My personal opinion is that this was a terrible/ awesome update.. i agree with some of the thing's you've included, such as the script which is the equivalent to a mass recruitment script.
what im not a fan of is barb farming.. i may aswell go back to playing Medieval total war if this game is just going to be people with pp blitzkrieging, people without, this has simply set another roadblock in between veteran and new player's.
what's next? an auto snipe manager which snipe's trains for you, come on tw bring back the value of the "player" not the "premium"
When I started W13, then I farmed the barbs in my whole continent. I avoided attention by sending a minimum amount of troops without losses to different villages, they all came back with full resources. A lot can be done, but it takes time to do it. With more time, we can do much more and raise activity levels. You don't just need to farm barbs, you can put focus on different issues as well. I were playing W5 as well, so I quit W13 in the long run due to the lack of time.
Most players are ordinary members. However, when you step up in the chain and takes responsibilities, then we'll notice that there's less time available for yourself. I'm sure that the farming manager will save a lot of time for players who don't have all the time that mainly younger ones do. Farming barbs isn't dumb while you're growing up, at one stage when you fight enemies, you would want to farm them. Not to mention, anyone who lasted a long time in a former world, would easily do well in a new one, unless there's someone better around the corner. So new players will rarely survive, if they lose on their first world, then they'll likely not be back. The farm manager will surely help them. It'll be easy to learn the game, but hard to master.
When you get large, then farming wont be attractive, or it would be rare for it to be. as in older worlds, we're super stacked and 500-1000 nukes are a drop in the sea, unless you're right next to the target.
I told the other guy that he could either spend money and save time, or spend time and in turn make less money. Finding one who both got the time and money is rare. And yes, the account manager will make a large difference, just as premium from none premium do. I had one member who got up to either 3 or 6 millions without premium, I couldn't handle it after 600k. So we all got different limits, now we get a choice of spending time or money.
And _Grimlock_
I got no idea how the research manager would work, as I only play in an old world. I would only want a template with all the researches being done as buildings are upgraded or hitting one button.
But it could likely be useful, if it were just to use a template, specially now since many of us will pay others to take small pointers in our backs to grow defensive villages.
Typhon will surely take note of it as he's keeping an eye here it seems. He or someone else will likely update us about what kind of improvements they'll look over after they discussed it, it'll likely take a few days. Well, hopefully not a month
And yes, it's all an overkill for small players. A time limit wont do much, as every would got a different speed and some gets stuck in a stalemate without barely any gains on any side for a long period. Either the administration upgrade the account manager when they feel it's ready, possible in several steps. Or it becomes available per player as they grow. Of course it would be best estimated by comparing villages to points. Some might noble tons of barbs, some other max out their villages just to get their features.
Once you get past the limit, you wouldn't lose the account manager feature. It would make people race to specific levels of the account manager.
And the gameplay need to change in old worlds as well, like the recent improvement. It's a nightmare to look for nobles in large accounts, specially when you noble in several areas now and then. As such you can just check in the academy where all nobles are placed.
I have likely swapped around 40-60 owners at least, in my tribe. Most quit when they start or get occupied at University, it's often common to quit as you search for a new job after. People who got themselves works are likely to return as they're settled down, however nearly everyone who gets a new job, always gets overwhelmed and are quickly replaced or stays inactive. It could be good to point out that some quit saying "It's just the same old shit over and over again", meaning that the game just got incredible boring. If more can be done in less time, then people might not be exhausted as quickly.
And Phoenix2050. As when I lead a tribe, the updates are useful for the overall amount of members. As they make updates we need to change play style now and then, the issue we all face is that the scripts can stop working until a new ones are made a week or two after. And they got to update the code for all the worlds, since it's a nightmare to have 57+ different codes. To implement new and good features, better code will always be needed.
There's always a few hardcore players who makes it without the upgrades. But that's only a handful, as a hardcore player, would you like when players on both sides just delete or seeing that everyone are just inactive? In the end you'll only see the hardcore players and inactives left, and they would delete by being bored. So updates are are always needed as it's a nightmare to handle tons of different source codes. And nothing is worse than editing shit code, I don't believe that Innogames were made of highly skilled programmers with a perfect structure, specially not when they likely didn't aim to get the best programmers from their start.
More can likely be done after the updates, with better code, it'll be easier to implement new features. As said, nothing is worse than shit code where you always wonder what the one before really tried to do. Not to mention, I'm sure that you use a lot of updates which came after the start. Not all updates are as horrible like the context menu, it's so slow that I don't use it myself. It just gets in my way.
And remember, that skilled players, rarely top ranked ones, Are hard to take down and you rarely start with them. As the world grows, you fight in a tribe. The tribes around always look for easy targets, for weak spots. Skilled players are brought down with the rest of the tribe as support will be limited once an enemy break through the front-lines. If less of these flaws exist, then it would improve your situation as well.
And the Account manager covers far from everything. There's much more possible improvement which most of us keep for ourselves, since we get around it.
