In its most basic sense, strategus is like singleplayer, just in multiplayer.
If you have ever played singleplayer and traveled across calradia, you should already have a clue on what it is now...
Just like SP, strategus was divided in 2 components: I'll call them Browser component and Battle component
Browser component: (Map overview in SP)
When you are playing SP, you walk around a map of calradia. This map is in SP full of NPC parties, cities and villages. In strategus, things are a little different.
The cities and the villages are still there, but there are no longer NPC parties. Instead, all players that chose to join strategus also makes their own party. This party is then affiliated with this character; the troops and the gold belonging to this party belongs to the character. (will explain troops and gold soon)
The "map" is actually a browser showing calradia. As a party in strategus, you have a couple of acitve and a couple of passive actions. Your active actions (Actions you chose yourself):
Move your party
Attack other players
Enter villages, castles and cities
Join factions
As passive actions, you also:
Scout other players equipment, gold and troops
Scout villages nearby's equipment, gold and troops
If we, for example, take the first action (moving you party), you click the option on the website, and click on a destination. Now, your party will start to move towards the destination, ignoring all obstacles and players (This early strategus was quite buggy). travelling across the whole map took something like 30 hours, so movement was rather slow. You would not be able to see you've moved after some time.
Lets move on to troops, gold and fiefs.
Fiefs are the various villages, cities and castles on the map. Every fief would passively grow both gold and population.
Troops in the game was gathered by recruiting in villages, castles or cities, or by converting population into troops. To recruit in a fief, you would first have to enter it. When entering it, you also agreed to pay the taxes laid upon you by the fiefs lord. After entering, you then chose to recruit troops for no further costs. (However the taxes might sometimes be quite high)
The best way to accumulate troops was by owning a village and convert the population.
Gold was accumulated by:
Playing cRPG (The little gold you gained there was also transferred to strategus)
Working in a fief (This is another option you have to do in a fief, apart from recruiting)
Transact gold from fiefs (Fiefs passively accumulated gold and lords could then use this gold)
So, as you can see, strategus progressed in many ways like a simplified singleplayer, just way slower.
Lets start talking about BATTLES:
So, when you've worked and recruited in a village and grinded in cRPG, you would then soon be ready for battle. You just need one more thing:
Equipment!
Apart from paying upkeep to your troops, this is what you use gold for. For the same price of 1 item in cRPG, you could buy 100 of those items in strategus. To buy equipment, you opened a new page to shop for weapons to your soldiers. Choosing equipment was a big part of strategus. I've uploaded our old equipment guide in the post, go take a look. (EDIT: Didn't work D
Now you were finally ready for battle!
When you chose to attack another player, you would book the strategus server (EU_3) in 24 hours. This time is then used to the final preparations for the battle. You should now see your strategus battle in the front of the character page.
You would then have 24h to prepare a roster for the battle, as well as buying any equipment you've missed. You see, not everyone is allowed to join a battle in strategus. To join the battle, you would have to apply for it on the c-RPG website. When you applied, the party's character would then chose who could join and who could not, for a certain pay. (High ranked players of the same faction could do it as well)
Example: My usual application for non-fallen and non-HRE battles:
Pay: 200 gold
Comment: 140/110 1h and polearm hybrid. Can also do cavalry.
As you can see, its nothing but a small comment and that request for pay. Furthermore, the people who could hire the player (Called mercenaries usually) could also see my lvl.
The characters of both parties then carefully chose their mercenaries to fight in their battles.
24 hours later, the battle would then commence. EU_3 would switch from Strategus_duel to Strategus_battle gamemode. All players were then assigned to teams according to the roster on the website. IE: You would get automatically moved into the party that hired you. If you aren't hired, you stay in spectator.
Then, the battle would commence! The gamemode was then TDM, and your party would fight using:
The players you've hired.
The equipment you've bought.
And the amount of troops you have.
Troops are then "tickets" for the TDM. IE: If you had 200 troops, your team could spawn a total of 200 times.
Battle would then begin, and when one team lost all its tropps/tickets and all of its remaining players, they would be defeated.
Thats the basic mechanics of strategus. Can't write anymore now.
