New Strat reset?

[njames89]

castle sieges almost an exercise in futility unless you want to dispense of about 3 times the amount of troops garrisoned.

I don't really see this as a problem as its realistic to need a much larger force to attack a garrisoned castle. I however agree that a strategus reset sometime in the near future could be interesting/.

[CrazyCracka420]

Yeah they took out neutral fiefs so they didn't have to deal with all the "problems" of people stacking troops in the fiefs (giving the opposite effect intended, which made it so the AI tried to buy gear for the 20,000 troops and ended up with peasant gear for 20,000 troops, rather than having expensive gear for 2500 troops).  Also the problems around getting people to signup for AI battles was numerous.

**I personally would like to see a return to neutral fiefs.

**Also some system (as discussed here and other threads) where you can't have an unlimited amount of troops/population in a fief.  The surrounding villages should be needed to provide food to the castle/cities (or the castles/cities would have to spend PP on producing food rather than on trade goods or equipment). 

**If you didn't (or hell even if you did) go with the food system, you should also make it so that you can attack any fief if you have over 1,000 (or 1,200, or 1,500) troops, negating the 1/3rd rule.  So that way if someone has 30,000 troops in a fief, you don't need to attack with 10,000 (which would be a waste of 8200-8500 troops, since you can't use up more than 1500 or so in a battle). 

**Fixing wooden walls so catapults can destroy them. 

These are all common sense most people can agree on.  One that is going to have split opinions, would be to bring back one map for EU and NA, and do it like strat 2 or 3 (either defenders/fiefs get to choose where battles are fought, or have a line going through Calradia determining where EU/NA split is).  I personally would go for the artificial NA/EU split.  I think having 2 maps is way too many fiefs for the amount of people playing strat.

Would be cool if we got a 2 week notice before strat ended, but I don't think they've ever done this, and I don't anticipate they will start any time soon.  That being said, I don't think we'll see another iteration of strat.

[Harald]

A reset will most likely come, but we don't have a date yet. First we need to finish the site integration/refactoring old code, then if there is time we can think about adding new features/improving existing mechanics. New stuff would most likely be tested on current data before doing the reset.

[njames89]

**If you didn't (or hell even if you did) go with the food system, you should also make it so that you can attack any fief if you have over 1,000 (or 1,200, or 1,500) troops, negating the 1/3rd rule.  So that way if someone has 30,000 troops in a fief, you don't need to attack with 10,000 (which would be a waste of 8200-8500 troops, since you can't use up more than 1500 or so in a battle). 

**Fixing wooden walls so catapults can destroy them. 

Agree +1

A reset will most likely come, but we don't have a date yet. First we need to finish the site integration/refactoring old code, then if there is time we can think about adding new features/improving existing mechanics. New stuff would most likely be tested on current data before doing the reset.

Thanks for the info Harald great to hear!

[Turboflex]

They probably took out the neutral fiefs because it was getting abused heavily with signing up for defenders or dumping stuff into the fief to give them less armor/weapons.

Yes it was a mess, lots of shenanagins.

Asides from what you mention there was also situations when defenders had very weak or incomplete merc rosters because of sign up abuse and no-shows, or just players in general not wanting to sign up against powerful factions because it would be seen as a hostile act, so they got easy flag captures.

The voting system is much better.

[Keshian]

Yeah they took out neutral fiefs so they didn't have to deal with all the "problems" of people stacking troops in the fiefs (giving the opposite effect intended, which made it so the AI tried to buy gear for the 20,000 troops and ended up with peasant gear for 20,000 troops, rather than having expensive gear for 2500 troops).  Also the problems around getting people to signup for AI battles was numerous.

Simple solution - don't allow transfers to fiefs without "allow incoming transfers" by the fief owner and with neutral fiefs that means not allowed at all.  Also, rosters n ai fiefs were ine, actually allowed people that normally wouldn't get hired to actually have a chance to try out strategus battle and it worked really well where in strat 1 the AI would hire 75 player roster against 60 and even with no shows it still had about 50ish - I think something similar with the current 50 man rosters - AIs get up to 70 or 75. 

The issue with pissing off a faction wasn't that pronounced - many people just wanted xp anyway - but if you are really concerned there was talk before about making mercs hired on roster have their names removed so merc 1 etc. - can set this up only for neutral fiefs. 

Overall, neutral fief fights were actually some of the best fights strategus had and put a significant damper on over-development by factions since villages only did so much and it took a lot ot get a castle.

[MrPink44]

**I personally would like to see a return to neutral fiefs.

**Also some system (as discussed here and other threads) where you can't have an unlimited amount of troops/population in a fief.  The surrounding villages should be needed to provide food to the castle/cities (or the castles/cities would have to spend PP on producing food rather than on trade goods or equipment). 

**If you didn't (or hell even if you did) go with the food system, you should also make it so that you can attack any fief if you have over 1,000 (or 1,200, or 1,500) troops, negating the 1/3rd rule.  So that way if someone has 30,000 troops in a fief, you don't need to attack with 10,000 (which would be a waste of 8200-8500 troops, since you can't use up more than 1500 or so in a battle). 

**Fixing wooden walls so catapults can destroy them. 

These are all common sense most people can agree on.  One that is going to have split opinions, would be to bring back one map for EU and NA, and do it like strat 2 or 3 (either defenders/fiefs get to choose where battles are fought, or have a line going through Calradia determining where EU/NA split is).  I personally would go for the artificial NA/EU split.  I think having 2 maps is way too many fiefs for the amount of people playing strat.

Would be cool if we got a 2 week notice before strat ended, but I don't think they've ever done this, and I don't anticipate they will start any time soon.  That being said, I don't think we'll see another iteration of strat.

Thanks for the info Harald! Always nice to hear from the powers that be on these types of things. So I think I'll edit the OP with some of the things Huesby mentioned above. Not really a hard and fast list of wants but more of a wishlist/idea board.

As far as neutral fiefs were concerned I think we've pretty much covered the bases there there was a lot of potential for slowed growth but yeah the way the AI handled things was a bit screwy. It's an idea that has some grounding and doesn't really need expanding on any further than it was cool, but there were problems that need to be addressed before returning to it.

I like the idea of villages contributing more to the whole fief structure rather than being useless throw-away's that don't really mean much. I think Sandersson and I actually had the same conversation about the villages actually producing the required resources to sustain a military. Towns should really be the cultural production centers with a minor focus on the ability to train and equip troops where as castles had almost no food and trade goods production and were more of a focus of garrisoning and training troops. So maybe a troop recruitment bonus while stationed in a castle as well as moving around the map. I don't care for the whole we have a castle, just turtle it out mentality that has become popular in late strat. I prefer the idea of people having to move around and conduct trade/recruit troops (as if in actual medieval times where recruitment was a campaign in itself) but there is so much crap on the strat map it's a mess. Just delete the inactive players please so our map isn't littered with white useless dots.

As far as starting a new iteration perhaps the castles and towns can start as neutral but leave the villages open for factions to at least have a starting point. I enjoyed the start of this strat where you could at least start with a home rather than just being a ronin clan. But try to limit it to just 1 maybe 2 villages per clan (probably a pain in the ass to achieve but there was a lot of chaos at the start of last strat with people just being randomly assigned fiefs. Also the clan system in strat is a bit convoluted so my question is, is there a way to associate it with the ladder and or streamline it? '

Wow that post ran a bit longer than I wanted but just some points of interest for me personally.