space):

- Have several instances of the game. Only makes sense if you have enough players to meaningfully populate the instances (then again, if you don't have that many players to begin with, space is less of a problem).
- Grow the game world as players join. The problem of how one does this aside (automatically generated content?) and the surprise element (you thought that part of your empire was fortified, suddenly there's an enemy behind you??) this can create an inflation of sorts, as new resources are injected into the world. New empires could make easy pickings for older ones, who would then acquire these new resources. You would have to also somehow remove these resources as players left or were eliminated.
- Make a Really Big World and hope things work out. The problem is that you still need to worry about where to put people on this world map.


What are your thoughts on a game like this? Does persistence mix with RTS/4X mechanics? The most difficult question in my mind is how you balance out the continually increasing strength of older players with giving new players a chance to compete in a world of solidly entrenched positions.
04 Oct, 2009, Erok wrote in the 2nd comment:
Votes: 0
I know you're posting about a persistent world, but your game description brought back fond memories of empire. This game hit its peak in the early 90s and brought down many a GPA, much like MUDs of the time. It's still going with a smaller community, but worth checking out if you are into multi-player strategy games with a mix of real-time tactics. The blitz games are the best way to come up to speed.
04 Oct, 2009, bbailey wrote in the 3rd comment:
Votes: 0
David Haley said:
What are your thoughts on a game like this? Does persistence mix with RTS/4X mechanics? The most difficult question in my mind is how you balance out the continually increasing strength of older players with giving new players a chance to compete in a world of solidly entrenched positions.


The most common method I see to help combat some of the issues you've described is to implement gameplay as turn-based rather than real-time, with turns accumulated every X minutes/hours/whatever. Generally, there is a maximum number of turns that can be stockpiled, so that users must be active and using their turns in order to maximize their gameplay. This will not address the problem of older players accumulating enough power to overwhelm new players if you assume that all players are active and using all available turns, but this often turns out to not be the case. The other main mechanic is to have a concrete end-game where the instance ends after so much time, and whoever has the largest empire, the most points, etc, 'wins', and then another clean instance begins. I'm not really sure how either of those mechanics will translate to a real-time, fully persistent, ongoing world.

In general, some combination of resource decay and maintenance costs can help mitigate the problem of players/empires getting increasingly powerful as play progresses. Having resources decay can help prevent stockpiling so that more careful attention must be paid to planning and actively building the empire as opposed to quick bursts of overwhelming, reactionary gameplay whenever a new opponent shows up. Maintenance costs can also help prevent the building of massive, sprawling, near-invincible territories that newer players simply cannot defeat. Essentially, I would try to encourage gameplay with compact, well-planned and maintained defenses.
05 Oct, 2009, David Haley wrote in the 4th comment:
Votes: 0
Erok said:
I know you're posting about a persistent world, but your game description brought back fond memories of empire.

Actually, although I haven't played the game very much myself, I am aware of it and have drawn some inspiration from it. Several of the same issues exist, so it's interesting to compare.

bbailey said:
The other main mechanic is to have a concrete end-game where the instance ends after so much time, and whoever has the largest empire, the most points, etc, 'wins', and then another clean instance begins. I'm not really sure how either of those mechanics will translate to a real-time, fully persistent, ongoing world.

Well, I suppose that an end-game of that sort makes the persistence be only local to the game session, in that it persists until time runs out (or whatever the end-game is) and at that point, the slate is wiped. This is probably an acceptable solution in many ways, actually. People don't typically play RTSs/4X games that last months at a time, so a relatively short timer (or other activity) would probably be acceptable.

This approach also helps one not use turns, which kind of bug me for some reason (but I can't quite put my finger on it). I'll have to elaborate on that at some point…

bbailey said:
In general, some combination of resource decay and maintenance costs can help mitigate the problem of players/empires getting increasingly powerful as play progresses. Having resources decay can help prevent stockpiling so that more careful attention must be paid to planning and actively building the empire as opposed to quick bursts of overwhelming, reactionary gameplay whenever a new opponent shows up.

