Two things change when the new season starts, and both are about where your rewards come from rather than how much you fight.
Short version: if your rewards come from normal combat across your opponents, nothing changes for you. Nothing at all.
Imagine you play football with your friends. You score 100 goals, and you feel amazing.
But all 100 goals were against one friend who stood completely still and let the ball roll in. Your other friends were running, defending, actually playing.
Are you really the best striker on the playground? Probably not. And that is what this change is about.
Starting next season, the game looks at where your gold and XP come from.
If almost everything you earn comes from one single player, then the rewards you get from that one player get smaller.
Read that last part again, because it is the important bit: only the rewards from that one player shrink. Everything you earn from everybody else stays exactly the same.
| How much of your income comes from one player | What you keep from that player |
|---|---|
| Up to half | Everything |
| Most of it | About half |
| Almost all of it | Very little |
Notice where it starts. You can get half of everything you own from one single rival and it costs you nothing. That is not an accident. That is a war, and wars are supposed to be worth it.
| Player | What they did | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Mia | Attacked nine different players this week. Her biggest opponent gave her a small part of her XP. | Keeps everything. She will never even know this system exists. |
| Ravi | Has been at war with the same rival for two weeks. It is personal. About half of all his XP this week came from that one rival. | Keeps everything. Normal wars, including long-running rivalries between the same players, are designed to remain fully rewarding within the normal range. |
| Sam | Mostly hits one neighbour and picks up the rest elsewhere. | Keeps around half from that neighbour. Everything Sam earns from his other targets is untouched. If he starts spreading his fights across more opponents, the effect will gradually decrease until he is back to keeping all of it. |
| Alex | Passes the same cities back and forth with one partner all day. Almost everything he earns comes from that partner. | Keeps very little from that partner. The amount he earned from real fights is untouched, and it is now worth more to him than the farming is. |
The system looks at your recent activity over time. If your fighting patterns change, the effect gradually fades with them. You are not permanently flagged because of past activity.
The second half of this change is about the cities themselves.
If two players keep passing the same city back and forth between them, that city will sometimes go neutral for a while.
While it is neutral:
Nothing is lost and nothing is destroyed. The city keeps its owner and its troops, and an army that arrives during that window simply marches home with every soldier intact. It just stops being a private arrangement between two people and becomes a real target that your neighbours can come and take.
An example. Bram and Sander have swapped the same city back and forth all day. At some point it goes neutral for a while. Bram cannot take it. Sander cannot take it. But Mia, who lives two islands away and has been eyeing it all week, absolutely can.
If you are in a normal war you will almost never see this. It takes a lot of passing the same city between the same two people to trigger it, and it wears off on its own.
We are not taking away anything you have already earned or restricting how you choose to play. We are adjusting how future rewards are calculated when too much progression comes from one opponent.
Right now a small number of players get almost all of their gold and XP by trading the same cities back and forth with one partner instead of fighting. That is not against the rules, and we are not calling anyone a cheater.
But it means the leaderboard slowly stops meaning anything, and that is not fair to everyone who plays properly. We would rather fix the rules than punish people.
Open a ticket. We can see exactly which opponent your income came from and exactly why, and if we got it wrong we will say so and fix it.
At the start of next season. Nothing changes before then.