Now that I have a bit more time:
- why are you wiping gold and items?
first, it's not really a good solution, i think we can all agree. A full wipe would be fairer. However, a full wipe is currently not possible.
Also, the reason for the wipe is not (only) the current bug. I actually planned item&gold wipe before, and now that this happened it's a perfect situation to combine it.
- so why are you wiping it!!?!!
because of a new game mechanic. The new gold income is lowered drastically (before: crpggold/20, now: crpggold/50-1). the reason is that gold should be, for now, earned in strategus, not by grinding. People kicked everyone out of their fief because they gave a rats ass about the money, they wanted the troops. making it unplayable for people without fiefs.
- why should that change?
by lowering the grind income, people have to consider how to make money within strategus. Which means working, raiding, fief visitor fee, etc. Overall, gold will be lower, which also means lower tier equipment and less troops. Troop cost will be increased too - probably heavily, whatever that means, we'll see.
- why is a full wipe not possible?
because it would take too long to see any kind of results. right now is the perfect stage to test things for the gameplay. and i cant wipe strategus any time i'm testing new values. it usually goes like this: when possible, change on the fly. when that would substantially make it unfair for certain groups, do a semi wipe. when it's broken beyond fixability, do a full wipe.
doing no wipe now would mean that those who stashed cash up to now would be really unreachable by those who would have to start getting gold now. doing a full wipe would mean it would take months to see how the values turn out. and they will probably be adapted soon again, hopefully(and probably) without the need for a semi wipe or a full wipe.
-why aren't you giving people resources to test stuff?
it's not just about the battles, those are working very good, i think. what i'm trying to tinker with now is the amount of gold(=items) and troops people can and want to bring to skirmishes. i can only test that with a semi-real world, like we have in strategus. giving or taking resources would totally influence this balance.
-why aren't you testing stuff before releasing.
the entire QA department is on vacation. on a more serious note, you cannot test strategus with a small team, and I currently don't have the time to set up a proper test world. there is only the real strategus. I know many of you think this is the worst strategus EVER. Bug ridden, unplayable, you never know what bug or exploit will screw your entire plans over. From a dev point of view, I can say this is the best round ever. Every bug found is one less in the next strategus. And damn we've fixed a lot of bugs. Lots of code was rewritten in the backend, and if it goes on like this, strategus will be (breaking)bugfree soon. And then you will understand why the current round is so important.
Some of you get annoyed by bugs, you think "wtf? another bug? learn2code noob!". But the way I see it is actually: "yay, another bug found! means one less to worry about next round!". Try thinking of it this way: there's x number of bugs in strategus. Once all are found, the game is bugfree. So every reported bug brings the game forward, not backwards. also, please, report bugs in the strategus issue forum with a descriptive title. It often happens that the entire community knows a bug apart from me, because people talk about it on TS or skype or whatever, but no one tells me, or just drops a line in irc which will get overlooked 80% of the time. If it's not in the strategus issue forum, chances are I don't know about it. Many thanks to the guys who keep reporting bugs, it's really appreciated. Special thanks to kesh here who gave many detailed reports so far, and the more detailed the report is, the faster the bug is fixed.
Long story short: if you're just here to play and can't accept setbacks, better sit out and wait for some time. There will be a real strategus up, and it will be as polished as possible. I know it's sometimes frustrating, I thank you for dealing with this - and me. I'm trying to put as much work into this game as possible, and I am not really a person with a lot of free time. For all those who are willing to sit this through - I thank you very much for your participation, I really rely on it and your continuous bug reports. They not only help, they are the columns of my work. Without it, strat would never be in a playable state. I promise I will try to keep the current strat as playable as possible for you, and the next strat as awesome as possible.