Restrictions for moving cities
I understand that limiting the use cases for Haypi coins affects Haypi's business model. However, Haypi has already made a very wise decision to prohibit buying population for coins. All players, regardless of whatever amount of money they can afford to spend for a game, simply have to wait until they have enough people to upgrade infrastructure or training troops. It takes time to create new people (like in real life), and no money in the world can accelerate this process. This is, in my opinion, one of the wisest rules of the game.
Moving a city as I understand it is a very useful way to revise a wrong decision regarding a city's location. As a matter of fact, one cannot influence the initial location of the main city, and there should be a way to relocate it, and it's okay that one has to spend coins to do this. One may also be not too happy with the locations for the branch cities, and of course there should be a way to change these, too. But now some players have found a way to pervert this useful feature to a means of devastating attacks. I therefore suggest that moving cities should only be allowed under some limitations:
- A player may move each of his cities only once in 24 hours. Once he has moved a city, he will have to wait at least 24 hours to move it to another location. This way, he cannot perform this kind of "hyperspace jumps" like in science fiction TV shows (moving to the target, attacking and moving back to safe havens within a few minutes). Even if it were allowed once per day, the attack strategy would simply change to "jump in at 23:59, jump out at 00:01". It is therefore crucial that there has to be a real waiting time, the date change event on the server does not provide an adequate delimitation here.
- Moving a city should not happen without any delay - it should take at least the same time it would take the slowest type of troops (siege engines) to dispatch to the destination. Actually, it would even be a bit more realistic if it also takes time to tear down the old city and build up the new one. The moved city should at least not immediately be "ready to use", it should take a reasonable amount of time (e.g. at least half an hour) before the player is allowed to commence an attack from his moved city.
Haypi's decision to prohibit buying population has turned out to be right - all players have to obey the rules of time, and there is no concept as "producing people out of nowhere" or even worse "buying slaves". Now Haypi has the chance to make another wise decision - there is no way that whole cities can be moved within the wink of an eye in real life, and there should be no way to do this in the game, either.
Of course, those high rollers will stop to spend lots of money on moving cities (they for sure will continue to buy resources and treasures and speed things up). But in the long run I expect more players to have fun in Haypi Kingdom (which is one of the declared goals of this game if I remember correctly) and maybe spend some dollars from time to time, either by buying coins directly or downloading featured apps - just to get a few resources, buy a treasure they desperately need or to speed up things a bit. On the other hand, if this kind of attack strategy is not soon disabled by the game's internal logic, the word will spread, and players with low budgets will refrain from playing Haypi Kingdom at all. Soon enough, the servers would become deserts.
Regarding the player-vs-player tournament these rules for moving a city could of course be different. If there's an iPhone or an iPad or whatever to win, players may spend as much money as they like, and they may use whatever strategy they want to.