Suggestions for new features in strategus

[Ozin]

I like all the new changes to strategus a lot. They should greatly help to make strategus more.. strategic. But I still think there is room for improvement, so I'm making this thread to share some of my thoughts and ideas for some features that might make strategus better and more fun.

Waypoints
First off, with the implementation of the geo-map in strat, I think a waypoint system for movement would help greatly. Something similar to what a lot of RTS games have for queuing movement orders. It would give the players the possibility of setting crude movement paths for movement orders to make traveling easier. No more need to log in every time you want to make a change to the direction your character is traveling. I think it would also help to make the logistics of strategus more realistic, with less players heading over mountains than around because they can't be bothered to log in to change the move direction all the time.

Doesn't need to be anything fancy, just letting players make a path of 3-5 lines would help a lot.

Combining forces and taking sides in a battle
Like in singleplayer, where you can join with your army and take action in a battle that is already in progress. This could be done in many ways, but this is what I think would be best:

- When a player is attacked, there is an 8 hour window for nearby armies to join the battle and choose sides.
- The longer time it takes for an army to join the battle, the less percent of troops and equipment they will be able to bring to the battle.
Example: Player A attacks player B. Player C is nearby, and moves to the battle. This takes 2 hours, so when he joins the battle on player B's side, 75% of player C's troops and equipment is added to player B until the battle is over. If player B loses the battle, player C will be left with 25% of his original troops and equipment.
The numbers used above are only examples of course.

This would make it viable to split a faction's forces instead of putting all troops and equipment on one player alone, which I think is needed to make strategus more fun for more players.

Bigger difference in movement speeds
Not really a feature, but right now it seems like crossing mountains is usually faster than going around them (like going from Tulga to Ahmerrad), and that seems wrong to me.
edit: It appears that moving over mountains will be exponentially slower the more troops you have, that is awesome. I would kind of like to see this on hills as well though, or extend the amount of mountains as opposed to hills on the geo map.

Faction member list to include locations
It would be great if the faction member list also included the location of each member that is inside a fief. Possibly also the closest fief if they are in the field as well.

That's all I can come up with for now.. so discuss.

[Phazey]

Not much to discuss. All three good suggestions. 

[Dehitay]

right now it seems like crossing mountains is usually faster than going around them

Sure, now you make me realize it after I already spent 6 hours moving around the side of a mountain

[PhantomZero]

Have bridges be own-able, whoever owns the bridge can charge a toll, people can choose to go around the bridge, pay the toll, fight it out(On a bridge map! we have millions of them), or sneak across (with the possibility of losing troops/goods and failing).

Barring that, have transaction history so I can see who has given me what and I can do it that way.

And increase the speed of traveling across the bridge so it isn't 0.025

[Plaksteris]

Maybe we really need diseases like in Rome Total war and Medieval 2, one city on map for several days gets disease and loses 1/4 troops and population, or there could be infection rats or whatever

[Goretooth]

Make castle's be worth something or useful besides just a place to store troops.

[Malaclypse]

Make castle's be worth something or useful besides just a place to store troops.

Holding prisoners captured in battle (that's another suggestion entirely)? Holding badass feasts of plenty? Storing your wife?

[Elmokki]

I looked into waypoints and if I could somehow inject a couple of lines of javascript to a couple of functions it'd be rather easy to implement a system that stores waypoint(s) and if on a natural 2 minute update of the javascript window sees that you're stopped it'd make you move toward a waypoint. The thing here is that I need to get those lines in specific places of a couple of functions and I have no clue how to do that - Greasemonkey didn't seem to really be able to just slightly modify functions. This would only be a dirty solution that only updates movement if you have browser on though.

Waypoints would be trivial to implement as an external windows program or an external javascript, but that would involve querying create_troops_js.php to get current x and y and destination x and y once in a while more than just leaving the Strategus window open would and I'm not sure if devs would be fine with this.

[The_danish_lost_viking]

That sounds good, i dont know what your guys working on yet, but to make it not safe for buy cheap stuff and sell it in another town, then it could be very cool to hire another clan there travel with you and protect your stuff, if you been attack and loose then the attacker steal All your stuff

[Ozin]

Faction member list to include locations
It would be great if the faction member list also included the location of each member that is inside a fief. Possibly also the closest fief if they are in the field as well.

[Lizard_man]

Waypoints are a must, we were also thinking, something to indicate that you're a caravan, once you have a trade good on you, at the moment it's just gonna be speculation right ?