Here's some argumentation

1- EM
1.1- At small size, EM is making up for 50-75% of total income of a human.
1.2- At bigger size, EM gives humans an unfair way of getting income: they can use 100% of their land in turtling when playing attacker. They don't need income buildings because EM is all they need.
1.3- The only nonhuman attackers able to compete currently are Repties (because of 9/6 leets with a 15% bonus of general + heaps of Orcish bonuses, effectively making like 12/6 leets + the defensive perk making them not very tasty targets) and Ravens (by sheer cheapness of troops). All other nonhuman attackers simply can't keep up with the growth rate of Viks and Dwarves and can't turtle as well either while still receiving 800-2500 free troops each tick.

2- Market
2.1- The market favors old alliances over new alliances. In KP I haven't run a mine for more than a year now. I have stopped running yards too since our economics is at 25%. Finally I am now massively earning money by training soldiers and putting them in the market 1 tick later. I earn over 300k per tick simply by training soldiers, putting them on the market and buying money off the market (about 5 billion to go still)
2.2- The market makes a lot of incomebuildings pretty useless since all resources are in infinite amounts available in the market.
2.3- A 'real' market makes more sense too than an infinite virtual storage of goods. It would definitely make gameplay more diverse.

3- Bonuses for defender in war
3.1- Well, just check most wars. It's too easy to get slaughtered. Once you roll you can keep rolling too. The attackers need only 4-8 t/ms online randomly to kick in a kill. The defender on the other hand needs precisely 1 tribe online: the targeted one. The defender is therefore already disadvantaged. Reward the tribe that comes online quickly to save himself and let others at least rebuild fast enough to bring themselves into more safety when another tribe is targeted.
3.2- Ideally, the defending alliance should also have a sort of alliance op/spell to decrease the damage done on the target to make up the balance. Currently you can give SoD, which is more than nothing. But it's not very much. An idea could be to give elders/coelders the option to rebuild their allies tribes in the first 4 updates of a war (can be toggled off by player itself ofcourse) to ensure a logical and swift convertion to either war or turtlemode.

4- Science better for smaller alliances
4.1- Currently, science is mainly used by tribes sitting at 10k that can't use money really anymore and therefore start pumping sci so they can use it a little in their next start. This is not that bad, but the idea behind the current way of science is that it would be used by the underdog rather than by the biggies. It is however hard to think of ways in which smaller alliance can use the science more effectively while bigger ones have more trouble.
An idea could be to change the decayrate according to alliance size but this has the drawback that it seriously benefits loners: they can use sci at low costs then. A better way might be to let the decayrate depend on the average size of the tribe in an alliance.
For example:
0-2000 average: halved decayrate.
2000-4000: current decayrate
4000-6000: 1.5x decayrate
6000+: double decayrate.
Preferably on a gliding scale obviously.

Other ideas would be welcome :P

(4.1- Science is underestimated
4.1.1- I think it is. The bonuses might be minor in themselves in terms of growth and the like, but some are really very useful. Some examples:
-1hr training time on sollies can be exploited by birds to make money with training sollies. Also the food bonus makes farms better than yards, increasing income of the whole alliance.
-1hr building time makes possible a 100% dwarven alliance all running 30% labs throughout the age, keeping warding sci maxed, giving extra citz, big protection and 1 hour rebuild time (=unkillability if you are online) and lowered losses.
-1hr returntime is extremely good in combat sci for every suiciding elite-attacker. If you suicide to get a kill in, you return in 2 ticks, making your troops out for only 1 full tick if you hit at 59:00. Also the other bonuses of combat are extremely good. It's lucky that it increases exploration costs but if youre planning to just war for 3 days this science branch is almost doubling your firepower (extra firepower + shorter time interval between KTs))

5- Less extreme differences between races
5.1- Differences are getting very tough to balance. The choices between the different mages/thieves/attackers should be subtle and slight, not as extreme as currently. Currently the DE/WE + maxed combatsci + warbonus is a nicely OP feature; after a kill the thieves are back home and the tp/mp are near to fully restored.
5.2- Other somewhat OP features:
- Britt walls. Heavily OP. And Britts already have EM too! As a Britt the only thing you need to do is recasting selfspells and claiming land. More thieves and defspecs stream in automatically. The big question is what to do with your money as Britt.
- Repties. 15% bonus, wtf? HEs get only 5% and are alot suckier, aren't they? And then Orcs have some racespells furthering that bonus and making them almost impossible to ic too. And then finally Repties also have a quadruple bonuses on def in case someone starts a grab war. Oh and I forgot Venom. Maybe we should give them EM too?
- DE regeneration. It's too much! If it is this high at least give them a decreased amount of max mana rather than a ML bonus (resulting in more guilds than the average mage)
- Templars. They have too much space, forcing people into extreme defences against magic, just because some overpumped Temp with ML 35 can cast 100 DMs on his own rather than the average 30-40. Decrease their efficiency a little and allow them to run 45% homes is the first thing that comes to my mind. Eventually make their CH and/or acads have some special effect, eventually science-related (acads/CH producing rps!?)
Ofcourse the templar power is balanced a little by their inefficiency. But I feel the Templar has 1- too much power and 2- is too easy to kill. They need to move a little bit to the middle in both aspects. They're too extreme.
- Owls. They rely too much on the thief unit. One feels almost too evil when you Jura or BC those thieves away in war. Make them need more of a mix of defspec/thieves. Also, please standardise those weird bonuses: why do Owls get +20% regen and Woodies +25%? Generally thieves can get too much tp too easily anyway so the whole regeneration is quite useless in a full warmode.

