B) Starting cash & materials
If you have a magic fix for these I would love to hear it. Seriously. The best I can think of, which I posted here, is some composite of A and C where you can't structure your own deals until you're a premium account. And some have said (with good cause) that they wouldn't be interested in that either.
Knolls
I have an unanswered suggestion sitting somewhere in the forums, that went into this direction, but rather addressed B.
The general idea was to give starting people "virtual" cash and materials. That is, instead of starting with real stone, real steel, and real cash, they start with a stone credit, a steel credit, etc. When they build new buildings, it's taken from these steel, and wood, and stone credits -
as opposed to "real" materials in their warehouse, which they could send to a main account-. Same when they expand.
When they want to start producing something, the production costs are taken from their cash credit (the "kapi" cost when they build & expand as well).
To get real money in, they have to be producing something, and selling it to NPCs, or the market, or contracts. It doesn't make cheating impossible, but it makes it way more tedious than send mats, reset, rinse-repeat. While your 3 point analysis is more complete, I long felt the primary root of the issue to be how much wealth you can corrupt out of its original intent of helping you start in the game (hence the tally/credit suggestion).
The obvious drawback of it is that players wouldn't have the liberty of starting directly with exotic buisness setups, such as selling their starting mats for extra cash, or using their money to buy something on the marketplace and resell it higher. It's not that they couldn't do it ever, just not at the start. Because obviously, if the starting tally allowed to buy from the marketplace, they could just buy steel there, and send it to their main account, then reset. Granted, it would be less than they currently can; but it wouldn't address the issue totaly.
It's still flexible enough to start in any product branch they like, but until their production and sales earn them "non-tally kapis", they'd have to find a healthy, self sufficient, profitable business setup, which doesn't depend on other people's contracts or on the marketplace... which is not neccesarly a bad thing either.
I realise this wouldn't address all forms of cheating. One person running two or three accounts and maintaining them could still do so. But there are other ways to address this issue (such as IP tracking, etc). Even then, it brings the limit down to whatever they can actually manage and run, and keep profitable for their main account... instead of how many hotmail addies they can create, and accounts they can reset per day, like currently.
problem could be because of the price - if you look only at price it could be consider as cheating