TaxesFinally, the most important change. As I said earlier, the most frequent action in strategus is transferring your stuff to someone else. Not only is this menial and boring, it is essentially handing off your ingame power so someone else can use it for you.
The goal of this proposal is to help restore some power and importance to the average strategus player and eliminate a large source of menial work.
The way to do this, in my opinion is to implement a clan tax rate. Clans would be able to set taxes on troops and gold to different levels, between 0 and 20%. At the end of each day, each clan member would automatically kick up the percent of troops and gold set by their clan tax rate to the rank above them.
So, for instance, if clan Lazer Catz had a 20% Troop tax rate, and a 10% Gold tax rate then at the end of each day all Rank 1's would send up 20% of their troops and 10% of their gold to be evenly distributed to Rank 2's. Then the Rank 2's would send up 20% of their troops and 10% of their gold to be evenly distributed to Rank 3's. And Rank 3's would send up 20% of their troops and 10% of their gold to be evenly distributed to Rank 4's (who don't kick up to anyone).I've done the calculations and what eventually happens is a balance forms, where each rank can typically support a certain amount of troops and income based on the number of players below them, and the clan tax rate. For instance, I calculated that in a 15 man clan with a 20% Troop Tax rate a Rank 1 player could support about 50 troops, a Rank 2 could support about 175, a Rank 3 could support about 450, and Rank 4 as many as is sent to him.
You can see my calculations here:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0Av7noDOFrOQbdEJoQ3NBalJLNWxtTGdoYjZfSTBwN2c&hl=en_US(Note: Gold income values were pre-strategus gold nerf, however my calculations were based on Working in cities only, not cRPG gold, so I believe these calculations are essentially still valid)So, as you can see, a large majority of the gold and troops are still being sent up to the top ranks to form armies, but the lower ranks are able to keep a certain amount of their troops and gold for themselves so they too can participate beyond just sending all their guys in. Furthermore, this system has automated "transferring in your troops" so players can focus on doing more interesting things.
Lower rank players will probably have to switch between Working and Recruiting occasionally to have a good balance of gold and troops while higher Rank players can afford to leave fiefs and patrol around or whatever as they'll have the lower ranked players feeding them gold and troops.
Inactive players who just sit in a fief recruiting will quickly run out of gold through this method and be kicked out.
--
How taxes are sent upTaxes will only be collected and distributed to you if you are within a certain range of other clan members or clan fiefs, say twice the attack range. So, for instance, if you are away from the rest of your clan off scouting or attacking an enemy you will not be sending off taxes to the rest of your clan so you don't dwindle away. On the other hand, you won't be receiving reinforcements either if you are Rank 2 or higher. So in that way, it may be wise to bring clan-mates with you on campaign so if you capture territory you can stock it with players to feed you reinforcements via tax.
One advantage of having a fief could be that your portion of the taxes will be collected at your fief if you are off on campaign or otherwise out of range.
What this also means attacking the lower rank players in a clan can have a more pronounced effect. Anything that disrupts the flow of troops and gold to the top of the pyramid can have a huge effect on a clans ability to field large armies. In this way, it may be much more important to attack and defeat lower ranked enemy players instead of just their main army. In this way, raiding and skirmishing with smaller armies gains importance and gives lower ranked players a more important role.
--
Nerfing transferringWith a clan tax rate in place transferring becomes much less important, but it still has a place in strategus. For instance, different clans will still need to transfer between them, as well as clan-less people. So how do you balance this with the clan tax rate?
Implement a transfer fee of 5,000 or 10,000 gold. What this does is makes big transactions still possible, for instance, the sale of a large number of troops from one clan to another, but makes small day-to-day transfers unprofitable so clans must rely on the clan tax rate for the majority of their transferring needs.