I like the idea of resource decay, as indeed it does require more planning and active involvement rather than simply letting your hoard grow bigger and bigger endlessly.

bbailey said:
Maintenance costs can also help prevent the building of massive, sprawling, near-invincible territories that newer players simply cannot defeat.

I think that maintenance costs are basically the way to go here. There are several ways to implement this; the Civ games have a notion of upkeep such that the more you grow, the more you pay, and cities far away from your 'core' pay more, sometimes so much more that the effects are basically crippling. One can think of this sort of thing as essentially imposing a cap on the maximum size of an empire, but in a way more palatable perhaps than simply saying "nope, you can't grow".

Sins of a Solar Empire is an extremely interesting game to me here as it mixes 4X mechanics with real-time strategy. The thing is that its world is not persistent – it's a single session not unlike a Civ game perhaps, but shorter – so I'm not sure how well the mechanics translate to a persistent world (without a wiping mechanism).
05 Oct, 2009, Omega wrote in the 5th comment:
Votes: 0
give the new players a 'timer' designed to build up their army, where they are un-attackable, unless they go out and attack someone, in-which case, they lose their n00b protection. I also recommend the wearing of silly hats…
05 Oct, 2009, Dean wrote in the 6th comment:
Votes: 0
Quote
1. New players would be disadvantaged compared to old players, who would have had much more time to develop their position.


Solution: Impose a timer on new players where they cannot be attacked, but they themselves cannot attack enemies. One can also make it so that attacking newer players (who usually will be signficantly weaker than experienced players who have been kicking for a while) doesn't provide much reward at all.

Quote
I think that maintenance costs are basically the way to go here. There are several ways to implement this; the Civ games have a notion of upkeep such that the more you grow, the more you pay, and cities far away from your 'core' pay more, sometimes so much more that the effects are basically crippling. One can think of this sort of thing as essentially imposing a cap on the maximum size of an empire, but in a way more palatable perhaps than simply saying "nope, you can't grow".


Taking an approach to how the Civ games do it is certainly a good idea IMO (I've spent countless hours on civ1 and 2 :tongue:)

Quote
2. There is an issue of space: the world only has so many places for somebody to settle. How do new players enter the game world?


My guess is the best way to handle this is create the world with a specific number of players in mind (let's say 50), when you reach that limit, create a new instance of the world for new players to join. When browser based games open new servers, you often find that they initially get populated by weaker players from another server, so they have a better chance at being one of the big boys.

Also, it might be interesting to have the player's character age and die. Once the character gets to an older age, their empire could become harder to lord over (A 100 year old guy sitting on the throne isn't very inspiring persay). Cities/territories far away from the capital might try and rebel*. Further more, you could allow the character to invest in finding an heir to their throne that they would assume control of upon death. Again, cities/territories might try to rebel in this event.

*Cities/terrirtories that successfully rebel, could become a part of a neighbouring empire. This could work in the realms of persistence and would help with power issues.
05 Oct, 2009, KaVir wrote in the 7th comment:
Votes: 0
You might want to take a look at Travian - it uses the first solutions you offered for each of the two problems you outlined: Each game runs for about a year, and there are multiple instances of the game running at the same time.

It's not turn-based, but time-based - training and moving troops, upgrading buildings, etc, all take time to complete. Thus you might log on, queue up a few hundred troops (each of which take a few minutes to train), start upgrading something (which might require several hours) and launch a few attacks (which might take anything from minutes to days, depending on how far away the enemy is and how fast your troops are), then log off and check back later.

You begin with a single village, but once you've earned enough culture points you can settle a second, then a third, and so on. This allows you to keep growing your empire and produce more resources. However it's also possible to raid other players and steal their resources, and the offensive armies from multiple villages cannot be combined, so having more villages doesn't necessarily mean you're stronger. You can combine defensive troops from multiple villages, but more villages means more locations you need to defend, so it balances out.

It's possible to start a server late and still do well, and in fact many players prefer to wait until a server has been running at least a few days before they join (the hardcore players start on day 1 and tend to dominate the centre of the map, so waiting a while gives you a better chance of survival, as you'll spawn further away from the centre).

