Hi guys. I happened to be involved in running 2 cities: one is mine and one belongs to another guy.
I can tell you for sure by comparison that the cities respond absolutely differently to the SAME approaches.
There are countless examples of irregularities that you would find out about by comparison.
When I first got involved with the second city, it was lvl 27, while my own city was lvl 65. The second one had all manufacturing buildings lvl2-3 and only light infantry barrack. To my amazement, it was much easier to develop the small city. Right now it is lvl 84 vs my main city lvl87. It has larder army, it has more frequent and larger PP payouts. As for the lvl 87, it took 4-6 months between large payouts. And I do pretty much of PP – 115 mil points
After they changed the game and started returning 30% of the potential payout prematurely. I adjusted my computation and started deducting the partial payout from my “investments”. Nothing worked. Even when the investment topped 150% of the last large payout – the new ones were miserable. Could be 66 Promachos after hitting lvl160 PP. After that, I sometimes go all-in and hit another 160 lv – with a similar result. Plarium would make sure that my partial payouts are mostly cavalry and most of all Xerexes positions are heavily skewed towards cavalry (or my phalanx vs the Xerxes phalanx), which makes it impossible to accumulate the troops to beat the top PP in less than 6 months. That is why (and because I need to produce “pieces” for my General) I would attack a lower lower position – and that is when Plarium allows a payout – much smaller than I was entitled during the several previous top PP attacks
One of the admins admitted that there is no fair rule in providing payouts and Palarium would “delay” it as long as it chooses, with no available timeframe. And boy, he was so right – maybe his honesty cost him the job. Every time I would ask the Parium staffers as to how to be able to catch up with their silent “changes”, they would hind behind the “proprietary”. In other words, in this “bank”, we are not guaranteed even that our “investment” comes back.. Last time I discussed the issue with an Admin a person called Kakos started filibustering as if he was on Palrium payroll .
The only rational explanation would be the “divine intervention” on the Plarium part- in a way the Architect from the movie “Matrix” had been re-writing programs. I can trace it to me refusing to spend even a penny, after the Plarium refused to take any responsibility for their “visual bugs” that cost me up to 4 raids for resources per day. I was persistent and vocal. That probably made me an unwanted player and subjected to harmful treatment. The point seems to be: either to force me to spend money or leave the game and then my “bad influence” on the sheep would end.