Wow. Excellent thought. Do not see any problem on merging with my approach leaving a small headache to all players who opt for merging.
Use-case: (referring two worlds as cities 'A' and 'C')
'A' is my big city and 'C' is smaller city which needs to merge with 'A'.
Problems and Solutions:
1) Multiple cities merging conflicts:
Solution:
-Wipe out all the 'C' city buildings and add in the inventory of 'A'.
-Some buildings cannot be added to inventory (goods, army building,roads etc), so those will be deleted automatically (painful) without any gain on coins/supplies.
2) Guild members and neighbor share of FPS:
Solution:
When GB gets deleted what happens same rule follows here.
Merging player cannot get benefit of city 'C' great buildings and City 'A' do not collect those prints from City 'C' automatically (Merging player: feeling sad).
3) Age and Era conflicts of special events Building, Units and Goods:
Solution:
There are three possibilities only,
a) City 'A' is higher and City 'C' is lower age.
Able to add the events buildings, goods and units from city 'C' to city 'A' with assumption of point 1) taken place with given use-case.
b) City 'A' is lower and City 'C' is higher age.
Very weird scenario but can happen and by following the assumption of point 1), BUGs of city 'C' can be visible to the merging player in city 'A', but other than goods, buildings and units can be used only when reaching that age since merging player current location city 'A' takes precedence even-though it is lower. (merging player: shocked)
c) City 'A' and City 'C' is same age.
- No changes. everything fits properly after merging.
4) FPS, Coins, Medals, Supplies and Diamonds:
Solution: When merging, in which city has more value that will be overwritten.
So,
If city 'A' has 5000 diamonds and city 'C' has 450 diamonds, merging player can have only 5000 diamonds, cannot have 5450 diamonds after merging.
same applicable for coins, fps etc.
If city 'A' has 300 diamonds and city 'C' has 4000 diamonds, merging player can have 4000 diamonds only. (merging player: hurray, finally one decent benefit)
5) Stats, Friends-Tavern, Cultural Settlements:
Solution:
Ranking, Achievements and other forms of records from city 'C' will be wiped out. Only, City 'A' current progress will be considered. Hence, City 'C' will be suspended forever after merging. Cannot create or seen again that player.
What if Inno does the merging without players choice?
every players information is lost or overwritten on the merging world city.
Is it possible for Inno to do it?
Still Inno can do it when there are no active players in a world more than a month, but why. Is there any profit in doing it other than getting trouble.
Today had some free time, hence simply attempted to give long answer. sorry to make you all read and getting tired of my comments.