In the quest to nullify the negative affect of bots on the network, the 
This strategy has largely hindered gameplay due to the fact that legitimate players no longer know who they should target. Sure, you can send out a Rowdy scout to ping an account, but doing so costs 600 resources and takes 13 minutes to complete.
In effect, this turn of events is ironically wildly ineffective. It gives even more power to the bots because now the programmers who are sniffing custom JSON operations can still see everything that's happening while legitimate players are in the dark.
We have to assume that the
Heist
The way money is distributed is completely broken still. We need to eliminate the mechanic that rewards accounts that aren't even playing the game. This means the drug production reward needs to disappear.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: there needs to be multiple reasons to incentivize taking risks in game. Currently there are none. The smartest way to extract rewards from the pool is to simply have a bot army that dumps drugs into the heist the second they become available. There is currently no way to stop accounts from exploiting this mechanic.
Solutions:
- Eliminate drug production payout
- Increase Heist payout based on risk taken.
- Increase the reward for attacking other players.
- Enable Protection Racket
- Enable Daily Quests
Protection Racket
As it stands now there is little incentive to attack other players. If I defend my base with a few million resources worth of units and no reason to take a risk by hording any of it, no one has any logical incentive to attack me. This is a big problem that can be fixed by implementing mob boss networking.
When you wipe out an account that account is now under your "protection". A certain percentage of the defeated account's resource production would now be siphoned to the dominating account. This percentage could be negotiable.
For example, let's say I get taken out by a bigger account. Let's say the range of negotiation is capped at 50%. By default, let's say the account that attacked me expects me to pay the maximum of 50%. My account counters with an offer of 20%. At any time either party can accept the offer, or cease negotiations to resume fighting.
In the event of an accord being reached, the dominating account is now responsible for protecting the account they are siphoning resources from. Otherwise, the submissive account has no reason to pay protection money and another dominating account could easily win a battle and take over the protection service. Therefore, there would need to be a way for accounts to lend units to the other accounts in their protection network.
It would be up to the dominating account to decide if they actually wanted to defend the accounts under their protection. I imagine some kind of history would have to be visible of how good a dominating account was at actually protecting their underlings. This would give submissive players some kind of idea as if they should take the deal or not. Perhaps a 50% protection racket tax sounds unreasonable, until you realize that the dominating player has a history of reinvesting most of those resources into protecting their network.
Multi-level marketing.
Basis for Gangs.
This system could easily be the foundation of gangs. The gang leader is at the top of the pyramid, and he can offer any deal he likes as high as a 50% to a 0% protection fee tax.
Daily Quests
This mechanic is an easy way to keep players coming back to the game on a daily basis. I appreciate the way the CCG Hearthstone does them. You can have a maximum bank of 3 daily quests. You get one per day, and you can cancel one per day to get a different one. Completing the quest gives you a reward.
For example, maybe you get a daily quest to kill 3 big mama's.
The reward is 100k alcohol.
Maybe you get a quest to dominate an account.
The reward is 5 ninjas.
The possibilities are endless, so I'll stop here.
Balancing changes.
After playing the game for a bit I've noticed a few flaws.
For starters, hitmen are the worst unit in the game by far.
I've been able to tactically employ every other unit in battle,
but hitmen are only good for modifying combat order.
I almost never have any reason to use more than one in combat.
This got me to thinking that each unit should have a special ability.
Special Abilities
Hitman
If I was in charge, I'd take away the 30 attack of hitmen entirely and give them a special ability:
Assassinate: kills two units no matter what.
This would make them really bad when paired against rowdy or bouncer but really good when they get paired against big mama or mercenaries. Ten hitmen would kill 20 big mamas, but at the same time they would also only kill 20 rowdies.
This special ability also just makes logical sense because you'd expect hitmen to actually be able to kill valuable targets. With 30 attack and a 100% weapons cost, they are largely useless in their current form.
This got me thinking about special abilities for other units:
Ninja
I think the first 5 ninjas in an army should get first strike against other melee units. For example, if five ninjas (250 damage) were paired against 125 rowdies, the ninjas would strike first and kill all the rowdies with zero casualties.
Knifer
Knifers could gain trample. If they overkill their target the extra damage moves to a new target. The new target would be at the end of the combat order to avoid attacking big mamas most of the time.
Big Mama
Some kind of taking ability;
Banding (2):
The stats of two big mamas are added together, making it so the group of 2 will only die after taking 220 damage instead of each one dying after 110 damage.
Rowdies
Some kind of swarming (zerg) bonus.
Example: scatter.
Only 20 rowdies can die in one round to a single unit. This means if matched against bazooka guys or mercenaries their damage per unit would effectively be reduced to 40.
Bouncers
Theft.
Every round that bouncers live they instantly steal resources rather than having to wait for the fight to end in victory. Only activates if all enemy bouncers are dead.
For example, in a fight with 1000 bouncers vs 1000 bouncers, if 600 died on each side nothing would happen, but if all 1000 died on the defending side 160k/160k/160k would be stolen no matter if the attacker won or lost the fight. In the event of a win or extra battle rounds they would continue to steal more resources if they were available.
Bazooka Guy
No ability, his damage is enough.
Mercenary
Damage bonus on rounds where they aren't under attack.
For example, on rounds where the merc group takes 0 damage, each merc does 25 more damage (120 + 25 = 145) (same as bazooka guy).
Resource cost changes.
Speaking of Knifers, in my opinion, their resource cost of 3000/800 makes the least sense. I would flip this to 800/3000. Units costs are currently heavily favoring weapons at the moment and I think this is a problem. I also think bouncers and big mamas should lean more in favor of alcohol, and snipers should lean more in favor of weapons, simply to balance out the resource costs and because it just makes more logical sense given the context of the game and the title of the units.
Average the speed in attack groups.
It's really annoying that the speed of your attack group is set to the slowest unit. The way the battle system works promotes using every unit, so the vast majority of the time your attack is going to take 20 minutes no matter what.
Rather than this, I think the speed should just be an average of every unit sent. This way sending more fast units like ninjas and hitmen will greatly decrease the time it takes the reach the enemy.
Safe House
This is not my idea, but it is a good one. Players should be able to choose to keep units in their safe house. This would allow them to avoid combat in the event of getting attacked by overwhelming force. This functionality already exists, but defending players have to be present during the attack and send their units to an undefended account to avoid losing them all. Best to just give the functionality to everyone.
2:1 Conversions
I got this idea from playing Settlers of Catan. Players should have the option of trading one resource for another with a heavy overhead cost. Need 100,000 weapons? No problem, you can trade 200,000 alcohol to get it.
Considering it's harder to produce drugs than the other two resources it might make sense to tweek the conversion ratios accordingly.
Conclusion
The primary concern for the
Going forward from here the focus should be on increasing game strategy and creating a hierarchical power structure to promote the combat system. Let's not forget daily quests.
There's a long way to go before
I hope they'll take my considerations to heart.
Each of these implementations will help reduce the effectiveness of Sybil attack,
while giving pay to play accounts the extra power they deserve.