So the last couple of ages have been nothing short of a bug fest, and I believe you deserve to know why.
The pandemic ages have taken the existing systems and pushed them to their max.
Healing Turns: The previous maximum I was aware of was 4/5 HT, and that was hard to do.
This age we have players with over 150 Healing Turns.
Gold: Usually people have a few million on hand as a limit.
This age we have people with over 100M gold on hand.
Battle Points: This age we have nations setting new records of battle points.
Non Technical: The systems never expected to handle number this high, and they broke.
Technical Bit: The database was using a mixture of tinyint and smallint for the above numbers. These have all now been hotfixed mid age to handle larger numbers.
The above explains a fair few of the attack locks. But there is also more:
Pandemic Ticks. The spread of the pandemic, and the path finding for the emperor is heavy work. This means the pandemic ticks take longer to run. We ran into an issue where if you attack or move during the processing of the tick it has a chance to cause an attack lock. This was very rare in the past, but with the pandemic ticks taking a lot longer it was made more obvious.
Fixes (will not happen this age)
HTs will be limited to 5 free and 5 normal.
The limit of 5 on each is independent of the other.
If you are clever about how you claim them you can have 10 on hand.
Any you try and claim or are awarded beyond these amounts will simply disappear.
Gold will be limited to 20M. Anything you gain above this will simply disappear.
Ticks will be locked during processing. The game will block you from moving or attacking until the processing has completed. All other actions can continue.
City Locks will be reduced to 2 minutes. We hope to not have city locks any more, but things still go wrong. We may increase this if we need to later on, but we feel 2 minutes is long enough to process the largest of battles, and short enough to not disrupt players too much.