I think the land auction price should be the average of all the players money

just had an idea, instead of being able to move off the board they move their bid down to the starting baseline before they come off the board and into the "buy" section, so if they go to a thousand when the baseline is 250, they have to walk all the way back down to 250 to come of the board. however other players retain where their maximum bid is on the board, but if their bid is less than what's on the eh board axis then they stay at the very bottom of the board just above the "buy" area, they can still move down (on the spot basically with only their bid value changing) as above but wont come off the board and into the buy area until their bid is below the baseline.

this would pretty much solve the problem I think, no speed changes and if you come down other people are able to compete again at the bid value that they went off the board.

I like that idea, my crops were eaten two times in a row then again after one round of peace, to be honest I think that's outrageous, suffice to say I came second, I think I could have won if they were at least just spaced out instead of being all in a row like that, it doesn't bother me because I came a respectable second place but I think the fact that bad events only usually happen to first place is bad, I think it should happen to all the players but 40% chance for #1, 30% for #2, 15% for #3 and 5% for #4.

since this is a serious bug I'd like to point out that people can't connect to my online games either

same problem I just got my dad to set up port forwarding (which is ridiculous that I have to do so to play this game, but that's another topic), I was talking to my friend on msn and he was saying that he couldn't join and the J key was doing nothing but he was in the lobby thing where you add players he just stayed under visitors. I think it's because the port is only allowing TCP (which I was moaning about as he was doing it telling him that the game states it needs TCP and UDP), I'll see to getting my dad to get it to do both (though on our router there didn't appear to be an option of both, but adding one exception for each is what I had in mind).

I played with a friend on the same computer like this:
http://filesmelt.com/dl/mule_2player_retarded_workaround.png

it's an extremely bad workaround and I wouldn't recommend it at all, but seriously the lack of same system multiplayer is retarded

hold on it seems nobody tried to think of a better way of doing speed based response things, so I say the response time should be generated on each client, then that response time sent to the host and compared, but it should be cut off when the player with the highest ping runs out of time, it would make the time between movement between land plots lag in accordance to the person with the lowest ping but it would be the fairest way to do it. I've only partially looked into any networking programming but I believe this is a viable method. TBH I couldn't really be bothered to read through many post on this thread but read peters and main and briefly looked over the rest and nobody else seemed to come up with anything better than what peter said.

still not fast enough, unnecessary pauses between what happens, as the above person said, pressing to skip to the end of each action would dramatically increase the speed of even the regular skipped development.

I don't see why they don't just quickly go through each screen automatically selling all the items for each player (no counting up items and raising bars with sound effects that would still just be unnecessary, immediately show the bars and numbers, deplete them to 0, again immediately, showing how much each person made from them, press a button to go to the next auction), because sometimes the AI doesn't even sell on the last round, and you gain no benefit from not selling to the store.