I've been thinking of creating my own game along similar lines (a separate game, but tied in with my mud, so that certain aspects of the two games cross over). I think Travian did a lot of things well - but it also has a number of problems. I wrote a design critique back when I was playing it, in which I outlined what I felt were the pros and cons.
05 Oct, 2009, bbailey wrote in the 8th comment:
Votes: 0
Dean said:
Also, it might be interesting to have the player's character age and die. Once the character gets to an older age, their empire could become harder to lord over (A 100 year old guy sitting on the throne isn't very inspiring persay). Cities/territories far away from the capital might try and rebel*. Further more, you could allow the character to invest in finding an heir to their throne that they would assume control of upon death. Again, cities/territories might try to rebel in this event.

*Cities/terrirtories that successfully rebel, could become a part of a neighbouring empire. This could work in the realms of persistence and would help with power issues.


An interesting possibility would be to allow players to step in and take control of cities/territories that are attempting to rebel or secede. This could provide interesting or more challenging scenarios for experienced players, and a new entry point for new players looking to get right into the action. They'd be stepping into a situation where there are more limited resources and a pre-existing infrastructure to manage, shifting the focus from empire-building to stabilization. There would be immediate sources of conflict and opportunities for diplomacy as you either guide the territory towards independence, or attempt to secure membership in neighboring empires, or whatever else.
05 Oct, 2009, David Haley wrote in the 9th comment:
Votes: 0
Dean said:
Solution: Impose a timer on new players where they cannot be attacked, but they themselves cannot attack enemies. One can also make it so that attacking newer players (who usually will be signficantly weaker than experienced players who have been kicking for a while) doesn't provide much reward at all.

I'm not sure that the timer is a solution to the problem of considerably more powerful older players being able to stomp over newer players. Yes, it will give them time to get ready a little, but the enemy can still mass up at the door. On the other hand, maybe older players will have better things to do than hang out at the doorstep.

KaVir said:
You might want to take a look at Travian

Funny that you mention it, as I had just finished reading that page when I made the OP. :wink: I haven't actually played the game, I'll admit, but the mechanics sounded interesting. I think that a whole year is kind of a long time, though.

KaVir said:
and the offensive armies from multiple villages cannot be combined, so having more villages doesn't necessarily mean you're stronger.

Well, that's certainly an interesting approach to preventing large empires from stomping on small ones. How do they explain this? (Do they bother?)

KaVir said:
I've been thinking of creating my own game along similar lines (a separate game, but tied in with my mud, so that certain aspects of the two games cross over). I think Travian did a lot of things well - but it also has a number of problems. I wrote a design critique back when I was playing it, in which I outlined what I felt were the pros and cons.

Thanks for those links: I'll be reading them soon.
05 Oct, 2009, Dean wrote in the 10th comment:
Votes: 0
It would be worth taking a look at this as well, Civony. Though basically, whoever is willing to spend the most is going to come out on top in that game everytime.

Quote
An interesting possibility would be to allow players to step in and take control of cities/territories that are attempting to rebel or secede. This could provide interesting or more challenging scenarios for experienced players, and a new entry point for new players looking to get right into the action. They'd be stepping into a situation where there are more limited resources and a pre-existing infrastructure to manage, shifting the focus from empire-building to stabilization. There would be immediate sources of conflict and opportunities for diplomacy as you either guide the territory towards independence, or attempt to secure membership in neighboring empires, or whatever else


I quite like that.
05 Oct, 2009, David Haley wrote in the 11th comment:
Votes: 0
I was also looking at Civony/Evony (again without having actually played them). Their controversial marketing aside, it seems that a lot of their mechanics come from games like Civ and resembles Travian. Still, the general genre is more or less what I'm thinking of.

Another thing I'm wondering about is how much sense it makes to control individual characters traditional-MUD-style in a tactics/RTS/4X game of this sort, but that's sort of a discussion for another thread… for now, I'm trying to focus on the higher-level game design problems of persisting any game with resource accumulation.

