I'll make a small comparison to Risk, because strategus in it's current and to my knowledge planned forms is severely inferior.
1. Risk has X amounts of areas that produce troops.
2. Risk has narrow passages that makes some regions more strategically important than others. Also when you own a Zone, no one can pass through.
3. Risk has bonuses for keeping whole areas. I.ex Australia or America. Some are easier to hold, some harder.
4. Win conditions(!)
No.1
If you look at strategus on a big scale, it is almost exactly like risk, only without point 2, 3 and 4. This makes strategus on a large scale a pure mathematics game, and rewards the faction that simply knows how to conserve troops and grow faster than the others. (Mercs have a great strategy) If you loose a fief, you can simply take another fief, pick and choose the easiest one.
If you add No2. Keeping and fortifying key castles becomes extremely important. Let's say you put a hexidecimal grid over the map. A castle or town can control all tiles adjacent to it, denying factions marked as enemies passage, or rather make movement there extremely slow for them. (24 hours to pass 1 grid space, to give warning for an incoming attack) The grid should be visible on the strategus map, and the tiles surrounding the castle should be coloured red for factions marked as enemies. Neutrals with a force up to i.ex 500 men should be able to pass.
In stead of making a complex hexidecimal map one could also simply draw lines in the middle between all cities and castles. (not villages) This would make traveltime for attackers harder to judge. (And would give "room/map-distance" value.)
Now what happens if you add no.3:
Some fiefs get's more important than others. As keeping i.ex 3 villages + a castle and a town nearby, gives a 50% bonus to troop production or money. If 2 big factions are at war, taking and holding that 1 village can severely hurt the enemy! It basically makes it much harder to keep efficient and large empires without keeping up on the defense. Not all villages and towns should belong to a country however, and some countries could be really small, perhaps 2-3 villages.
No4.
This is an extremely important part of Risk, because it gives players incentives to attack and be aggressive. They are also secret, something that can turn into interesting things like spying/reasoning/guessing goals etc. Right now in strategus there is not much happening. Some guilds are hoarding up millions of men not spending them on any epic battles. (Probably saving them for the c-rpg patch though, to help level up their members) That's just retarded.
I suggest that on week 2-3, chadz or some other game-master deals out the "cards". Giving the win-condition's to the guilds that have managed to get a town. This could be eliminate another guild, take 3 random countries, take big country A + small country B etc.
That should put peoples ass on fire. Especially when they know that the winning Guild's member get 100k gold each and 1 million XP or so..
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