izigame.me

Dear Devs,
thank you for the 80 hours of fun i got out of the game, before you ruined it.
I sincerely loved the many ways in which you could play this game. My personal favorite was a heavily import/export oriented playstyle. Something truly unique to this game, which other similar games never really got right, or even offered. I would produce lucrative goods to export and import most of the needs of my citizen. Starting out with Trading Ports and Trading Posts early game, then transitioning more and more to Trading Companies lategame, since they let you automatize the process. Pretty much the only advantage of having Trading Companies is to not type the name of the good and the quantity you wish to buy/sell into the Port/Post every single time you want to trade. When we are talking about volumes of goods in the high tens of thousands, or beyond the hundreds of thousands, this becomes unfeasible to do, even if you were to build like 50 Trading Ports. That's just not fun gameplay. But thankfully the devs thougt about that, hence why they introduced the Trading Company. Or so i thought. Since now they decided to reduce the frequency at which the Trading Company trades to ONCE PER YEAR. Say what? That's just way to inconsistant. They are a bit cheaper in upkeep now, so in theory you could just build several times more of them, build tons of storage, and import the goods for the entire next year in advance.. but that's highly unrealistic. Not just because this would require a ridiculous amount of upfront cost, or because the population may grow drastically during that year, depending on which stage of the game you are in.. no it also basically means you are out for the slighest miscalculation. Trading Companies simply cancel the trade, if you are so much as 1 gold in the negative. They dont have any issue with putting you into negative gold tho.. even by hundreds of thousands of gold. Being slightly negative right before a trade can happen easily. Didnt pay attention to a tax cycle? Thought you had more gold? That means you skip a trading cycle, since it will auto-cancel all of it (it wont even export to make you money). This wasnt that bad when trading happened more frequently. You probably had some buffer for food, medicine, tools, and all the other stuff anyways. Skipping one trade now tho? That's 2 years between your last and next trade. There is just no way your civilization makes it through that. You probably wont lose, but it's a highly frustrating experience. And building ressource buffers for 2 years worth of ressources is just silly, if not practically impossible.
The thing is, technically you can still play exactly like i did before. It would just involve building and manaully managing tons of Trading Ports. That is, typing douzens of import/export goods and their quantities manually into douzens of individual buildings every few minutes. That's not fun. Wasnt that the entire purpose of the Trading Company? I'm not going to manually import and export half a million goods a year by micro-managing douzens of Trading Ports, each being able to only carry a couple hundred items. That's ridiculous. Certainly not fun.
It pains me to lose such a great game. It was one of the very few games we kept coming back to, just to play one more round, even with no patches happening inbetween. That's rare.