It sounds like the dominant response so far is the clean slate approach, where every once in a while the game world is wiped and starts over. Then there are things like maintenance and upkeep, which can help prevent empires from getting too large. Let's say for now that we're not going to wipe the slate clean from time to time: how could this work? Is this even a good idea?
05 Oct, 2009, Dean wrote in the 12th comment:
Votes: 0
Quote
Also, it might be interesting to have the player's character age and die. Once the character gets to an older age, their empire could become harder to lord over (A 100 year old guy sitting on the throne isn't very inspiring persay). Cities/territories far away from the capital might try and rebel*. Further more, you could allow the character to invest in finding an heir to their throne that they would assume control of upon death. Again, cities/territories might try to rebel in this event.

*Cities/terrirtories that successfully rebel, could become a part of a neighbouring empire. This could work in the realms of persistence and would help with power issues.


Quote
An interesting possibility would be to allow players to step in and take control of cities/territories that are attempting to rebel or secede. This could provide interesting or more challenging scenarios for experienced players, and a new entry point for new players looking to get right into the action. They'd be stepping into a situation where there are more limited resources and a pre-existing infrastructure to manage, shifting the focus from empire-building to stabilization. There would be immediate sources of conflict and opportunities for diplomacy as you either guide the territory towards independence, or attempt to secure membership in neighboring empires, or whatever else.


You could always introduce the possibility of available resources running out if you're not too careful with your management. If you're cutting down forests for lumber faster than it can regrow, you run the risk of extinguishing your lumber resources in your region. The same thing can also be applied to farming/grazing. You farm the land too much and you run the risk of ruining the soil you're trying to grow things on.

Then you move on to metal resources which could be limited, so it doesn't matter how quick you mine it, they will run out eventually. (Obviously those who mine these sorts of resources at a quicker rate will see them diminished quicker than those who approach with a slower strategy.) This is a double edged sword though, you're either going to get A) the big guys picking on the little guys for more territory anyway, B) The big guys trade with the little guys to get more resources to compete (the more ideal outcome I think) or C) A mixture of both.
05 Oct, 2009, David Haley wrote in the 13th comment:
Votes: 0
Although it's a very interesting idea, and I think there's a lot of potential there, the problem with resource extinguishing in a persistent world is that you basically have a sink but no faucet. Once resources are gone, they're gone, unless you have some kind of slow replenishment of nominally "dead" resources. It makes sense in relatively short sessions and is IMO a great solution there (many games implement resource quantity, and force you to expand, or otherwise move on to greener pastures).
Perhaps it could be workable in a persistent world if you occasionally discover new sources, although this works better for things like mines than it does for forests. :wink:

It would make for some interesting gameplay, though, to conquer a territory and then raze its resources before leaving it to its original owner, similar to what the Romans did to Carthage (where they salted the fertile land to make farming very difficult). A scorched earth type of maneuver, I suppose.
05 Oct, 2009, Dean wrote in the 14th comment:
Votes: 0
Oh shocks, I thought I had added that something like prospecting might turn up new mineral resources over time. As far as forests go, it'd just require good management on part of the player. For example, the player has two forests, A and B. Let's say he's aware that if you cut down the forest entirely then it's gone. So he sets his workers to cut down forest A, leaving forest B alone for now. He cuts through Forest A till it's only 20% then decides to shift work over to forest B, to leave forest A to naturally regrow over time.

I suppose you could also offer saplings to the players in the event they cut down all forests (at a ((dear))price) which could then be replanted. There'd still be a waiting period to allow the saplings to grow into a large tree though. It might even be worth making it possible for forests to actually expand beyond their initial area if they are left alone for long enough.
05 Oct, 2009, KaVir wrote in the 15th comment:
Votes: 0
David Haley said:
Funny that you mention it, as I had just finished reading that page when I made the OP. :wink: I haven't actually played the game, I'll admit, but the mechanics sounded interesting. I think that a whole year is kind of a long time, though.

They also have "speed servers" that typically last around three months, but those require more activity to play competitively. A year is pretty long, but many players are fairly casual, and you can do okay just logging on two or three times a day for a few minutes at a time. I think it's good research material for creating a persistant game though.

