Couple things

1) Ability to cancel troops movement, building, research. Even if its limited or there is a penalty.
2) Ability to pick what resources you are plundering. Again, even if its limited but if I could tell my troops to focus on wood and they at least get some...
3) Dont know if this exists but I have a feeling it will be worth while if it doesnt... larger players have a handicap for attacking smaller players.

The White Company had 3k escrow declaring war on The Knights of Ni

joekewl wrote: 1) Ability to cancel troops movement, building, research. Even if its limited or there is a penalty. 2) Ability to pick what resources you are plundering. Again, even if its limited but if I could tell my troops to focus on wood and they at least get some... 3) Dont know if this exists but I have a feeling it will be worth while if it doesnt... larger players have a handicap for attacking smaller players.

1. Cancel Orders
Troop Movement:
I think we might allow cancellation of troop movement within (eg) 2 minutes of sending the troops out (in the case of an 'Oh My God, I just did what?!' moment).  But I'm against doing much more than that, although I can see some hope for us allowing you to recall troops from Reinforcing duties in another player's town (or allow the player being reinforced to "send foreign reinforcements home").

Beyond that (for troops) you can always research and use the Feint stratagem if that's your purpose.  But I'm against the possibility of just changing your mind on a whim with an army in motion - it's potentially got too many gameplay balance issues with it, and would make all the careful preparation of a hostile diplomatic corps working against a player kind-of pointless.

Buildings & Research:
Yes, we might add this to the list. But the penalty is likely to be 100%.  ie, we will probably permit players to just clear their queue out, but they're not going to get anything back from it (just like you don't get anything for Demolishing a building).

2. Ability to choose what resources you're plundering
Highly unlikely to happen, I'm afraid. 

We want more thieves & armies plundering out there, not less.  Letting players choose the resources they steal would reduce friction between players. 

You already have the ability to pick what kind of resources you wish to gather from the NPC squares, and also what kind of resources you wish to focus on (through your town plot development, Geomancy spells, prestige etc), and I think that's more than enough!

3. Penalty for Large Alliances attacking smaller Alliances

GM Gryphon wrote: Joe-- There is a mechanic for large alliances attacking small alliances (they have to pay much more in escrow)... Correct SC?

Um, yes. Correct.  For 4 more days only, though, then this is being removed with the Alliance changes as per the Announcements thread (and the thread at the top of this forum).

We did think about this for a bit (messenger pigeons or the like) and we also considered some spells in the Illusions school to "project" new orders out to armies.

We did also consider "forging" orders as a hostile action against an army.

We pretty much entirely rejected both as being too potentially game breaking in terms of the overall balance, but we're willing to reconsider if people can make a good case for it. 

I still haven't heard a compelling argument as to why the game should allow cancelling actions to occur, versus the huge, massive, game-quittingly-unbearable frustration of a player laying lots of intricate plans based on carefully gathered Diplomatic and Scrying information around a "known" fact such as X army is arriving at Y time at Z location only to have a "throwaway" carrier pigeon completely change the situation after 24 hours of travelling across the map, by saying "Oh, no, we're not really doing this action after all".  Convince me otherwise and we'll put it back on the list!

Regarding cancelling buildings (and unit builds) that could be a runner.  The general concept is further down the dev priority list, though, than a good 3/4s of the stuff at the top of the list which is more pressing (we reckon, anyway).