Strategus's major flaws lie in the spawn flags and the defective siege gear. In another thread discussing how spawns and respawns are addressed, several people brought up good points. This idea just came to mind, so I'm just hoping for discussion, rather than a Yes or No.
We play strat battles for large-scale battles that consist of utilizing tactics, choke points, and various equipment loadouts to appropriately handle opponents in multiple settings. Right now, castles are the point of interest, and struggles lie around buggy siege equipment, towers that don't break, walls that never fall, ladders that need to be placed in silly ways to avoid being tickled apart by long spears, and capping spawn flags with the same action button that picks up the dozens of littered weapons that decorate the numerous bodies on the floor.
To repost what I said elsewhere,
Ladders and siege equipment are just too poorly implemented to be the cornerstone of the entire campaign. Village fights were always a blast, but aren't as key anymore. We don't play this game to organize a dozen people who can 'drop good ladders'. Its not a negligible detail that we should just simply deal with - its a glaringly terrible system. Siege equipment has been removed from battle, its been removed from siege: all for good reason too.
I appreciate both Torben's suggestion and Smoothrich's response, because they both have merit. Respawns are goofy. They're necessary, since to make it realistic, you'd literally need 5000 players all with only 1 life. We have 50-200, and thousands of tickets to blow through, and respawns are a somewhat decent way to simulate being pushed back into certain areas, and choking off other areas.
I think they should be more like siege server sieges. I don't think its "dumbing it down" at all. Though it'd be a much more visceral experience, we give far too much credit to the defective siege system that's in place now. If gen 10+ players are turned off by it, imagine how alienated new players must feel.
Furthermore, I had in mind a potential change to spawn flags. Zones of control, or control points rather than spawn flags might be an effective means to fight over a castle. I'd hate to see it simplified to taking point A, B, and C, but there could be a number of them, up to 5 or 6 even, for each of the important walls, the front, middle, and rear courtyard, and each one takes down all the flags as one cluster. Siege would be a better game mode if all flags had to be taken down instead of just the one in the center of a tower or courtyard, and we wouldn't see the same 10 athletics character make a break and put up half the flags, completely undoing the past 40 minute struggle. You also won't see the same potential abuse where you can't capture a flag because someone is hiding on the upper floor, or in unreachable places.
Again, just a suggestion. The amount of hours of work to make these changes would be outrageous. I don't want my suggestion to come true, I want someone with a better idea to step forward and put us in the right direction; one that leans toward making village fights more favorable and castle sieges more fun and interesting, because right now open field battles have been the most dynamic, which is the least this game has to offer.
