I agree both that this game is awesome and that it needs more! I'd love to be able to keep building the town back up. I also agree with people who were saying that at some point the money comes too easily. Maybe nerf rubies/gold a bit?
Yeah, not gonna lie... waiting until people post the answers and coming back for the points. The original was a cool game, but this is just way too tedious to deal with.
You know, as much as I was complaining about the energy thing a while back, I find my self coming back to this game day after day. It's definitely to be approached as a campaign rather than a sit-down-and-play-for-four-hours-then-never-play-again kind of thing.
Maybe another solution to th energy issue is that if you pay money you're adding to the overall cap every time you do. So you get a refill and your overall cap goes up by 100 points or something? Because otherwise it's paying a buck to get another 10 minutes to play the game (if you're lucky). That works out to about $6/hour, meaning for 4 hours of this game could pay for an entire month's worth of playing an MMORPG.
I will say, however, that energy should probably recharge faster. They should focus on making gelt off the cards, not off how often people can play the game. Because otherwise slow down their playing and don't get as hooked. Just like, from a business perspective, the "recharge" seems counterproductive. You want to create addicts if you're a crack dealer, and slowing them down doesn't tend to do that for you. ;)
Complaining about having to pay for stuff in this game seems a lot like complaining about buying Magic cards. If the game is good enough that you'd even consider it, that's a good sign for the developers.