How about making Strat a bit more like native in terms of equipment?
What I mean by that is the following....
1) You buy/craft whatever gear you would like to be able to use in Strat Battles as now, but you only ever have to buy 1 of each item and then the item is unlocked for all battles your character is involved in.
2) At the point that the battle gets uploaded to the server, the total amount of gold on the character/fief gets divided by the number of tickets in the army. This becomes the base amount of gold for every ticket and people can select whatever gear they can afford out of the unlocked items.
3) In the battle you gain half the unspent gold of anybody you kill for future use. To give an example - 2 people both spend 400 out of a 500 gold allocation meaning they both have 100 gold unspent. Person 1 then kills person 2. Person 1 now gains 50 gold meaning they have 150 gold unspent, whilst person 2 respawns with 550 gold to spend. If person 1 now dies their killer will gain 75 gold and person 1 will respawn with 575 gold to spend. This system ensures total gold is always constant, whilst any money spent of equipment actually disappears. It also encourages people to actually spend their gold allocations as they will lose half of whatever they didn't spend when they die.
4) At the end of the battle all unspent gold goes to the winner as well as refunds for whatever equipment is being used by battle survivors.
5) Possible addition. You could add something whereby you can designate people to have an increased share of the base gold. This could easily be done on the roster page by assigning people a number between 0 and 4. Base gold is then calculated by adding all these number together, adding them onto the number of tickets and then dividing the total gold by this new figure instead by the number of tickets. Overall this will reduce the base gold per ticket however the final step is to times each person's base gold by 1+their assigned number. So if my assigned number is 4 I will get 5 times the base gold to spend.