You could also check out Tribal Wars, which Travian originally copied - they're both very similar games, but Travian has an end game phase where alliances compete to build a World Wonder, and it serves very nicely as a long-term goal.

David Haley said:
KaVir said:
and the offensive armies from multiple villages cannot be combined, so having more villages doesn't necessarily mean you're stronger.

Well, that's certainly an interesting approach to preventing large empires from stomping on small ones. How do they explain this? (Do they bother?)


They don't explain themselves, or even talk to the players (in fact it's been stated by the forum moderators that the game staff don't even read posted suggestions!) but it's a frequent proposal by players that it should be possible to combine armies - and the proposal is always shot down by people who point out that it would let players create silly-sized armies.

In fact you can create silly armies, but they take months to train, and a tonne of micromanagement to look after (you have to spread them around multiple villages so that the troops don't starve). I'm not fond of the approach to be honest, but with some tweaking I think it could reduce the problem of big players wiping out little players.
05 Oct, 2009, David Haley wrote in the 16th comment:
Votes: 0
Dean: buying saplings of some sort is an interesting idea, I suppose it would let people "fix" the mistake of wiping out their forests.

KaVir: thanks for the Tribal Wars reference – I'll check that out.

KaVir said:
but with some tweaking I think it could reduce the problem of big players wiping out little players.

Could you expand on this point perhaps? What kind of tweaking did you have in mind?
05 Oct, 2009, KaVir wrote in the 17th comment:
Votes: 0
David Haley said:
Could you expand on this point perhaps? What kind of tweaking did you have in mind?

Some sort of hard limit on army sizes. I'd let people train as many troops as they liked, and even let them combine troops from different villages, but I'd place a limit on the size of an attacking force based on some sort of building (logistics office?) or leader unit. I'd also support sieges for walled settlements (giving the defender a strong advantage), rather than simply having the enemy charge in and wipe out the entire village. I think it should be easier to raid the surrounding area, but getting into a well-defended village should be more difficult.

In Travian the really big armies take months to train - and they're sacrificed in one glorious attack on the enemy World Wonder at the end. But it's really not that fun to put months of work into a single suicide attack. I'd rather see smaller armies and tactical choices, rather than simple number-crunching brute-force and massive amounts of micromanagement.
05 Oct, 2009, David Haley wrote in the 18th comment:
Votes: 0
I like the idea of limiting the size of attacking forces one way or another.One thing I was thinking of was to have a supply line mechanism of some sort, which would make it very difficult to have large armies deep within enemy lines, let alone several large armies wandering around: you would be incentivized to manage your armies carefully. The supply line would basically be that you need to bring various things to your armies (food, weapons, replacement parts, whatever), but that these supply lines would be vulnerable to enemy disruption when in enemy territory. An army could be self-sufficient for a certain (short) amount of time, but any extended campaigns would require a supply line of some form.

A sufficiently large army would require so much supply bandwidth that you'd be moving lots of goods through enemy territory, and protecting these valuable resources would cost enough in terms of troop allocation that it would be prohibitive.

(No, this isn't really meant to be an accurate reflection of real-life armies, although clearly real-world armies have always had to deal with the issue of keeping their troops supplied.)

Going back to limiting troop numbers, the RTS/4X space simulation Sins of a Solar Empire uses an interesting mechanic here. You have a limit on the number of troops (well, ships, but whatever) you can have. You can increase this limit by conducting research, however each increase incurs an upkeep cost. For example, the first increase of army size means that you incur a 9% upkeep cost on all resource accumulation. So if you used to acquire 1 unit of metal per second, you now only acquire 0.91. The upkeep raises by about 10 percentage points for each level of increasing.

This means that you really don't want to grow your forces until you have the economy to support it. Furthermore, you are very vulnerable to losing your resources when you have high upkeep. It's ok to have high upkeep if you control lots of resources, but each point of upkeep makes the marginal cost of losing a resource generator that much worse.

