Hi guys,
The "no morale" setting has now been corrected. To answer a couple of questions, we do proof the settings, and these are also confirmed by a second set of eyes to ensure no mistakes have been made. In this instance, something has occurred in our system between that check taking place, and the world being opened, which has reverted some settings back to their default values. We're unsure at this point if this was merely human error, or if something has been reset in error by the system.
Morale has been set correctly, but we will leave the City Foundation time at 4 hours. This is mostly because resetting this now would give those who have already founded cities an undue advantage over others, and as has been addressed in this thread by a few people, this is mostly fairly low impact. Additionally, it could deliver some interesting results, and maybe changing city foundation time is something we might look to vary on future worlds (no promises).
Lastly, to the alliance limit, this was actually entirely due to human error. More specifically, my error. I set the alliance limit to 33, but the minimum allowed by the system is 35, and I missed the system automatically changing my entry to 35 from 33. Apologies for the confusion on this point.
Thanks again for your patience whilst this was resolved.
Richard