Harden up bro. There are us hard-types willing to play / contribute with high ping - look at dutchy and his engineering crew. Or is it all about K/D and your fragile ego can't handle the whooping you'll get with a high ping?
60 players isn't enough to warrant a whole strat map I don't think.
In my opinion if Aussie's want to get involved in Strat -- get involved. Make diplomatic relations so you have enough low-ping mercs for any Castles / Fiefs you own, just like everyone else.
If you all want to be part of separate (Aussie) clans, fine, have your clans, and just combine them into a single Aussie strat force (faction) -- Look at FCC and Central Confederacy sharing resources across multiple clans (within each faction, not between them, lol).
I don't have the numbers for active oceanic players, but I do remember when strat came out, a lot of us got on board, even with 250-350 ping, there was a good contingent playing every day. I was organising for a group of 25 or so at one point and we were just one of several quasi-clans trying to get an advantage in c-rpg by working the strat system, which was very rewarding at the time.
We used to have a laugh playing with an all 300 ping team against totally unprepared bands of newbies or just earning our keep fighting for wealthy EU clans who payed by the kill. The incentive eventually fell through though, with the upkeep patch. It was easy enough to get whatever we wanted in c-rpg that playing on unplayable servers lost its charm. The fun of strategus, capturing our own castles and so on was never really an option for us, because of the lack of server support.
The oceanic community is practically dead now, though a new server is getting some players, it's a bunch of veterans rather than the constant turnover that we used to get. I've noticed overseas servers also have far fewer players these days, so maybe it does seem more significant to have killed off this community with patches biased against small populations and no strategus server, or official server of any kind, when once upon a time there was a lot of interest. Really, I doubt it concerns the devs much and it's a free mod, but if it does, I hope they can see where they screwed up and work on not making that kind of mistake in the future.
Edit: On compatibility with Asia: we can play goofy but not constantly rubberbanding matches with Japanese and Korean players, with pings from 120-180 usually, (in fact I believe there are some JP players who spend all their time on AU servers) but with China, ping is around 200 and very unstable, while the ping with America is a bit higher, but not nearly as unstable.