I like the idea of sieges: it's always bothered me how relatively easy it is in many games to take fortifications. Civ4 does a good job here IMO, where the defending square chooses the unit most suited to counter the attacker. This means that a defender can fortify their town with, say, archers, mounted units, and pikemen. If the attacker picks mounted units, the pikemen slaughter them. If the attacker picks straight infantry, the archers can be used (as they get considerable defensive bonuses, even more so when in fortifications). The result is that besieging a city is actually rather expensive, unless you have overwhelming technology or can throw very large numbers of units.

I think you're right that favoring defense helps solve this problem: new players start out with this defensive advantage, making it harder to take them out in general. Big players will have enough to do that they have no reason to bring large armies to bear on a small new town.
Furthermore, if people are incentivized against attacking well-fortified cities, this can make for other interesting tactics, such as cutting off supply to the town, or even completely orthogonal gameplay like favoring economy development, etc.



I'm still fairly curious about how to solve the space issue. It's sounding like the favored solution so far is to use several instances of a world?
05 Oct, 2009, Dean wrote in the 19th comment:
Votes: 0
Quote
It's sounding like the favored solution so far is to use several instances of a world?


It seems that way. Though I guess it depends on several factors.
- The medium; MUD, browser based etc
- Intended size of a world: 20, 100, 1000?
- Expectation on whether the initial world will fill to warrant additional instances.*

*I'll just re-iterate my earlier point that when browser based games open up new servers, quite a large percentage are not new players at all but those looking to increase their chances on becoming the big guy when it might have been hard to do so on the first server, or players who are looking to put their new found experience in practice early on in an instance/server because they have made some pretty bad mistakes on their first attempt. At least that's from my experiences with Civony and co.
05 Oct, 2009, KaVir wrote in the 20th comment:
Votes: 0
David Haley said:
One thing I was thinking of was to have a supply line mechanism of some sort, which would make it very difficult to have large armies deep within enemy lines, let alone several large armies wandering around: you would be incentivized to manage your armies carefully.

Travian automates/abstracts that sort of thing. Each unit eats a certain amount of wheat per hour (usually 1/hour for infantry, 2-4 for cavalry, etc), which is automatically subtracted from the village it belongs to - the only exception is when reinforcing another village, that village feeds the unit (although the moment you recall it it begins eating from its home village again, even while walking back home).

When scribbling down ideas I also played around with the idea of a supply wagon unit type - that way it would slow down the army, and you could assign guards to protect them, etc. But (IMO) one of the keys to Travian's success is its simplicity, and I'm wary of overcomplicating things unnecessarily.

David Haley said:
I think you're right that favoring defense helps solve this problem: new players start out with this defensive advantage, making it harder to take them out in general. Big players will have enough to do that they have no reason to bring large armies to bear on a small new town.

In Travian each unit type moves at a certain number of fields per hour - cavalry are obviously the fastest, then infantry, then siege weapons. This means that (for example) if an enemy village is 30 fields away, it'll take them 10 hours to reach you with catapults. But if they're right beside you, it'll only take them 20 minutes. As a result, it's common for the bigger players to wipe out every possible threat within several fields - simply spawning near another player is incentive enough for them to destroy you.

A common strategy in such cases is called "croplocking". You destroy the player's wheat fields, plunging them into negative wheat production - without help from another village, they're then stuck, and you can help yourself to the rest of their resources whenever you like (as they can't spend them).

I don't like the concept of croplocking, but even without it you'd still get people clearing out possible threats. This is a common source of complaints on the Travian forums, and the response is generally "delete and start again". Personally I'd rather give players the option of abandoning a damaged village - much as a village can train settlers to found a new village, so they could abandon a village to produce refugee units that could then settle somewhere else.


Dean said:
*I'll just re-iterate my earlier point that when browser based games open up new servers, quite a large percentage are not new players at all but those looking to increase their chances on becoming the big guy when it might have been hard to do so on the first server, or players who are looking to put their new found experience in practice early on in an instance/server because they have made some pretty bad mistakes on their first attempt. At least that's from my experiences with Civony and co.

It's exactly the same with Travian as well, except that many players tend to get burnt-out after a game or two, and either leave or start dualling (sharing an account with other players).
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