Why was this card removed and not other more useless cards like flood and rotten food? The only really useful things those cards are good for are to be consumed by gris gris. Just wondering if you were trying to shift the balance from trade to pirate, not that they don't make a lot of cash raiding my trade fleets. I figure that is the cost of doing business but when the pirates can make more cash with raids than the traders can replace with voodoo cards than this will shift the balance of the game to raiders. I guess we will all just have to evolve new tactics again.

I guess its part of the switch-over to players controlling production directly, which will have far greater effect in future than the current notional 'production' which gets influenced by fertile lands.

Danik is correct. That is the plan. But we also need to consider that Fertile lands is a "broken" card; it is too powerful and there is no counter to it. Look at the picture right now: All ports have 2B resources stored as their primary resource (which is max); this is something that Fertile Lands achieved throughout the years. The initial plan was that ports would run out of resources, if a port was overused. The current situation breaks the supply and demand system that is in effect into the market.

Regarding reserves, we forecast that it will take a really long time before these resources will run out. In fact, if all continues with same pace, without a single new resource crate produced, resources will last for about 5 to 6 years. Therefore, we cannot speak of anything detrimental. Still, when the time is right, some ports resources will be wiped by natural disaster.

If we still wanted to look for strategy change, then we would only have to seek those who use the card to affect the price right before the update. Still,there are more than 6000 Fertile Land cards in user possesion so even so, the card will continue to do the same work. The only thing that will be affected in the long run, will be its price. It may also increase the price of Crystal Ball and Thieving magpie by a fraction.

I hope I analyzed the tweak in a good way for everyone.

Just a thought occurred to me, re: natural disasters ; we already have a Tidal Wave card which hits a random port and snags a ship for the caster : could this be tweaked to also damage production and/or lose stock in storage in that port, as a real Tidal Wave certainly would create much havoc?

Perhaps this would go some way to reducing the over-production and add an element of risk to using TW's, should you hit your own 'home' port with one.

That would be an interesting idea. With regard to the FL card use and the effect it has on goods traded between ports, would it be possible to buy excess tools that come to Regis from Vaasburg, for example? Then, if there are multiple goods for sale at one port, it could make it more challenging to pick "good" routes. Also, the 4 port trade route system would be much more useful as there are not many ports close enough right now to make that a viable option for maximizing profit. Might make it harder to hit trade fleets too if they are not in the same port every 2 hours. Still thinking about this.