Faster Regeneration of turns.

The turn limit is in place for very specific reasons. On the extreme side, with absolutely no turn limit, a player could just solo train every skill to 600 and every weapon to hardcap in 3 minutes simply by typing a few numbers and there would be no character advancement at all.

With a daily limit, as long as everyone is given the same amount, the exact amount is arbitrary but the goals it aims for are fairly clear.

Goal 1) Every player generates the same "work value" per day, and what you define as your goals, and how you distribute that work value towards your goals defines your character as unique.

A player who decides to dedicate themselves to the months and months long process of becoming a master in a craft is very unique, smiths and tailors provide valuable equipment needed by everyone. These characters will be individually weaker than someone who focused only on their personal stat evolution to become the strongest fighter, but they work well when combined together, now the strongest fighters in the game have the best equipment in the game too. These arbitrary limits introduce cost to the decisions, if you gained turns 4x-12x quicker, instead of taking 12 months you would take 1-3 months, and while it's not as bad as 3 minutes of typing, every player would be a master of 4-5 crafts and have maxed weapons in under a year, making every character the same.

Goal 2) Minimize required player dedication to an acceptable level per day so that players can reasonably participate and keep up.

In the previous version of the game, the average encounter length was fairly long. You would encounter 18~64 monsters at a time, and spend dozens of minutes chopping through them. It was a high fantasy world with demon armies and dragon hordes, and you were the invincible heroes. Even though that game had basically the same resource system (120 turns a day, roughly 75 steps every 10 hours), you could realistically train 24/7 just due to the sheer length of the encounters, as you were fighting you regenerated turns and moves to find even more fights. This led to a few players who had uninterrupted access to the game leaping ahead of others in progress, whether it was from not having a job or being able to play at work. This power gap frustrated those who could not or would not dedicate 10-20 hours per day to the game, and those players quit as they fell behind unable to compete.

You said it yourself that you want to train all day while at work, and if that were possible, you would just surpass all of your peers who could not, and they would likely quit. Ironically, if there were no limit, you would never catch up with the most elite players as I assure you there are players here with more playtime than you can boast, or it would encourage players to cheat-to-compete by account sharing to keep uptime on the game and we surely do not need more of that. In a similar way to mobile games that drain your wallet to climb the leaderboards, there is always a bigger whale with a bigger wallet, or with more time to waste.

In Agonia, the fights are on average much shorter as you are fighting 1-5 beasts, even with the same encounter rates, resources, and move costs. It fits with the low fantasy / pre-historic realm we're in, but it also lets you translate all of your potential "work value" into combat exp in far less than 10 hours. The daily ceiling is now much lower, and more players are reaching it. This is strictly by design as for a scenario based on PVP and teamwork, you need the population to sustain it, and you can not have extreme outliers that can shift the balance so heavily and discourage the other players.

Goal 3) Regulate Balance in the game systems

Every single part of Agonia is rooted in mathematical comparisons to the other parts. Time spent fighting in a high exp area is time not spent crafting or advancing a general skill, and time not spent mining resources, and time not spent farming special loot monsters. Since you generate fights through movement as well as exploring with turns, both resources are of course included in "time". The encounter tables, difficulty (healing investment, equipment investment, etc), exp rewards, exp requirements per level, all have their purposes and are all balanced a very specific way from the ground up, and there are many moving parts. Fiddling with any of them require you to redo all of them.

One example, when harvesting iron, a single mine can only be hit 24 times per day. It doesn't matter how many turns you generate, you can only hit it that many due to fertility. A player who went to an iron mine to harvest has mathematically sacrificed a certain amount of EXP that day just by moving to that area (through low fauna transit zones/roads), and exploring in that area, by simply not being in a better EXP area. This is fair, as the iron mining player is getting (a resource + lower exp) instead of just (higher exp + no resources). This gap would widen if you were to double the turns generated per day, as the "Higher EXP" area reward would scale better than the "Resource" area reward due to the cap on fertility. Therefore when you double one thing, you'd need to double everything basically.


In the end, 120 turns/3600 moves/24 fertility per day is what the game is designed around to provide a balanced EXP trade-off between all in game actions/resources/skills, a healthy playtime investment each day, and an opportunity to make each character somewhat unique in the foreseeable future.

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Regarding Newcomer Bonuses

Bonus 1) 30% EXP boost in combat during month 1, and 15% EXP boost in combat during month 2

This simply translates to you getting an extra half month of acceleration during your first two months playing. This can easily propel you to 350+ skill and give you very quick evolution gains on lower level secondary weapons afterwards. This is only a start, and the smallest overall boost.

Bonus 2) Equipment, Knowledge, and Support

Established players have abundant tier 3 and 4 armors to supply you with while training, which makes you suitable for going to higher level areas sooner (at lower skill), and that alone increases your EXP per day. This compounds upon bonus 1 above. Better protection means not needing as much healing, but not having to gather or craft for your own herbs and healing in the first place, and knowing where to go from the start is already a huge bonus over what players had starting out. Older players will also play the part of PVP vanguards for you until you're ready, making your training grounds safer than ours were. Spare t3+ weapons will be provided for you meaning you likely won't have to spend time mining your own iron or paying your own crafters to make them, and the established crafters on the island already mean you won't need to spend months skilling up just to have access to an item unless you want to.

Bonus 3) Training with Established Masters

You will, no matter your racial bonuses, benefit massively from training under another player in basically every general skill. In some circumstances, this is a 300% increase to your exp gained per turn, but usually around 25-33% for other skills.

Bonus 4) Extra Softcap Avoidance

Training from roughly 350 to 400 is currently under a softcap, which means it will take 4x as long. This is roughly over 2 months. A player who comes along in a year will not have to do this, as the softcap will be from 400 to 450 instead. This means they will gain the skills from 350 to 400 in 1/4th the time, saving them 1.5+ months total. Each year that goes by increases this amount. Older players who have stayed at the top of every hardcap will have invested a lot of time over the years simply to doing so.

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This is a very simple breakdown of the explicit additional catchup systems, and doesn't even begin to touch on the mechanics behind the evolution system, which has built-in newcomer catch up mechanics in it due to how stat gain/character growth slows over time. Put simply, a character does not gain the same amount of comparable "power advancement" in year 2 as they did in year 1. Even with no newcomer bonuses, a 700 day old character is not twice as strong as a 350 day old character, not even close.

As time goes on, each bonus gets better and better. The Newcomer EXP% boost will be increased, the masters will be better or more abundant, there will be even better equipment and more of it, there will be less time spent in softcap compared to older players, older players will be able to advance their characters less and less, and older players will have died more losing more skill/time overall. All added together these bonuses provide 6~8+ months or more of a gap closer, and the stats in-game prove that they are working at about that rate for the things it affects.

I believe it's impossible to be unfair to older players with these systems, and I would like to see some of these bonuses boosted sooner than they have been. Fresh blood and a healthy population of players is what makes this game function, the catch up mechanics and the limited investment needed to keep up are two important parts of maintaining and growing that population in my eyes. There is nothing more unfair to an older player than to allow the game world to die on them.