Turn Strategus battles into Battle mode and you will drive 99 percent of the playerbase that still has fun in the game away because Battle gameplay is probably the main reason the game has always been rather unpopular (its terrible except for niche tryhard nerds). Its just gameplay stolen from a mod like Counter-Strike that is horribly balanced for a game of this sort but lazily slapped on the engine for turkish profit.
Bravely lead a charge as infantry, get headshotted or couched, enjoy not playing for 1-2 hours. Even 5 minutes of not playing because of an early death like that in Battle I've seen cause gen 10+ players to uninstall the game and not come back, because of how unfun it is.
Every strat battle is a siege by the way. Open plains, defense camps their spawn, offense takes tons of casualties just closing the distance. I'm pretty confident most people posting here in support of perma death in Strat battles do not play Strategus and are speaking as a vocal, slim minority.
The moment I die in the first minutes of an hour+ long Strategus battle and couldn't respawn I would immediately stop putting up with the bullshit of Strategus map mechanics and diplomacy, because there is a lot of effort involved to get to what is actually fun, and changes of this nature would make it nothing but sadistic "hardcore gamer" bullshit in a slapped on lazy way that would never be worth playing for the majority of people.
The fun part of Strat battles is territory control, maneuver, getting ranged in a good spot, using cav to disrupt enemy maneuver or ranged, coordinating two flanks of an army to pincer, cav cutting down routed players after a failed charge. None of this shit exists in Battle mode because it is just blobs of heavy armor/strength builds clashing and people instantly dying, along with kiting ranged and cav being solo heroes that can avoid most danger.
These "tactics" people wishfully long for happen constantly in the Strategus battle system, the only problem is how difficult it is for offense to hold ground due to close proximity of defense spawn flags to fighting, unless there is a big gear discrepancy. This matters less for Town maps due to the sprawling nature of them, and are the perfect example of Strat gameplay working wonderfully and being a massive improvement over anything else in cRPG.
The main focus of Strategus right now should be fixing all of the horrible bugs, like walls that never come down, construction sites that don't work, catapults that don't fire, siege towers that don't go down, that kills the game more than any crying about "TDM NOOB GAMES" by a handful of tryhards. Also add battering rams, nerf pikes/longspears against ladders (or raise ladder hp) and maybe a few other things.
To make field battles more interesting you could spread out spawn flags more, so instead of defense having 1 small hill or 10 yards of flags, have the spawns stretch across the map, and have penalties happen to defense spawn rates/ticket drain or something if they don't keep most of their flags up. This would allow attackers to attack a flank and set up forward spawns and create more intense gameplay. Just add more ways to implement "territory control" to the game as that's the best part. Why I pimp out "conquest mode" so much as it would be a great fit to cRPG compared to Siege or Battle.
Basically you should focus on the strengths of Strategus battles as they are, and identify/acknowledge the weaknesses of Battle which people are trolling in here about being "great." The "fear of death" isn't fun, it means kiting, strength, armor, running away, and people quitting the game.
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