Great post.

1. Give the repts EM, that will be lovely ;)

Now seriously:
Something I thought for long time- I do not agree that having much races is bad. Actually having much races is rather fun the problem is that some are better than others. The real problem here is not how to nerf the strong races but how to make the other more attractive. Maybe we should get a penalty for having an ally with 12 dwarfs? The ally should be stimulated to pick a wide selection of different races each giving an unique ally bonus. For example getting:
- 2 orks, 2 elves,2cursed,2humans, 2 birds would get you a 5% cost reduction on your military training
- 6 orks should give you 10% increased off but more expensive units.
Also make a penalty for picking the same races. For example more than 2 dwarfs in an ally will cause all dwarf units for that ally to cost 25% more.
Or maybe even screw the bonuses and just add the penalties.
With rules like this I believe we will see allies mixed up with races different than brit,de,rept,dwarf which are the obvious choice. The allies will still be able to get one good attacker in the face of a rept hai but guess who will be targeted first when a war comes?

I can’t agree more with the idea for bonuses for defending tribes in war. The idea where the elder can rebuild your tribe in the first 4 ticks is awesome but please make sure you do a rule that the tribe must have been elder for atleast 4 ticks. I don’t want to see allies that don’t vote an elder so that one tribe can come online vote himself elder and rebuild everyone…

the concept of an elder changing contrustion to more of a turtle mode is great. the problem is in better alliances wars are basically won in the first four turns. I'm just not sure how much that would help in the long run but its a great place to start. But great ideas

2. for a market, how about the maximum storage is based on the amount of markets(buildings) a tribe has.
Where for the alliance market it counts the sum of all markets of the players in the alliance.
Science could improve the possible market storage.
The only problem I have with this so far is that I would like a market system that actually favours small tribes/alliances.

Well, that idea of yours HaRRy, does definitely favour small tribes/alliances. They ca put their resources into troops which are useful. Imagine you're 15k and unable to do anything useful.. You'll make money like crazy and you can't put it in the market because it's filled.. You will slowly die by the sheer weight of the gold piling up around you until it covers you completely :P

Well, a big tribe should just get enough markets ;-)
Of course in war mode... yeah you need to watch out some. But then maybe big attackers that can now assist in maging will have to keep markets.

It does really add some complexity and need for team play(huge tribe fills the market but small tribes can't sell.

Or maybe to make it a bit less problematic: Allow overstocking. Overstocked goods decay some AND can be stolen by other tribes.
It does not affect tribes personal credits. Just the amount of goods on the market.

Also, that last part can be a separated idea. Have max on the market with overstocking. It can be by markets or landtotal or fame or just a fixed number per tribe/alliance.

Gold/wood and sols dont decay as fast as food would... although that depends on which food was grown and how old the sols would be

and can an undead soldier die of decay/old age?

these ideas are interesting but they do tend to be hard for space inefficient tribes like MH

I remember when basics used to eat the food on the market. Does that still happen?

For each soldier
2 food (need to feed them)
0.2 logs (they have to be kept somewhere)
1 credit (upkeep)
are used (decayed) each tick.

And if there's not enough resources to keep them, they abandon the market

I disagree. I think some races need nerfing. Look at how easy it is to makekills nowadays, even against fully turtled tribes. Sure, make races more attractive by adding cool special abilities, but I think some nerfing is in order.

On another note, does anyone know the origin of the word nerf? It seems a bit odd...

“On another note, does anyone know the origin of the word nerf? It seems a bit odd...”

nerd fix = nerf

As in, “hey, that is imba, can you give it a nerd fix”?

Also known as fixing something by those who “know better”.

to nerf: to water down, dumb down or especially weaken, particularly in the context of weapons in video games. (A term derived from the foam brand of toys, which are generally made safe for play. The term compares the subject to foam.)

If a certain race is giving negative bonuses to its ally you think that is not nerfing enough ? :)

For further discussions on this subject, see also:

http://aatw-live.rob-franken.nl/forums/game/373090/dev-game-concept-fix-by-joe/0-0