Civ is just a game, but it is weighed against the fact it is supposed to be an MMO. Still, most MMOs have fun gameplay that allow for many types of players to participate without giving all of the metas away to subsets of players - knocking over sandcastles is particularly unique to civ and EVE, but even in EVE it's nearly impossible for a single aspect of gameplay (pearling and holding pearls, or 'hard power') to dominate and override nearly every other aspect of gameplay across the entire map.

We should want to balance civ's mechanics around things that make the game fun for players while also encouraging basically community building and emergent group interactions without overly favoring people who are accomplished butterfly clickers or who have 20x more spare time than most stable people. Knowing we want interesting communities and a broad group of players, the goals of our mechanics should be that 1) if resources are equal, larger groups should have hard power advantages over smaller groups and 2) that hard power-related mechanics should reward casual players as much as possible.

This has been rehashed by Dan and other admins, but pearling is fundamentally flawed, period. Players need to enforce consequences on players, but divorcing players from gameplay and restricting their response to "hopefully I'm allowed out one day either by my friends or by my friendliness" is not fun. Pearling is the best we got, though we need to find a way to better enforce consequences on small groups who are basically still able to attack much larger groups without recourse (and sometimes even imprison them!).

Until we crack the code on a better system for enforcing consequences, the gist is pearls are relatively "expensive" drains in terms of essence, and essence has gain and drain multipliers from logging in consecutively, and pearls stop draining after players are inactive for some time. Expensive is in quotes above because currently essence has no other critical use in the economy, pearls will always be the only thing they consume, and this puts admins in the fun spot of having to strike a sweet spot with pearl costs to make it "expensive but not impossible" - there will always be too much essence basically if you have a large, connected, and active server, or you will always have too little. There is no consequence from diverting your essence from running factories or powering bastions into your pearls - this would allow for sane mechanics, right? Without some type of relative costs to defenses or someone's "hard-power potential", you're basically granting power groups a divine mandate to hold anyone for "just enough" or you're making it hard for a small town to hold a group of raiders.

The other point I brought up was about streaks: it purposefully favors the 20x spare time player over the normal person. I'm sure it causes a rush of dopamine in some freaks brain to get that max streak every day, but it's a mechanic that introduces complexity for players from trying to hold pearls, makes balances decisions necessarily more difficult to judge because it assumes a vast majority won't be active but if that were to ever change for whatever reason, the balance and meta might be shifted drastically and it'd be really hard for even large groups to hold scrubs.

So for pearled players, there's a fun prisoners dilemma almost that if not everyone in the group is willing to login everyday to drain essence, then there's not much point to login since gameplay has already been restricted. That's an awful mechanic, but it's required by prisonpearl - however, it's one we can soften up by not favoring people who login everyday so strongly. We want to give casual players as much hard power advantages as possible since power players will always have massive soft power advantages by nature - and we should design mechanics around a hypothetical "casual" player. The hypothetical player I imagine is /u/WingZero's wife who can only login once a week because of a busy schedule, but who can play for a few hours at a time. She also becomes very disinterested in the game once exiled, but logs in about as frequently as she checks the subreddit for any changes to the in-game power meta.

Logging in for 30 minutes at a time gets you essence that day, and every day for the next 9 days you will collect essence for each day which will be given to you instantly the next time you log in. After 9 days, you have to log in again for 30 minutes to gain essence - there are no streaks because we don't want to encourage freaks or the meta of buying Raspberry Pis to collect essence. However, I hate WingZero's wife, and exile her (if exile is the cheapest pearl type, we should focus around balancing it instead of other types) in my underwater vault. She now gets spawn reset and can't really do her old playstyle of bounty hunting, so she now very rarely logs in. She still checks the subreddit about once a month, but she's not connected to the game much other than an observer. Thankfully she only needs to log in for 30 minutes to activate her pearl for draining for the next 45 days. This doesn't force her to have to login to a game she doesn't find fun every day to even make a dent on players who are able to play without degradation. This balances the lack of desire to play from imprisonment with a longer relative "collection period" compared to pearl holders, it's assumed pearl holders still gain more total essence than exiles can drain, and groups of freaks have less capability of holding very large groups of casuals.

Wait, wouldn't this suck for VPN alts? Well, yes, but we can require authentication requirements like associating a 2 factor phone number with your account through Kira in order to verify that you're real. Additionally, essence would only start gaining or draining on accounts that have played on 3 or 5 days for at least 30 minutes each day. Wing has also committed to banning trench suiciders and petty griefers if there's not a very obvious reason they got pearled but just managed to get over the 45 day drain requirement.

Anyways, those were some thoughts on balance both in general and specifically pearl mechanics. Pearl/essence mechanic proposal is to allow for essence to be collected for up to a ~week without logging in, and pearls to be drained for ~1.5 months without logging in, with no weird multipliers or streaks. I'm probably not going to respond to comments.